The Packbats' Weblog

So, you might not know this about us, but until - *checks date* - two weeks ago Friday, we were using Windows 7 as our OS.

"But Packbats!", someone might exclaim. "Windows 7 hasn't been supported since 2015! Hell, as of January, you couldn't even bribe Microsoft to keep your system limping along!"

And you'd be correct! Which is why you might not have known this about us, because "oh yeah, our primary computer, our connection to a world where being a queer trans plural furry is normal and unremarked upon, is running an OS so insecure that even Mozilla has given up on supporting it" seems like an irresponsible thing to say on the public network.

That is, until the day just under two weeks ago when we weren't running Win7 any more, because our laptop had stopped functioning and we couldn't figure out how to fix it.

So yeah. We're posting this from NixOS.

So far, we have:

• Altered one config file so we could read ntfs drives.
• Used nix-shell to grab a file partition tool so we could turn our temporary Windows 7 ntfs drive (the 2 TB one) into a proper Linuxy ext4 drive.
• Used tune2fs to tell Linux that it doesn't need to save 5% of our now-storage 2 TB drive for root.
• Decided to hold off on moving home to the 2 TB drive, because it would mean messing with hardware-configuration.nix and we're tired.

We're tired. But we have a working computer.

At a formative age, we read a 1981 science fiction novella by Vernor Vinge titled True Names, about a population of hyper-hackers doing operations around the world and maintaining the secrecy of their identity to protect them from being controlled by others through elementary magic spells computer exploits.

...come to think, it used "the Internet as a 3D immersive space" as a narrative device eleven years before the publication of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash made "the Metaverse" a meme. Kinda funny.

Anyway, in retrospect, that novella really encouraged us to think about security of identity in a substantial way. (At least, once we started caring at all.) This is a story in which an action which restricts your identity to three million possible candidates is considered high-risk. The concept of what could expose personal information becomes very broad, when you're thinking about that level.

And then you get into the stories about people identifying physical locations by nothing but the background scenery, or incidental environmental details. Like that time Tom Scott challenged people to identify where he and Matt Parker watched an eclipse from, and they got it within feet.

On that level of investigation - the, to be frank, "ten thousand people decided to stalk you" level - we are shit out of luck. If we wanted to be secret at that level, we would have to burn the name "Packbat" altogether and start over. But ... increasingly, we are very careful about landmarks in our photographs, we don't talk about trash pickup schedules or the weather, and we do not name streets. We will say we are in the mid-Atlantic region - we will even say where within on occasion - but we do not want to be specific enough to phone book.

Because it's 2023, there have been a lot of harassment campaigns that jump from Internet to city streets, and we don't want to make it easy.

There's an interesting arc you can have with studying Toki Pona.

At first, you're learning words and phrases. That "toki" can mean "speech", "communication", "stories", and suchlike. That "pona" can mean "good", "acceptable", "approved of", and similar. That "jan" can mean "people", "characters", "humans", that kind of thing. That "jan pona" can mean "friend" - a person or people you approve of, that you like and endorse. That "insa" can mean "inside", "center", "stomach", and so forth. That "toki insa" can mean "inner monologue" or "thoughts". And learning all these things helps you understand what people are talking about.

And then you start unlearning them. Sort of.

Like, the thing about toki pona is that a lot of its strength is being not specific, is being contextual, is being personal. And you can translate the English word "think" with the toki pona phrase "toki insa", but there's a lot of things that a communication can be within - a house, a community, a back room, standard usage ... a lot of things. And "think" does a lot of work - I think that origami is delightful, but when I say that, I am saying that to me origami is delightful: musi pi lipu sitelen li pona tawa mi.

This isn't actually about Toki Pona - this is about Kyle Kallgren's analysis of the movie "Network", and the cover of "Land of Confusion" it ends with, and the idea of reading classic rock songs as saying something. Saying "things aren't okay, we're being lied to, and we need to stop the damage". Saying "justice for those American Indians who fight against poverty and police violence". Saying "the classist and racist status quo isn't actually a natural state, we can do something about it". Saying "The USA gave us a terrible life, sent us off to kill people who looked different than us, and left us with nothing when we got back, if we even made it back". All these words that got flattened into "angry" or "comforting" or "exciting" or whatever else, they were saying something.

People learn to ignore what a communication means.

Probably because if any of these people were allowed to be understood, we might not be okay with letting the rich get richer as everyone else kills each other.

Howard Beale was saying something. He was saying that you have to get mad because the other option is depression and not caring, and if we have any hope of not taking it any more, not letting all the evil be wrought upon us, we have to care.

And on a personal level, to paraphrase jan Sonja about Toki Pona: if a friend is a "jan pona", a good person? A bad friend is a contradiction in terms.

Words mean things. And caring about what words convey can mean caring about a lot else, too.

"The Salt Merchant and His Ass" is not a particularly famous Aesop fable, but it's a funny story and we recently translated it into Toki Pona.

By our count, the English translation we were working from (George Fyler Townsend's, basically), was about 169 words long.

By our count, our Toki Pona translation was 114 words long.

Now, some of that is editing. The Fyler English translation was a little florid, and we could have stood to be a bit more expansive when writing ours. But the obvious thing to expect when going from a language with a typical average vocabulary of twenty thousand words to a language with only about a hundred and twenty would be, y'know, the same ideas taking many times more words to express, and that's not what we're seeing. Toki Pona is really remarkably good at expressing the essentials of these old stories, despite having far, far fewer tools to do it.

I think that's really neat.

Edit 2023-08-03: We poked around a little more looking at other texts, and typically our Toki Pona renderings are longer than the English versions ... by somewhere between 5% and 30%. (For example, the IPA edition of "The North Wind and the Sun" has 113 words and our off-the-cuff Toki Pona telling would have about 144 if we didn't run out of space.) And all of these are written with the Sonja Lang's basic 120 words - we didn't even add "kin".