The Packbats' Weblog

Just recently found out about the webcomic Runaway to the Stars. From its About page:

Runaway to the Stars is a hard science fiction slice-of-life story focused on communication, accommodation, and everyday life in co-species spaces. The main storyline follows Talita, a centaur aerospace engineer and cross-species foster kid. More information about the universe can be found on my website. Runaway to the Stars updates every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It is recommended for readers 16+, as it contains swearing, references to sexual culture, and obtuse adult life drama.

We really like the art and characters. And worldbuilding, too. It's very fun. And there are transcripts for all the pages.

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools. Then we came up with a very silly idea: what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB? Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same resolution, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?

"image processing silliness – from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole explored by the Packbats, Jan 2024"

We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.

We have been struck with a sudden inspiration.

In the past - for example, while writing and editing our guide "naming yourself in toki pona" - we've thought of nouns for speakers as a static thing: if someone's head noun is 'kulupu', then you call them 'kulupu', end of story. And it's important that we understand and conform to the nomenclature of the subject we're discussing.

...but in the style of lipu pu, "Toki Pona: The Language of Good", the first official Toki Pona book, words can be more fluid that that. jan Sonja might say "meli li lili" to talk about a woman being little, even though that meli is definitely also a jan. Provided there is no misgendering or other deliberate misidentifying going on, there doesn't seem to be anything hostile about that.

So, you know how, in resources like pronouns.page, there will be lists of words that can be marked with hearts or thumbs-up or thumbs-down or other such indicators of mood?

What if tokiponists did that for words about them? Like, if we add this to our profile:

sina toki e mi la, mi olin e nimi ni:

• kulupu
• poki
• tonsi

...nimi ni li pona:

• ijo
• jan
• meli
• nasa
• tomo

...nimi ni li musi:

• kijetesantakalu

...nimi ni li ike:

• mani
• mije
• pakala (mi ken pakala! taso, kon mi li kon pakala ala. nimi "pakala Pakapa" li ike a!)
• sewi

...would that be clearly understood? Would people know that they can say statements like "meli ni li kulupu Pakapa" and be polite and accurate?

I think it would be good if this is something they could check as needed. Obviously, most speakers would simply grab "kulupu" or "poki" off the top and use one of those, which works fantastically and requires very little memorization ... but I think it's good to have, and good to have thought about in case people ask, "mi wile ala wile kepeken nimi 'meli' lon sina?"

wile. mi meli tonsi. mi tonsi meli. pona, pona.

We talk a lot about the conlang Toki Pona because we think it is delightful. We haven't talked a lot about our experience with the online Toki Pona community, once we moved beyond watching jan Misali videos and talking to friends of friends.

It was bad. It was real bad.

Now, this is a blog post written in mid-2023 about events occuring mid-2023. You, dear reader, might find the Toki Pona communities you encounter to be different. Our experience with tokiponists around our side of fedi (which actually bans people who adopt white supremacist memes, like functional antiracist communities do) has been positive. Toki Pona, the language, has not been hostile to us.

But ... listen, if you recommend people read Sonja Lang's book about Toki Pona without mentioning that there's a strong theme of jan Sonja's religion through it, then that's a big thing to leave out but not a big deal - there are a lot of atheists, including us, speaking Toki Pona, and jan Sonja seems like a nice person and explicitly queer-positive. But a history of racism is a big deal. And it's a big deal that Toki Pona communities are going to have to deal with, and keep dealing with for so long they get sick of having to keep dealing with it. That's how wrestling with a racist history works.

And if you're just learning Toki Pona in 2023? Stars, I'm sorry to have to tell you this. But stay safe. jan sin o, o awen e kon sina.

toki pona is a fun minimalist philosophical constructed language made by jan Sonja. As of early 2023, it has been exploding in popularity, and as more and more people who know us Packbats know, this means that there's a very real chance that a friend of yours will want to ask you, "how should I refer to you when I am speaking toki pona?"

