i have a six-year-old???

November 13, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that can finally feel a change in the air that seems autumn-like 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Instant Band Night 24: NEW YEARS BALLInstant Band Night 23 was last week and it was (as usual) an astonishing explosion of creativity and inspiration. We're doing the next one in January, and we're pretty sure it should be (1) bigger (2) snazzier. SO! Come to this one dressed to the nines and ready to amaze, and bring your friends!!January 11 20246p$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 YOUIt's 2023 and there's no reason you should settle for a boring garden, potted plant, or living space! You could have a little statue of a crazy-colored tardigrade, a little guy to hold your last fruit, a Star Trek buddy in a party hat, or an Ediacaran life form right now. Take a look and consider some clever ceramics for you or a friend — I hear it's gifting season???Idea Factory GiveawayI think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.There's a slightly old NYT article about "literary hats."* They look like this.It's a fun idea but it's also boring.I want a series of hats for scifi/fantasy authors that look at first glance like branding for legit sports teams you've simply never heard of. Doesn't that seem like more fun? Why settle for a Kansas City Chiefs or Philadelphia Eagles hat when you can have one that supports, say, the Jemisin Earthquakes, the Muir Lyctors, the Chambers Wayfarers? I can see them in my mind, but I know I can't draw them; this would actually be one time where I would love a Midjourney account so I could feed it some prompts, because I bet they'd be entertaining as all get-out.Here's where I want you to chime in with other "teams" based on scifi/fantasy authors, because this sounds like fun to me. The Herbert Sandworms? The Wells Murderbots? (too on-the-nose?) I'm stuck on trying to nail one down for the Culture novels. And oh god, where do you even start with a Tolkien team? The Wizards? The Wraiths? What've you got for me? And also let me know if you have a generative AI account to play around with, because I'm very curious to see what The Machine would come up with. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin turned six today. He's six! And he's having a great time. Trying to tune the mix of birthday/Xmas presents is turning into a real head-scratcher: (1) they're super close together, and (2) there are some real heavy hitters in the queue, or at least some things I'm guessing will be heavy hitters, and I don't want there to be any sort of anticlimax or disappointment. So I left the Transformer in the garage, and we haven't even gone out to get a Pikachu stuffy, but we did deploy the big cardboard rocket from Ikea, and there was a pack of hastily-ordered garden tools that arrived in time for him to do some real good digging in the backyard.* The rocket is .......... bigger than I thought it would be in the kids' room, but putting it up on the dresser at night for bedtime turns the room into THE LAUNCH BAY (this was a Mavis idea), which pleases Quentin immensely.Presents from others were also much appreciated: even though we cited the usual "no presents, just your presence" in Quentin's birthday gathering invite,** his classmate Mishika could NOT resist telling him she was getting him a boomerang for his birthday, and as a consequence he also could not stop talking about it. Lo and behold, she did, and what's more, it works: we took it out to a nearby park in the late afternoon yesterday, and we learned that (1) it does fly back to you (or at least in your general direction) (2) Quentin is at present too small to throw it effectively, although odds are high that he'll be getting taller in the near-to-long-term future.Our friend and Quentin's Auntie Avery also came through with some big ones, including but not limited to a rock-painting kit he insisted we start using same day, an assortment of ten random Pokemon cards he's almost assuredly already memorized,*** and a field guide to "familiar North American mammals" that he flipped through as he followed me around the kitchen, opining on the comparative rarity of each animal on every subsequent spread. It is my considered opinion after careful research that you have not lived until your kid has done this, or something similar thereto. To witness the blossoming of curiosity and love of nature in a mind you were responsible for creating is almost indescribably rewarding, it turns out!!! Thank you to everyone who helped make him and his birthday something special.* The house we're renting has a nice backyard; there's one area near some garden beds that's always been bare dirt, though, so we feel no compunctions about letting the kids go at it with whatever they want to, and with the addition of these built-for-purpose kids' garden implements it's going to look like a strip mine out there pretty soon. I figure this is something a grownup with actual lawn tools could remediate in about an hour, though, so right now I'm not worried.** I once again highly endorse the concept for all little kids of "Just schedule a huge-ass playdate at everyone's favorite playground and serve cake as early as possible" for a birthday party. It's all they want to do anyway! Especially if there's a seesaw on the grounds that can fit six kids simultaneously!*** I need to emphasize at this point that Quentin doesn't watch the show or play the games. His extremely patchy, etiolated knowledge of the Pokemon gestalt comes from contact with his classmates and his cousin Sam, who went through a big Pokemon CCG phase. Quentin likes the cards because he likes the little monsters, which honestly is probably as it should be, right? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Instead of reducing production, the petrostates are planning to double their output by 2030. What in the fuck?????? (Guardian) 

