impromptu fever watch 2023

March 20, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that now owns an actual raincoat and needs to remember this fact when heading outside in the future 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 20: DOUBLE XSpring will be in full swing when the next Instant Band Night comes around, and that means it's probably going to be a very good time. Don't risk missing out; just mark your calendar for May 11 and make sure your dancing shoes are shiny.May 11 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$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  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.We're halfway into the last season of Star Trek: Picard and I have to tell you my complaints with it have decreased linearly since the first episode. Here's the thing: I still can't tell if that's because it's actually good now, or because I'm just so goddamn happy to see everybody. I don't even know if it'd be possible to tease those two factors apart. Two things I will admit still rankle me, and someone please tell me if this is also true for you:🕵️ How the hell many uniform designs does Starfleet have going at once? Doesn't it seem like the pace of change has accelerated even since the first season of this show?🤔 I understand why the people making this show thought they needed to change the shape of the USS Titan to be "Enterprise-like" but a) they really didn't need to b) it barely even makes sense in-universe c) there was nothing wrong with the Luna class to begin withI'm just sayin'!!! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.A while ago Mavis wanted Felix to have a way to refer to Quentin verbally, but the word "Quentin" is kind of a mouthful for a toddler who's still learning how the whole thing works. He could do repeated monosyllables, though, so she had us all settle on "Bro Bro" when pointing Quentin out to Felix. He started using it regularly a couple weeks ago and it's been Very Good. Felix asks about Bro Bro a lot. He points Bro Bro out when he reappears after an absence of sufficient length. However, we're now seeing signs he may be aware of Bro Bro's other name. I'll keep you all updated, but I think "Kenty" might be Felix's toddler pronunciation of "Quentin." Interestingly, there hasn't been any use of Felix's own name, but I'm sure he'll get to it!After (hopefully) dodging a stomach bug that made the rounds at his daycare on Friday — he had a whole weekend of utter normalcy — Felix popped a fever two hours into his arrival on Monday and we brought him home. Tylenol knocked it down, but it came back up after the Tylenol wore off, and it brought some little red dots for company on his arms and legs. Chickenpox??? Or just a fever rash??? Guess we'll find out!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "Every Libertarian Becomes a Socialist The Moment The Free Market Screws Them: If the rich customers of Silicon Valley Bank deserve to be protected from economic hardship by the government, what about the rest of us?" (Current Affairs) 

  • Cops routinely overrepresent Black people in their social media posts about criminals they've caught. (538) 

  • Machaela Cavanaugh is a goddamn hero. (AP) 

  • Reminder that when you see idiots like Marjorie whatshername bleat about secession, it's already kinda here in soft form across the country. (The Conversation) 

  • Here's the best article about the best printer. No, really. Read it. (The Verge) 

  • "The Fantasy Of The Dream Job Is Gone: Layoffs at some of the country’s most prestigious companies are the latest sign that no one’s job is ever really safe." (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Plastiglomerates by definition haven't been around long enough to have gone through the full geological cycle, but they're still not a great sign. (Reuters) 

  • Let's look at the new spacesuits NASA's working on! (NASA) 

  • Some Engineers have built soft robots that can transition from land to sea without missing a step. (CMU) 

  • Meta's giving up on NFTs, heh. (The Verge) 

  • The Scientists have completed their map of the fruit fly brain, and it's damn impressive. (Nature) 

  • Okay, so light reflects. Right? So does sound. How about ........... time??? Time reflections????? (CUNY) 

  • As long as your brain is twisting, let's read about retrocausality, which is the notion that future events can impact events in the past. (Motherboard) 

  • We've been sneezing our germs all over the top of Everest and they're still up there. (U of Colorado Boulder) 

  • "24 Hours of News Shows America's Transportation Hellscape: Broken trains, trains that don't fit in tunnels, perpetual gridlock, and astronomical price tags to make anything better." (Motherboard) 

  • Most people who have EV range anxiety shouldn't bother worrying, because a huge chunk of the driving population doesn't actually need an enormous battery. (Ars Technica) 

  • For the first time ever, The Scientists have fully figured out at the molecular level how an odor molecule actually binds to its receptor in the human nose. (UCSF) 

  • Here, have some nice, designy physics posters. (Abakcus) 

  • The Scientists have worked out a mixture for a building material they call "StarCrete" for building on Mars that involves potato starch and is actually stronger than terrestrial concrete. (U of Manchester) (Paper) 

  • We all saw that video of the lightsaber; here's how it works. (The Verge) 

  • There's a chance that tidally-locked exoplanets without a whole lot of water could still be habitable in the thin zone where night and day meet. Anyone else out here who read the LANCER RPG ruleset like me just sat up a little! (UC Irvine) (Paper) 

  • The effectiveness of helpful robots depends on what they look like, according to a new study. (U of Cambridge) 

  • Is seaweed farming going to save the world or not? (Hakai) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

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.