The Packbats' Weblog

Simplicio: Computers are magic.

Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.

Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?

Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.

Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.

Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.

Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.

Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.

Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.

Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.

Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.

Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.

Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?

Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.

Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.

Sagredo: It is not supernatural.

Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?

Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.

Simplicio: It is.

Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.

Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.

This post consists almost entirely of spoilers for 1949 British noir movie The Third Man.

Also, we don't have an answer to the question. Suggestions welcome.

Content warnings for general murderousness (including of children), car accident, and medical stuff.

Negativland's album True False on Seeland Records was released on 25 October 2019.

The music video for "This Is Not Normal", track 12 of 14, was produced in April 2020 and released on YouTube on May 4. It contains a lot of distorted and strange imagery and camerawork and contains some fast cuts, body horror, and death, and the lyrics feel ... at the very least, heavy-adjacent?

The following bit of fiction is an in-character post-LARP report from a game of Off Recipe, a solo cooking LARP that was a part of the Solo But Not Alone solo-TTRPG charity bundle on itch.io that we just purchased.

We realized partway through our reading of Musicking: the meanings of performing and listening by Christopher Small that we no longer expected the reading of the book to be an event we appreciated - we expected it to be an obligation. So we halted there. We'll talk more about the book at the end.

We found out about Christopher Small and the book (and word) "Musicking" through the YouTube videos of Adam Neely, and were prompted to read it specifically from its reference in Neely's video about hating CCM - Contemporary Christian Music - but trying to like it. It clearly left a strong and lasting impression on Neely, and for good reason: as a musician and especially as a working jazz musician, a musician in a heavily improvisational style of music seeking to make an income out of performance, the importance of music as an entire event is inescapable. And though we don't love the book and didn't finish it, this perspective was enriching to us as well.

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.

occasionally we are overwhelmed by the realization of how much weirder we are than we had any idea we were allowed to be.

- 🦊 (January 12)

Thinking about this b/c 👋🏽 🐰 - new system member fronting.

Like, god, the goalposts on our brain's bullshit just don't stop moving. We grew up taught to be proper and obedient, and we grew up knowing on a gut level that stepping outside the bounds of what's allowed could mean being punished and being told you deserve it ... so we have a really strong sense of when we're in a zone that we feel confident of social safety - of society's authorization - and when we don't.

And we can sense the gradations, because being a plural system with two members is already breaking from what society licenses, but being a plural system with a bunch of members, and adding more month after month, just ... we know we're not safe from What Everyone Knows out here.

...

Thank goodness for friends who are excited to meet new friends instead.

- 🐰

(Maybe with help from others - 🦗? 🐦? or maybe when I'm driving my fingers, their signatures feel close to hand. We don't know. We're still learning.)

we can't speak to anyone else's weird

weird, for us, was not lying to ourselves nor sabotaging ourselves in the name of compliance to the expectations placed on us

it has been scary because it has meant putting ourselves outside the bounds of what power structures defend as normal

but it has also made us real

made us self-aware, self-affirming, and self-actualizing

we get to exist and avoid pain and harm and seek out joy and accomplishment

this is the part in the script where we say it is worth it, but it honestly wasn't a decision for us - or if it was, it was the decision we made as a child, that we were not okay lying to ourselves

but we can say that not lying to ourselves seems to work out

I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.

I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.

( Content warnings: homophobia, classism, sexism and racism mentions, hospital mention, and a brief rant about 1978 made-for-TV movie 'Rescue from Gilligan's Island' )