give life back to music(?)

October 23, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that saw a possum cross the street in the night several weeks ago and still thinks about it occasionally 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI know I say this every week, but the possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded! 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 23: YOUWe're two weeks out, just about, and if you haven't gotten your ticket yet (or told a bunch of friends about it), you oughta. I recently had the opportunity to describe Instant Band Night to some folks who'd never been, and what came out of my mouth was "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." I'm just sayin'!!!Nov 9 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 decided to experiment a little with the pricing in the shop, so if you haven't stopped by, or if you know someone with excellent taste who needs something that literally can't be bought anywhere else, maybe take a look right now and consider some clever ceramics! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! I'm working (slowly) on even more delightful little weirdos and I hope to show you soon. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I have never heard of Noah Kahan. Have you? Is this a sign that I truly am out of the loop where music is concerned?Also, props to the person who coined "stomp clap hey" way back when — as a pejorative term for an entire subgenre of music, you will never find a better ratio of murderous precision/economy. Could you do this with any other genre in just three words? The closest thing I can think of is Strong Bad's idea of rap rock: "jugga jiggy jugga" (if that last sentence made any sense to you, congratulations).Seriously, though, is it time for me to get back on the paying-attention-to-music wagon or what. Do you have a band or two to recommend? Let's open these floodgates!!! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Oh, the fundraisers. It turns out the PTA funds a lot of the stuff at Quentin's school that makes it an extremely good and fun place for him to be! Which means we need to raise a lot of money for the PTA every year. I'm happy to help, of course, but I've also noticed that I've never received a fundraiser email from any of my friends who have kids. I choose to do them the same courtesy and not blast one out their way, either.That said, if you're reading this and you have an extra dollar or two, we're running a fundraiser right now that his school calls the "Tigerthon" — basically it's an event where the kids try to walk as many laps around the school track as they can in 30 minutes, and our generous donors either pledge per lap or just a flat amount. I was in such a daze when Quentin started TK that this whole thing skated right past me, but this year I've volunteered to be a Room Parent for Quentin's class and I need to represent this time. Anyway, if there are a few coins burning a hole in your pocket, consider a donation, why not! If you work for a place that does company matching, there's a box you can check, too. At least click to see a pretty good picture of Quentin on his first day of kindergarten. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Whoops Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro took plea deals whoops!! Uh oh! Whoops! [salacious_crumb_cackle.wav] (MSNBC) 

  • Some Engineers have worked out a better system for generating clean hydrogen from sunlight. (MIT) 

  • "When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person?" (TechCrunch) 

  • It's a beautiful day: Alex Jones isn't going to be able to use bankruptcy to wriggle out of paying the Sandy Hook families their billion dollars. (Reuters) 

  • It turns out some algae have a mechanism that lets them cope with the warmer seawater that climate change is inevitably going to foist on them. (U of East Anglia) (Paper) 

  • Canada's looking into how to implement a UBI. They're not gonna do it, at least not anytime soon, but they are looking into it. (Motherboard) 

  • Anthropic decided to let about a thousand Americans determine the rules for an instance of The Machine to follow, and they turned out a pretty decent set. Sure, why not. ($NYT) 

  • "How to fix the internet: If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms." (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Why does stuff get more complex over time? The Scientists propose a missing law of nature that incorporates evolution into, well, everything, it sounds like. (Carnegie Science) (Paper) 

  • The gentrification font. (Guardian) 

  • Some Engineers have built a bionic hand that works shockingly well — even transmitting some sensation back to its user. (Bionics Inst) (Paper) 

  • "How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship: Successful marriages are defined not by improvement, but by avoiding decline." This one's old, but I missed it the first time around. (~$Atlantic) Pairs well with this study about how accuracy really matters when perceiving your partner's behavior. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have worked out a simple, sustainable method for turning industrial waste chicken feathers into fuel cell components. (ETH Zurich) 

  • A new study shows that sleeping people can still respond accurately to commands about 70% of the time. (Nature) 

  • The Jimmy Dubs has revealed that Jupiter has an equatorial jet stream! (NASA) (Paper) 

  • It sounds like dark magicks, but it does kinda make sense that The Machine can field eerily accurate guesses about your age, location, gender, race, and even job based solely on the way you talk online. (~$Wired) 

  • The Machine also occasionally comes up with completely outlandish responses to ordinary stimuli, which is probably a good way to test it. (MIT) (Paper) 

  • Founder personality actually accounts for quite a lot in the long-term success of a startup. (U of New South Wales) (Paper) 

  • Mice aren't seasonal animals — there's no such thing as "mouse mating season" — which they have in common with us. Interestingly, their metabolism still seems to be affected by the change in daylight hours brought on by the seasons; something we might want to consider, maybe. (U of Copenhagen) (Paper) 

  • Speaking of mice, The Scientists have been running across mummified mouse corpses at the tops of volcanoes in the Atacama Desert for years, and it turns out they got there on their own, on purpose, which is mystifying for several reasons including: WHY? HOW?? (U of Nebraska-Lincoln) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have figured out a way to decontaminate soil by mixing biochar into it and then blasting it with electricity. Works great with no downsides, apparently! (Rice U) (Paper) 

  • It sounds like an absurd viral video, but no: groups of people are starting to form where ten of them go to breakfast at a restaurant and each one drops a hundo on the table for the server, so they always leave a full grand as a tip — minimum — for whoever served them that day. There are probably more efficient ways to redistribute wealth, but if this takes off, I'm not gonna be mad about it. ($WaPo) 

  • When the cicadas come out, birds eat them, which means they're not eating as many caterpillars, which means more leaf damage. Makes sense, but still: huh. (GWU) 

  • The Scientists think there's some lava in the Arctic that may have come directly from the core of the planet, and they have chemical evidence to back it up. (Motherboard) 

  • It sounds nuts, but the results were published in a peer-reviewed journal: The Scientists trained The Machine to identify whether someone has type 2 diabetes based solely on the sound of their voice, which it was able to do with shocking accuracy. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • A fast radio burst 8 billion years distant has been detected, beating the previous record by two billion. (Motherboard) 

  • There's no actual hard evidence in the archaeological record that only men were hunters and only women were gatherers and so forth. (U of Delaware) 

  • Mass gray whale deaths that have been recurring sporadically since the 80s have confounded The Scientists for years, but they think they've hit upon the answer: it's the Arctic ice melting. (Oregon State) (Paper) 

  • The "purpose" of dreams might be different depending on what culture you're from. (U of Geneva) (Paper) 

  • A short history of the drum machine. (Music Radar) 

  • I need to preface that I still only understand about half to three-quarters of this at best, but even so, this whole "dark photons" thing is fascinating. (Physics World) 

  • A Pitchfork music critic did some experimenting with an instance of The Machine that can create music from text prompts, and the results are pretty wild. (Pitchfork) 

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 Don Kaveen 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 Vincent Van Zalinge on Unsplash🎶 Reader Kyle M says "Streets Alive is clearly a Weakerthans tribute band/sound-alike."🧙‍♂️ Reader Steve muses "'In the room of lengthening shadows' is a pretty good album title for something a bit dark and portentous. 'Streets Alive' is the name of a terrible and terribly sincere project trying to improve disadvantaged people's lives through the medium of jazz dance. The combination is hurting my brain. I think it sounds like: the East Portland Community Childrens' Choir does Godspeed You Black Emperor." 

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.