happy Doritos products day

July 03, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes all Americans within the radius of this message a good day with at least one bag of some sort of Doritos, and all other people a perfectly pleasant time 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe 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 21: MIXER✨ IT'S NEXT WEEK ✨Summer is officially here and that means it's time to ring it in with an explosion of musical creativity!!!! Come play or come watch; either way it'll be something you've definitely never seen before, and really, aren't new experiences what we're after here??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 YOUNew stuff alert: there's a bunch in the Etsy shop right now! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! What are you waiting for?? 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Going to have to make this one brief, as I seem to have bruised some part of my left wrist in a way that makes typing uncomfortable, though I don't at all remember doing it. Aging! It's ........... fun? I just wanted to use this space to quote a particularly salient part of the latest edition of How Things Work by Hamilton Nolan on the general fuckedness of the divide between the rich and the rest of us: 

People know this, just by living in the world, but mostly it seems so big and entrenched that fighting it seems futile. This attitude of helplessness makes it comfortable to outsource our political opinions to the two parties and carry on as best we can. Bernie and the DSA wage the fight for socialism nobly, but remain role players in the grand political landscape of today. It feels to people like there is nowhere to put their class rage, because there is not a mainstream political party that is ready to wave the red flag and tell the rich motherfuckers that we are coming for you directly. This helplessness and futility and weakness forced upon working people ferments into anger that spews out in many stupid and self-defeating ways. It is fuel that cannot seem to find an engine, so it just burns.

He identifies the proper engine in the next paragraph. It's very persuasive! Also persuasive is the opening of the essay, which notes that really, truly, "the left" should be just about everybody who hasn't been infected by Fox News brainworms, but the preponderance of socialist thought has been too recondite and intellectually self-referential to be useful or relatable to anybody outside their own academic circles. There are other, louder drums we can and should be banging. I like it! I just wanted to make sure you heard it, too. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.This one will also be quick because my wrist is still bugging me: Felix seems to have a certified household nickname, though to be honest with you I'm not sure if it came from Quentin making a strange syllabic mutation or just Felix mispronouncing his own name (he doesn't say it very much, but he does seem to be working on it). Anyway, sometimes he's called Fiki ("feekee") and I don't know if it's going to stick in any way/shape/form, but it's pretty good that one or both of our offspring was able to create a phonetic combination I never would have imagined in a million years! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • There are startups out there trying to figure out how to reverse the acidification of the ocean. (Nature) 

  • The Scientists have run the numbers, and it looks like investing in nature contributes a staggering amount to the global economy; unsurprisingly, continuing the way things are results in a huge net loss. (U of Minnesota) 

  • Over a thousand actors have signed the letter signaling readiness to strike if negotiations don't go their way, including the President of SAG-AFTRA herself, who I'm always lowkey delighted to note is Fran Drescher. (Deadline) 

  • Texas is fucking roasting right now, and the only reason the power grid hasn't fallen over and died while everyone's running their ACs is because of — yes — renewable energy. (HEATED) 

  • The Scientists have built what sounds like a game-changing carbon capture system that's modular, scalable, and energy-efficient. (Rice U) 

  • While there's no one single answer to why people believe in conspiracy theories, there are some common threads. (American Psychological Assoc) 

  • Here's a really good summation of experts' takes on the state of AI right now. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The largest-ever survey of coral reef ecosystems is complete and has already yielded some interesting results. (U of Konstanz) (Paper) 

  • If you remember reading back in May about a system The Scientists demonstrated that can pull electricity literally out of the air, here's a great read on the next steps, including scaling challenges. (Guardian) 

  • Starting in 2025, an entire neighborhood of Stockholm is being constructed out of wood, and the renders look great. (Robb Report) 

  • Nobody has ever been able to prove to me that foldable smartphones are at all a good idea, and this Pixel Fold review (it died after four (4) days) doesn't help. (Ars Technica) 

  • HRD closed? What the fuck? [tableflip.gif] (SF Standard) 

  • The fabric of the entire universe as we know it is constantly being squashed and stretched by gravitational waves coming from countless pairs of supermassive black holes. (NSF) (Paper) 

  • Who wants to live on a cruise ship for 3 years for $30K? (CNN) 

  • The Scientists have designed a soft film that can alter its transparency to just about any useful wavelength of light at will. (American Chemical Society) 

  • Gallup tried to take the world's emotional temperature; have a look at the results. (Gallup) 

  • The Scientists have spotted a planet that should've been destroyed when its host star swelled into a red giant and receded, but it's ............ still there. (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) 

  • Making a slogan for your brand? It can be memorable or it can be likable, but you gotta pick one. (City U of London) 

  • Some Engineers have built a proof of concept for a data transfer system that uses different wavelengths of light to transfer half a goddamn terabyte per second through a single fiber-optic cable. (Columbia U) (Paper) 

  • A plant was just discovered in Borneo that both flowers and fruits underground. Wild hogs seem to be the distribution method — they dig the fruits up and eat them, okay — but nobody can figure out who the hell is pollinating the fuckin' things, or how. Mysteries!! (Guardian) 

  • How does Taylor Swift stack up on the "unique songs per concert" metric? Not bad, it turns out. I still think about the time I saw Radiohead play "Creep" at Coachella a thousand years ago. (Can't Get Much Higher) 

  • Looks like having a sense of purpose helps ease loneliness; makes sense. (Washington U in St Louis) 

  • NASA has locked four volunteers into a simulated Mars habitat for the next year to see how they handle it. Good luck in there! (Universe Today) 

  • The Scientists have concluded that the ancestors of mammals like dogs, bunnies, and (crucially) primates coexisted with dinosaurs for a brief time before the asteroid hit. (U of Bristol) (Paper) 

  • People who are more guilt-prone are less likely to be corrupt, according to a new study, so maybe we've got at least a crude rubric for sorting out who belongs in positions of power from here on out. (UC Santa Barbara) 

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 Andrey K 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 Yohan Marion on Unsplash🤹 Reader Lauren H is pretty sure this is "a Soundcloud album some 12 year olds made in their basement, and you can hear sporadic giggling in the background of every track while one of them aggressively raps about poop. "🫥 On the other hand, reader Steve, uh, well: "I Made The Poop Appear by MC Butt Butt is exactly as bad as it sounds. It was a real record but society chose unanimously to make a massive effort at forgetting it. The masters and all copies were destroyed, and MC Butt Butt himself was thrown into a volcano to appease the gods, before we all took truly spectacular amounts of drugs to destroy our memories.Every so often someone sort of remembers it. These incidents are called "leakages" and result in a visit from the Sanitisers. It's been nice knowing you, I hope to see you on the other side." Oh shit! Shit! Shiiiiiiiiii— 

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.