packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (ace pack)
Friday, August 23rd, 2024 11:52 am

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).

packbat: Selfie looking off to the side with a scrunched-up scowl. (grump)
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 08:53 pm

So, we were walking home one day and there was a box by the side of the road with an ergonomic keyboard and a monitor marked "Free". We haven't tried the monitor (the stand is fractured) but the keyboard works and it has a bunch of extra hotkeys - and we were really missing the play-pause button from our laptop.

But also, in a fit of ... something, we decided that as long as we're learning a new physical layout, why not learn a new software layout?

Colemak-DH is (a) a variation on QWERTY for easier learning, (b) designed to be more efficient in finger motions, and (c) the first one suggested to us on fedi when we asked about keyboard layouts for split keyboards. It makes ... enough sense, we're trying it. And trying to maintain our ability to type with QWERTY, because new layouts are fun but we're going to have to deal with QWERTY keyboards a lot and typing on an unfamiliar keyboard layout is frustrating.

On which note, wow, this is frustrating. This is hard. But also we're making progress - not a lot of speed, not nearly the 75 words per minute we used to have in QWERTY, but we're beginning to know where our fingers should be going. And only messing up a lot more than before in QWERTY now that we have other muscle memory to cross wires with. We're making progress, and it's not terrible.

And the keyboard is nice. Having an emoji key is weird but it's not like we don't use it.

packbat: An anthro furry with tan fur and brown curly hair, turning into dreadlocks down zir back. Ze is wearing sunglasses and a bright red shirt. (batfox sona)
Tuesday, December 12th, 2023 10:36 pm

So apparently Omegle only just died this year.

alluding to the heavy details )

So, that sure is a thing.

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Sunday, September 10th, 2023 05:28 pm

Right off the bat, we're just going to link to Tamiko Nimuras's review on DiscoverNikkei.org, which is better informed than our opinion.

We were looking at the books available through OverDrive, a library digital lending service, when we saw Displacement by Kiku Hughes. Specifically, we recognized the art style - Kiku Hughes' guest comic about asexuality for Oh Joy Sex Toy was part of our journey to realizing we were ace - and we remembered thinking her comics were very good.

And Displacement was certainly good.

This is a comic about the internment of Japanese citizens in the United States of America during World War 2. It's a time travel story, but it is not about time travel, it's about history, and ignorance of it, and tangibilities of it, and aftereffects of it. And explicitly places this eighty-years-past atrocity in the context of more modern atrocities, and connects resistance to that to resistance to these.

It's historical fiction, first. And it uses the format well. It shows us insides of camps, in tangible details: smells, temperatures, censorship, propaganda, and resistance.

packbat: A black line curving and looping to suggest a picture of a cat. (line cat)
Saturday, March 26th, 2022 01:33 pm

This recipe is based on the one in this recipe post from Kitty Unpretty on Tumblr (cw: meat, dairy), which in turn is based on a more elaborate bread recipe by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois. Those recipes use volume, though, and we have a kitchen scale, so the following is all weights, measured in baker's percentage: whatever mass of flour you choose is 100%, and all other masses scale accordingly.

(Dairy is mentioned below, but all other described ingredients are vegan.)

Photo ) Ingredients ) Procedure ) Commentary )
packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Monday, March 21st, 2022 06:58 pm

An account from poet and programmer Allison Parrish about a project of low-energy computational poetry:

Last year, CultureHub accepted a project proposal of mine for their residency program. I proposed the creation of “a radically small language model, trained on a low-power microcontroller,” which operates “only when drawing sufficient energy from solar panels.” This language model would be trained on a corpus of “albas, a poetry genre in which lovers lament the oncoming dawn” and generate new examples of poems in this genre—again, using only solar power. Both Solar Protocol and Low Tech Magazine’s solar powered server inspired this work, and I also see it as a continuation of my research in standalone poetry-generating devices.

In this post, I show the progress I’ve made on this project, and relate what I’ve learned so far. [...]

