The Packbats' Weblog

toki pona is a fun minimalist philosophical constructed language made by jan Sonja. As of early 2023, it has been exploding in popularity, and as more and more people who know us Packbats know, this means that there's a very real chance that a friend of yours will want to ask you, "how should I refer to you when I am speaking toki pona?"

There are three reasons why this isn't trivial for your hypothetical friend to answer themselves:

1. In toki pona, to talk about something, you have to say what it is - and different speakers use different concepts to encapsulate themselves, both for identity reasons and for fun.
2. In toki pona, one speaks using very few sounds, and those sounds are put together in very few ways. This makes it easy for anyone to speak toki pona, but means many names need to be modified to become toki pona names.
3. In every language, the correct thing to call someone is what they want to be called.

So: what do you want to be called?

A little belated of an announcement, but this is the introduction to our guide for non-tokiponists on how to make a name for yourself (literally) in toki pona.

We're really proud of it, honestly! It's about 3k words total, plus a wordlist for quick reference, and there's .html and .pdf downloads for offline use. We'd love to hear from anyone who tries it.

So a friend of ours was making a funny "games of the year 2022" post, one of those that people make who have no respect for the triple-A gaming industry and want to look at cool weird obscure stuff that fails that industry's metrics and succeeds at being something else. And we love that.

And our friend put our work on that very short list. Twice.

Anyway, we've been putting out a free 200-word TTRPG every month on Patreon. And there's a style of phrase-long badass mech names we enjoy, names like Boiling Water Scalding Away Layers Of Bitterness, and a good way to make one is to look at the teapot on your desk, think about how the residue of old brews can be removed with hot water and scrubbing, and then remove context and make the wording go harder until it hits mech name status.