can anyone get in touch with the plastic brick people

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's glad to be back and hopes you're in the mood for a big long links section this time around, friend. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway80 - Rap Fact Saturday"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Geri-Ayn (@geriayn) once again both unveil and create ideas around gender expression, home entertainment, and vocabulary."Geri-Ayn reveals some more details about herself and her current life that should make anyone listening envious, plus the idea she proposes at the episode's end is a banger.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcast app of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).More Tales From Ten ForwardWe made our goal! I just wanted to say a sincere thanks for helping us make more Drunk History for Star Trek. And if for some reason you feel like you missed out, or just want to snag yourself a snazzy honorary producer title, the GoFundMe is still up.Instant Band Night VI: The Undiscovered CountryIT'S THIS WEEK.Thursday September 13507 55th St 946098p$5/personBYOBInstant Band Night is a pet party concept of mine where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot.(1)The first rule of Instant Band Night is: 👏 YOU 👏 DON'T 👏 HAVE 👏 TO 👏 PLAY 👏 AN 👏 INSTRUMENT 👏 TO 👏 ATTEND 👏 (2)The second rule of Instant Band Night is: We guarantee you (the audience) an astonishingly excellent time.(3)The third rule of Instant Band Night is: Invite your friends!!!!!!!Here's what it actually looks like:1. The stage has a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard, and mics.2. We draw names out of hats to make instant bands that get 10 minutes in the green room to plan an 8-minute set.3. A hat-drawn artist will also take the stage alongside each band to draw their gig poster on a meeting room easel pad.Come play or come watch; you'll have fun either way! Bring your people, crack a beverage: let's do this. Here are convenient links to Facebook and Eventbrite; invite your pals! Forward this email! Do it! Do it now!!! (We'll see you there) 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.If you're anything like me, you occasionally wonder what the fuck we're going to do about that goddamn island of plastic garbage in the ocean. Did you know there are actually five of the fucking things? Anyway, a Dutch company calling itself The Ocean Cleanup is working on it, it looks like, which is great, but that caused me to wonder whatever became of ByFusion. Remember? ByFusion? They came up with a way to compact plastic trash into building blocks? Their Twitter account -- typically anemic for an early-stage startup even when it was alive -- hasn't been active since last December, but more ominously, I can't find them in Crunchbase. Where'd you go, fellas? When something like this shuts down, what happens to the technology? Just because you can't make it work, or scale, or whatever, doesn't mean nobody can -- in the case of a technology or idea intended to be a direct benefit to the world, a company that tried and failed should release the whole thing as an open-source project in their death throes. I'm just sayin'. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We're in week X (as in I have no actual idea) of Quentin MobilityWatch 2018, and here's the scoop: 

• As of roughly five days ago, Quentin is no longer 100% content to sit upright in one place and play with his toys

• His goals now include a lot of tipping forward/sideways and flopping around on the rug once he's there

• Still no signs of consistent forward locomotion (despite a sort of "air-humping" move we see him do a lot that seems like a precursor to crawling)

• He's definitely mastered rotating on place once on his belly

• Ditto the backwards scoot

• All of this is extremely entertaining to him

I've become slightly more vigilant at my perch here on the couch during the day; I can't technically say he stays where I put him anymore, but the possibility space is still highly constrained for the moment. We'll see what another week does; will he learn to crawl, do you think, or will he skip straight to walking, which is something I've heard is possible? I have one friend whose tiny son perfected a mode of locomotion I called "Tebowing" where he assumed the "taking a knee" position and then used his front leg to sort of hook and drag himself forward without ever getting up. Quentin does have some pants with reinforced knees, just in case. 

Fascination Corner

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

• Why are desk jobs so exhausting? 

• If I'm reading this right, it should be theoretically possible to heal wounds by smearing special proteins on them that cause the cells therein to turn into skin cells, which basically sounds to me like Mass Effect medi-gel. I am okay with this. 

• A fascinating longread from a Vox writer who spent a day in a metabolic chamber and what it showed her. 

• One guy says AI might be heading for a public backlash and I don't know if I buy it. 

• Why do people stick to false beliefs? Here's a clue. 

• One of our many missions from here on out should be to make sure this happens at every single one of Trump's stupid ego-inflating bullshit rallies. It's true we'll have to show up and fake enthusiasm for odious MAGA nonsense, but only until they select the onstage audience; if we're not in, we can just leave and go have a burrito. 

• It's been "fuck the NRA" for a while around here, but now it seems like their brand has taken actual lasting damage in the post-Parkland timeframe: hell yeah. 

• Is the transmission of tail walking proof of the existence of dolphin culture? 

• Chuck Todd takes a really long time to get where he needs to go on how reporters can fight back against the long, venal campaign that's been fought against them; if you really just want to cut to the chase, it's the second-to-last paragraph. 

• Two reads from Fast Company and The Nation that both talk about how and to what extent corporate payouts to shareholders instead of workers are fucking all of us over: Why work has failed us: Because companies aren’t sharing the profits and The Shareholder Revolution Devours Its Children. They both note that it doesn't have to be this way, either. 

• I, uh. This ...... huh. You know what, I'll just let the headline do the talking: Artificial intelligence can estimate an area’s obesity levels by analyzing its buildings. 

• Fucking spectacular, you idiot pissgoblins: After Equifax's mega-breach, nothing changed. 

• Would you believe a story that says 1 in 50 airplane passengers meet the love of their life on one? 

• It sounds absurd, but there are actually highly compelling reasons to address the world by splitting its entire surface into a grid of 3mx3m squares and assigning a random trio of words to each one. 

• This is the only good take on that anonymous piece of shit NYT op-ed. 

• The Robots are Coming, and Sweden is Fine, says the NYT, and now I kind of want the nation of Sweden to fucking invade the US and just goddamn take over. 

• Title of this one pretty much says it all: Idiots Burn Nikes to Own The Libs. 

• AI still has a ways to go as far as stopping nasty language online. One day -- one glorious day -- the comment sections will finally be sane. Right? Right?? Where's everyone going 

• This prototype smart scroll is ....... good? I like it and I can't really say why?? 

• Here's a good discussion of a couple book-length meditations on universal basic income. 

• Repurposing human waste toward crop fertilization could dramatically reduce the use of fertilizer; the trouble, I'm guessing, is just extracting the relevant nutrients at scale. There's money to be made here by someone. 

• Given the horror stories I've been hearing about the costs and hassle of daycare, I think I'm OK with Silicon Valley attempting to fix it. 

• Here's an interesting profile on a construction business that gets things done ahead of schedule consistently. 

• I realize it's going to take a while to get there, but if Alex Jones dies penniless in a gutter somewhere, alone and unmourned, I promise to offer prayers of thanks in at least one (1) major religion's place of worship within a calendar year of said event. 

• We have the data to be able to say Trump tweets like Voldemort. 

• An interesting piece on a Russian discord/disinfo campaign that actually failed. 

• We probably don't have to rely on just 4 crops to provide 2/3 of the world's food supply. 

• That "30% of the ants do 70% of the work" thing you might've heard about was actually part of a study on traffic flow. No, really! 

• Your fascinating and frustrating longread for the week is this one from Motherboard about The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People. 

• The UN has a guy whose job is to think about killer robots. 

• It's possible memes can function as a kind of conscience for the internet? Huh.

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumPermanent Manic Phase, Then Came the Monsters 

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.