greetings from vacation bungalow alpha, week 2

January 17, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's settling into this substitute house surprisingly well 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe edit on the last episode we recorded is almost finished, but as you can imagine, moving temporarily to a new house while still managing a baby and a 4yo is not without its logistical challenges.As of the time of this writing, there are still 43 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings, plus howevermany wonderful reviews. You have the power to take us to 45 and beyond: you!!Instant Band Night 15: TIME WARPAll right, vaccines for kids under 5 probably aren't going to appear by March. What do we think. May? July? Should I just shoot for holding this in July? (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Is there a limit past which crypto enthusiasts can no longer be scammed? Asking for real, because the comedic tragedy that is SpiceDAO makes me wonder why we're not all doing variations on this:1. Create a DAO for a putative goal like "bring back Firefly with original cast" (which would be a bad idea for many reasons, but it doesn't matter -- we're never going to do it)2. Watch the DAO somehow accumulate people and money3. Once the DAO collects enough money, abscond with the funds and never return4. Rinse/repeatThe fact that SpiceDAO actually seems to have been earnest in its goal is simultaneously worse and better.Worse: You got all these people and all this money together for something that could never in a million years have happened and nobody raised a red flag?Better: The money rolled in regardless, which means there's a lot of incredibly easy marks out there with enough free-floating collective cash to make you Comfortably Rich, given the correct (fictional) goalI'm only partially kidding when I say that the only thing preventing me from running a scam of this type is a lack of specific technical knowledge and the time/patience to acquire it. I'm just going to wait for someone to launch Crypto Scam As A Service instead; tagline: "You think it up, we'll do the backend and split the proceeds!" I realize it needs work, but it's just a version 1.0 for now. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.This Airbnb has a third bedroom we've been using as an office, but also there's a bed in there, so we're taking the opportunity to try to tune Felix's overnight sleep a little: he sometimes wakes up around 9p, which isn't super ideal. Our sleep advisor says we can more or less train that out of him, or at least get him to learn to self-soothe so he can go back to sleep if he does wake himself up. The training phase involves not being in the room around 9p, which is easy to do here, but will be less easy when we move back home -- hopefully by then he'll be used to sleeping through until midnight at least? Our hope is to reduce his wakeups to midnight and 4a, but interestingly, the last couple nights he's just slept through to at least 2a, which would be even more convenient if he can stick to it. This is most of where my Felix thought energy goes, because in all other aspects he's ridiculously easy to take care of. Lately he's been flipping himself over onto his tummy whenever we lay him down on his playmat, so it'll be interesting to see how long it takes him to learn to flip back consistently.That's all I've got for this week! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "The Agony of Parents With Kids Under 5" is accurate. (Slate) 

  • It's been a while since we've heard from Ed Yong in these parts; let's change that. "Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble: Omicron is inundating a health-care system that was already buckling under the cumulative toll of every previous surge." (~$Atlantic) 

  • The James Webb Space Telescope has completed all the really hairy parts of its remote deployment and now it just needs to get where it's going and calibrate its mirror segments. (NASA) 

  • If a badger digs up ancient treasure because it's winter and he hongry, what percentage of the find is his, legally? The article does not answer this question. (Guardian) 

  • There's a way to get cops and citizens to listen to each other; if only it were scalable. (The Trace) 

  • Knowing what I know about the people in this country, I cannot imagine a circumstance that would let me take seriously the idea of a citizen assembly chosen by lottery to run shit. (Vox) 

  • For the first time in history, the Scientists successfully implanted a gene-tweaked pig heart into a person, and now we're just going to have to wait and see if his body continues to accept it. (U of Maryland) 

  • What happened to colors in TV and movies? (Vox) 

  • The Scientists are trying to model the spread of misinfo in the hopes of figuring out how to stop it. Good luck, folks! (Tufts) 

  • Uhhhhhh. Mutation may not be as random as we thought: a study seems to show that our genomes actually protect the more essential parts of themselves from random changes, which: huh. Huh! (UC Davis) 

  • The math says the supply chain runs better when women are involved. (Phys.org) 

  • Unfortunately, the best way to improve at something involves work. (Psychology Today) 

  • Way, waaaaay more fossils come from rich countries than not, which is a Problem that we've only just now become aware of. (Nature) 

  • "A syllabus for a new world: Art reminds us that survival after apocalypse is insufficient." I also want to remind everyone that "Survival is insufficient" is a line from Star Trek: Voyager, which is acknowledged in the Station Eleven novel but I don't know if it's also mentioned in the show. (Vox) 

  • There's a hole in the ground in Texas spewing a 100ft geyser of thousands of gallons per day of salty water into the air and nobody's quite sure where it's coming from or what the best way is to stop it. (~$Texas Monthly) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumLesbian Firepower, Now Who's Uncomfortable(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.