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HTML tips for 90s kids trying to make 20s websites, metadata edition (indiepocalypse.social repost)

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Sunday, March 3rd, 2024 07:11 pm
  • <!DOCTYPE html>: you have the modern HTML standard at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ bookmarked now, you're not making terrible Microsoft Internet Explorer 5-only broken pages, the browser doesn't have to use ~*~quirks mode~*~. Stick this at the very top.
  • <html lang="en">: If most of the page is in one language - this one is English - then you can tell the browser that so language-dependent stuff can use that. Use the ISO 639 abbreviations. I think. (Correction: BCP 47, not ISO 639. It's a subset, I think.) Anyway, if part of your page is in another language, you can put lang="whatever" on the element containing the other-language part. (Or, like, wrap it in <span lang="whatever"></span> if you don't have one.)
  • <meta charset="UTF-8">: Did you make your HTML files using UTF-8? It should be an option in, like, the Save As dialog or something. Anyway, if you did, you can put this in the <head></head> part so the browser knows it's not Windows-1252 or something.
    • Edit: If your server declares a character encoding in an HTTP header, this line will do nothing. It looks like Neocities doesn't do it for our site, though, so we still need it.
  • <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">: Okay, so, you didn't use any tables for layout, right? And you still don't understand CSS or Javascript? Okay, then your website probably works fine on, like, a tiny screen. You can check this by zooming in like 500% or opening it in a small window or, idk, both. Anyway, the viewport thing tells mobile browsers that they can just display your site normally and it'll all be good.

Folks who learned HTML in the past fifteen years, feel free to chime in with more hot tips. Because we need them. Please.

(Link to Indiepocalypse HTML tips thread, because which a number of folks did, in fact, chime in.)

Tags:

commercial aviation industry advice (Weirder Earth repost)

packbat: A selfie shot of a light-skinned black plural system from above, with grass behind zir. (from above)
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023 12:55 pm

Caveat: we are not pilots, we have never been pilots, we have other priorities. This whole thread was us being fans of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot".

I think if there's one thing to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it is that "am I the asshole?" is a much less useful question than "how did the totality of habits, tools, knowledge, communication, and so forth - because it's never just one thing - result in something unfortunate happening, and what can I learn from this to avoid such things happening in the future?"

I think if there's two things to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it's that if you've had less than 21 hours of sleep in the past 72 (numbers to be adjusted as necessary based on your own medical history, but that's the standard for pilots), you ought to bear in mind that you are at elevated risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.

( (the thread went on for a while) )

Anyway, now we're going to fix the "it's totally normal to have two to-do list alerts all the time" problem. The dentist one we can do on Thursday, so we'll hide it until Thursday, and the cmus one we can do now.

*opens the man page*

Tags:

The Packbat flashcard technique

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Thursday, November 16th, 2023 04:38 pm

Did we not write this post? We can't find a copy of this post.

Okay, so, the trick is this: each time you study from your stack of paper flashcards, you follow these steps.

  1. Lift the number of flashcards you want to study right now off the top of the pile.
  2. Shuffle your small study pile. (We like to flip one half of the stack upside-down with each shuffle, so which side up the cards are is randomized.)
  3. Go through each card one by one, practicing. Each time you finish a card, if you feel confident about it, put it on the bottom of the original pile, and if you want to bone up on it more, put it on the top of the original pile. (Optionally, you could put some in the middle.) If you get a card wrong, put it lower in your study pile so you can try again in a little bit.
  4. When the study pile is empty, put away the original pile (that now has all your cards again).

What this means is that, as long as you're taking more cards off the top than you put back on the top, you always go through the cards that you need to learn, and you slowly but consistently cycle through the cards you know. That means you're reviewing all your old cards while learning your new ones, while only studying as many cards at a time as you're comfortable with.

It's not the scientific system that the scientific science-based flashcard programs use, but we hate all those programs because our memory is a sieve and those things don't care if we want to study more or not. This lets us decide what we've learned and what we haven't, and it's dead simple.

