greetings from vacation bungalow alpha, week 3.5

January 31, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's about to contend with the truly shocking amount of stuff that got moved to this Airbnb while the seismic retrofit was happening 

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.The seismic retrofit at our house is complete, the walls in the lower half of the house have been reconstructed (including the built-in shelves in the garage), and the whole place has been cleaned to within an inch of its life. Now we just need to get ourselves and all the stuff we needed for living and shove it back in there, and it's going to be: a surprising amount of work!Some of the work was done in the garage, so all the stuff that was on the shelves had to get taken down and piled up, and it turned out some of that needed to go in the other room, yadda yadda there's basically a mountain of Things + Shelves that we have to rearrange and refile so we can put the office back together. But we also had shelves on one wall of the office that also need to go back up. And then there's all the other stuff that belongs in the office that we moved to other random locations in the house so it'd all be out of the way.None of that encompasses the things we brought over to the Airbnb: clothes, food, random kitchen implements, toys, co-sleeper, playmat, stroller, a card table, all the bathroom gear, etc etc. We've been in this place for so long that I'm paranoid we're going to miss something just because it's become part of the background.Once all the stuff is back, we can rebuild our office setups, which we had to disassemble and move so the work could get done. I'm bizarrely looking forward to redoing the cabling for my desk -- I think this time I'm going to rig it so all the various USB and HDMI nonsense stays as hidden as possible in the channel under the desktop -- but this whole process is going to be a fuckload of tasks, a truly never-ending list of tiny! little! things! that will need to be checked off until our living space is back where it was before this whole process began. How long will it take? I'm guessing at least a week, including the better part of the weekend. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We think we can see some front teeth starting to emerge, ridgelike, from Felix's lower gums. They're juuuuuust starting to make themselves known, and I've lost all semblance of memory of Quentin's teething phase, so I have no idea when we need to start giving Felix his painkillers. "Just do it when he starts crying" is, of course, the obvious thought, but the trouble is that he still tends to cry a fair amount when we put him down for a nap at least 50% of the time. He's doing this thing now where sometimes he'll nap hard for at least a couple hours, which fucks his naps for the rest of the day. We're pretty sure babies are supposed to nap for at least a couple hours in the morning and the afternoon; Felix's naps almost never go past the 40m mark, and they need to be initiated after about 90m of consciousness have elapsed. So when he goes off-script and banks a few hours of nap, it usually renders him unable to nap the next couple times we try: instead he just yells. This all evens out by the time bedtime is reached -- usually -- in that he's been awake for hours upon hours and the odds of him dropping off right away go up slightly. He might also be so tired that he cries about it instead of sleeping, but eventually the fatigue takes him out. ANYWAY, the end result of all of these overlapping possibilities is that I worry that I'll have trouble distinguishing between the I'm Too Tired And Must Scream state and the My Teeth Are Coming In What The Fuck Is This state. At least we have painkillers at the ready!!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "The Anti-Vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America: Since last summer, the conservative campaign against vaccination has claimed thousands of lives for no ethically justifiable purpose." (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Scientists tried to survey a representative sample of Americans about their views on space, and got some surprisingly well-aligned results. (Vice) 

  • Sure looks like we'd get more EVs on the roads if we let the companies sell them directly to consumers. (~$Atlantic) 

  • There appears to be an obvious direct relationship between the amount of money parents have onhand and their babies' brain development. (Vox) 

  • A recent study seems to indicate that social media filters are fucking up The Kids, probably unsurprisingly. (Teen Vogue) 

  • Is it really possible to be pals with an octopus? (Hakai) 

  • The existence of these workstations with a built-in kid kennel is evidence of both genuine innovation and a profound societal failure to provide parents with actual support. (~$Curbed) 

  • Here's a fascinating longread on a notorious but (deliberately) forgotten female hacker. (The Verge) 

  • Looks like The Scientists have given us yet another very good substitute for plastics as we know them and we should probably start using them immediately!!!!! (Anthropocene) 

  • Because of the way Cape Cod is shaped, close to a thousand Kemp's ridley sea turtles strand themselves on it every year on their way to warmer waters, so it's up to a bunch of ambitious and highly empathetic humans to patch 'em up and fly 'em where they need to go. (bioGraphic) 

  • What I can only assume to be a combination of The Scientists and Some Engineers have created a bioelectronic tongue capable of "tasting" sweetness. (American Chemical Society) 

  • "Please make a dumb car" (TechCrunch) 

  • You can influence people's impression of the taste of a snack by labeling it with two words that are unsurprising but hilarious nonetheless, because why would you ever. (Ohio State) 

  • There's some kind of lazy, fucked-up magnetar out there, about 4000ly away, and The Scientists have never seen anything like it before. (Intl Centre for Radio Astronomy Research) 

  • OpenSea admitted that over 80% of the NFTs created for free on its platform are grifts. (Vice) Pair that with the discovery that nearly 90% of the activity on OpenSea's nearest competitor is just wash trading where users are shuffling money between different wallets they own to give the appearance of massive sales. (Decrypt) 

  • How do you rebuild a town after it burns down? Like, how do you even go about starting to figure that out? (Northern Arizona U) 

  • The Scientists have created a little puzzle game for mobile devices that'll help advance breast cancer research. No, seriously. More of these, please. (Center for Genomic Regulation) 

  • It turns out surveys that ask repetitive questions get worse data overall! (UC Riverside) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bands/artistsTop Five EnemyAlison LoveYouCabbage Crime Saturday(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think these bands/artists sound 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.