a Chicken Fries-based epiphany of sorts

May 28, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that went to a wedding so great it honestly produced a mild case of the "post-convention blues" afterward, a thing that normally only occurs after a large-scale event like San Diego Comic Con. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway69 - The Butler:Person Ratio"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special guest Erika (@erika) unshroud a cocktail-based idea before going deep on butlers, a voting idea from Jon's friend Elsie, and vampire lore."This is a reminder to myself to circle back with Erika and Kelly on ToddyCon 2018* once the fall rolls around.* You'll just have to listen to the episode.You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/ 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Let us take a moment to sing the praises of the faithful plain cake donut and the humble animal cracker, of which I could probably eat truly alarming amounts if nobody stopped me. It's not just me, right? Both of these items have a kind of faint lemony undertaste to them that's 95% of their appeal? And yet the recipe for plain cake donuts that I just looked up contained no lemon. What is this sorcery? Do you mean to tell me there are ingredients that can be combined in just such a way as to form a palimpsest gestalt of overlapping flavors that presents to my palate as a hint of lemon? Does this not imply a whole new culinary pastime? Of trying to mix disparate and unexpected ingredients to produce recognizable tastes not to be found within the original set? Or am I taking crazy pills here? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I just took my first trip away from the family: a couple of days down in southern California for a friend's wedding. It was great! But I also spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time also noticing how weird it felt. I've traveled tons of times in my adult life by myself, but on this trip I felt like I needed to somehow recontextualize everything I was doing, as if I'd never done it before. Relearning how to just be on my own in the world. Madness. I'd been doing it just fine for the vast majority of my adult life! And all of a sudden I'm at an airport food court thinking "Wow, I really can just get whatever I feel like and sit anywhere, huh." Don't knock it til you've tried it, folks. (spoiler: I ended up getting a Chicken Fries meal from the Burger King; Chicken Fries are weird, everyone)Honestly, it was An Adjustment. But it makes sense: the changes my life has seen in the last six months as compared to the previous 37 years or whatnot are fundamental and essentially unprecedented. There's probably more coming; I just wanted to record this moment before it slipped past. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye. 

  • I want this autonomous urban boat idea to become a thing just to see if it actually works, but I get the feeling that we're all going to get an up-close look at "waterway-rich cities" before too much longer anyway, so. 

  • Where are me and all my pals going to live when we hit retirement age, assuming the ocean doesn't just up and swallow everybody? Not just where, but how? Worth a thought. 

  • I don't even want to get into his stupid letter canceling the summit, but this hideous goddamn abomination of a coin just points ever more clearly to what a tacky, simpleminded clown Trump is and how much I hate that he's the president. 

  • Turnkey boutique dating sites like Trump.dating (and its mirror twin, NeverTrump.dating) are a scam -- obviously -- but they're sort of interesting scams?? 

  • Up until now, the vast majority of the plastic we've been using has come from petroleum, but what if we could make it from wood using bacteria? This is a question science has gone some way toward answering. 

  • Popular Mechanics interviewed 26 companies about the state of American manufacturing, and the answers are intriguing. 

  • Here's something unsurprising: covering white supremacists and other garbage on the internet literally gives you PTSD. Great. 

  • Business Insider, of all places, has put together a compendium of all the moons in the solar system that have subsurface oceans, and there's way more than even I remembered. If each one of them turns out to contain life in different varieties, I will be the world's happiest person. 

  • Uh, it turns out you can make a plain silicon crystal into a photovoltaic one just by stabbing it? 

  • The Atlantic reminds us that There Is Only One Trump Scandal, and goddammit they're right. Sometimes I wish there were a literal King of the Press who could issue directives about coverage that would have to be obeyed, until I remember that's a terrible idea. 

  • We now have clearly documented video evidence that at least two good cops exist. I'm not saying they're the only ones that exist in the whole world, but we definitely know that there are least two, and it's these two specifically. 

  • The Netflix Tech Blog sometimes publishes stuff that's way over my head, but for your enjoyment I would like to present Data Science and the Art of Producing Entertainment at Netflix and Engineers Making Movies (AKA Open Source Test Content). 

  • Literally the only way this "octopus is aliens" thing works is if we (and by extension all other forms of life on the entire planet that use DNA) also came from space -- from the same original source in space, no less. Sure would love to know what all those extra genes are doing there, though. 

  • Here's something interesting to watch if you've got a few minutes of downtime to kill: Trippy Magic Happens When AI Only Knows About Flowers, Waves, and Fires.

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumELECTRODAVE + The Dance Team Captains, Please Eat Yourself 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.