dancing or lurching between the raindrops

January 29, 2024

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that still swears the water from the downstairs bathroom faucet is measurably colder than anything coming out of any other tap 

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.Nothing in this section for you today, folks, but there's plenty in the other ones! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I would commit unspeakable acts to get a full 24 hours of something resembling rest. Since somewhere around the start of 2024, this house has been host to a nonstop parade of illness or the lingering effects of illness in one or more of its residents, and we are fried to a crisp. We are the little bits at the bottom of the chicken tender box that aren't even chicken, they're just pieces of batter that have been sizzling in hot oil until their structure is crisp and lacy and delicate, the kind of thing a vaguely determined ladybug could smash to atoms with minimal — minimal!! — effort.💥 For the past 48h, a pattern has emerged wherein some mainspring in Quentin's system shatters during the latter half of the day and turns him into the kind of whiny sick kid who complains of symptoms and hungers and then refuses the solutions to those things. This would try the empathy of any parent, but we've been at this for a fucking month that's lasted a thousand years and to say I'm running on fumes would be a laughable understatement.🤪 As a sort of delightful bonus, Quentin's normally rock-solid sleep has been heavily disturbed by some ill-defined malaise that makes him toss and turn and emit heartbreaking half-crying sounds; sometimes he says his ear hurts. It looks normal to us! Maybe it's the congestion? We go through about a box of tissues a day around here currently. Does ibuprofen help? Sometimes??😫 Of course the noise also wakes Felix; as a bonus, last night's wakeup was unfortunately-enough timed that it triggered a night terror episode! Ten minutes of screaming that by definition cannot be comforted, which I observed the whole of from the side of our bed, the other side of which Mavis got into after she'd finished comforting Quentin and washing up for bed, by which time Felix was sleeping or at least lying down peacefully.*🫠 Within the last week, we have received notices from daycare and Quentin's school to the tune of👋👋 One kid at daycare presented with something that sure looks like hand/foot/mouth, everybody watch out🤒🤒 Hey, don't forget that if your kid has a fever, you cannot bring them back to school until at least 24h have passed fever-free🌬️🌬️ The wonderful daycare provider's youngest child has developed some kind of wheezing sickness, so just a reminder to please not bring your kid if they've got wheezy breathing or whatnot👁️👁️ Hey, some kid in kindergarten (we can't say which class) has pink eye, so watch out for that if you could, thanksIt feels like we are dancing between the fucking raindrops trying to avoid yet another goddamn microbe and we don't! have! the energy! to deal with it once we inevitably get hit with whatever the next fucking thing is. Should I start drinking coffee? Is this what caffeine is for? It must be, right?I shouldn't overlook that we've also had some legit magic happen in the last month; we managed to make it to Glowfari at the Oakland Zoo, a thing that really needs to be seen to be believed, and arranged a really nice park playdate that a bunch of kids showed up to. Bright spots in what's otherwise been, to put it charitably, a slog. If you're even still reading this, you're a champion; thank you.* I have not, btw, slept in my own bed for well over a month: at some point between 9p-4a, Felix will almost without fail awaken in his crib and shout for me, whereupon he requests transfer to the bed where Mama sleeps. Failure to comply with this request results in screaming, which as you can imagine is not a noise that brings Quentin or Mavis or me any joy.** Therefore! I simply sleep on the couch, mostly because I'm trying my best not to resent Felix — who is 2 — for this particular sleep phase, which I miiiiight start doing if I have to be evicted from the comfort of my bed every single goddamn night. So! Sleeping on the couch. This way I don't have to be disappointed at being exiled; I simply begin there. Honestly, it's a good couch, great for sleeping (weirdly, it reliably produces interesting dreams), but it's slightly tiresome having to make my entire sleeping place every night (pillows. back cushions off. blankets. etc) and then unmake it in the morning. There is, yes, a plan for weaning Felix off of this habit. However, it requires everyone in the house to be healthy or at least for the parents — particularly me, for reasons that will become clear once I explain the plan — to not be absolutely fried to a crisp. The plan is this: basically we have to let Felix scream it out. Which means Mavis cannot be in the building, because the screaming quite understandably enervates her beyond belief, which banishes sleep for literal hours. So she needs to spend the night at her best friend's place (conveniently only about a ten-minute drive away) for a minimum of three (3) nights running. The hope is that we'll see some sort of downward trend in the length of Felix's yelling — 45m to 30m to 20m or whatnot — and thus eventually it will dwindle to 0 and he'll accept sleeping in his nice comfy crib. That's the hope. The hope. But of course this experiment will mean kind of a long three nights for me and probably Quentin, so we need to wait for a long weekend or probably just President's Week — kids get the entire week off for some reason?** To be fair, if Quentin is having a normal night of sleep, Felix's screams usually don't wake him, which is truly incredible, but even this power has its limits. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • That "AI-generated George Carlin" special wasn't. (Ars Technica) 

