i guess i should learn more about which directors are a pain on set

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's typing this with one hand on its laptop keyboard and the other on its Bluetooth keyboard about three feet apart in order to not disturb the baby strapped to the front of its chest 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayPlease continue to enjoy the back catalog as I continue to parent a 3yo and a baby!Journalists in back rooms everywhere are talking about how tacky it is not to go to our Apple Podcasts page and give the show a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review; I can't control what they say in there, but you can at least make sure it's not YOU they're dissing.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberI'll be honest: I don't know if the Delta variant has fucked our plans for November 11th's return of Instant Band Night. At this point I'm assuming everyone reading this has gotten their shot, so what's left to do but wait, cross our fingers, and also run through the streets forcibly vaccinating everyone we can get our mitts on? I'll see you out there.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.Right now I don't have a lot except to thank everyone who's been sending me little updates -- they're truly a joy -- and to note that I really am typing this on two different keyboards three feet apart and about 90° from each other, because Felix is strapped to my chest and if I try to type on just one, it applies just enough compression to make him just uncomfortable enough to start wriggling around and possibly wake up, and I cannot be having that right now. Surprisingly, it's not as brain-breaking as I thought it'd be; it turns out my hands each know their roles startlingly well. I could rock that weird keyboard they gave Donna in that one Parks & Rec episode with minimal trouble, probably; this is good to know about myself. How's your week starting off? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Hanging out in the backyard of a friend's house forever ago, he mused on his kid's propensity to absolutely lose his shit if drops of water touched his head: "Is he OCD or is this just toddler bullshit?" This has stuck with me for literal years, and resonates especially now because Quentin is in some sort of Tyrant Director phase that goes like:INT - LIVING ROOMJON and QUENTIN KUBRICK are in the living room, which is downstairs from the bedroom.QUENTIN KUBRICK: Let's go upstairs!JON: Sure!(JON takes a few steps toward the stairs)QUENTIN KUBRICK: Noooo!(JON pauses)QUENTIN KUBRICK: You have to come back! Come back so we can hold hands and go!(Jon walks back into the room and offers his hand)QUENTIN KUBRICK: No, come back HERE!(QUENTIN KUBRICK indicates the spot JON was standing in when this idea initially took hold)QUENTIN KUBRICK: You have to stand HERE and that's where we'll start!JON: Buddy, I'm in the room, here's my hand, we can walk up now.QUENTIN KUBRICK: No, you have to come back and stand HERE and do it!JON (internally): Oh boyEither I can accede to his demands or I can attempt to teach him it doesn't fucking matter where we're standing, we can go upstairs and hold hands just as well. Which approach I take is a function of how much time, energy, and rest has been stored or consumed, not to mention the proximity and sleep status of Felix. I'm 99% positive this is just a phase -- perhaps part of the stage known informally as "threenager" -- it would be nice to know when it'll be over!!! 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.(Four Covid Reads up top this week, and then the rest; just fyi)"America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate: A realistic Covid-19 endgame requires accepting some risk. The question is how much." (Vox)"Just Say It: The Health Care System Has Collapsed" (Slate)Here, have a very good meditation on this phase of the pandemic, our own internalized (and externalized anger), and what it says about us as a country. (BuzzFeed News)On the other hand, a global study seems to indicate something called "cognitive reappraisal" could actually help us feel better during [waves hand around at all this]. (Vox)I don't remember when I linked to the paper from the NOAA CAPSTONE expedition, but I was re-reading it the other night and discovered this, and thought it might delight someone the way it did me: they were doing a lot of deep-sea animal identification with experts around the world instead of just the people on the boat because Technology, and they put together a website reference guide for everyone because it was the easiest way to go. If you want to click around and look at pictures of weird sea creatures, you could do a lot worse than this. Click "Animalia Other" to see the ones they weren't sure of or absolutely could not figure out. (Benthic Deepwater Animal Identification Guide V3)"VCs are financing an economy of servants" (Sifted) Pair this with a longread on what it's like for delivery cyclists in NYC right now. (The Verge)I will admit to you that A Moon Shaped Pool did almost nothing for me, so I'm excited to be a total nostalgia monkey for some unreleased B-sides recorded around the time of Kid A and Amnesiac. (Pitchfork)A new Cambrian species has been identified that's much, much bigger than any of its peers at the time. (Royal Ontario Museum)I'm just going to put the subhead here because uh: "Researchers think birds can hear hurricanes and tsunamis—a sense they’re hoping to tap into to develop a bird-based early warning system." (Hakai)Back in the 60s, the government put together a report compiling the absolute worst predictions ever made. "It starts in 1486 with the royal committee that advised the king and queen of Spain not to fund a numskull named Christopher Columbus. Sailing west to Asia, the committee insisted, would take an impossibly long three years. And, besides, there was nothing between Europe and that destination but a vast, featureless ocean." I downloaded a copy of it if you don't have any WaPo clicks left this month; just let me know! It sounds like it might be entertaining reading. ($WaPo)Humans as a species were great at sharing for a majority of our history; what happened? (Aeon)"The Endless Life Cycle of Book Cover Trends" (AIGA Eye On Design)If you ask people to make up sounds from scratch that stand for particular concepts, there's a better-than-random chance that someone from a whole other culture might still guess their meanings, which is a fascinating glimpse into what could have been the beginnings of language. (Scientific American) (Paper)Public housing for everyone in US is theoretically possible; here's how. (NOEMA)Three cryptocurrency doofuses tried to turn a cruise ship into a Libertarian seastead paradise -- it went about as well as you might expect. (Guardian)"Just a Bunch of Easy Ways to Make Vaxxed Hangouts Safer in the Delta Era" (Vice)A single well-placed nuke detonated in the atmosphere could theoretically take out the entire US power grid with the EMP. (IEEE Spectrum)Researchers have identified seven personality and behavior traits in cats. (U of Helsinki)A lab at the U of Arizona just got a grant to look into autonomous robot swarms for moon mining. Sure! (U of Arizona)There really, truly is such a thing as too much free time when it comes to our mental well-being, apparently. (American Psychological Association)"Returning 600,000 Acres to Nature, One Piece at a Time" (Reasons To Be Cheerful)Here, have a free ebook chronicling all of the robots and probes we've sent to space since the start. (NASA)Ammonia is used to make a shitload of things, but making ammonia itself is an energetically costly process -- but hopefully not for long now that engineers have figured out a way to make it using sunlight, wastewater, and a catalyst that they're looking into industrializing. (U of Illinois Chicago) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumArglebargle, The Fuck is This Then 

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.