here bunny bunny

August 02, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has come to the definite realization that it's a winter person and not a summer person on the basis of its reaction to the growing heat 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayIt's ........ it's probably gonna be a little while until I can get the new episode done, I'll be honest with you. Maybe once we're out of the "every 3 hours" part of Felix's feeding schedule? A man can dream.The number of people who will be the only ones left standing after the dragons are awoken from their slumber under London still stands at 38; you can join them by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on our Apple Podcasts page. Unless you like being dragon food.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberGet your goddamn shot! Then and only then you can pencil 11/11/2021 into your schedule; if we're all good and vaccinated, we'll be able to see each other at the next Instant Band Night.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I'm eventually going to have to do something about this spare tire I've acquired. It's not hugely noticeable -- I haven't exactly gone fully pear-shaped -- but it's there, and I'm not a fan. Please note that I'm not here making value judgements about body shapes of any kind; it's not wrong or bad to be whatever shape you are, nor does it make you a bad or unworthy person in any way -- it's just that I've noticed my own body has changed shape somewhat, and I don't like it. I finally replaced the jeans I've been wearing for probably the last 2-3 years with the help of my excellent friend Maya, and we bought two pairs -- one for now and one for eventual backup. When I opened my archival drawer, I discovered I still had a pair of pristine backup jeans from the last time I bought 'em. Needless to say, said backup pair did not fit. They're going to Goodwill or maybe Buffalo Exchange on the next run; I'm not about to save aspirational jeans.My plan, such as it is, will be to implement an intermittent fasting diet combined with exercise -- probably some running. Maybe a bike? I have a lot of time to think it over, because I'm not going to be able to start until the kids are able to make their own breakfasts (I'm a morning exercise person; it's the only time of day it makes sense to me). So let's say six years from now, minimum. Check in with me on this then, folks. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Three days ago, Quentin was playing with the purple bunny he picked out for Felix, and now we can't find it. I've looked absolutely everywhere I can think of; this shit is driving me mildly nuts. The purple bunny had been living a nice quiet existence in the corner of Felix's daytime crib (we set up a Pack & Play downstairs with the bassinet insert -- it's fucking fantastic, btw), but Quentin wanted to take it for a spin; last any of us can remember, he was dragging it up the steps at the end of a ribbon clipped to one of its ears. How many places can a small purple bunny hide? Apparently it only takes one to completely confound a full-grown adult and a 3.5yo with an at-best diffident relationship to his own memory/attention span (for which I don't blame him, c'mon -- he's three and a half). Further updates as events warrant. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Do the defiant vaccine refusers deserve our pity? One sociologist says: nah. Once they discover they've been conned, they have the choice to renounce it, but instead, they double down. She does offer a strategy to deal with them, interestingly, but it takes a lot of involvement from fairly specific people. (Thread from Brooke Harrington on Twitter) 

  • We shouldn't have to spend so much time dealing with government bureaucracy that puts the onus on us to figure out its purposefully byzantine, obscurantist morass of paperwork. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Cockatoos are teaching each other how to open garbage cans in Australia. (New Scientist) 

  • Trump and his idiots really wanted to tear down the way the government worked and replace it with their own bad, stupid ideas, but (surprise!) it turns out they were amazingly shit at the actual process of doing so. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Scientists think they've worked out a way to generate antimatter using lasers, but I want details on whether this could be used for ....... you know. [gestures at a model of a Federation warp core] (Science Alert) 

  • Here's an interesting longread on the human desire to colonize the galaxy. (BBC Future) 

  • The math says decarbonizing the planet will take away fossil fuel jobs (duh), but it'll also create 2x as many jobs in the new energy industries that will blossom thereafter. (Anthropocene) 

  • Have a fascinating peek into a corner of gay culture I admit to knowing zero about: BuzzFeed News figured out where poppers come from. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • According to a new study, it may be possible to tell what your personal circadian rhythm is like just by drawing some blood and analyzing it for specific metabolites. (U of Colorado Boulder) 

  • We know almost nothing about most of the marine species we consider to be invasive, because a few superstars are hogging all the attention. (Hakai) 

  • Engineers are working on ways to charge EVs by embedding magnetized particles into the road itself. (Engadget) 

  • Who's ready for some BARGAINS?!?!? Here's the website the government uses to auction off all the stuff it confiscates. The folks up in Sacramento have a real thing for 20ish-pound boxes of knives, but you could also buy a 26-passenger Startrans bus and kit it out for a road trip or somethin'. (GovDeals) 

  • We already think there's a subsurface ocean there, but now we've detected water vapor in the atmosphere of Ganymede somehow. (NASA Hubblesite) 

  • Naming unrelated words might be a decent way to measure individual creativity. (McGill U) 

  • The astrophysicist who insists we shouldn't rule out the possibility of ʻOumuamua being an alien probe is putting together a project to scan local space for more potential objects like it. (Science) 

  • Conditions on Snowball Earth about 750M years ago might have been responsible for the rise of multicellular life. (U of Colorado Boulder) 

  • The math says we could shrink our food production land use by a truly shocking percentage if we decided to put some real weight behind figuring out how to grow microbes with solar-power-derived nutrients and eat them for protein instead of, you know, all that other stuff we eat. (U of Goettingen) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumLeafstyle, Get Real Withered 

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.