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Saturday, March 6th, 2021 10:21 am

We were reminded today of this music video and how much of an absolute trip it was the first time we saw it:

Animated music video of a fight between a group of clowns and a group of vampires.

Content warning (spoiler) )
packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (nanowrimo09)
Monday, January 18th, 2021 12:37 pm

We've been pretty interested in game design's Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework for a while, but today for reasons we decided to take the idea of "the list of aesthetics isn't fixed, these are just the ones we, the authors of this paper, thought of" and extend that to making a list of aesthetics for traditional non-game fiction.

Edit: To sum up very quickly: one of the ideas of the MDA framework is that players engage with videogames to enjoy particular aesthetics, and serving their aesthetics successfully is a big part of making effective games. So, it's not that, say, challenges of execution are what makes games good, but if that's what you play a particular game for, then how well it does that is part of what might make that game good. Or bad.

What we (mostly Packdragon, I think) came up with, with a bit of help from someone on one of our group chats:

Setting:
The vividness and interest of the world in which the story takes place.
Allegory:
The political, moral, or similar implications of the fiction for the world outside the fiction.
Simulation:
The care with which plausible connections of cause and consequence are represented.
Identification:
The establishment of affection for characters within the story whose success is desired by the audience.
Character Development:
The representation of change within characters as they progress through the story.
Interplay:
The dynamics formed between characters who interact within the story.
Mystery:
The establishment and subsequent resolution of curiosity about elements within the world.
Spectacle (or Sensation, to borrow from the original list):
Moments and scenes which are delightful to behold.

It was a really delightful exercise, and looking back at the original list, I think it shows a substantial weakness in the idea of isolating "Narrative" as a separate aesthetic of play: we would analyze narrative as a dynamic which can serve many other aesthetics, not as an aesthetic in and of itself.

(...the fact that, to the authors of the paper, 'Narrative' felt like a self-contained aesthetic separate from the creation of a fictional world, the exploration of a creative work, and the overcoming of challenge by the player? Feels of a kind with the phenomenon of incoherent game design that inspired the coining of 'ludonarrative dissonance' as a term.)

(Those were sure some long sentences. Oh well.)

I think this was a really good exercise. It'd be interesting to do the same thing with other artistic media, like music or visual art.

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Monday, December 14th, 2020 08:52 pm

It's almost difficult to remember what it was like to just ... assume, on a bedrock level, that D&D as we experienced it was just What Tabletop Roleplaying Games Meant.

We actually didn't start with D&D - our first system was SLUG (Simple Laid-back Universal Game) - but it was very easy for us to go from playing SLUG as a kid to playing D&D and acculturate to the latter. The social structure of the table is the same in both cases: each person at the table owns a single character except one, who owns the entire rest of the universe and is usually called the DM or GM instead, and it is the job of the character players to use their characters to successfully traverse an obstacle-ridden story created by the universe player.

It functions. It facilitates a kind of storytelling focused on preparation by the universe player - massive sprawling networks of tunnels and rooms, full of secrets and setpieces, with challenges designed to strain the abilities of the protagonists - and that's wonderful. Our hours spent exploring such spaces were not wasted.