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not a place of conlangs

packbat: A black line curving and looping to suggest a picture of a cat. (line cat)
Monday, October 30th, 2023 02:40 pm

In 1990, Sandia National Laboratories convened two teams of cross-disciplinary experts with a question: how can we mark a disposal site for nuclear waste in a way that will successfully warn people off for ten thousand years? The two teams went off to develop their strategies, and by 1992 had returned their reports; in 1993, the final paper, "Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant", by Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Horal, and Robert V. Guzowski (doi:10.2172/10117359, OSTI 10117359), was published.

Appendix F - the report from Team A, made up of Dieter G. Ast, Michael Brill, Maureen F. Kaplan, Ward H. Goodenough, Frederick J. Newmeyer, and Woodruff T. Sullivan, III - contains the following passage:

This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ...nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

I don't think that it's surprising that, decades after this report was written, this ominous and urgent warning caught the imagination of many.

And I think that, if they aren't already doing it, conlang enthusiasts should add this to their repertoire of standard example texts, alongside the Tower of Babel story from Genesis, "The North Wind and the Sun" from Aesop, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations, and others.

  1. It's memorable and popular;
  2. It's evocative and interesting;
  3. It is simultaneously a very modern message (being concerned with radiation poisoning) and one intended to be understood by an audience without a modern understanding of science (and therefore possible to convey in most languages);
  4. The intent of the message - that people understand that they are not to dig here lest they release radioactivity into the local environment - can be clearly understood by we the translators;
  5. Communication of that intent is more important than perfect word-by-word translation, allowing a degree of artistic liberty in translation;
  6. It (or, more precisely, something like it) was always intended to be presented in multiple languages, for obvious reasons; and
  7. It is reasonably short, and therefore not too onerous to translate.

None of that is a coincidence, either. If you read (or skim, in our case) the original report, you will find that this passage is what Team A intended to convey "non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a 'natural language'" - it is a translation into English of the emotional impact on (they hoped) any human of an ominous field of spiky obelisks engraved with warning messages and human faces expressing horror and disgust. (A place that is both a message and part of a system of messages, you may note.) The actual messages they proposed to write on these obelisks are much more straightforward and direct, and the actual languages they propose translating them into are much more popular.

So it's not useful to Sandia National Laboratories to translate this into a conlang ... but I think it is useful to creators of conlangs to do so. I think very few standard passages pose similar challenges to this one - it speaks of things that many such messages do not, in a manner that many such messages do not.

And I think it would be fun if it existed in lots and lots of languages.

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Racism in online Toki Pona communities (Blaugust #7)

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Thursday, August 10th, 2023 01:53 am

We talk a lot about the conlang Toki Pona because we think it is delightful. We haven't talked a lot about our experience with the online Toki Pona community, once we moved beyond watching jan Misali videos and talking to friends of friends.

It was bad. It was real bad.

( In no particular order: ... )

Now, this is a blog post written in mid-2023 about events occuring mid-2023. You, dear reader, might find the Toki Pona communities you encounter to be different. Our experience with tokiponists around our side of fedi (which actually bans people who adopt white supremacist memes, like functional antiracist communities do) has been positive. Toki Pona, the language, has not been hostile to us.

But ... listen, if you recommend people read Sonja Lang's book about Toki Pona without mentioning that there's a strong theme of jan Sonja's religion through it, then that's a big thing to leave out but not a big deal - there are a lot of atheists, including us, speaking Toki Pona, and jan Sonja seems like a nice person and explicitly queer-positive. But a history of racism is a big deal. And it's a big deal that Toki Pona communities are going to have to deal with, and keep dealing with for so long they get sick of having to keep dealing with it. That's how wrestling with a racist history works.

And if you're just learning Toki Pona in 2023? Stars, I'm sorry to have to tell you this. But stay safe. jan sin o, o awen e kon sina.

  • Current Mood: drained
  • Current Music: MUNA - Runner's High
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Aesop is pretty good for toki pona practice

packbat: A black line curving and looping to suggest a picture of a cat. (line cat)
Thursday, June 15th, 2023 06:45 pm
( Read more... )
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naming yourself in toki pona (itch.io link)

packbat: An anthro copper dragon playing music on a small MIDI controller keyboard. (packdragon midi)
Sunday, April 23rd, 2023 11:22 pm

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.

