a road trip success, more or less

August 14, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has a couple Bluesky invite codes if you want an escape from Twitter-that-was; just hit Reply! 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI know I say this every week, but the possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded! In the meantime, you can find the show's Apple Podcasts presence here, which includes a back catalog over 150 episodes long chock-full of excellent ridiculousness, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that could almost be their own show if I had the time to make yet another podcastInstant Band Night 22: WILDI want you to know that this is happening in about a month and it's the easiest and best way to make musical magic happen in your life. Even if all you do is watch! There's no obligation to play if you just want to check out the bands; every act needs an audience — that could be YOU. Bring a handful of your coolest friends and bear witness to the most intensely joyful evening of creativity to be had in the entire Bay area!!Sept 14 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUIt's never too early to think about either the holidays or those people with fall birthdays in your life. Consider some clever ceramics! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! I'm working (slowly) on even more delightful little weirdos and I hope to show you soon. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I had quite the weekend, so there's no room in my brain left for anything substantive enough to demand an entire ramble. I did see a possum for the first time in my life* tonight, scrambling out from under a car to dart into the space next to our house where the trash cans are. Godspeed, giant night mouse, and may your rummaging be fruitful.* It's always possible I saw one during the roughly dozen or so years I lived in the Presidio, but I remember the Presidio as mostly a place of skunks, coyotes, and quail. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Semi-live updates:SATURDAYI'm typing this right now on Saturday night in a hotel room in Seaside, a few miles from Monterey, where tomorrow, if the gods be willing, we will successfully breakfast and watch some cartoons and go to The Aquarium, whereupon once and for all Quentin will find out whether they have an ocean sunfish or not. I say this as though it may not come to pass; in reality this trip has thus far been pretty straightforward and I'm just trying to maintain humility.Putting a stroller + a Pack & Play into a 2010 Honda Fit means the rest of the luggage needs to be divided into smaller bags that can be fit in/around the aforementioned bulky items, and this we have done. It does mean I needed one of those luggage carts to actually bring everything from the car to the room that we needed, which seems ridiculous since we're only here for one (1) night, but honestly, it worked great and this place has carts aplenty. And the hotel restaurant was pretty good! Also fast! The boys ate, and nobody had a meltdown — not that a public restaurant meltdown is typical of the Sung Gruver Boys, but it's still something for which I feel no small amount of gratitude.The aforementioned Boys are in their own room; we got a suite that included a bedroom and a living room with a pull-out couch. The bedroom has Felix in his Pack & Play and Quentin in one of the two double beds; in a spur-of-the-moment decision that provoked no small amount of delight in Quentin, Mavis is taking the other one whenever she feels sleepy, and I'm gonna do the folding bed. This place is good; if you're ever headed down to do The Aquarium with a couple of kids, you could do far worse than the Embassy Suites in Seaside. MONDAYOverall it went pretty well! The boys took in a great variety of wondrous sea animals, which included witnessing the feeding for the million-gallon Open Ocean tank (no sunfish, sadly). Quentin observed but declined to pet the live giant isopods, which is a literal thing you can do right now at The Aquarium. The cafe is spendy, but someone clearly thought about it very deeply from a design and user throughput standpoint and I was both grateful and impressed: getting food was an efficient and orderly process, and there was plenty of available seating even during the lunchtime rush.The one down moment was on me: we gave both of the boys their choice of a stuffy from the gift shop for a keepsake, and during the one-block walk from The Aquarium to our car, Felix fell asleep in his stroller and we think that's where he must've lost his grip on his sea turtle, an incident none of us noticed at the time. Getting everyone bundled into the car was a somewhat hectic process, and I didn't think to take stuffy inventory, so I didn't notice the turtle was missing until we were literally a hundred miles away. Saving graces here were twofold: (1) Felix hadn't had any time to get attached to the sea turtle (2) Quentin, unprompted, announced he would share custody of his existing sea turtle back at home* as well as the blacktip reef shark stuffy he'd selected, a generous and heartwarming big-brother offer.The boys were so enamored of the hotel and The Aquarium that we think we might make a yearly tradition of this trip, so hopes are high that we'll be able to secure Felix a replacement sea turtle on the next go-round.We've learned that a ~2.5h drive is about the limit as far as road trips for us as a family, even taking into account the boys napping through at least part of it. We could possibly extend it if we gave them a 20m break to just run around at some point, but it's so hot out there that I don't know how well that'd go over, nor where precisely we'd do it, but that's just a planning thing. This was good! It was a good idea for a trip and it went shockingly well overall; would recommend!!Tomorrow Quentin starts kindergarten; more on that next week, I suppose!* A highly treasured companion who had been missing for almost two weeks after an excursion to a friend's house and an unmarked stay in a toy suitcase, which is a story in and of itself tbh 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Blessings of Father Indictments upon you: Jack Smith got a search warrant for Trump's Twitter account, which who knows? Might include DMs, or deleted tweets? How delicious would it be if Trump's utter inability to keep his own stupid flapping fuck mouth shut was what ended up sealing the deal? (CNBC) And now I'm hearing the Georgia indictments dropped? Absolutely incredible. (AP) 

