contains one (1) good Oscar idea

February 05, 2024

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's pretty sure the hour right after dinner is one of the worst times for your house to lose power 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Instant Band Night 25: PI DAY 2 (PIE HARDER)You don't have to take my word for it anymore! The Oaklandside did a writeup on Instant Band Night and you can read it right here!!Whether you choose to play in one of the bands or just watch it all unfold, it's a joyful celebration of spontaneous creativity that we could all probably use more of in our lives; also, there'll be pie. Come have pie.March 14 20246p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUNew year, new space! Why settle for a boring garden, potted plant, or domicile when you could have a little statue of a crazy-colored tardigrade, a delightful friend to hold your last fruit, a Star Trek buddy in a party hat, or an Ediacaran life form right now. Take a look and consider some clever ceramics for yourself, for family, or for a dear friend far away.Idea Factory GiveawayI think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I'm just going to say it: there should be another Oscar that gets handed out every year for Best On-Set Presence, open to all cast and crew for any movie. Who made coming to work every day great? Who was just a goddamn delight? Let's find out who the best one of those people is and give them their fucking Oscar, because you know what, they deserve it. This idea also comes with a bonus side effect, which is that after enough years, a sufficiently long list of nominees will build up that you could staff an entire movie production with just those people. I'm just talkin' here!! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Save Monday, Quentin spent the entirety of last week at home on the couch recovering from whatever the fuck it is that chose to make him its vessel. Its ministry seemed to be centered around Having No Appetite, as well as Barely-Controllable Diarrhea and also Coughing So Hard Your Gag Reflex Sometimes Engages And You Barf A Little. These were not, as you might imagine, a set of gospels that any of us endorsed or even particularly enjoyed. Having already been run ragged by the flu that visited itself upon us in the first 2/3 of January, I'll just say this last week was a struggle on many fronts simultaneously.I do, however, have a TV show recommendation for you if you've got kids in the house between ages 2-6, because it's become a topic of great interest for both Quentin and Felix. It's called SPIRIT RANGERS, it's on Netflix, and it's about three kids who can transform into animals (their parents are park rangers, so they're junior rangers, naturally). The show's creator and characters are Chumash — I don't know if all the voice cast is, too — and there's a ton of nature spirits and stuff happening in there. Mavis heard about it somewhere and introduced it sometime during the Interminable Week, and Quentin chose it for both boys' morning cartoon hour on Saturday. By Sunday, it became the only thing they wanted to watch. This would be fine, except that the kids' animal transformation sequence comes with a somewhat repetitive song that I can't banish from my head without serious effort. But look, who's made it to this point without getting the Octonauts' Creature Report theme stuck in there? Every show has something that we must endure.I'm typing this on Monday afternoon and both kids are out of the house; let us pray that it remains this way for as long as mathematically possible. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The Scientists' latest simulations show solar geoengineering — in this case the kind where you spray particles into the stratosphere — would slow the loss of the Greenland ice sheet. (Hokkaido U) (Paper) 

  • "How the U.S. Government Could Lower Food Prices for Everyone" (Motherboard) 

  • A newborn great white shark has been spotted for the first time ever. (UC Riverside) (Paper) 

  • Why do autoimmune diseases seem to disproportionately target women? The problem might have something to do with the X chromosome and the fact that two copies of it exist in their cells, which didn't occur to The Scientists as a factor for an embarrassingly long time. (Nature) (Paper) 

  • I love this: the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park, home of the cussing parrots, is going to integrate the malefactors into the greater flock in the hopes of "diluting" their swears; the potential downside is that all the parrots might start cussing instead. Fuck yes!!!! (BBC) 

  • Some Engineers have built a prototype fake plant that harvests energy from wind and falling rain; I challenge you to find something more poetic anywhere else. (Anthropocene) 

  • "Everyone’s a sellout now: So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?" (Vox) 

  • The Machine typically takes trillions of words' worth of input to learn language effectively, but babies can do it just fine on a fraction of that. If you strap a camera to a literal baby's head and just give pieces of that input to The Machine, how much does it learn? A surprising amount, it turns out. (NYU) 

  • Otters helped stop erosion in a California estuary. (Duke) 

  • A rocky planet about 1.5x the size of Earth has been found in a tight orbit inside the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Music appears to cause similar feelings and bodily sensations across cultures. (U of Turku) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have successfully 3D printed functional human brain tissue, which is a literal game changer for all kinds of neurological research. (U of Wisconsin-Madison) (Paper) 

  • A woman with crippling OCD has been seeing benefits from a brain implant originally designed solely to treat her epilepsy. (Science Alert) 

  • Rat selfies can tell us things about ourselves, too. (NYT gift link) 

  • "An AI-Generated Content Empire Is Spreading Fake Celebrity Images on Google: A ring of websites using AI and run by an aspiring movie star are behind fake celebrity images featured in Google results, Motherboard found" (Motherboard) 

  • If you want your teen to listen to your advice, you have to give them more autonomy first. (UC Riverside) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are making some progress on developing phage therapy for bacteria we can't otherwise kill. (Northwestern U) (Paper) 

  • Standing dead trees (called snags) are actually super important to have in a forest, which naturally raises a question for forestry experts who want to create them: what's the best way to kill a tree and leave it upright? (Anthropocene) 

  • If you watched Cunk on Earth and laughed like I did at the running Technotronic joke, this is well worth a read. (Joel Morris on Substack) 

  • The sun's magnetic poles are about to flip, something that happens roughly every eleven years. (Vox) 

  • Online dating profiles that reveal a sense of purpose in their creator do better, at least according to one study. (Washington U in St Louis) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Panji Adhi on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Photo by GTN on UnsplashResident alternate universe music critic Steve is confident this one is "One long spiralling forty three minute track that fades in slowly and builds and builds to a Mogwai like crescendo before slowly fading out to one slow heartbeat and then silence, and then John Carpenter says 'I know where we are.'" 

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.