🎃 aw yiss 🎃

October 31, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that knows a thing or two about building a cardboard candy chute for prospective trick-or-treaters 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Ignite SF #15Video of my talk does exist! The audio is distorted, though, which is at least partially my fault: I felt the need to speak into the mic with a touch more force than usual because the house volume wasn't particularly high, and also (this is going to sound incredibly arrogant but I can't report it any other way) the audience was very kind, which meant I needed to talk louder to be heard. Of course, you can't tell in the video because the mic didn't pick up any of the crowd noise, so it looks like I'm haranguing these poor people when in reality I'm just doing what I can to be audible over the sound of general merriment resulting from my performance. It really did go very well and I was beyond pleased to be included in the lineup!Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is on that list. In the meantime, you can find its 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 17: GO TIMEInstant Band Night is NEXT WEEK. If you haven't already, put it on your calendar! We're making it as covid-safe as possible and there will be birthday cake.If you don't already know what Instant Band Night is, imagine a great party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can just watch. It is, and I'm not exaggerating here, fucking incredible.✨🎶🎸PREPARE FOR A MERCILESSLY EXUBERANT EXPLOSION OF UNBRIDLED CREATIVITY🎸🎶✨Nov 106p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.It is absolutely fucking comical to me that Team Trump has such an obvious, unpatched weakness in that they are utterly unable to resist hiring The Hot Chick. What was Kayleigh McEnany doing in that press room? Was anyone surprised when Cassidy Hutchinson came forward to testify and it turned out she was cute? I do not enjoy or endorse sexism, lookism, or any of the other applicable -isms, but look: these idiots are overtly sexist pigs who are plainly unable to stop being sexist pigs. It's an unpleasant reality that also happens to be a window of opportunity the size of a goddamn city bus that I cannot believe nobody else has driven through. At this point any existing Trump org should be absolutely riddled from top to bottom with conventionally attractive women masquerading as MAGAs who are 100% there to gather wildly incriminating dirt and distribute it to devastating effect. I'm not even talking about enticing lecherous scumbags into sexual harrassment lawsuits or anything; all they'd need to do is stand in the same room while a meeting is taking place and just roll tape on whatever criminal bullshit is being discussed. Again: I don't love that it's possible, but this is a tactic that would clearly work, and the fact that nobody has done this exact thing many times is sort of unbelievable to me. There unquestionably exists a nonzero number of people who are smart, bored, liberal-minded, relatively unscrupulous, and itching to use their acting/improv skills who also happen to be a 10. Their employers — their quarry — will not regard them as people, will not see their true worth, will not be able to perceive their real mission. I wish them good hunting. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.After requesting the construction crane costume that I duly built for him (complete with working crank for bucket raising/lowering), Quentin changed his mind about five days out from Halloween, declaring that he wanted to wear the astronaut outfit I'd made for him the past two years running. This actually turned out great, in that he was able to wear the astronaut costume to school — there was even a costume parade in the afternoon that we were able to witness — and agreed with enthusiasm to be a construction crane when it was time to go out trick-or-treating (the construction worker costume I found him at Target, complete with hard hat, vest, and a couple simple tools, may have also been a factor). As of the time of this writing, I'm due to pick him up from aftercare in about an hour; we'll have dinner and then Mavis and her best friend Maya will take Quentin trick-or-treating while I mind the house, put Felix to bed, and hand out candy to any kids that come by. Will Quentin go about a block and lose interest, or will he keep everyone out until he's filled his little basket with candy? I honestly don't know! The crane costume is great, but it's a little cumbersome, so I think it's going to depend on how much he wants to put up with it. On the other hand: candy. It could go either way, folks!PS: It's 948p as I type this. Quentin was out of his mind with excitement when I picked him up from aftercare, and he was a ball of energy throughout dinner. Mavis and Maya took him to Maya's neighborhood in north Berkeley, which was absolutely the right call as it was jam-packed with kids, and we got maybe a dozen spread over 90m, plus a single gaggle of kids that I'm assuming were allied families that showed up at like 910p. Mavis was right! Quentin went to maybe a half dozen houses and got an extremely modest haul but had a good time doing it, and then spent the rest of the evening with Maya helping to hand out candy, which was a blast. A++ will do again next year; now that he's seen the variety of costumes that are possible, I wonder if he'll go for the astronaut outfit again or branch out to something entirely different? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I'm not even going to try to top this. "Welcome to hell, Elon: You break it, you buy it." (The Verge) 