I suppose it was technically collaborative. It didn't feel that way. When we first read the rules of Fate Accelerated Edition, we found them completely alien - the players get to write the same kind of "this is what is true in the universe" cards as the GM? It was the world turned upside-down and we were not prepared for it. And when a DM tried to get the players to do some authorship in the form of adding worldbuilding details, we felt terrifyingly anxious and out of place - we did our best but we felt overwhelmingly that it was not our place. Our one GMless game was ... well, it was a farce, which would have worked if we'd gotten the joke, which we didn't.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019 our feelings changed. I'm not sure by what.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we tried games which were both themselves and not D&D, which helped. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we had conversations with people laying out all the myriad ways in which D&D is an incredibly specific tabletop roleplaying game system and not generic at all. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we internalized some ideas about game design and aesthetics of play. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we realized we were trans and transitioned, which helped us developed a better degree of connection with ourselves and, we suspect, more capacity to play characters we chose as opposed to just Packbat's Dude Cosplay. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we gained an appreciation for games that openly acknowledged their limitations, as contrasted with games that purported (and failed) to be unlimited in scope.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we changed from the kind of people who had no way of understanding what Fate Accelerated Edition was trying to do, to the kind of people who could make decisions about what we would want to use Fate Accelerated Edition to do. We could recognize a system that approached the question of "how do you create the pieces needed to evoke a world and tell stories within it?" through freetext concepts instead of formal systematized mechanics, and which incorporated the Session-Zero "what kind of game do we want to play?" questions we previously didn't know needed asking into the act of player character design. And tried to encourage and also force players into staying in character very clumsily - the compel rule feels like one that would be useful to stop minmaxers from trying to maximize all the numbers but framed as a general game mechanic, and we'll probably houserule it away because compelling players to play their characters in a specific way is not something we want at our table. But we understand it.

We don't have a conclusion here. We just kinda started typing without knowing where to go.

packbat: Photo of self in front of a brick wall looking out. (three-quarter)
Thursday, July 16th, 2020 11:20 pm

We seem to have become better at naming things in the past year. Possibly just better at naming musical tracks, but those are the things we most commonly need to name.

Outside the songs we name for the prompt or the structure, it's exactly the kind of process that we wouldn't expect to help anyone else, unfortunately. We listen to the song, try to understand how it makes us feel, and try to produce some kind of language that makes us feel likewise. "Proficience" is a piece that made Packfox think of someone competent working on a task of some kind; "Torque" made Packsnek think of motion, force, velocity; "Open" is very sparse, with lots of space between quick little staccato notes.

It's slow sometimes. We do a lot of sitting with a track, listening to it, trying to feel some sense of it.

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Saturday, October 12th, 2019 10:45 pm

Someone made a comment on the fediverse and got me curious about the history of emoji's four different mailbox symbols. Crossposting here because why not?

Most of an answer to the question, in 653 words. )
packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Friday, December 21st, 2018 06:12 pm
(There was an outburst of "Nonbinary people are valid!" exclamations in my part of the Fediverse - probably in response to jerks being enbyphobic - so I figured I'd contribute. Turned out what I had to say was this.)
  • Listen to us as we try to explain our gender to you.
  • Be okay with our genders changing.
  • Be okay with still not wholly getting it.
  • (Be okay with us still not wholly getting it.)
  • ...but respect our expertise on our lives and our needs.
  • Singular-they is a great default, but listen to what we tell you and try to learn the pronouns we use.
  • Be okay with multiple sets of pronouns. Our genders can be large and contain multitudes.
  • Be okay with unfamiliar and novel pronouns. Finding our genders in words can be really hard.
  • If you mess up, apologize, move on, and try to do better. Making the mistake is not as big a deal as refusing to acknowledge it or refusing to try to change.
  • Beating yourself up isn't an apology, though. People feel really awkward when they have to comfort someone who just hurt them, and it's kind of unfair. Support in, vent out: say your apology to the enby and save your feelings to talk out with another friend or write in your journal or something like that.
  • Speaking of venting: let us vent about dysphoria and stuff. Someone might be a glorious androgynous mystery, a cute thrift-store demilady, a sharp-dressed genderfluid dude, or whatever, but however much they're killing it with their presentation, it doesn't take away their struggles.
  • (These last three go for binary trans people too.)
  • (And an aside on compliments: specific positivity is a fantastic tool and frequently very welcome ... but if we're busy venting something when you feel like bringing out the affirmations, let us speak our pain, first. Complements rarely have an expiry date.) (And acknowledge and validate our struggles, if you can; it helps.)
...I'm sure this list could be longer, but ... yeah, it's what I got off the top of my head. Feel free to suggest more bullet points.
packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Wednesday, November 8th, 2017 10:43 am

Some time ago, I saw on Tumblr a screenshot of this tweet by @JohnJpshanley:

Do you ever feel like you're in Season Five of your life, and the writers are just doing outrageous shit to keep it interesting?

