how to charge up a bunny

June 28, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that would still really like to know about the glycemic index rating of those Cheez Ball-type corn(?) snacks and keeps getting frustrated by the Google results 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway155 - The Algorithm Did It"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy discover some fascinating ideas for stories and consumer products while considering a heretofore-unexplored new venue for gambling."We come up with a lot of taglines for this podcast whenever we record with Amy and I'm all about it. Also listen around the half hour mark for a moment where we all pause to take stock of something that truly seems like a huge opportunity in the convenience beverage market.For the love of all that's holy, don't light off fireworks if you're in California; instead, just go to our Apple Podcasts page and leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review. It'll produce the same feeling, I promise you.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.Just popping in here to tell you the second Goblin Emperor book by Katherine Addison is good. It's sort of a side sequel, dealing as it does with a minor side character from the first book, but it almost doesn't matter, it's just so nice to be back in that world again. This might sound utterly banal, but it's striking to me how much the plots of these books are propelled by innate goodness on the part of one or two key characters -- if the Emperor's secretary in the first book had been an asshole, everything would've gone to shit immediately. And yet he has no plot-driven reason to be good; he just is. It's nice. It's a surprisingly nice, comforting world, despite the fact that there are also huge assholes in it, who again just seem to be who they are: fully-realized beings who are just shitty. I think it's comforting reading because it posits a universe where the cumulative actions of good people just about counterbalance the ones from the dipshits. The second book does this too, and it still works. Recommended! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Baby Lime is fast approaching, and one thing we needed to do this past weekend was take Quentin to the toy store to pick out a stuffy for the baby. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he chose a small purple bunny produced by the same company that made his own beloved Bunny.* Since we got it, he hasn't been able to leave it alone; it's an even split between two activities: 

  1. Hugging it to "fill it up with love," which is even more ridiculously sweet to witness in person than you can possibly imagine

  2. Playing with it, possibly also to charge it up with same(????)

We've taken great pains to point out to him at every opportunity that the purple bunny is the baby's bunny, and it'll belong to the baby; obviously he understands this on some level (see activity 1), but we'll see on the day whether he'll be able to fully relinquish it into Baby Lime's custody.* Jellycat. One of our greatest unsolved mysteries is who gave us Bunny in the first place, because we know it must've been a gift, but can't remember who from. It's been Quentin's absolute favorite for years, so whoever you are: you did excellently. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "What Quitters Understand About the Job Market: More Americans are telling their boss to shove it. Is the workplace undergoing a revolution—or just a post-pandemic spasm?" (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Teamsters are going to push to unionize Amazon's warehouse workers. (TechCrunch) 

  • Scientists think they've nailed down the cause of the Permian extinction, which up to now has always been kind of hand-wavey. (Northern Arizona U) 

  • I actually really like this: "19 Unforgettable Ways to Make Up for Lost Time With Friends This Summer" (Vice) 

  • Farming mixed cultures turns out to be way more productive than acres and acres of the same damn crop. (ETH Zurich) 

  • Mackenzie Scott has announced another $2.7B in donations, making her total to date $8.5 billion in less than a year. (Recode) 

  • Researchers have worked out how to effectively disarm a virulent bacterium in the lab. (U of Geneva) 

  • Startup Ipsum. (Startup Ipsum) 

  • Data seems to indicate men and women react differently when playing professional sports depending on whether an audience is present. (Martin Luther U) 

  • There are about 2000 stars from which our planet could be seen occluding our sun; 75 of them have already been swept by our radio transmissions. (Nature) 

  • What if some of the people on Twitter who are just Like That are suffering from actual mental illness? Shouldn't that be a part of the conversation? (Unherd) 

  • Speaking of people who are just Like That, this essay from Chimananda Adichie, which is linked from the previous article, is worth a read. (It Is Obscene) 

  • "9 Evolutionary Adaptations We Love" (NEO.LIFE) 

  • Whether you're a morning person or a night owl seems to be loosely correlated with certain personality traits. (Warwick U) (Paper) 

  • There's no evidence that chance meetings at the office are good for business, and in fact open-plan office spaces lead to far, far less of them. ($NYT) 

  • A coalition of scientists at McMaster have built a proof-of-concept handheld device capable of detecting a UTI without getting a lab involved. (McMaster U) 

  • I'm putting this article here about an elephant that poked its head into a Thai woman's kitchen solely for the A+ video thumbnail. (Guardian) 

  • We could filter sewage water through the roots of willow trees to our (surprisingly) mutual benefit. (U of Montreal) 

  • In one of the most unsurprising research findings to be released in perhaps the entire century, it appears that powerful people are less likely to be understanding when subordinates make mistakes. (UCSD) 

  • There's a correlation between the amount of green space a city has and how happy its citizens are. (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Tech) 

  • Comet fragments hitting Earth about 13,000 years ago might have provoked a change in how we organized ourselves and our societies. (U of Edinburgh) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesAlbatross-class USS BlanketUnicanthus-class USS Crash CourseRuth Grisham-class USS Rocket Stagger 

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.