  • Billionaire philanthropy is falling tragicomically short where climate change is concerned. (ClimateWorks) (Report) 

  • Those robot cars Cruise is trying to build are having trouble recognizing children, according to internal documents. What. (~$The Intercept) 

  • Disaster microbiology is a thing now. (proto.life) 

  • Sergey Brin's big ol' electric airship is starting flight tests. (TechCrunch) 

  • The Scientists have created a yeast with a majority synthetic genome!!!!! (Nature) (Paper) 

  • I'm linking a TikTok. Put your headphones on. (TikTok) 

  • An experimental spinal implant is helping a man with Parkinson's walk normally again; although the disease itself is still progressing, his mobility has been essentially restored. (CNN) 

  • Fascinating: how much do our genes shape our facial features, and in what ways? (Knowable) 

  • Racehorses almost certainly have no fucking idea they're in a race. (The Conversation) 

  • Our current last-line-of-defense antifungal works great, although it also fucks the kidneys up real bad; The Scientists have tuned its structure to keep its antifungal power while rendering it safe to use. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • Sea stars don't have heads, right? WRONG. [morpheus voice] What if I told you that sea stars are all head? (PhysOrg) 

  • The Scientists have created a synthetic melanin that not only acts as a sunblock — it can also help heal damaged skin. (Northwestern) (Paper) 

  • Scottish wildcats have been interbreeding with feral housecats so much they're in danger of vanishing entirely, but The Scientists have a plan to reverse all that. (Nature) 

  • Does large-scale analysis of a culture's output provide a snapshot of that particular civilization's psychology at the time? The Scientists think maybe? (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • I saw an opossum cross my street one night months ago and I still think about founding an entire religion based on it. Blessings of the Giant Night Mouse upon us all. (NBC News) 

  • The Scientists are making impressive progress on sensors and Machine systems that can read and interpret brain activity. (Duke) (Paper) 

  • Coral needs algae symbionts to grow; this is known. Tests have shown that introducing heat-resistant algae to coral helps it bounce back from bleaching and keep on truckin', which is fantastic, but now we need to test it in the field and at scale. (Australian Inst of Marine Science) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers built a Machine-powered set of noise-canceling headphones that let the wearer select what kinds of sounds they want to allow through. (U of Washington) 

  • A new study suggests pet ownership during the pandemic didn't actually improve peoples' lives relative to non-pet owners. (Michigan State U) 

  • By running a series of cage fights on bacteria and viruses, who are already eternally at war, The Scientists have shown that evolution doesn't need a lot of time or room to go nuts. (UC San Diego) 

  • New microfossils may prove that life got more complex after the Great Oxidation Event while also pushing the appearance of eukaryotic cells back almost a billion years. (Penn State) (Paper) 

  • Yes, but how well does it work? PepsiCo has developed a little app for gamers that detects the sound of crunching Doritos and removes it from their sound feed so they don't annoy their pals online. (Food Dive) 

  • The subsurface ocean on Enceladus is looking more and more promising. (!!!!!) (Science Alert) 

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 Brock Wegner 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 Eren Yildiz on UnsplashReader Patrick says "Real Doll Penis Bone is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an act that applies the sterile sexuality of robots (think Sorayama posters) to techno beats in an amalgam of Kraftwerk, DEVO, and Lords of Acid that is at once alienating and danceable, and profoundly-but-probably-deliberately unsexy." 

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.