endorsements for 2023 thus far

May 30, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that acknowledges this is coming out late but also it was a long weekend with the kids home the entire time, so 🤷 

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 21: MIXERWe have already sold some tickets to Instant Band Night 21, if that tells you anything. If you've never been, this is going to be the one to see! Come play some music with friendly strangers for a wildly receptive audience, or just be part of said audience and chill out. Mark your calendar now just to be sure you don't miss it! We've got at least one idea in the works for something you've never seen before!July 13 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.A friend in one of my Slacks recently asked us "if you were famous, what product would you like to be the spokesperson for?" and I couldn't think of anything immediately offhand, but now that I've had a little time to mull it over, I would like to officially announce my endorsements for 2023:🥔 Trader Joe's Ridge Cut Potato Chips! "My prediabetic bloodstream prevents me from eating these without the promise of future consequences, but prior to my diagnosis when I lived in a state of blissful ignorance, these were hands-down the best chips you could get at a store!"🚀 The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks! "Start with The Player of Games! Report anyone who tells you to try Consider Phlebas to the proper authorities."🍎 Envy apples! "The crispest, tastiest eating apple that currently exists. You can get 'em at Safeway. Just go"Please direct all inquiries and requests for future endorsements to my staff.* Thank you, thank you, no questions at this time, thank you, no questions!* This email 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin has definitely made some friends in his TK class and it's very good. For the sake of posterity if nothing else, I might as well tell you he says his best friends right now are Cooper and Ngawang. There are three kindergarten classes at Quentin's school, so some degree of splitting up the entire TK gang is inevitable, but I've heard the teachers take information like this into account to some extent when they're formulating the rosters for the following year; I'll try to put in a word. If he doesn't get to have them in his class next year, Quentin can at least see his besties at recess every day, but still: cross your fingers!One of Felix's favorite activities is still what he calls "Hallway! Ball!" which involves going to the upstairs hallway, closing all the doors, and throwing or rolling a collection of six balls around. Inevitably there'll be a detour to the stairway landing, at which point the game mutates into rolling or tossing all six balls down the five-step staircase, then seeing who wants to go to the bottom and toss them back up. Is Felix going to be a sports kid, maybe?? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • State Farm is no longer insuring new homes in California, in case you're wondering whether The Corporations are going to start taking climate change seriously. (ABC News) 

  • "A Far Right Moms Group Is Targeting Students. These Women Are Fighting Back." Godspeed. (Vice) 

  • Some Engineers have worked out a design for a device that can harvest electricity literally out of thin air. Let's go!!!!!! (UMass Amherst) 

  • We can all agree there's some bad shit on the internet kids probably shouldn't see, but we haven't figured out how to legislate against it effectively without unacceptable splash damage. (Vox) 

  • This is probably related in some way: "Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet: Puriteens, anti-fans, and the culture war’s most bonkers battleground." (Also Vox) 

  • Those plastic bags you've been putting in the plastic bag recycling bin may not actually be getting recycled, according to an infuriating investigation involving actual physical tracking devices across 10 states. (ABC News) 

  • An expert in AI would really like us to stop freaking out about large language models, which are basically just fancy autocomplete. Good interview! (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Implants in his brain and spinal cord have restored the ability to walk naturally in a man who was paralyzed in a bike accident a decade ago (!!!!!!!!!!). (Nature) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are getting better at reconstructing imagery from reading brain activity, although (of course) there's a healthy dollop of Stable Diffusion in the mix. (Motherboard) (Paper) 

  • GQ just did a very good profile of — yes — Dave Matthews. The hill I'm about to die on flies three flags that say "DMB's audience was not their fault," "They actually really were great live," and "'Crash Into Me' is less a song and more of a fungus'"!!!!! (~$GQ) 

  • SETI is doing a test run on the whole "receiving a message from deep space" thing, and it sounds fun. (SETI) 

  • Why do we have limbs? [waves away a weed vape cloud] No, really: where did they come from, evolutionarily speaking? The Scientists think they might have figured it out. (U of Colorado School of Medicine) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are starting to think it might be possible to measure the health of an ecosystem by the level and diversity of sounds it makes. (The Conversation) 

  • I was just made aware the Boston Museum of Science has been trying to fundraise for a memorial sculpture of Leonard Nimoy, which is an unalloyed good, but there has to be a better design than this. Just make it a statue of Spock, cowards!! (Boston Museum of Science) 

  • Looks like humans aren't as unique as we think we are among mammals when it comes to how we raise our offspring. (UC Davis) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists may have pinpointed the areas of the brain that light up when you have a "Eureka!" moment. (Paper) 

  • Orcas have sunk at least three boats in the Strait of Gibraltar with clear purpose and method, and the current leading theory is that they're being led by a traumatized individual they call White Gladis. Good for her, honestly. (Live Science) 

  • Here's a great writeup on Defector and how they've managed to stay solvent and pay their staff; you know how good they are if you read last week's Elon piece from the king David Roth. (Columbia Journalism Review) 

  • The Scientists have created a bacterium that can synthesize an amino acid not found in nature; this opens up some, uh, some possibilities. (U of Delaware) 

  • Are things maybe getting more expensive not because of hard-to-explain-or-disentangle market forces, but simply because The Corporations have realized they can make a lot more money if they just charge us more for the same shit? It's almost as if they're .......... greedy or something? [shocked_pikachu.jpg] (Axios) 

  • The Scientists are thinking about putting a SETI listening post on the far side of the moon, which makes sense. (Supercluster) 

  • Mice can inflict untold millions of dollars in wheat crop damage, but The Scientists have found a surprisingly simple and effective way to make them look elsewhere for a snack. (U of Sydney) (Paper) 

  • What does "climate-friendly beef" mean, though? Really? (HEATED) 

  • I had literally never heard of Alyx Weiss before reading this article, but how the fuck do you have 1.7 million followers and just fuck off into the ether abruptly for months without ever once thinking "Somebody's probably wondering where I went; I should let them know"???? (Time) 

  • Sure, you can count bacteria in an environment, but what's more important to find out is how fast they reproduce. Side note, because if you've been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you may be wondering how many Max Planck Institutes for __ there are? There's 85. (Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology) 

  • If you second-guess your decisions a lot, that might not be your personality talking so much as a hardwired genetic tendency(!), at least if these mice are anything to go on. (U of Utah) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have used some tough-ass robots to take measurements in the damn middle of a cat-5 typhoon. (Okinawa Inst of Sci & Tech) 

  • Looking at the same picture of food 30x or more can make you feel less hungry, according to a new study, so if you'll excuse me I need to google up a good image of an apple fritter to make my desktop. (Aarhus U) (Paper) 

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:

Reader Steve wants to know: "Is "The Legendary Makeout Kings" really not an existing band name? If so, literally everyone who has ever had a band harder than Simon and Garfunkel has absolutely missed a trick here." A quick google would seem to indicate there is in fact not a band with this name out there! Somebody grab it!!! 

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.