down the fantasy draft rabbit hole we go

January 27, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that bought a bag of Sweet Tarts candy hearts in a moment of weakness and must be restrained from eating all of them within the next week. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayBONUS: Fantasy Star Trek Bridge Crew Draft with Jen, Evie, & Avery"In this bonus episode, Jon and special guests Jen, Evie, and Avery fantasy draft their ideal starship bridge crew from the entirety of all Star Trek continuity thus far."I wanted to do something special to commemorate the release of Star Trek: Picard, and I felt comfortable borrowing the format of another show because I'm positive they'd never do this particular draft. Seriously, though, if you haven't already, give All Fantasy Everything a shot so I have someone else to yell with about how great it is.Anyway: this fantasy draft was amazing, and I'm not gonna lie: I’m kinda contemplating doing something similar for, say, the premiere of Lower Decks, or the Section 31 show, or maybe even just the start of Disco s03. But I need new, extremely nerd-ass premises like:

  • You have been charged with leading a party out of Rivendell to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring; take five characters from the entirety of Star Trek with you. No Trek technology or omnipotent beings are allowed 

  • You have been sent to rescue the colonists of LV-426; which five characters from the entirety of Star Trek do you want in your dropship? You’re equipped only with US Colonial Marines technology (I haven’t yet decided if that disqualifies Data)

I'm slowly gathering more despite not entirely knowing whether I'm really going to do anything with them; I just like having them and thinking about them because I have completely lost my mind.Now is a great time to pop on by our Apple Podcasts presence and throw us a quick li'l  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ -- we're at 28 ratings now; who wants to be the one(s) to push us to 30??Instant Band Night 15: NUMEROLOGYIt's the 15th one and it takes place on a date whose numbers add up to 15. This cannot be a coincidence. Just to be on the safe side, I think you should be there, and maybe bring a few friends. Remember: you don't need to be a musician -- just showing up guarantees a good time for all!! That's right, I said it!!!🎶 Send everyone you know this link immediately 🎶http://bit.ly/instantbandnight15🤘 And/or invite your top 50 fun crew on Facebook 🤘* * w e ' l l   s e e   y o u   t h e r e * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Whatever else happens in the coming weeks, or months, or possibly years, we can all agree on hatred and vitriol for Mitch McConnell everlasting, right? That every American should mock-spit in disgust every time his name is spoken? Great, just checking. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment."Family hug" is a concept Quentin either internalized or invented himself a few months ago; it involves both of us hugging him simultaneously. It's something he requests when he needs comforting -- if something scares him, or if he bumps his head, or if one of us has (gently) rebuked him for doing something unwittingly dangerous to himself. "I want family hug," he'll say, reaching up, and if we're both home, of course he gets one, because it's adorable. Family hug is the most powerful form of comfort he knows; hugging Bunny is close but still second place. May it always be so. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.24 comedians weigh in on comedy cliches they would like to see mercy-killed. They're all right. (Vulture)A Florida State team has worked out a ridiculously powerful form of mass spectrometry imaging that can resolve down to the literal molecular level in a sample; frustratingly, the article is unclear on whether this technique only works on very thin slices of tissue or if you can just toss a fully-3D chunk of something into the magnetic array and just go to town. Also, the URL for their press release has a typo in it, which: Florida, please never change. (Florida State)Organoids are little balls of lab-grown cells normally used in research and testing, but researchers in the Netherlands have grown snake organoids that actually produce venom, which is both fascinating and potentially useful, because we need lots of it to make antivenom, and the only way to get it right now is to literally milk snakes' fangs, which, uh, you can see the problem there. (Science Daily)A 22-city version of the traveling salesman problem has been solved; they had to monkey with the architecture of the computer chips involved, but it worked. That mod probably has other applications, I'm guessin'. (Popular Mechanics)The fuck? There's extra mitochondria just swimmin' around in our blood, and they've been there the whole time. (Inserm)I've never liked the idea of contact lenses -- having something on my eyeball just doesn't seem right -- so self-moisturizing ones that use a tiny amount of electricity to make it happen are even less appealing, but hey, I'm not the target market, am I? (Tohoku U)Vaccines have a short shelf-life and need refrigeration. New research has shown that coating them with particles derived from insect viruses can make a vaccine shelf-stable at room temperature for a year. (Biomed Central)Feeding the world without wrecking the planet is possible, but it will take major changes, a lot of which seem to add up to "farm what's right for the region." (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)Researchers have figured out a way to turn CO2 into just O2 and CO with the aid of sunlight and a photocatalyst -- the sticking point, as far as I can tell, is that the photocatalyst is either hard or expensive to produce, or both, because they don't mention anything about it in the article. (Institute of Basic Science)Your interesting longread for the week is this one on the Internet of Beefs. (Ribbonfarm)Having contextual information doesn't actually seem to affect how you perceive art. (U of Basel)Making nanoscale machines out of biomolecules that can do useful work has always been tricky because heat makes them unstable. Scientists in Japan have discovered that incorporating a molecule found in animals that live near deep-sea hydrothermal vents can make biomolecular machines resistant to swings in temperature, which holds promise for making actual useful nanodevices of this type someday. (Hokkaido U)Lionfish are an invasive problem species, and the only way to control the population is to spear them, so why not make a robot that can do it? Plus, they're apparently tasty, so once we can scale lionfish hunting appropriately, there'll even be good money in it. (Popular Science)Universities talk a big game about research that fuels new companies, but hat's actually much, much harder to do than anyone's willing to admit, and it shouldn't be. (Hechinger Report)Once it's built, I want to visit this all-wood neighborhood being built in Denmark. (Fast Company)Here's an explainer on that Chinese coronavirus you've probably been hearing about. (Vox)I lived in San Francisco for a dozen years and I must've walked by this place a hundred times; what else have I been missing out on?? I love that the city can still support a business that's just enamel pins. (SFgate) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesJaws-class starship USS Sierra ScienceRachel-class starship USS Bright SkinkStar Wars: Battlefront II: Rogue One-class starship USS Boomstick 

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.