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spelling is fake, it's fine (weirder earth repost)

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Friday, January 13th, 2023 07:42 pm

(original thread version on Weirder Earth, a Mastodon instance using the Hometown fork. Lightly edited.)

"mastodon" is spelled "mastadon" because the 'o' there is reduced to schwa and 'a' is the most schwa-like vowel letter in English. Same thing behind "definite" and "definate" - a schwa got spelled with an 'a', it's phonetic as hell. It sucks when it's in a hashtag because that splits the hashtag, but mostly it doesn't matter which you use - it's just an "uh" sound, it's the most generic sound possible.

Anyway all writing is a lie, if people understand you then you succeeded, go push the grammaticasters into a pool and live your life.

Sorry, that was kind of judgey.

What you're feeling when you cringe at "mastadon" is damage that was done to you. It is all the people who fucked you up because it was more important to them that you looked like a rich white person than that you survived intact - probably because they got fucked up the same way, because that's what generational trauma is. It fucking sucks and I get it.

But the answer to generational trauma isn't to pass it on, it's to heal.

And everyone knows what "mastadon" is. It's the "calling all photocopers xeroxes" word for the microblogging side of fedi.

20 year old Packbats: I know I'm on the Internet, but I'm going to spell everything correctly, with proper grammar, because that's just the kind of man I am!

37 year old Packbats: I'm not a man and spelling is fake and that makes me really mad because "actually, 'muchly' has been a part of English since the 1620s" is a really cool historical fact and completely irrelevant to why this jackass needs to shut the fuck up about our grammar

(yes, we're still bitter about the person who said that "thanks muchly!" was incorrect to us last year - they knew exactly what we meant, they were able to paraphrase it perfectly)

(don't be like that person, thank you and we appreciate it)

Addendum the next morning:

We care about this because that "you must spell it this way" damage isn't just a thing for those of us who do spell it the way we're told, it's a thing for those of us who can't.

Like, listen: we suck at remembering names, they slide right out of our head, they're arbitrary sounds and they barely come up most of the time ... and for a lot of people, that's spellings of words.

Plus there's disabilities affecting writing.

Plus there's differences of education.

And the thing about mocking people who don't spell it the way they "must" is that that mockery always always always lands on those who can't, over and over and over, and is used as justification for shutting down anything they have to say.

It has a discriminatory impact.

It marginalizes people.

Addendum 2: everything we know about schwas we know from that one Language Files video from two years ago. Shoutout to Tom Scott, Molly Ruhl, and Gretchen McCulloch.

(Emeto content warning on video for brief comment+animation about almost throwing up.)

  • Current Music: Radiohead - "Everything In Its Right Place"
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Thoughts about misandry and harassment dynamics, blog version

packbat: Selfie looking off to the side with a scrunched-up scowl. (grump)
Thursday, January 12th, 2023 04:41 pm

(This began as this fedi thread.)

Bigotry is specifically the exercise of power within and by a system like kyriarchy to fuck over marginalized groups in favor of privileged groups. We're not professionals, but that's our best understanding of the definition.

That said, kyriarchy isn't self-consistent. Kyriarchy can contain hatred of men just fine - hating men is a lot less threatening to it than hating injustice, so threats to the system can be diverted to individuals within it...

...and especially diverted to marginalized individuals within it.

So, yeah, misandry is real. You can tell it's real because autistic people, black people, trans people, disabled people, PoC, children, migrants ... we all get attacked. People take a power structure, turn it into a description of a villain, and use it to attack the vulnerable. It's not hard - all it takes is attacking people you hate with things you're told are hateful traits, and never ever ever listening to them when they try to teach you to be better.

This is half a tangent, but we still like Jay Smooth's video "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist" and its distinction between the "what they are" conversation and the "what they did" conversation. Pretty near every time we try to talk about something we have a problem with, we try to talk about actions we have a problem with - about what they did - and, when necessary, let people draw conclusions from what they did about what they might do next.

(By the way, Jay Smooth's followup TEDx talk, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race", is terrific. It's worth watching both.)

I'm gonna be honest with y'all as people who've been around on the Internet for a hot minute: we've seen some bullshit. But I'm also gonna be honest with you as a disabled genderqueer transfem Black plural system: "what they are" got fuck-all to do with whether you got bigotry in you. You got bigotry in you. You got that for free.

