highway to rambunctiousness

October 07, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes it had the time to really run a for-real D&D campaign. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week, but this gives you a perfect opportunity to go to your podcast app of choice and deliver us a 5-thing rating like this:💜💜💜💜💜which would really be fantastic of you. If you take a few seconds to leave a nice review, you will be automatically granted entry to the afterlife of your choice. I don't make the rules here; it's just true.Instant Band Night: Lucky 13All right, we're about a month out, so it's time to get serious: put it on your calendar immediately for November 14! And tell at least 5 people you know!🎃 All the details are here 🎃🎸 http://bit.ly/instantbandnight13 🎸 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Friends, we need not speak of professional idiot Jacob Wohl's latest extremely visible public mistake in detail, but I have a question: does anyone else aside from me also exist in a kind of quantum state that forever oscillates between 

  • Furious that this apocalypse-level dumbfuck, whose insipid schemes regularly fail at every conceivable level in full view of the public, is still breathing air instead of having drowned himself looking up at the sky into the rain 

  • Faintly amused and amazed that this flailing, incompetent shit-for-brains clearly thinks he's amazing at this and is still out there trying his unbelievably asinine bullshit nonsense with the expectation that it'll work despite the fact that it has clearly never worked and everyone is always 1000% onto him from jump

I'm 90% the former, 10% the latter most days. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We're about a month away from Quentin's 2y birthday, and signs are beginning to emerge that point to Rambunctious Toddler: 

  • He's always on the move, usually with a toy in his hands

  • He likes to climb onto furniture and bounce

  • He's showing increasing interest in smacking furniture and other surfaces with objects*

  • He's figuring out how to throw things, too**

Thus far, the boundaries we've set for him have mostly held; we're reading How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen in preparation for the era when they don't. Having done a preliminary survey of a relevant-seeming chapter, I think I'm ............ at least partially ready??? I came to this rambunctiousness realization extremely recently and even the thought sort of took me by surprise! Any other random advice around this area of parenting would be happily accepted by this office.* We're trying very hard to keep him from hitting anything (especially people) with hard things like his plastic frying pan or toy trucks or whatnot.** We're trying to limit this by category of object (pillows, silicone coasters, toy balls) and location (throwing is only permissible in the little foyer between the bedrooms and the bathroom, where he can't damage anything and there's no place for a thrown object to be irretrievably lost). 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Stockton's universal basic income experiment isn't over yet, but they've released some in-progress results, and they're interestingly unsurprising. (CityLab) 

  • Technology that can print electronics in place onto human skin has been demonstrated in a lab. (Pratt School of Engineering) 

  • One function of sleep and dreaming seems to be to help cement learnings from the day. (Cosmos) 

  • Hmmm. "Yes, capitalism is broken. To recover, liberals must eat humble pie." (Brookings Institute) 

  • Wendy's released a 97-page ruleset for a tabletop RPG because the universe loves us and wants us to be happy. (Comicbook) 

  • The great apes appear to have a theory of mind after all. (Inverse) 

  • I've been reluctant to provide Quartz links ever since they went semi-paywall (I have one free article remaining this month, which isn't great given that we're not even a week in), but what the hell: Algae might be a secret weapon to combatting climate change. (~$Quartz) 

  • I'm glad somebody's thinking about the problem of bug splatters on a self-driving car's lidar sensors. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Google built an AI that can do extremely convincing text-to-speech. (VentureBeat) 

  • What would it take to shut down the entire internet? (Gizmodo) 

  • Bacterial manufacture of non-endogenous compounds in meaningful amounts is possible, and can probably be amplified: some scientists tried it with (heh) psilocybin. Also, who knew there's a whole journal for metabolic engineering? (Science News) 

  • Some real talk on the whole WeWork thing from the guy who saw it coming. (NYMag Intelligencer) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some new and exciting words I put together out of the letters on the fridgeCRAMBULEBLEMAUNDCLORIQUE 

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.