am i sci fi heretic or not

July 18, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that sits triumphant atop a mountain of cherries and doesn't want to hear about the end of stonefruit season for at least two more months 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe thing about having a 4yo and a baby who doesn't yet sleep through the night is that you can't put them in the same room together overnight, and it's also not possible to put yourself in the room with him without causing even more sleep complications. Long story short, we're sleeping in the office (the house's third and possibly actual master bedroom, considering it has the attached half bath) on the pull-out couch, which is also where my computer is, so the edit on the last episode we recorded (which admittedly was last year) still isn't quite complete. But it'll get there someday!As of the time of this writing, there are still not only 43 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings, but someone managed to slip past the perimeter and enter another lovely review, which I only just saw now! Whoever you are, you have not only our thanks but our favor should we ascend to the throne. The rest of you: a new standard has been set!!Instant Band Night 16 is September 8Instant Band Night 15 was an unqualified success: a good time had by good people with shockingly good bands. Mark your calendars for September 8, tell your buddies, and watch this space for an event page and so forth.+ +  A W   Y I S S  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Does anyone else here get the feeling that the production team behind The Orville are making this show at us? The third season feels almost aggressively good and I can't explain it any better than that. Yes I am being serious.I actually don't know where the rest of Star Trek fandom sits w/r/t The Orville. On the one hand, Seth MacFarlane has been responsible for some heinous crimes against comedy/culture; on the other, he gave us a strange, glittering gift in the form of a Classical Star Trek Show that I really do think is pretty good. It is, at the very least, the most TNG-like show we've gotten in a very long time, until Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds came along.* The first few episodes of the first season lean a little too hard in the "trying for comedy" direction, but they found a balance fairly quickly, and it works. I have no idea if my opinion is heretical or not. The fact that I'm a little nervous to ask probably speaks for itself; my dim memory tells me that MacFarlane has been either Officially Problematic or functionally close enough thereto to warrant caution, but can't give me any specifics. And yet the show is good. It really is! I can give you a whole laundry list of Trek-like themes that it tackles either as well as or better than actual Trek, but I don't want to sound like a madman. I don't know! It's weird! Is anyone else in this boat with me???* No shade to Disco.**** I don't want to talk about Picard. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.By the time you read this, Felix will officially be one year old. A year! A year of Felix already!! In celebration of a most precious baby I would like to tell you some news, namely that Felix has a favorite book, and it's Maisy's Bus. It's one of the first books he likes to pull off the shelf, and he tries to hand it to us repeatedly until we open it for him, at which point there's a gleeful giggle and clapping of little baby hands. It's very good. We haven't been able to capture this on video yet — he has an awareness of the camera already — but hope remains high. We've gotten him another Lucy Cousins board book, because it's delightful but also maybe to see if there's something about her oeuvre overall that appeals to him.When we brought up the subject of Felix's birthday card this evening, Quentin wanted to ensure that his words be written within thusly: "Dear Felix, I hope you love this book, and it's your birthday tomorrow!" I think we have the makings of a good big brother, folks.Happy birthday to you, Felix. You are a treasure. A treasure we kind of gave ourselves, but it still counts. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Ed Yong, y'all. "Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?" (~$Atlantic) 

  • "Unimaginable abortion stories will become more common. Is American journalism ready?" (Nieman Lab) 

  • Thursday was when I learned there's a museum comprising 52 empty school buses full of the belongings of kids shot at school, and it's going on a tour visiting shitbag politicians who've accepted money from the NRA. First stop was Ted Cruz. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Open this up and click on one of the released images from the James Webb Space Telescope just to watch the view swing around and zooooooom in: holy fucking shit. (JWST images in context) 

  • Here's word from an epidemiologist on how worried we should be about monkeypox becoming a pandemic. Spoiler: not very? (The Conversation) 

  • The Scientists are starting to figure out how to bolt molecular-scale artificial parts onto living bacteria, which could one day make them very useful for targeted treatment of things like cancer. (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems) 

  • Heads up: Christofascist maniacs are starting to threaten teachers and librarians. Some people need to be more afraid of getting punched. (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • A blog post from Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery division, reveals some fascinating but also kind of hilarious-looking machines that you might imagine coming out of one of those books about the history of flight when they were still figuring things out. There's video, too. Worth checking out! (Wing Blog) 

  • "DALL-E 2's Failures Are The Most Interesting Thing About It" (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Why are there some times when urchins and thriving kelp forests can coexist, while other times the urchins just go fucking HAM and eat all the kelp in sight down to the rock, leaving nothing behind? The Scientists may have found the answer. (UCSB) 

  • Here's an interesting medium-dive on the establishment and growth of the Margaritaville brand. I didn't know they have a resort in the middle of downtown Manhattan. (~$Skift) 

  • Big cities saw historic population losses during the pandemic, but suburbs didn't grow all that quickly either. Where'd everybody go, then? Frustratingly, this writeup doesn't address that at all, but I'm guessing they must've gone to suburbs that weren't measured. (Brookings Institute) 

  • The Scientists have discovered behavior in a species of gophers that sort of resembles farming. (Science) 

  • Is ........ could we one day live in a world where crops don't need to be pollinated in order to bear fruit???? (UMD) 

  • "Tacky is back! Meet the internet aesthetic romanticizing “the glamour of getting by.”" (Vox) 

  • Childhood Me would not have believed the world of ridiculous wonders we live in now. (TechCrunch) 

  • It turns out sea turtles make amazing sensor platforms for collecting cyclone data out in the open sea. (Hakai) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated a proof-of-concept machine learning model capable of determining the suicide risk of individual handgun purchasers. (UC Davis) 

  • Your Interesting Correlation (Not Causation) For The Week is the one found between eating lots of fruit and having depression, or more accurately, not having depression. I will say that having either the time or resources (or both) to eat a pile of cherries the size of my own head every day probably would do wonders for my mental health. (Aston U) 

  • I didn't even know there were this many flavors of Mountain Dew. (Everywhereist) 

  • Please enjoy this photo of a sloth getting fitted with a science backpack. (Nature) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumBad Dad Alert, All Of This Is Canon Now(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.