The Packbats' Weblog

okay, but for real now

depending on genre, fantastical elements are approached in different ways

in much of the ~speculative fiction~ umbrella - sci fi, fantasy, superhero stories, blah blah blah - there's prolly an answer to how it works, and knowing the answer can help people deal with the challenges they face

for example, one of the characters in the 1999 Mystery Men movie, Invisible Boy, can make himself invisible when no-one (including him) is looking at him

like, obviously, that's funny - like, how do you even know

but also that's the rules, that's how it works, and that's how he saves the day later in the movie

in that story, knowing how things work is how you win

...but in other genres - something something magical realism? - how it works is simply not considered interesting

if Hobbes is a person, a walking tiger who can demolish Calvin at snowball fights, you can make humor and story out of it

if Hobbes is a toy, a plush animal that Calvin plays with, you can make humor and story out of it

if none of Calvin's magical nonsense is real, then he's a kid, using his imagination to create stories that feel real

but also for a lot of kids, especially neurodivergent kids, toys are a kid of real which matters

but also Calvin isn't real, none of this is real

Hobbes makes sense to us, reading a newspaper comic, because a kid and his tiger friend makes sense, and a kid and his tiger plushie makes sense, and living in a different world than the people around you makes sense

and if you want to tell a story with that? choose which one you want to tell

"Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy about an anxious neurodivergent person who is cajoled into joining their MMO friend's tabletop roleplaying group, and we kind of really love it? It is, like a lot of portal fantasies and adventure stories in general, very much about someone being pulled out of their familiar world, forced to deal with a new and terrifying situation, and discovering and developing new strengths in the course of rising to that challenge...

...and in this case, that actually starts before anyone is sucked into another dimension? Tar joining the Kin game is such a brave moment for them, and that ends up being enormously positive in their life before they and their group are handed a whole lot of magic and another entire world to try to navigate. It's a story about making friends, supporting each other, and saving people along the way.

It's also about disability and neurodivergence. It's about people having struggles because their brains and bodies can't do what needs doing on their own, and it's about people having friends who help them get through anyway. It's about having internalized negative stereotypes and being told how amazing they actually are. It's about finding ways to manage, no matter how weird.

It's about a group of marginalized queer people surviving and thriving. It's a kind of story we personally haven't read enough. We're glad we had a chance to read this one.

(p.s. In the course of writing "Non-Player Character", Corva accidentally wrote a sourcebook for Kin, the tabletop roleplaying game from the book, which we haven't yet played but could imagine ourselves running a game of. The flavor is very good, and we like how effectively it simplifies its mechanics by reusing systems.)

Thinking more about that boombox we got out to look at its cassette deck and the feeling we were enjoying of having sound in our physical space from it instead of in our headphones, and we ended up having a couple more thoughts.

You know that Brian Eno quote? "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"? I think one of those weird and uncomfortable things about radio is that you don't control what you listen to, when you listen to the radio - whatever the broadcaster decides you will hear, you either hear that or you don't listen to the station at all.

...and that can be fun? We have to be in the right mood for it, but it can be cool to make the soundtrack to our day be someone else's musical choices for a while. It ends up being surprising and novel, and encourages us to find what we appreciate in music we'd never've sought out.

(Admittedly we're currently listening to the web stream of WRUC 89.7 FM instead of a local station over the airwaves, but the principle applies.)

(We're still fascinated by Project Gemini and still lack access to a gemini web host to be able to respond to blog posts directly, so ... doing it here, sorry.)

There's been a little bit of a conversation happening among the gemlogs that we follow on Project Gemini about the limitations of the standard Gemini markup language. Someone found an old Reddit comment that was contemptuous of its limitations, and (unsurprisingly) a lot of folks who use it regularly wanted to talk about why it's good, actually.

Oddly, though, I don't think we've actually seen any of these posts center the point that caught our attention about the text/gemini format, which is (ironically) a point we've seen made about HTML: you do not have to specify formatting.

If you don't want that, you don't use Project Gemini. If you do, then Project Gemini is a relief.

It's ... impossible, frankly, to create a space where holidays do not exist. People will accidentally wear a pin or a T-shirt or a sweater or whatever, people will barge in unnoticing and carry those events in with them, conversations will accidentally drift in directions ... even without a global pandemic and our complete lack of funds, there's no way an actual, physical establishment could be made to guarantee holidays won't intrude.

We still like the idea, though. A fictional space, representing the idea that it's okay to set an impossible boundary and be able to spend a while not having to avoid or shut out a societal celebration you don't belong in.

Not sure if it'd be better realized as a story, an interactive fiction, a Bitsy game, or something else.