entering the brambly hedge expanded literary universe

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that, in lieu of making any kind of resolutions, downloaded that Year Compass thing and immediately decided it was too much fucking work. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayWe're in the midst of recording new episodes, so sit tight!Who needs more work after the 2020 you just had? Why not head over to Apple Podcasts and put a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in for the show instead of trying to commit to some kind of resolution?Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.The prediabetes thing means I have to keep an eye on the glycemic index of foods I want to eat. Annoyingly, it's ruled out a fair number of extremely solid favorites like mashed potatoes and white rice and cookies and whatnot. I've ditched a lot of these in bulk and reduced others to a "sometimes" treat -- my hope is that these dietary measures plus the exercise I get walking Quentin to preschool four days a week should put my hemoglobin A1c back where it needs to be. I've also discovered some weird little quirks of the glycemic index: dark chocolate, for instance, rates lower than apples, which are themselves pretty low. This would be great news, except that for some reason Trader Joe's only manufactured about twelve of those dark chocolate oranges they always sell around the holidays. I was planning on stocking up for the year, maybe buying a few every time I went, but they all dried up weeks ago. What the hell, Trading Joseph? What happened, guy? Does someone in your demand forecasting department need to be fired? Was there a break somewhere in your supply chain? Was there maybe just a company-wide ordering error and there's a huge accidental stockpile just sitting in an array of warehouses somewhere? Some of us have needs, dammit -- and nobody talk to me about the resellers on Amazon, those prices are absolute highway robbery -- I'm going to have to invent time travel just to get this done, aren't I. While I'm at it, I suppose there are some other, bigger mistakes this country has made that I should fix. Meet me in the alternate timeline I'm about to create, everybody. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.A very excellent friend of ours gave Quentin a book for Xmas that he became progressively more enamored with day by day. Did you ever read The Secret Staircase by Jill Barklem? If not, don't worry, because I can probably recite it to you from memory at this point. Not that I mind -- it's pretty goddamn great, actually -- but the little "Brambly Hedge" emblem at the top of the cover made me wonder if there was more where that came from. It turns out YES: you can get eight of them in a little slipcase (we found a used set that quite frankly seems indistinguishable from brand new), and we received it a couple days ago. Not only are they now practically the only books he wants read to him, they're almost the only thing he wants to do, period. This is not a complaint; quite the opposite, in fact: I'd give a lot to know the precise mix of factors that have Quentin so thoroughly captivated. Each one of them has a sweet, easy-to-follow story; incredibly detailed, lavish illustrations chock full of cute mice including at least one very interesting cross-section of a dwelling (or, in one case, a boat); plus a sort of overall communal countryside vibe that's almost unspeakably cozy. We read Winter Story fully three times over the course of Sunday -- it contains a drawing of a sort of scaffold structure the mice use to hollow out a deep snowdrift for an all-night party that shares a lot of DNA with construction drawings he loves, but he also gets a huge kick out of a warm kitchen scene where crabapples are strung together to roast over a fire. Autumn Story is the only one he's not super into; a mouse gets lost in the woods for a little bit and he says it's scary. I can respect that. Sea Story is also an emergent favorite for reasons that are less clear; same with Poppy's Babies, which we also read three times on Sunday. The whole thing is very cute and very good. Would recommend. I hope it sticks with him long enough that I can get his take on why he likes it so much (being 3, I'm not sure he has the whole introspection thing down at the moment), but I'm happy to just witness it. His little mind; it's so good, y'all. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.(I'm aware this section is a favorite for a lot of readers, so I need to let you know right now that a lot of places just didn't send out newsletters over the Xmas/NYE break; this week's harvest is comparatively small.)

• Ed Yong tells us "Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us" (this one's free). (Atlantic) 

• You can do a whole-body scan of an animal, but actually interpreting the data you get can take hours of work. Or you can feed about 10 scans to a machine learning network and on subsequent scans, it'll figure out where all the organs are in seconds. (Technical U of Munich) You can also use an AI to correctly guess the emotions people are feeling based on the music they're listening to. (U of Turku) 

• Would ......... huh. Would making satellites out of wood help reduce space junk? (BBC) 

• "An earnest review of a robotic cat pillow" (TechCrunch) 

• Neural scans seem to indicate that lonely people actually have more activity in the social centers of their brains than people who aren't. (NEO.LIFE) 

• I fully admit I clicked on this just because of the headline: "Big bumblebees learn locations of best flowers" (U of Exeter) 

• I missed this one back in March, I think: there's a persuasive historical argument to be made that the entire concept of the nuclear family was an aberration. There are better, bigger forms of family, and they're desperately needed. (~$Atlantic) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumDICKBABY, The Needs of the Many 

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.