There are three reasons why this isn't trivial for your hypothetical friend to answer themselves:

1. In toki pona, to talk about something, you have to say what it is - and different speakers use different concepts to encapsulate themselves, both for identity reasons and for fun.
2. In toki pona, one speaks using very few sounds, and those sounds are put together in very few ways. This makes it easy for anyone to speak toki pona, but means many names need to be modified to become toki pona names.
3. In every language, the correct thing to call someone is what they want to be called.

So: what do you want to be called?

A little belated of an announcement, but this is the introduction to our guide for non-tokiponists on how to make a name for yourself (literally) in toki pona.

We're really proud of it, honestly! It's about 3k words total, plus a wordlist for quick reference, and there's .html and .pdf downloads for offline use. We'd love to hear from anyone who tries it.

(This began as this fedi thread.)

Bigotry is specifically the exercise of power within and by a system like kyriarchy to fuck over marginalized groups in favor of privileged groups. We're not professionals, but that's our best understanding of the definition.

That said, kyriarchy isn't self-consistent. Kyriarchy can contain hatred of men just fine - hating men is a lot less threatening to it than hating injustice, so threats to the system can be diverted to individuals within it...

...and especially diverted to marginalized individuals within it.

So, yeah, misandry is real. You can tell it's real because autistic people, black people, trans people, disabled people, PoC, children, migrants ... we all get attacked. People take a power structure, turn it into a description of a villain, and use it to attack the vulnerable. It's not hard - all it takes is attacking people you hate with things you're told are hateful traits, and never ever ever listening to them when they try to teach you to be better.

This is half a tangent, but we still like Jay Smooth's video "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist" and its distinction between the "what they are" conversation and the "what they did" conversation. Pretty near every time we try to talk about something we have a problem with, we try to talk about actions we have a problem with - about what they did - and, when necessary, let people draw conclusions from what they did about what they might do next.

(By the way, Jay Smooth's followup TEDx talk, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race", is terrific. It's worth watching both.)

I'm gonna be honest with y'all as people who've been around on the Internet for a hot minute: we've seen some bullshit. But I'm also gonna be honest with you as a disabled genderqueer transfem Black plural system: "what they are" got fuck-all to do with whether you got bigotry in you. You got bigotry in you. You got that for free.

So when we're talking about misconduct, we leave "what they are" out of it. We even avoid "reply guy" and "mansplaining" and other suchlike phrases. Are they doing harm?

Are they doing harm?

Like, seriously, is anyone being hurt here? Is this just weird and uncomfortable and makes you feel bad? Because it's okay to feel bad, feeling bad isn't a sin.

And if people are getting hurt, what kind of hurt is it, where did it start, and why? If one person weren't fighting, what would the other person be doing? (That last question is inspired by "Lady Eboshi is Wrong" from Innuendo Studios.) (Lady Eboshi transcript.)

It doesn't matter which people in the conversation are being called what kinds of oppressor. Calling your critics your oppressors is the easiest damn thing. And the kyriarchy doesn't care why you attack its favorite targets. It just wants those targets taken down.

Someone turned us on to Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend by Usui Shio (aka Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita) and it's extremely adorable!

(Also, content warning for food - it's a recurring thing throughout - and occasional alcohol.)

This is slice-of-life in the most lovingly mundane form: the protagonists navigate chores, purchases, and differing dispositions, and the feelings and questions that spill out from these day-to-day things.

...but they also deal quite directly with amatonormativity. Their marriage does not fit the cultural model of romance and sex that surrounds them, but it also does not fit the model of "just friends" that they initially assumed it would. They care quite intensely about each other, are desirous of each other's company, and do their best to support each other through struggles small and great. Their approach to the whole affair feels much in the vein of relationship anarchy: dissecting their feelings and making decisions based on what works for each of them, finding where their joys lie and celebrating that in the face of the obliviousness of others, and talking to each other.

I don't know if their relationship as of now is more queerplatonic or ace romantic, and I don't know if the author plans to remain in this space for the rest of the story's run or to portray its metamorphosis into something else. But I do know their relationship is healthy, and nuturing, and sweet.

It's currently serializing in Japanese - Chapter 22 came out this month, looks like.

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.)