So when we're talking about misconduct, we leave "what they are" out of it. We even avoid "reply guy" and "mansplaining" and other suchlike phrases. Are they doing harm?

Are they doing harm?

Like, seriously, is anyone being hurt here? Is this just weird and uncomfortable and makes you feel bad? Because it's okay to feel bad, feeling bad isn't a sin.

And if people are getting hurt, what kind of hurt is it, where did it start, and why? If one person weren't fighting, what would the other person be doing? (That last question is inspired by "Lady Eboshi is Wrong" from Innuendo Studios.) (Lady Eboshi transcript.)

It doesn't matter which people in the conversation are being called what kinds of oppressor. Calling your critics your oppressors is the easiest damn thing. And the kyriarchy doesn't care why you attack its favorite targets. It just wants those targets taken down.

Tags:

Positive counter statements, a mental health tool

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Friday, May 6th, 2022 03:43 pm

A preface: nothing in this post is the fault of Edmund J. Bourne, PhD, author of The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook (fifth edition). That book introduced us to the concept, but we are not psychologists and our interpretations are our own.

That said, we hate most of the posts we can find on the World Wide Web on the technique, so we're writing our own. Hit us up in the comments if you have thoughts on our presentation of it. Content warning for discussion of self-loathing, albeit in a healing way.

( Sometimes your brain comes up with reasons for you to hate yourself. The goal of positive counter statements is to refute those reasons. )
Tags:

TTRPGs, die rolls, and how often things happen

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Friday, March 25th, 2022 12:19 pm

There's this great joke d20-based tabletop roleplaying game that we do not know the name or author of, but which has very simple mechanics:

  • If you do something, then roll a 20-sided die.
  • If you roll 2 or better, you succeed; if you get a 1 on a die roll, then you die.

So, your character wakes up (die roll), gets out of bed (die roll), puts on clothes (die roll), opens their bedroom door (die roll), walks down the stairs (die roll) ... you see where this is going. And where this is going is approximately a twenty-minute life expectancy. This character is gonna die.

And that doesn't really make sense, right? Your typical person has a lifespan of at least half an hour, and often much longer. However generous the checks look on paper, the frequency of the checks tells a different story.

...so in the name of not beating around the bush, lemme put a formula in front of you:

If consequence rate is how often (times per day, week, year, whatever) you want a given thing to happen, check rate is how often you want someone to make one or more die rolls that could cause that thing, and check probability is the chance that any given check will lead to the consequence, then:

consequence rate divided by check rate equals check probability.

If you want to tell a story in which something has a chance to happen, and you want to defer that chance onto random luck, it's very easy to make that chance way too high or way too low. And that's kind of why we want to talk about it, because it felt like that came up in an actual-play we were listening to today.

( What happened was: ... )

Like, it's easy to miss this in the language of rulebooks, but numbers tell stories. And when players and GMs know what stories they want to tell, it can help them to know what stories their numbers would tell.

So, consequence rate divided by check rate equals check probability.

(Oh, and something like AnyDice to do the arithmetic to find check probabilities, if you don't know them already.)

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They're all game designers.

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 08:46 pm

I don't think it's very confusing to think of someone who writes out a set of rules to guide the play of a tabletop roleplaying game as a game designer. Their decisions shape everything that happens at the table - what aspects of the experience get focus, what aspects get glossed over, what deserves reward and what that reward looks like ... their role in a tabletop game is very clearly that of a designer.

The idea of a GM as a game designer comes up periodically in GM advice columns. I think we first saw this in the form of blog posts highlighting elements of the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework as relevant to GMing, particularly the idea of aesthetics of play; a player who thrives on experiencing discovery at the table is going to want different things out of a session than a player who thrives on performing a role as a character, and GMs are well-served by being aware of what their players want (and what they themselves want) and designing what they create and provide to the players with that knowledge in mind.