My own take was that my series got cancelled and what I'm living out now is a 500k fix-it continuation fic - because everything is consistent with what went before, but...

  • Everyone is queer now.
  • And mentally ill and/or autistic.
  • And much more self-aware than how they used to be.

...and so on.

(Although there's a lot less shipping than you usually get with fanfic. #aroace)

(probably aro, definitely ace - autochorissexual)

As my updated profile now says, I'm trans. Genderflux demigirl - some variable amount of 'female', as opposed to anything else. HRT is working really well for me - coming up on two years on. Will have to change some of my user icons.

Also, no longer a grad student.

I'm dealing.

Am writing a D&D story about a friendly soulless druid. Not for NaNoWriMo - aiming for "write words you feel good about and seek external validation from your friends", and that's maybe a fifth of the NaNo pace. Might post excerpts of it.

Peace, folx.

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (hat)
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 02:50 pm
Post edited ~5:20p EDT - thanks, [livejournal.com profile] zwol!

Well, I'm coming back into blogging with a fury, aren't I? First politics, and now religion!

Those of you who do not follow the atheist blogosphere may not be aware of the long, boring back-and-forths between the "New Atheists" and the "accommodationists". To summarize: the latter frequently accuse the former of being mean to theists (people who believe that one or more gods exist) and the former retort that the latter are being intellectually dishonest. What's annoying about it is that the argument never actually connects to the essential disagreement, edit: rarely gets back to actual questions of fact. The latest brouhaha, for example, relates to a question which "New Atheists" answer in the negative and many "accommodationists" answer in the positive: do any people have sufficient intellectual justification to believe that a god is real?

And for that reason, I want to congratulate Larry Moran, who is addressing this question.

This brings me to my challenge. I challenge all theists and all their accommodationist friends to post their very best 21st century, sophisticated (or not), arguments for the existence of God. They can put them in the comments section of this posting, or on any of the other atheist blogs, or on their own blogs and websites. Just send me the link.


(Link via pharyngula.)

If anyone in the audience believes that there are good reasons to believe that a god exists (or has a friend who so believes), please contact Prof. Moran (or have your friend do so) by Saturday, October 2.

As a footnote, though: I realize that there are a subset of people who would answer in the affirmative to the question above without answering Moran's challenge: some people believe that they possess evidence good enough to convince themselves, but that their evidence cannot be communicated to anyone else. Whether this is true is a philosophical question, and one which I would be glad to discuss ... but unrelated to the announcement.

Remember: if you believe that a God exists and you can prove it, or if you know someone who so believes, tell Larry Moran by Saturday, October 2.

Thanks!
packbat: One-quarter view of the back of my head. (quarter-rear)
Saturday, September 18th, 2010 03:44 pm
Dan Shive (best known as the creator of El Goonish Shive) recently wrote a brief argument why alternate universes would probably not contain alternate "you"s. His argument looks correct, as far as it goes, but it is qualitative - lacking numerical estimates - and I don't see why it has to be. The data exists. Surely ballpark back-of-the-envelope numbers could be produced.

...but not trivially. Dan Shive's challenge can - and I think should - be broken down as follows.

Read more... )

Now, I lack the knowledge of biology to, first, nail down these questions to their most correct forms, and second, assign probability estimates to relevant steps in the chain. But the most superficial examination of the situation seems to suggest at least one thing: any alternate universe measurably diverging a significant period before the birth of an individual is vanishingly likely to contain a copy of that individual. Which, of course, is what Dan Shive has pointed out.

And, as an obvious consequence of this, even if such a universe contained a duplicate of yourself, it would still be vanishingly unlikely for it to contain duplicates of anyone not your direct descendant. (Which would make for a heck of a paternity test, I have to tell you!)