  • This week's Atlantic read is most likely to resonate with parents, but it's an illuminating one regardless: "Why We Long For The Most Difficult Days Of Parenthood: Older parents are always telling parents of young children to cherish every second; it will be gone in a flash. But it’s very difficult advice to follow in the thick of it." (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Scientists have run some polling to figure out which kind of climate messaging actually hits; the results are interesting. (Anthropocene) (Paper) It'll come in handy, too, because we are officially in a climate emergency. (OSU) At least it'll theoretically increase some folks' chances to see rainbows by about 5%? (U of HawaiÊ»i at Manoa) 

  • Twitter is wondering where everybody's going. (Reuters) Ryan Broderick knows. (Garbage Day) 

  • "Universal Basic Income Has Been Tested Repeatedly. It Works. Will America Ever Embrace It?" ($WaPo) 

  • We knew this a couple years ago thanks to the NPR report that this article also mentions, but plastic recycling at scale continues to be an unachievable fantasy under current conditions and we need to start rethinking packaging immediately. (Vice) 

  • The viral bomb that went off in our house over the last month or so turns out to have been part of a nationwide wave. (Vox) 

  • Vice has an oral history of the giant Home Depot skeleton. (Vice) 

  • Study says mass school shootings are not — repeat, NOT — caused by mental illness. (Columbia U) 

  • Here's an interview that proves once again that the only person we really need to listen to about crypto and web3 is Molly White. (Protocol) 

  • The Scientists have run the numbers and it looks like conservative policies are correlated with higher mortality rates on a state-by-state basis. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • NASA's UFO study has begun; we'll hear from them sometime next year. (Motherboard) 

  • Research from The Scientists suggests little kids need naps to help fix memories in their minds and age out of them naturally once their hippocampus is big enough. (UMass Amherst) 

  • As if we didn't already have enough to worry about, now we can add "mystery sun storms that may recur every thousand years or so" to the list. (U of Queensland) (Paper) 

  • Kind of hard to argue with once you read it: "Ring Cameras Are Going to Get More People Killed" (Motherboard) 

  • Your would-be Starfleet technobabble term for the week: The Scientists have come up with a way to cleanly convert nasty hydrogen sulfide byproduct gas into commercially useful hydrogen and sulfur in a single step that they call plasmonic photocatalysis. (Rice U) 

  • Do ................. do bumblebees ............... play? (Queen Mary U of London) (Paper) 

  • We should be extremely careful not just about contaminating Mars with our own bacteria, but about the Martian microbes that might be sleeping under its surface. (Northwestern) (Paper) 

  • It's probably not scalable to the national level, but "multivoting" turns out to be an intriguingly good way for groups to arrive at decisions. (U of Washington) 

  • The Scientists have discovered an interesting, partially music-based way to treat pathological nightmares. (U of Geneva) 

  • They're not making it up: certain people really are way more delicious to mosquitoes than others. (Rockefeller U) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have worked out yet another way to make bricks out of moon dirt, which is going to be extremely important if we're ever going to establish a long-term presence there. (U of Central Florida) 

  • Pet therapy programs tend to only include dogs, but survey data indicates a lot of people want cats, too; interestingly, the cat requesters tend to share a personality trait in the form of "high emotionality." (Washington State) 

  • A hideously powerful extragalactic gamma ray burst has astrophysicists scratching their heads. (Quanta) 

  • The Scientists have thought about it and they agree it would be extremely cool for many reasons if we could figure out how to make ceramics ductile. (Tampere U of Applied Sciences) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Loved Ones, Best Finish What You Started(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.