  • Dung beetles can cooperate to roll their poop balls around even though they don't have a clear destination in mind, which is fascinating when you consider how unbelievably tiny their little brains are. (Guardian) (Paper) 

  • Is this the first you're hearing about Mystery Roman Dodecahedrons, too? (Motherboard) 

  • The Scientists have built a false-color video system that shows us how animals with crazy photoreceptors see the world. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have invented a cheaper, less energy-intensive way to make the OLEDs that are going into every display these days. (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) 

  • I ............ kinda get the logic of the "buddymoon," tbh. Huh. (WaPo gift link) 

  • The hoods on pickups and SUVs are getting too damn tall and now we have the pedestrian death data to prove it. (Ars Technica) 

  • That nine-month cruise is becoming a content farm, to no one's surprise, but it doesn't sound like it's become total hell yet. (Vox) 

  • Oof: the way your brain responds to rewards is to some extent tuned by your socioeconomic background, at least according to this new study. (MIT) 

  • NASA's Ingenuity Marscopter is broken, but holy shit, what a career for a flying robot that was only expected to operate for a month! (Nature) 

  • A six-year experiment on diversifying crop rotation in China shows a truly shocking array of benefits in carbon sequestration, crop yield, and soil health. (Anthropocene) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have invented a simple but insanely effective water filter made from cheap, easy-to-obtain materials. (UT Austin) 

  • A deep-sea coral reef 3x the size of Yellowstone has been mapped off the US Atlantic coast. (PhysOrg) (Paper) 

  • Doctors at UC San Diego let The Machine monitor a huge array of patient symptoms in order to detect sepsis before it starts, and it works great. (UCSD) (Paper) 

  • Inflatable space habitats are getting there, folks. (Ars Technica) 

  • What: The Scientists have discovered a whole new class of quasi-life in the form of little RNA guys that they're calling "obelisks" for lack of a better word. (Science) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have figured out how to build a lithium battery that can charge in five minutes instead of goddamn forever. (Cornell) 

  • When asked to do some forecasting on how technological change will shape the world in the next couple decades, a bunch of experts seem to converge on "irresponsible or indeed malicious use of AI is going to fuck us all, informationally speaking." (Lancaster U) (Paper) 

  • It sure looks like humpback whales are perfectly aware of acoustic interference from other animals and what-have-you, because they seem to like moving to quieter areas of the ocean to do their singing. (University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa) (Paper) 

  • Sit people down for a conversation with The Machine about climate change or BLM and they may not think it's a great experience, but their opinions on the actual issues might edge closer to sanity. (U of Wisconsin-Madison) (Paper) 

  • We're running out of sand and it's going to become a Problem, but The Scientists have found a substitute in the form of — I shit you not — graphene. Wheeeeeee!!! (Rice U) 

  • You can get a more authentic "yes" out of someone if you give them a script they can follow for an easier "no." I promise it makes sense when you read the article. (Cornell) (Paper) 

  • This should not be surprising, but those manganese nodule fields on the bottom of the sea that The Corporations are salivating over have more biodiversity than we thought. (Royal Netherlands Inst for Sea Research) 

  • If you see somebody calling out some antisocial bullshit behavior, don't just stand there: join in. (U of Bath) (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 GTN 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 Garvit Nama on UnsplashReader and alternate universe music critic Steve is of two minds on this one:  

This album cover, band name, and title feel like a unified whole to me. They all work together I think. But what is this album and who are We Are Tendons?I am thinking either bleepy math rock and the ramifications are because the tracks start simple and get complex, or else angry angry music like Idles, and the ramifications are bad ones for the ultra capitalists.

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.