  • A rule adopted in 2020 cut shipping emissions of sulfur by 80%, which is great, except that it also got rid of "ship track" clouds, which seems to have sped up the warming of the planet. There is some sort-of-good news, though, in that this proves solar geoengineering is probably a viable option?? (Science) 

  • The Scientists have once again discovered a new method for taking unrecyclable plastic waste and turning into industrially valuable chemicals. Again!!!! (U of Wisconsin-Madison) 

  • Hamilton Nolan's got another banger for us about some awful viral conservative country song and what our actual response to it needs to be. (How Things Work) 

  • Most of the time, The Machine can't really explain itself when we ask it how it got whatever result it's showing, but The Scientists have invented a version that can recognize patterns and say where they're coming from. Nice! (U of Waterloo) (Paper) 

  • Pair that with this writeup about a study The Scientists ran where they asked The Machine to answer coding questions, a lot of which it got wrong — and lots of wrong answers skated by the judges because they were pleasant to read. That oughta tell us something. (The Register) 

  • Whoooooo's ready to get their heart ripped out, but in kind of a good way? "Notes from Grief Camp" is ready for you. (The Walrus) 

  • "Why He Look Like That?" An investigation into the artist's rendering of the recently-discovered Perucetus fossil, which hints at the existence of an ancient animal bigger than the blue whale. (Defector) 

  • AP wants to know if there's a Kenaissance coming or what. (AP) 

  • Hydrogen-powered airplanes are getting there. Really! (Ars Technica) 

  • City versions of animals are different from the wild ones. But how exactly? The Scientists are figuring it out, and it's fascinating. (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) (Paper) 

  • Retailers like to do This One Trick called "fictitious pricing" that's, well, a trick. The Scientists have worked out a fix and asked some execs about it, and surprisingly, they didn't shut it down immediately. (Notre Dame) 

  • There are probably microplastics in your literal heart right now. That ................ can't be good, right? (American Chemical Society) 

  • VFX workers at Marvel are trying to unionize. Do iiiiiiiiiiit!!!! (Polygon) 

  • The Scientists have isolated a promising new antifungal molecule, which is good because the fungi are out there and they're hongry. (U of Oklahoma) 

  • Nobody actually swallows spiders while they sleep. Why would spiders wanna go in there?? They can tell you're breathing! Don't talk to me about Spiders Georg (and if you get that joke, tell me your Tumblr username so we can be mutuals). (BBC) 

  • All right, all right: in space, everyone can hear you scream if the materials involved happen to be piezoelectric. Fine! (U of Jyväskylä) (Paper) 

  • You may have fucked up in your life, but have you fucked up bad enough to create what seems to me like possibly the worst idea for a wine startup in existence? (KEYT) 

  • The Scientists have completed a first pass on a tool aimed at measuring bias in generative AI art. (UC Santa Cruz) (Paper) 

  • "As Star Wars Stagnates, Star Trek Is Flourishing: Disney’s Star Wars feels beholden to the past, while Paramount is letting Trek go wild" (Kotaku) 

  • There's a whole 'nother ecosystem underneath the deep hydrothermal vents, folks. Maybe put a pause on that whole seafloor mining thing. (Science Alert) 

  • This proposal for turning an asteroid into a space station is wild. (Universe Today) (PDF of paper) 

  • It turns out that not only do people generally expect others to mirror their own generosity or selfishness, they'll reward identical behavior and trust those people more, even if it's to their own detriment. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • More than half the species on Earth live in the soil, according to an estimate from The Scientists. (Guardian) 

  • Instead of feeding it a billion tons of training data, The Scientists took an instance of The Machine and taught it the laws of optical physics, then asked it to reconstruct some images of human tissue samples based on holograms; whaddayaknow, it worked pretty well. (UCLA) (Paper) 

  • What are cities going to be like ten years from now? Will they be .............. good? Here are the key questions to ponder. (Vox) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Ilia Bronskiy on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Photo by Levi Arnold on UnsplashReader Erin is nearly 100% certain this album contains a cover of "Little Boxes" that sounds a lot like the Thermals. 

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.