A lot less obvious, I think, is that the players design the game as well. Pacing is an element of game design - and the same combat created by the same GM in the same system, for example, can be a tense three hours spent calculating every move to deal with one's opponents as effectively as possible or a single whirlwind hour of snap decisions and adapting plans on the fly, depending on how the players conceive of their roles and how they act within them. Narrative focus is an element of game design - and the same scenario can be a romp from battle to battle or a series of negotiations to muster enough support from all the parties involved to forge a peace, depending on how the players interpret their role within it. Tone is an element of game design - and the same system can produce a lighthearted comedy or a grim struggle, depending on what the players contribute to the story with their choices.

None of the participants in the event of a roleplaying game have full power over it - it is, as everyone always says, a collaborative storytelling - but all of them have some power over it. And I think it benefits all of them to be conscious of that - benefits the authors of systems to know what they want to facilitate, runners of games to know what they want to provide, and players of games to know what they want to do.

  • Current Mood: geeky
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How to Be a Jerk Ethically

packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
Wednesday, September 30th, 2020 11:34 pm

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.

  • Current Mood: okay
  • Current Location: Laptop at home
  • Current Music: Puroresu No Seishin by Jori Kemppi
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Some people have the normalized experience

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Saturday, June 1st, 2019 04:28 pm

(crossposted from my dragon.style fediverse account)

( Pride Month reminder, some second person (445 words) )
  • Current Mood: peaceful
  • Current Location: Laptop at home
  • Current Music: ECHOS - All I Want (Dawn Golden Cover)
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Style Guide Arguments (dragon.style crosspost)

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Monday, May 13th, 2019 10:21 am

(Original post on the fediverse.)

( A meta discussion about some social justice conversations. Content warning for trans discourse being used as an example. )
  • Current Mood: thoughtful
  • Current Location: Laptop at home
  • Current Music: Mastodon - Motherload
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Some tips for being a good enby ally

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (Default)
Friday, December 21st, 2018 06:12 pm
(There was an outburst of "Nonbinary people are valid!" exclamations in my part of the Fediverse - probably in response to jerks being enbyphobic - so I figured I'd contribute. Turned out what I had to say was this.)
  • Listen to us as we try to explain our gender to you.
  • Be okay with our genders changing.
  • Be okay with still not wholly getting it.
  • (Be okay with us still not wholly getting it.)
  • ...but respect our expertise on our lives and our needs.
  • Singular-they is a great default, but listen to what we tell you and try to learn the pronouns we use.
  • Be okay with multiple sets of pronouns. Our genders can be large and contain multitudes.
  • Be okay with unfamiliar and novel pronouns. Finding our genders in words can be really hard.
  • If you mess up, apologize, move on, and try to do better. Making the mistake is not as big a deal as refusing to acknowledge it or refusing to try to change.
  • Beating yourself up isn't an apology, though. People feel really awkward when they have to comfort someone who just hurt them, and it's kind of unfair. Support in, vent out: say your apology to the enby and save your feelings to talk out with another friend or write in your journal or something like that.
  • Speaking of venting: let us vent about dysphoria and stuff. Someone might be a glorious androgynous mystery, a cute thrift-store demilady, a sharp-dressed genderfluid dude, or whatever, but however much they're killing it with their presentation, it doesn't take away their struggles.
  • (These last three go for binary trans people too.)
  • (And an aside on compliments: specific positivity is a fantastic tool and frequently very welcome ... but if we're busy venting something when you feel like bringing out the affirmations, let us speak our pain, first. Complements rarely have an expiry date.) (And acknowledge and validate our struggles, if you can; it helps.)
...I'm sure this list could be longer, but ... yeah, it's what I got off the top of my head. Feel free to suggest more bullet points.
  • Current Mood: nerdy
  • Current Location: Laptop at home
  • Current Music: Rob Scallon & Andrew Huang - Making an Album in a Day
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Disagreeing Productively

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (backpack bat)
Monday, October 29th, 2018 05:32 pm

A while ago, a group I was in decided to have a meetup on the subject of "Disagreeing Productively", and I volunteered to give a talk, saying that it would be based on what I learned relevant to having conversations on the Internet. One of the other people organizing this meetup immediately said, "Well, that's easy - never have an argument on the Internet."

