brief notes from the Comic Con thunderdome

July 31, 2017

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, your weekly window into whatever's on my mind. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.It's been a long time; I shouldn'a left youWithout a rhyme about the 9 or what the TEC do(It's my firm belief that Ratatat need to refocus their career on simply making hip hop instrumentals, based solely on the strength of their remix albums.)Sorry to have been gone so long, everybody -- I have some excellent friends with a long-running booth at San Diego Comic Con, and for the past decade+ I've been helping them run it. For what might be obvious upcoming-baby-related reasons, this was my last SDCC for a while. Booth setup and takedown meant that I needed to take essentially an entire week away, so that meant no podcast (and no newsletter) for a bit, but I'm back now. Back, and wondering just how much content exists in and around SDCC that one person can reasonably consume. Since I help run the booth, I never get to see the totality of SDCC except in passing. For at least the past five (possibly more like ten) years, SDCC has been metastasizing past the confines of the already-colossal convention center into the surrounding environs in the form of tents, pop-up buildings, and storefront/restaurant/stadium takeovers the scale of which truly beggar belief, and I seriously want to know if it's possible for a single person to experience all of it. What would your mind be like at the end? I have at least one friend who goes every year and manages to see at least some of it, and I salute her. I catch up on all the Comic Con news well after the fact in the form of blog posts, and I salute those hard-working writers as well. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.The amount of support we've been getting, even in purely notional form, is something I want to take a moment to really acknowledge. As just one random example: while I was down at San Diego Comic Con, my buddy Charlie (also a dad) made me promise to call him anytime I had a question of any sort -- he's very smart and has a lot of opinions, so that wasn't a hard sell by any stretch. Neither is he alone; we've received a truly staggering array of helpful offers from all corners of our various social circles, and I want to take a moment to thank each and every one of the glorious maniacs who've made them: seriously, thank you. I have to do this now because I'm reliably informed I won't have anything like a functioning mind in the immediate 1-6 weeks following Lemon's birth, and that's too long for kindnesses to go unacknowledged, even ones that haven't happened yet. Thank you in advance. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.This might be a longer section than normal because I've been keeping up on the newsletter flow for my day job and there's a two-week backlog now. Sorrynotsorry. 

  • Obviously, there are Concerns about developing hand-sized microdrones that can be deployed in literal swarms, but (a) these are kind of adorable and (b) I really do want to know what happens if you drop a bunch of these into a tornado.

  • Hunting for new antibiotics in filthy, filthy places is both a sensible and convenient concept that for some reason appeals to my sense of cosmic symmetry, but wouldn't this also just be a case of moving the goalposts further down an ultimately finite field? Or do we trust nature to Always Be Innovating new ways for microbes to kill each other? I still think we should climb aboard that host tolerance train and see where it takes us.

  • If it's true that there really are way more rogue planets out there than we thought, what does that do to models of interstellar fast travel? If I'm zipping between star systems at high warp, can I detect a rogue planet fast enough to avoid it? Are we just going to have to get really good at mapping? I'm sure glad I'm not putting a theoretical cart before any particular abstract horse here.

  • Hands up anyone else who would like to follow Overwatch League, but without having to actually watch games from Overwatch players' POV because that first-person view is disorienting and even motion sickness-inducing. I would love for them to build inworld drone cameras that hover sedately over key vantage points and give us a third-person perspective. Is that something they're already doing? None of what I've read so far gives an indication, but maybe I'm reading the wrong publications.

  • I just want to let this cloud services company called Bespin Global to know I see what you did there. You nerds.

  • Just a heads-up, it's gonna cost you five grand to be a racist piece of shit on Airbnb in California if you get caught. It's heartening to know something actually came of that.

  • If you've ever wondered how much it actually costs to open a restaurant, this'll be an eye-opener. Granted, it's for kind of a fancy restaurant -- certainly nothing like the International Bureau of Dumplings -- but still.

  • I don't know what to do with this medium-longread on the people who tend to leave their hometown vs those who stay, and what that means for the political and economic makeup of said hometowns. It sure is interesting, though.

  • Some researchers from Oxford and Yale published a paper on how long they think it'll take before AI can do better than humans at various tasks; the list is super intriguing!

  • Where my fellow Becky Chambers fans at? Or really anyone who wants to know about cultivating algae for fuel?

  • You might remember an article I linked to in a previous installment about AIs at Facebook that had developed their own language as part of an experiment? Well, they shut that shit down. Guess it spooked 'em.

  • It doesn't surprise me that the ultimate goal of Amazon Alexa stated in their own words is to build the computer from the starship Enterprise, but it does surprise me to know that you can apparently configure Alexa to respond to "Computer" instead of "Alexa."

  • This longread on The Quitting Economy checks out, honestly. Which probably isn't a good thing?

  • I want it on the record that while I'm generally against spiders being near me, I do not object to their silk being used for our own ends whenever possible, especially if that silk is made using genetically modified yeast instead of actual arachnids.

  • Is it completely insane that Cabin kind of makes sense to me? Kind of? You don't have to deal with airports or lines -- just climb aboard and go directly to sleep, and then wake up in LA. The cost's still a little steep to really justify it, though; as I said, it only kind of makes sense.

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway48 - Singles Night at Borderlands"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Jon (a different one) discuss non-standard dating events, a new use for churches, and an idea for another niche podcast."Just a heads-up: there's a point in this episode where we get into some extremely weird questions raised by the Cars franchise. And I mean weird.You can subscribe using:iTunesRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/CAPTAIN TO THE BRIDGEI forgot to mention this when it happened, which was almost two months ago? Whoops. The good people at TrekMovie sent me and some pals over to Ubisoft to play Star Trek: Bridge Crew (the VR game) and give our impressions. Now if only I owned a VR rig. 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumKale Don’t Care, Come Gather Your Weapons 

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.