coxsackievirus watch 2023

May 01, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that might finally watch Yellowjackets now that there's a writers' strike on 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life sometime in 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 20: DOUBLE XNext week! Next week! Next week! We're going to throw the doors open and see! what! happens! Come take the stage with a thrown-together band of friendly strangers, or just watch new bands debut every ten minutes or so! This is the best thing you're going to see or do for the entire month of May, folks, and that's a guarantee.May 11 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$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 YOUI've finally put up an Etsy shop where you can find some of my sculptural output; the announcement at the top of the page and the About section at the bottom really encapsulate the entire vibe, so I advise checking it out for either of those if nothing else. Watch this section for new drops, or just follow the shop. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.As I'm putting this edition of the newsletter together I see the WGA has called for a strike. Flex!!While you're looking for something to watch until the studios pull their heads out of their asses, I suggest getting a subscription to Dropout so you can mainline Game Changer; after the first season you can intersperse Make Some Noise in there 'cause why not. I haven't gotten into any of the D&D stuff there — I can only really do actual-play content in podcast form, because the episodes are just too long for my parent-of-two-kids ass to just sit and watch — but I strongly suspect it's very good. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Felix has caught another round of hand/foot/mouth; he's not especially feverish, but there must be blisters in either his mouth or throat that make him reluctant to swallow (he's drooling a lot) and extremely picky about what he'll eat. Plus, he occasionally just looks at us and says "Hurt" while pointing at his mouth, or "Mowf hurt." Aw, bud. Last night he kept waking up and crying at medium volume before drifting back off to sleep. Hopefully it'll pass quickly; the bumps on his butt seem to be fading already. I just hope the entire rest of the house doesn't catch it. Watch this space, I guess??? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I was on vacation when Tucker Carlson got booted from Fox, so I'm going to have to celebrate belatedly, but also: suddenly axing people seems to just be how the Murdochs roll. ($WaPo) 

  • Meanwhile, the QAnon idiots are predictably going even more nuts. (Vice) 

  • Just a heads-up that WHO is worried about the possibility of bioweapons coming into play in Sudan. (Motherboard) 

  • The Scientists have crunched the numbers and concluded which areas of the globe are most at risk of suffering when a big heat wave hits. (U of Bristol) (Paper) 

  • The private Japanese lunar lander didn't make it, but you know what? If you look at the entire history of humanity's attempts to fling probes and robots into space/at other planets, it's a fucking miracle any of them make it. NASA has a free ebook that chronicles just about all of them since 1958, and it's malfunction after malfunction, although admittedly we do get better at it as the years go by. (Ars Technica) 

  • The ocean is getting a lot warmer a lot faster and The Scientists don't know why. (BBC) 

  • Fuck, that sounds brilliant: The Scientists have worked out a way to break down incompatible plastics and mix them together with crosslinking elements into a viable upcycled new plastic. It sounds simple but it's a huge breakthrough! Imagine getting Legos and wooden blocks and those weird waffle guys to all work together with some kind of magic connector toy — it's on that level. (Colorado State) 

  • "What Kind of Pandemic Storytelling Do We Actually Need?" (LitHub) 

  • We should all wish Kat Abu long life, prosperity, and a highly trained and ever-vigilant personal guard force. Also, RIP BuzzFeed News. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • I swear to fuck I thought people were kidding about Bluesky posts being "skeets." (The Verge) 

  • The Scientists have built a machine learning model that, once trained on an individual's brain activity, can provide a better-than-chance reconstruction of their verbal thought stream based on nothing but fMRI signals. (UT Austin) 

  • Some Engineers put together a 3D bioprinter out of Lego and made the plans available online for anyone to use. (The Conversation) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists built a transistor made of wood. Wood! (Linköping U) (Paper) 

  • Would it surprise you to know that there's no nationally-defined standard for junk food? (NYU) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated a zinc-based battery that's pretty damn good; now they need to see if it scales. (ETH Zurich) (Paper) 

  • Philly cheesesteaks are blowing up in Lahore and now I want to try one because those spices sound good. (Philadelphia) 

  • How do bacterial spores know when conditions are right to kickstart the resurrection process? (Harvard) 

  • The purity police are going buckwild on libraries out there. (NPR) 

  • NASA figured out a way to keep Voyager 2 working for another few years as it continues blasting into interstellar space at ridiculous speed. (Gizmodo) 

  • This isn't the first time we've seen breakthroughs in wind turbine blade recycling, which seems like a niche problem until you consider how fucking huge they are and how many of them exist or will need to exist shortly. (Aarhus U) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have invented a device that can print shelf-stable vaccine doses on demand, which would be amazing for reaching underserved populations. (MIT) (Paper) 

  • Why do people include themselves in photos? The Scientists have investigated and the answers are legit interesting. (Ohio State) (Paper) 

  • Automakers are finally starting to realize what a fucking terrible idea touchscreens are. (Slate) 

  • The Scientists have put a piece of crystal massing about half an eyelash's worth into a state of quantum superposition. Wow! How, though? How?? Anybody??? The paper's paywalled; yes I tried you-know-what. (Science News) 

  • Some folks are trying to compile a bestiary of DMT hallucination entities, and this definitely seems like one of those cases where generative AI drawings might actually be useful. (Motherboard) 

  • I have no doubt that GM has sales numbers that back this move up, but I still think it's a shame to kill the Bolt in favor of more trucks and SUVs when the Honda Fit and its clones are clearly the ultimate urban vehicle. (The Verge) 

  • "How Did Chess Pieces Get Their Names?" (Atlas Obscura) 

  • We could really use applied humanities courses. (~$Inside Higher Ed) 

  • Some Engineers have built a jellyfish-inspired robot prototype whose descendents will hopefully clean up the oceans one day. (Max Planck Inst for Intelligent Systems) (Paper) 

  • Speaking of oceangoing robots, Some Engineers have also successfully tested a new kind of actuator for robot fish that works a lot better than previous designs. (U of Bristol) 

  • The urban beekeeping boom might not be great for wild honeybees, or at least that's what The Scientists are worried about. (Concordia U) (Paper) 

  • Candy's going nuts on TikTok right now. (Eater) 

  • "Is the Loneliness Epidemic Making Us Susceptible to Wellness Scams? A writer examines why we should be concerned about the rise of unlicensed practitioners and what causes us to ignore our intuition in the quest for calm." (Shondaland) 

  • The Scientists have determined that small acts of kindness occur once every couple of minutes worldwide. (UCLA) (Paper) 

  • What is art? According to this poll data, one of the main criteria for Americans is whether or not they think they could reproduce it themselves. (538) 

  • It sure looks like parrots enjoy talking to each other on FaceTime. (Guardian) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are recording underwater environments just to know what sounds all the creatures make, which is naturally leading to them encountering sounds that are a total mystery. But because they're not fools, they've made a YouTube channel to see if anyone else can help figure them out. (Motherboard) 

A Fictional Thing

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

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Aaron S says Candy For Villains was a "Supergroup of a member each from The National, Belle and Sebastian, Yo La Tengo, Death Cab for Cutie. Which members? During an all-band jam session, whoever generated a sound above 60 dB was tapped out." 

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.