It was a funny line and a funny anecdote, so the first index card in the stack of index cards I wrote my notes on just said doing better than "never have an argument on the Internet" as a rule, and I opened the talk by sharing the anecdote, reading out what I wrote on the card, and saying, "This is my goal for this talk."

I don't remember everything I said at that meetup - I was too busy talking, and too nervous to remember to record myself, and it wasn't scripted. Those index cards were cues for extemporizing, not slides to keep me on script. But I still have the stack of index cards and what I said was stuff I knew, so at the very least, I can go down that stack again and extemporize on the same subject, and even add some things I learned in the time since I did the talk. That's this post.

(Words in bold text - technically, strong emphasis text - appear at the beginning of each of the cut-tag sections below, if you're wondering how I'm dividing this up.)

( Should you disagree? )

( Context )

( Public vs. private disagreement )

( Some comments on actual arguments )

...that's all I got for now. I mean, maybe a link to How to be a fan of problematic things, because I've spent a lot of time in fandom spaces and I think that's a good bit of advice for fans, but that's about it. Comments section is down there if you want to comment - I'd love to have corrections and additions and "thank you, that was a good post"s.

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Link: Jackie at the crossroads

packbat: One-quarter view of the back of my head. (quarter-rear)
Sunday, September 19th, 2010 10:38 am
Fred "slacktivist" Clark tells a story of an urban legend, a debunking, and two reactions. Short and (bitter)sweet.
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Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (spectator)
Monday, July 5th, 2010 08:49 pm
Via kirabug, a proper description of the instinctive drowning response:

  1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
  2. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
  3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
  4. Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
  5. From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.


Read the rest, and read the prequel about cold water survival.
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Mishle Packbat: The Proper Shape and Stiffness of Moral Strictures

packbat: One-quarter view of the back of my head. (quarter-rear)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 09:19 pm
Hi! I'm going to talk to you about morality, because I'm arrogant and you're imperfect.

No, these facts have no relation. Everyone is imperfect - myself more than you, I wager - and I'd be arrogant even if the lot of you were plaster saints. But the second has interesting consequences which the first permits me to address.

(And as long as I'm blathering, let me make a quick clarification: morality is not law, and law is not morality. If you find yourself interchanging the two, you need to recheck your math. Moving on.)

The thing about morality I want to address today is not the content, but the form. Morality acts on three grammatical persons - the first, the second, and the third - and among most people it tends to be different for all three. (This is why Mormons come to your door - it's harder to be rude to a face than a phone.) This makes sense except for one important factor: a lot of people (though probably fewer than it seems) get the proportions backwards, and need correction. So let me break it down for you.

In the first person - in your morality for you - you ought to be strict but fair. As some wit commonly cited as "Yahl, J." is quoted: "Perfection is our goal, excellence will be tolerated." Stick to the straight and narrow road, get it right the first time, and if you get it wrong, get it right the next time. Practice your morality with all the intensity, precision, and dedication that you were supposed to practice the piano when you were growing up.

In the second person, and still more in the third person - in your morality for your friends and for your strangers - be looser. If your personal code is the double-yellow line, give your friends the entire road and strangers two city blocks in both directions. If your personal code is the Geneva Conventions, let your friends have the Declaration of Independence and allow the rest the Golden Rule. Or, if you prefer: an it harm none, let everyone else do what they will.

Why this? Because you don't really know what's right and wrong, not to any sensible degree of accuracy. Oh, you're better off than the Hittite slave holder who, lacking our hard-won experience, never made the connection between the wretched condition of the slave and the moral repugnance of the institution, but "better off" is a long way from omniscient. And the hard part about morality is that it's chaotic - it depends on a tremendous array of details which you might (if you're lucky) know for your own situation but which you are more ignorant of the farther you look from your center of consciousness. While on the one side you want to do right, on the other you don't want to be - in fact, you shouldn't be - the one who beats people up when they haven't done anything wrong.

So how do you do this? You set an engineering margin of error - draw yourself a circumference small enough that you may be confident it (mostly) resides within the right and aim for that, while drawing for others a loop which (mostly) circumscribes the right and nudge what falls outside back in. In other words, you be the anti-hypocrite: you criticize in yourself what you let pass in others.

And that's the form to take, in the first, second, and third persons. Thank you for your patience.
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