contains vital Lady Bird-related content

January 23, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter for the world's most powerful dads. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway60 - Witch 9.5"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Jen (@jennifermarie), and special guest Casey strike a surprisingly rich vein of ideas around VR, mediation, and magic-based fictional universes."I am dead serious when I say this one contains a solid gold pitch for a videogame that I desperately want someone to make immediately.You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/ 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I haven't seen Lady Bird yet, but we need to talk for a second about how apparently ‘Lady Bird’ Has Made It Safe to Like Dave Matthews Band Again. Which honestly, I'm all for. I went to high school in the mid-90s, so not only was I squarely in the crosshairs as their target demographic for the release of both Under the Table and Dreaming and Crash, I went to several shows, owned bootleg concert recordings on cassette tape, and played violin in bands that covered a highly extensive range of DMB material more or less right up until graduating college. Yes. YES. FINALLY I CAN SPEAK MY TRUTH. I mean, fuck, if you went to my wedding, you heard me duet "Lie In Our Graves" with one of my best friends and college bandmates.However.The song in Lady Bird that seems to have revitalized DMB fandom is apparently "Crash Into Me," and this cannot stand. "Crash Into Me" is not a song. It is a fungus. I never liked "Crash Into Me," not even when it was released as a single, despite or perhaps because of its presence on what is inarguably DMB's best album. It's just not a good tune, and the lyrics are very bad. Dave actually has kind of a Problem where his slow songs are, or at least he used to, and I'm sure there's already been plenty of Discourse about them elsewhere, so I need not get into it here. Instead, here'sA Short List of Contemporaneous Dave Matthews Band Songs That Would Have Been Better to Use in Lady Bird Than "Crash Into Me" 

  1. #41

  2. The Best of What's Around

  3. Lie In Our Graves

  4. Two Step

  5. One Sweet World

  6. Dancing Nancies

  7. Recently

This list is legally binding and non-negotiable. Thank you for your time. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I'm typing this from inside a jury selection waiting room. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind going through this whole process, but right now Mavis has a really bad cold. We're hoping it's not the flu, but just in case, we're taking strong precautions to not infect Quentin that boil down to a lot of handwashing and being careful about what touches where. More importantly, it's just a lot to deal with on top of already taking care of a tiny baby, and I would much rather be home helping out with all of it.And now, without further ado, an important and simple lifehack for taking care of a sick person: 

  1. Every time you eat chicken that involves bones, put them in a bag in your freezer instead of in the garbage.This includes wings. In fact, you might want to eat more wings now and then.

  2. Keep a bag of vegetables in there, too: floppy carrots, onion halves, and the inevitable mountain of leftover celery you end up with whenever you want to make a normal amount of soup.Ponder why nobody packages celery in bags of 4 or 5 stalks.

  3. If you or someone in your house starts to get sick, open the freezer bags and toss some of the stuff inside them into a cooking device along with a lot of water.You can probably see where this is going.

  4. In whatever amount of time makes sense -- a lot of hours if you used a crockpot, a couple if you have an off-brand Instant Pot -- toss all the stuff you can get out with a slotted spoon and run the rest through a strainer.Congratulations: you've made extremely lazy chicken broth.

  5. Make soup with your broth using ingredients you didn't get out of your freezer.Or if you're feeling especially lifehacky, crack open a pack of ramen noodles and put the flavor packet in your junk drawer; use the broth you just made instead of water.

My mom bought us an off-brand Instant Pot on sale at Sam's Club last year, and honestly it's been kind of fantastic. I used to have to start this broth process in the morning if I really wanted to get good results with my crockpot, but with this thing, I can kick it off at 3p and have something usable before 5p.[the_more_you_know_shooting_star.gif] 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I can sooooort of see how this would technically constitute a tractor beam, but it seems to require a bed of speakers under whatever it is you're trying to move, which kind of misses the point of a tractor beam. No? 

  • I'm going to be both happy and darkly amused if it turns out the tech industry is more progressive about employing ex-cons than, you know, the whole rest of the world. 

  • So if Twitter is going to email everybody who got duped by a Russian troll during the 2016 election, what's that email look like? "Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, my dude?" 

  • Every time I read something about how Trump's own big stupid flapping mouth gets him in trouble with himself, I think about what it would look like if he were actually halfway fucking competent and shudder. 

  • Right now this short Wired read about how we're probably going to end up working alongside robots feels the most realistic to me, but I hope that's not just internal optimism talkin'. 

  • There's something delightful about the prospect of 3D printing not drugs themselves (because that's too fucking hard right now), but instead a series of vessels that contain catalysts for pouring simple starters into that kick off the reactions that make drugs. I wonder if it looks the way science on TV shows does. 

  • [Jeff VanderMeer joke.txt] 

  • In what fucking universe do we allow any nation to put a laser in orbit to clean up space junk? What happens if you decide to retarget that laser to, you know, any point on the planet's surface?? Or is atmospheric scattering enough protection? 

  • This is an interesting article on what happens to used clothes and why that whole cycle is breaking down right now, something to which I'd previously not given any thought. 

  • I'm not gonna lie: I would find living in a sort of upscale trailer park with my pals appealing if there were enough indoor communal spaces that were sonically isolated from each other and the living quarters, because you bet your ass I would try to put together as many game nights and Artemis bridges as possible. 

  • I honestly love that scientists figured out that you can make 3D printed parts of just about any kind stronger just by rotating the print head. 

  • I have to ask: is dirt going to be a truly inexhaustible source of new antibiotics forever, or are we just extending the clock a little longer? It sounds like this approach is also helping to design new antibiotics, though, which I'm also all for. 

  • Benedict Evans has some interesting thoughts for us on TV, retail, advertising and cascading collapses. 

  • It makes sense that "doggo" probably came from Australians. 

  • This is just the newsletter issue where I link to articles about laser weapons, I guess, sorrynotsorry 

  • Odds are good you saw it, but if you didn't, #BlackHogwarts was easily the best hashtag of January. 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some mp3s in a long-forgotten folder labeled “90s music” 

  • The Cranberries - “Zombie” (Paul Oakenfold vs Portishead Ape Shall Not Kill Ape Remix)

  • PM Dawn - “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” (Squarepusher vs Sasha & Digweed I Am the Keymaster Reconstruction feat. Lisa Loeb and Toad the Wet Sprocket)

  • Right Said Fred - “I’m Too Sexy” (Propellerheads vs Tricky vs My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult They Mostly Come Out At Night (Mostly) Remix)

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.