contains at least one (1) distraction

March 16, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will never stop showing up as long as you're around to read it. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week because, well, shit got in the way. You can still leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in Apple Podcasts if you're feeling bored and generous, which hopefully is at least 50% true (the latter 50%).Instant Band Night 15: POSTPONEDWe postponed it until May 14! Let's hope we'll be out of the epidemiological woods by then.This link still works, though. Click and daydream of a time when we'll all be able to see each other again in person, climb up onstage, and rock out for a few minutes at a time.It's also on Facebook if that's where you are.* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Obviously you're staying home for a while. I have a suggestion for something to do if you happen to bea) A musicianb) A person who used to play an instrument in high school or college but haven't picked it up in forever (which to my mind still counts as a musician)Here's a link to a folder in Google Drive; right now it only contains one file, and it's under 1MB. 

  1. Tune your instrument, whatever it is.

  2. Warm up with a nice D scale.For those of you in category (b), that's the one with F# and C#.

  3. Download the file.

  4. Toss the file into iTunes or possibly Winamp if you've got it.I don't recommend letting VLC have it because we want it to play on an endless loop, and VLC doesn't seem to loop things seamlessly.

  5. Put it on a single-track loop.

  6. Press PLAY.

This is a little backing track for you to improvise a solo over, basically. It loops endlessly and never wears out, so it can last as long as you want or need. It's in D (hence your warmup).If you're in category (b) and have never played a solo over anything in your life, don't worry: I got you.How to improv over a backing track if you've never done it before in your lifeSpecifically this backing track. 

  1. Brush up on your D scale if you haven't already.If it helps, D is the one with F# and C#; you can probably look it up online somewhere.

  2. Start the loop going.

  3. Literally just play your D scale.Take your time. Go up and back down at whatever pace you want. Listen to the way it just sort of fits with the music.

  4. Keep playing your D scale for as long as you need in order to feel comfortable with it.Really get it into your fingers.

  5. Remember the backing track is essentially a robot: it's not gonna judge you if you fuck up.

  6. Keep playing that scale.

  7. Are you bored? If you're bored, that means it's time to change it up.Start playing around with note duration.Skip around in the scale; you don't have to play every note in the sequence -- what if you played every other one instead?

  8. Start to really go nuts, for whatever value of "nuts" you're comfortable with.Literally any note within the D scale is fair game!Express yourself! Let it out!And remember the backing track is essentially a robot: it's not gonna judge you if you fuck up. Honestly, you may at some point discover that an F natural here and there actually works.

  9. Oh shit you're improvising

I hope you have fun with it; let me know if this helped, or if there's anything I can clarify? I might fuck around and make a video version of this little tutorial just to pass the time; let me know if that'd be useful. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's Crib Crew -- the elite team of stuffed animals who must join him in his crib for optimum sleepy bedtimes -- has seen a sudden spate of additions as of late, and I for one find it incredibly precious. The full roster, more or less in order of their adoption into the Crib Crew, is as follows: 

  • Bunny: Quentin's hands-down favorite stuffed animal in the whole world, the one he turns to for comfort in times of stress, his constant companion. We actually own two of these and swap them out seamlessly for cleaning when one of them starts to smell funny from drool; it's unclear to me whether Quentin actually knows that there are two, though I imagine if he did know, he'd demand access to both at all times.

  • Deer: A never-used hand-me-down from the 7yo girl next door, Deer is a semi-realistic stuffed deer who was promoted to the Crib Crew very quickly upon adoption.

  • Penguin: A small, dapper penguin with a neat little bow tie, Penguin was the first addition to the Crib Crew after a long period of Only Bunny + Deer.

  • Koala: An Xmas present from Quentin's Uncle Gene and Auntie Liz, Koala is, well, a flat koala bear who, like Deer, was also promoted to the Crib Crew essentially instantly.

  • Totoro: A stuffed Totoro handmade by his own mother and added very recently.

