The Packbats' Weblog

Over the past month and a half, as we've been coming up on the anniversary of our first installing Linux, we started poking at blog post ideas trying to sum up our thoughts and feelings - something honest, that captures some feelings.

We ended up writing two different posts with very different tones, and struggling to decide which to post. And then in a moment of shitpostiness, we said: cursed option: html table, one on the left, one on the right.

...whereupon our friends were immediately like "yes".

So: here are our thoughts about our experiences of our linux year 1 (twice).

the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers

the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us

the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers

the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise

why? why are we being yelled at? why for humanity are we being yelled at?

Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but listen to his imaginary machines

his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days

his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help

our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood

our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising

why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make?

why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?

why not "are you good"?

can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?

(edit: followup)

So a friend of ours was making a funny "games of the year 2022" post, one of those that people make who have no respect for the triple-A gaming industry and want to look at cool weird obscure stuff that fails that industry's metrics and succeeds at being something else. And we love that.

And our friend put our work on that very short list. Twice.

Anyway, we've been putting out a free 200-word TTRPG every month on Patreon. And there's a style of phrase-long badass mech names we enjoy, names like Boiling Water Scalding Away Layers Of Bitterness, and a good way to make one is to look at the teapot on your desk, think about how the residue of old brews can be removed with hot water and scrubbing, and then remove context and make the wording go harder until it hits mech name status.

Being raised, we were handed a box to remain inside. Be polite. Don't be prideful. Stay cautious. Practice your piano pieces. Wear a suit. Get good grades. Sit in the first rows of the classroom. There were cracks in the box, to be sure but we were expected to keep ourselves contained. We knew, compliant though we were, that pieces of us stuck out, but we held ourselves in enough. Told ourselves that we held ourselves in enough.

We were lucky enough to be spared attack for our parts that stuck out.

...well, for a while. Did you know that being trans stuck out of the box? We didn't know being trans stuck out of the box. We thought that fit in just fine.

I don't know if that was a turning point. Connecting our dots, we can see holes in the box from before that. I do know it was impossible for us to accept being contained that far. Surely that was allowed. We knew we wouldn't stop being trans - not for anyone.

I don't know if that was a turning point, but it meant that we knew what it was like to have a wall pressed against us, and we knew how to break it.

We're nonbinary. We're not a woman. The world isn't a sphere, it's an oblate spheroid. We're nonbinary, and there was a wall pressed against us, a wall beyond which was neopronouns, beyond which was expressing gender through language more resonant with ourselves than "they" and "it", and it was a wall we knew how to break.

Nonhumanity ... took more force, to break a wall to reach. Plurality, not as much force but more time. Disability, mostly took us time to name and tentatively claim. By the time we knew the thickness of the wall blocking the way to asexuality, we were already well past it, and we easily explored aromanticism, polyamory, and relationship anarchy from there. The person who showed us our autism, years before the rest of these, was happy to do it and happy to see it, and so were we - the box wasn't even on our mind.

The box is on our mind sometimes. That fear that we are somehow inexcusable for being outside it, leading to dread as we look at how far our wings span and see that we will never fit back inside it.

But also fuck that box. It was a prison. We'll never go back.

We were watching a video about character design that a friend of ours shared and, while very interesting, we actually spent a lot of it thinking about our physical form as a character and what was communicated by its costume design.

Then we started thinking about the "what if your current [selves] met your past self" hypothetical. It'd be pretty easy to make up plausible costumes to highlight the differences.

2005, a skinny college student with an afro, would be wearing a graphic tee (maybe the gray Dominic Deegan one we got once upon a time), a pair of khaki slacks, and a white pair of athletic socks in a mostly-white pair of sneakers. I'm not 100% on the timeline for these but let's also give them a gray flat cap, a mustard-colored windbreaker, and a big black laptop backpack. I'm guessing they have a little bar cell phone with Snake on it.

2021, a more chubby queer goblin with waist-length dreadlocks, would be wearing the same graphic tee under our white-and-green mini dress, leg warmers, and gray socks in hiking boots (which would probably make xem slightly taller than 2005). We'll also give xem our blue windbreaker with the pink highlights, our gray backpack, and our green purse. Xey have an old (which is to say, nine years in the future for 2005) iPhone in a purple case that xey're pretty attached to.

Also, 2021 is happier in xyr skin than 2005 is in theirs. Xey've had a lot more practice taking selfies, but I think xyr smiles are less stiff, and I think that's because xey know xey're trans and are acting on it. That's not something on 2005's radar.

