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, I don't know how many people are still thinking about the 200 Word RPG Challenge in 2022, but earlier this year when we were looking at our completely unused Patreon, we decided, "what if we started writing 200-word tabletop roleplaying games and posting them every month?"

And then we did! It turns out that it's just a really good format for us, and it lets us finish things in a way that we struggle to with larger projects.

Anyway, here's what we've posted so far:

1. May: maryland tornado warning, a mini-larp: an imitation of the experience of sheltering in place to wait out tornado warnings.
2. June: conspiracy in reverse: a solo fiction-writing game where you use an oracle deck to tell a story of someone uncovering secrets about themself.
   • The Packbats' playing card oracle system, which we invented before we had a tarot deck of our own.
3. July: as you would expect: a two-player game about one character visiting the dreams of another.
4. August: space to unfold: a freeform game about escaping a repressive culture and discovering yourself now that you're in a safe place.
5. September: talk about your lives: a letter-writing game: in which you tell each other about events in your lives, good and bad, and use those events to make up stories about events in your characters' lives as they also write letters back and forth.
6. October (today!): where things will happen: a worldbuilding game designed to set up the games that follow it with a setting that the players know and that has a few plot hooks to draw on.

We're hoping to finish out at least a full year, so, this is the official halfway point! Feeling optimistic about continuing - we have some bangers in the queue, I think.

...oh, and on the subject of mini TTRPGs: we also made a podcast pilot episode for a jam where us and our podner (podcasting partner) invented a roleplaying game to create the prologue to a YA creature horror story and then played it. It's an hour and fifteen minutes, and a copy of the post-recording edited version of the game is available on the page - feel free to check out either or both! (The jam was for The Podcast Mines, which is a delightful show about pitching podcasts but never actually starting any of them; our episode will likely be a part of their Episode 100 special that should drop tomorrow.)

"Against Access" by John Lee Clark, on interpreters, descriptions, and the difference between being burdened with objective data and getting help from an accomplice.

I just want to quote the whole thing, but here's a bit that stood out:

( Another thing ASL interpreters habitually do is describe the whole of things... )

(Hat tip to fluffy's Notes page on beesbuzz.biz, via the fediverse.)

Gaming and the Golden Record is a compilation of tiny video essays on the theme of the Voyager Golden Record, each answering the question: if you could package up videogames on a golden record to send out into the universe, as a communication to people who don't know anything about Earth about what we people on Earth are like, what would you send? We have issues with some of the responses - a little blatant fat-negativity, a little casual amatonormativity (assuming romance is for everyone here) - but it was interesting and the question was interesting: what do you send?

Our first thought was a game we loved and loved the plot of, pretty unsurprisingly - one that has things to say about who we are, what our social structures are like, what motivates us, what kind of injustices happen ... but we stopped, and we thought, and we decided that a story next to a game just wouldn't work, however well told. Every story is full of gaps, assumptions about what people will infer and therefore shouldn't be said, and if all you have is handfuls of words, there's so little to help you find what you're missing in them.

And on that note, shouldn't we try to help them understand us? There's going to be loads of stories on this, a lot of which will probably take for granted an understanding of our ordinary. Maybe we should include a game about that ordinary - give them "Gone Home" and let them pick up books and pens and cassette tapes and turn them over and around in their hands, or give them "The Long Dark" with bodily needs to be taken care of in a world physical enough that exertion keeps you warm and different species of wood burn differently, or give them one of The Sims games and let them watch the characters seek to fulfill their bodily and social needs both.

...we probably shouldn't give a group of people who, we presume, will tear apart the few records they have of an alien civilization for every atom of information it can give them ... a game with easy-to-find glitches that break things as a guide to what normal is. We don't want them to think the most efficient form of human locomotion is backwards long jumping. We probably also don't want to give them a game quite so cisheteronormative.

So ... screw it, "Stay?" by ejadelomax.

"Stay?" is a choice-based text adventure. You act by clicking links, not by pushing joysticks - the extent to which you can glitch out the story is probably near zero. ("Stay?" also deals with abuse, body horror, and violence, so be prepared for that kind of thing. Also food and alcohol, incidentally.) "Stay?" is a story about being a person interacting with people - about lying in bed the morning after failing at the task you were trying to achieve, about deciding who to spend time with in school, about asking your friends for help, about leaving everything behind and walking off into the mountains to go be somewhere else for a while, about mysteries and secrets and turning over every metaphorical stone in your hands until you understand enough about the situation to do something about it. "Stay?" stuck with us for hours after we played it, grieving our choices.

It's a whole lot of words - a whole lot of details, for everything it glosses over - even if it doesn't have images to help you interpret what the words are describing. But it has words, it has the specificity and perspective that words make explicit, assuming we send their readers enough dictionaries and encyclopedias to understand them. It has choices for you to make, and reactions for you to have to them. (I love abstract expressions of meaning, but ambiguity is not so helpful here.) It's not everything we want - there's a dating sim component to it, even if it lets you turn someone down and remain the closest of friends, and we're sure that there's not gonna be much aro representation in the collection - but ... but screw it. I want a story that doesn't apologize for queerness on the disc, and I want a story that talks about war and suffering and injustice, and I want a story you can spend hours pulling apart to try to understand, and a story that matters a lot to us and we want to share.

From Teen Vogue: We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs: Why is it so common?" by Lauren Michele Jackson.

A good discussion of how racist stereotypes about black people play into and are reinforced by the use of GIFs of black people to represent strong emotions. Short quote under the cut:

( Read more... )

Found this a while ago on itch.io but are still intrigued by it: "Video Games in a Low←Tech Future, a web of ideas contemplating what technologically-mediated entertainment might look like in a particular low-resources future Earth.

It's kind of a fascinating idea - turning a lot of fundamental assumptions (always-available electricity, always-available network connections, gigabytes of memory and gigahertz of processor power) that a lot of us on the Internet can assume without thinking, and using the contradiction of these assumptions to imagine how this art form that we love might persist recognizably into the future.

Someone on the fediverse shared a link to everest pipkin's massive "Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup", and I decided to go down the list and talk about the ones we've touched.

Firstly, the ones we've actually tried to make something - or even succeeded at making something - with:

( Read more... )

Secondly, the ones we've looked at but never tried to create in:

( Read more... )

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling today on three cases related to LGBT+ rights - Gerald Lynn Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express, Inc., et al. v. Zarda et al., as Co-Independent Executors of the Estate of Zarda; and R. G. & G. R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission et al. - answering the question of whether Title VII the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination against gay and trans people when it prohibits discrimination by sex. In, unexpectedly, Justice Neil Gorsuch's words, the answer is "yes, it is illegal to discriminate against them" (us):

An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

cosmolinguist has a nice roundup post bringing up a lot of good points about how much this means (tl;dr: a lot).

Post edited ~5:20p EDT - thanks, 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!

Fred "slacktivist" Clark tells a story of an urban legend, a debunking, and two reactions. Short and (bitter)sweet.