The Packbats' Weblog

So, you might not know this about us, but until - *checks date* - two weeks ago Friday, we were using Windows 7 as our OS.

"But Packbats!", someone might exclaim. "Windows 7 hasn't been supported since 2015! Hell, as of January, you couldn't even bribe Microsoft to keep your system limping along!"

And you'd be correct! Which is why you might not have known this about us, because "oh yeah, our primary computer, our connection to a world where being a queer trans plural furry is normal and unremarked upon, is running an OS so insecure that even Mozilla has given up on supporting it" seems like an irresponsible thing to say on the public network.

That is, until the day just under two weeks ago when we weren't running Win7 any more, because our laptop had stopped functioning and we couldn't figure out how to fix it.

So yeah. We're posting this from NixOS.

So far, we have:

• Altered one config file so we could read ntfs drives.
• Used nix-shell to grab a file partition tool so we could turn our temporary Windows 7 ntfs drive (the 2 TB one) into a proper Linuxy ext4 drive.
• Used tune2fs to tell Linux that it doesn't need to save 5% of our now-storage 2 TB drive for root.
• Decided to hold off on moving home to the 2 TB drive, because it would mean messing with hardware-configuration.nix and we're tired.

We're tired. But we have a working computer.

imagine this: the weather is good today, so we want to take tea out onto our porch and sit in the fresh air. let's talk toki pona grammar.

this essay exists because we, while we've been learning, have been very frustrated about not being able to translate things, and we couldn't translate because we didn't know how the words went together. this probably isn't gonna solve that problem for you, but it hopefully means you've at least met all the constructions and you know they exist.

we are not as of this writing fluent, so many thanks to our beta readers, including Russ Sharek of The Circus Freaks, @f00fc7c8@kind.social, and various members of the kama sona Discord. any remaining errors and eccentricities are our own.

first line is in toki pona.

second line is a word-by-word gloss in english (spaces separate toki pona words) with grammatical particles in square brackets and prepositions in curly braces.
third line is a somewhat-literal english translation. (obvious example: singletons saying an unmodified 'mi' probably mean "me" - the actual toki pona word does not indicate number.)

the rest are commentary.

let's go.

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.

Someone made a comment on the fediverse and got me curious about the history of emoji's four different mailbox symbols. Crossposting here because why not?

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' )