(We had about half a setup for a story that was ... actually impossible, for both 2005!Packbat and 2021!Packbat, and also anachronistic for both them and us.)

It's ... impossible, frankly, to create a space where holidays do not exist. People will accidentally wear a pin or a T-shirt or a sweater or whatever, people will barge in unnoticing and carry those events in with them, conversations will accidentally drift in directions ... even without a global pandemic and our complete lack of funds, there's no way an actual, physical establishment could be made to guarantee holidays won't intrude.

We still like the idea, though. A fictional space, representing the idea that it's okay to set an impossible boundary and be able to spend a while not having to avoid or shut out a societal celebration you don't belong in.

Not sure if it'd be better realized as a story, an interactive fiction, a Bitsy game, or something else.

Step 1: Make a mistake that hurts someone.

This is something to avoid as much as you can, but it will happen no matter what you do - it's kind of inevitable. All of us grew up in a society that was pervasively problematic, and as much as we try to work against that, we're not immune to it and it still comes out sometimes. It still sucks, though, and trying to avoid it wasn't a wasted effort.

Step 2: Get called on it.

This is actually harder than you might think. With some notable exceptions, it mostly happens when you associate with people who are themselves trying to fight their bigotries and have a positive impact on the world, and it mostly happens when you demonstrate by your actions that you aren't prone to self-protective displays of anger, distress, contempt, or the like when people disagree with you, and when you demonstrate an interest in and willingness to learn.

Step 3: Don't do a self-protective display of whatever.

Finding out that you screwed up is really hard, and dealing with your emotions around it is hard as well. Some useful tactics include:

• Giving yourself space to process
• Talking to people outside the situation if you need to vent your upset
• Talking to people outside the situation that you trust if you can't figure out on your own if you're in the wrong or if people are being unreasonable, and conveying the details as accurately and completely as you feel able to/you can ethically do

but ultimately, you need to figure out what works for you.

Step 4: Figure out what you did and avoid doing it again.

If you've done Step 2 well - which, as we mentioned, is harder than you might expect - this will be a lot easier: generally people will try to call out what needs changing, so you should be able to figure it out from what they said. If you need help, it's possible to ask for it or do research, but remember that people who were just hurt aren't obliged to help you.

Step 5: Apologize, if appropriate.

If someone tells you to go away, don't protract your presence in their company, but most of the time, an apology in the place where you screwed up is appropriate.

Remember to apologize for what you did. Apologizing because people are mad at you isn't helpful. Apologizing when you hurt someone for actions by people who are not you - for society, for your race, for whatever - isn't helpful. Apologize for what was done that you did.

Step 6: Figure out why you did it and learn how to do better.

This ... can take decades. Or minutes. Work at it as best as you can, be aware of it as something you had to work on. Research you did or do on what you did wrong is often helpful here.

That's probably the main stuff we'd like to suggest. Remember, the point isn't actually to be a jerk, however ethical - the point is to actively make things better - but also remember that being the jerk isn't something you have to double down on. You learn what you can and you do better.

I don't know how literally they meant it, but in the time we've been active on the fediverse, we've seen a lot of people talking negatively about irony and trying to speak out in favor of being sincere, and ... well, we take things literally. It's literally a thing we do. And taking literally this push to be sincere, genuine, and unaffected has been...

...I think "transformative" makes it sound bigger than it is.

But it's not been as simple as flipping a switch, making a choice. It's been a learning process, or an unlearning process.

What we're noticing - what we're noticing now, anyway - is that we have more work to do. We wrote a reply just now that could have said, "It sounds like they're making some ... assumptions", and that would have been funny, but it also would have been a way to avoid having to explain why we thought those assumptions were troubling. It's not a huge change going from that to "It sounds like they're making some expansive assumptions", but it changed the remark from a vague expression of negativity at a group of people to specifically naming a problem we see in how that group of people have gone about their business.

It was less cruel, looking it over. Less cutting. Instead of saying they're bad, it says that they messed up and it says how and it points in the direction of them doing something about it. Wanting to be sincere led to us being kinder - not necessarily less negative (honestly, I think the scale of what that word implies makes it more so), but less brutal.

Wanting to be sincere has also forced us to recognize negative self-talk and respond to that instead of vaguely self-deprecating. I ... don't remember an example of that, though.

I don't know. It's a process. We think it's been worth going through.