The Packbats' Weblog

We're thinking about making a new personal website for ourselves, and thinking about the way we avoid buying physical things most of the time, and suddenly we remembered a concept that computer software developers talk about: tech debt.

Like, the thing is, if you write code, then now you have to maintain it. If something changes in the computers that use the code, the code can break and you have to deal with that. If something changes in the problems the code must address, then the code may no longer fit and you have to deal with that. Writing code is work, but now that it exists it continuously produces more work, and that work doesn't happen on a schedule of you just feeling like writing code one day - it happens whether you like it or not. The upkeep costs come due no matter what.

And we're thinking about making a new personal website, and what to put on it ... and it's the same problem. Unlike a blog (where posts happen and then settle into the archive) or a microblog (where posts happen and then get buried in the churn of the past), anything we put on a website we have to upkeep. What ingredients we use in a recipe changes. We write new PICO-8 chiptunes. A webcomic's site hosting dies. These are changes and, to us, if we make a website, it's supposed to be correct, not just a historical artifact.

So ... yeah. We're thinking about making a new personal website. But it probably won't have a lot on it.

Shim the kobold is a doctoral student in runic magic with focuses on computer-aided magic and human transformation. Or "human", rather, because ey is an alter - a nonhuman person born with a human body - and for eir thesis project, ey has designed and is testing a computer-controlled magic circle system to automate (and therefore make more accessible) the process of transforming alters to their natural forms.

Eir current stage of research is simple on paper: solicit volunteers to go through the process and document the outcomes.

As Shim is discovering, however, alters are a more interesting lot than one might assume...

So, back in, like, October 2020, we were on a now-inactive fediverse instance called Monsterpit, and - already having a fediverse account - we (well, Packdragon, in practice) decided to use our new side account for writing a series of transformation fics: stories focused on people's bodies changing shape in ways that aren't commonly seen outside fiction. It was a fun creative exercise and we're proud of the two stories we posted there, but with the site down, they've not been available and we've not been writing any others.

This is us trying to change that. We're gonna make a new "fiction: shim's circle" tag and update this post with a list as each post gets posted.

On which note: stories in the series so far:

1. Connected* (originally posted 2020-10-10)
2. Hypothetically (originally posted 2020-11-18)

(* Story name changed to be less of a spoiler.)

We've made a couple hacks at trying to write a Proper Guide to writing music in PICO-8, but it just occurred to us that we could, y'know, be not organized and just post higgledy-piggledy stuff we know and want to talk about.

Should we do that here? It'd probably replace some number of our usual posts if we do.

Got around to removing the old icons. Added a new one while I was in there.

- 🦊

I don't think we said anything here, but at 8:52 a.m. on January 11th, we realized that we, Packbat, were a plural system - more than one person/personality in one body. We've kinda settled into signing our names as emoji - we're keeping a pinned post on our dragon.style Mastodon/fediverse account with associations.

Unrelatedly: we've almost exclusively been posting on dragon.style and hanging out in group chats, but one of the folks we follow on the fediverse recently made a post trying to encourage people to blog more. So ... we might? We might start blogging regularly here. Maybe daily at first, just to kind of establish a habit.

...idk. Let us know if you want us to!

- Packdemon 🔥 🗒️

*looks at previous post*

So, I've been active on Mastodon for a while - @packbat@dragon.style, DM me when you send your follow request if you want to follow me there - and one of the really important features that was added to it years before I joined was the CW. Basically, some posts are hidden with a freetext-input line of description in which people can describe the content (e.g. "Brexit, debunking Project Fear", "on what it means when someone lets you know that you messed up (quote, transphobia mention)", "lewd" - the amount of detail varies) and let their audience decide if/prepare themselves before they engage with it. And then read it without needing to leave the home timeline (Masto's equivalent of DW's Reading Page).

...the cut tag on my previous post was basically the same thing I would have written when CWing that post on Mastodon.

Kind of funny how these things follow people along as they drift from platform to platform.