  • Bun-Bun: Quentin's first stuffed animal, actually.

  • Brown Bear: One of the few stuffed animals whose origin I can actually pin down, this bear was a gift from the mother of one of my best friends from high school, and was used for size comparisons throughout his first year.

  • Small Bear: A much smaller polar bear with a bow tie of sorts. I'm not actually sure if this one has truly been named yet, but he seems to be a required companion of Brown Bear.

  • Cozy Doggy: The subject of a tweet when his name was still being established, Cozy Doggy is a ridiculously soft dog that frankly I'm sort of jealous Quentin gets to snuggle with.

  • Pink Puppy: A childhood companion of Quentin's mom's, Pink Puppy's promotion to the Crib Crew is something of a mystery, as she was largely ignored in favor of the other stuffed pals for some time.

As always, further updates as events warrant. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Stop comparing Covid-19 to the 1918 flu. Stop it! (Vox) Here are 6 of the main differences in a more concise form. (MIT Technology Review blog) 

  • "Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place." (Slate) 

  • The almost unbelievable stubbornness of life is quietly awe-inspiring: there's microbes and fungi living almost half a mile under the bottom of the seafloor. (Eos) 

  • Researchers have worked out -- in theory, on paper -- a way to degrade chemicals previously thought to be essentially indestructible. (UC Riverside) 

  • I burned a free New Republic click on this and I have no regrets, as it was appropriately caustic: "The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic" (New Republic) 

  • Housecats that get to go outside have somewhere between 2-10x the killing power per unit area of natural predators. (Inverse) Oh yes, there's a paper. (PDF) 

  • Your interesting less-consequential longread for the week is this one on the millenial aesthetic. (The Cut) 

  • No AI is as good as a person at tracing the arms of a spiral galaxy, so if you're bored while you're isolating, give this a read and join in, why not. (NC Museum of Natural Sciences) 

  • We waste a lot of bread; we should use it to cultivate microbes to make, well, more bread. (Anthropocene) 

  • Outdoor Voices was a nightmare to work at, it sounds like. (BuzzFeed News) Why are all of these direct-to-consumer startups going poof anyway? (~$Marker on Medium) 

  • Butterflies can do vantablack, too. (Duke) 

  • Scientists didn't literally use a slime mold to elucidate the megastructure of the universe, but they did use an algorithm derived from slime mold to do that thing. (UC Santa Cruz) 

  • Speaking of the universe, a new theoretical particle would be the answer to some big universal mysteries (like: why there's more matter in the universe than antimatter) if it turns out to be a thing. (U Michigan) 

  • Robots that admit to making mistakes spur better conversations between the humans surrounding them! (Yale) 

  • This sounds nuts and then makes plenty of sense once you relax into it, but: our brains are pretty good at predicting whether videos will go viral. (Stanford) 

  • Is lurking online .......... bad for you? (BuzzFeed News) 

  • So that Elon Musk battery farm in Australia works, it turns out. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • This week in "small moments of pure nerd enjoyment" is a chart that tells you what kind of sci fi you're about to watch based on how the ship looks. (Jalopnik) 

  • What kind of dumbfuck idiot universe do you have to live in where you think publishing an editorial titled "President Trump Needs to Step Up on the Coronavirus" will be effective? As if he's somehow been choosing not to do any of these things? HE CAN'T. He doesn't have the basic fucking mental ability to even grasp the concept of any of the most entry-level, minimally-presidential crap you want. He's demonstrated this from literally day one of his entire stupid fuckshit administration, repeatedly, on video, in print, and on the phone to Fox News. Read this if you want a glimpse into the most tragically optimistic worldview possible. (National Review) 

  • Actually, if you want a glimpse at a whole other kind of tragic optimism, you could burn a free Atlantic click on "The Trump Presidency Is Over". (Atlantic) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSauve Qui Peut, Great Work, Everybody! 

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.