in which an important? question is asked

January 08, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that hopes its 8wk-old never outgrows the Technocradle. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway59 - The Tenets of Great PumpkinismJon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Sarah Harrison (@sourjayne) get into consumer products, a modification of a Black Mirror proposal, and an unexpected choice of religion for online dating.The online dating religion thing makes sense when you hear it, I swear to all possible gods above and below.You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/Instant Band Night 2THIS WEEK, PEOPLEIn case you missed it last time, Instant Band Night is a thing that happens where I take over a small music venue:1. The stage has a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard, and mics.2. We draw names out of hats to make instant bands that get 10 minutes in the green room to plan an 8-minute set.3. A hat-drawn artist will also take the stage alongside each band to draw their gig poster on a meeting room easel pad.If you're in the Bay Area on January 11th and enjoy fun, get over to the East Bay Community Space:507 55th St (@ Telegraph)Oakland CA 946098p$5 doorBYOBThere are details and FAQs on Eventbrite and Facebook if you're into that sort of thing. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.This might end up sounding like some Thomas Friedman-ass bullshit, but hear me out: as a global civilization, we've reached a milestone of knowledge whose impacts may be deeper than we realize, and whose long-term effects may not be even remotely guessable.For thousands of years, people have had run-ins with stupidity that were necessarily limited to their personal radius -- in class, at work, on the street or whatnot -- and having had them, were able to do no more than sit back, cross their arms smugly, and say something to the effect of "the world's full of dummies lol." They didn't really know how many dummies actually existed; at best they could hazard a vague, nebulous guess, if they even wanted to, which why would they.But then came the internet, and with it the comments section. YouTube. Reddit. Facebook. Twitter. Now we're exposed to a whole world's worth of idiots, on a scale that actually makes it seem possible to somewhat reasonably estimate the amount of dumb people that exist as a percentage of the total population. And it's a lot. There is a truly shocking number of them out there. And they're not just stupid; there's a depressing Venn diagram we could all draw that'd look like a flower of humanity's worst qualities -- the proudly ignorant, the hateful, the needlessly vicious. This is something we now know: these people exist, and there are a ton of them. It's not theoretical, it's not abstract in any sense; we see the evidence they leave everywhere on the internet: we know they're there, how dumb they are, and in what ways. I think this knowledge is fucking us up, maybe on some level we're not really aware of yet.For instance: I'm just talkin' here, but I had this horrible notion hit me: what if it turns out that the foundations on which every society built in human history thus far were laid on false assumptions? I mean, Democracy's whole "everybody gets a vote" thing only looks like a shining ideal if you ignore the fact that some of the people voting are anti-vaxers and Gamergaters and Trump supporters who love him harder the more stupid and racist he gets. This can't be good. Right? ON THE OTHER HAND: is even asking this question just me being an asshole? To me it doesn't feel like it, but of course it wouldn't. I honestly do not know anymore. The whole thing feels like a new area of inquiry. For instance: now that we have this knowledge, can we do anything with it? Whose problem is this to study? Psychologists? Sociologists? Historians? Hell, philosophers? Please @ me. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Two important pieces of advice today if you're going to have a baby or you have a tiny one already:Get your 8 hours of sleep.You won't be able to do it in one shot, obviously, but here's the next-best way:

  1. Write down your sleep.Whenever you wake up, write down when you went to bed and how much sleep you got. It might feel silly, but just do it; get in the habit.

  2. Feed the baby, then go right back to bed.Do not wash dishes, do not run errands, do not pass GO or collect $200 -- go back to bed.

  3. Rinse and repeat until you've accumulated 8 hours of sleep.Once you've built up 8 hours, you can go about your day as normal.

This shit works. It might be the most important advice we received from our doula, honestly -- whenever Mavis or I get told something to the effect of "you two look surprisingly put-together and relatively unfrazzled for parents of a newborn" (which has happened a nonzero and seemingly statistically significant number of times), we credit this One Weird Trick, and I duly pass it on to you, should you need it.See if anyone you know can lend you a 4moms mamaRoo.We received one, which I call the Technocradle, from a friend at Mavis's work, and it's been great at granting anywhere from 5 minutes to 1.5 hours of respite. A buddy of mine says it only worked up until his kid was 2 months old, though, so I'm waiting to see what happens with Quentin. This thing has safety buckles that we haven't had to use yet, which implies it can be used on much larger children. FINGERS CROSSED. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • You want a good, wholesome, interesting, winter-themed hashtag? For once, Twitter's got you covered with #museumsnowballfight. 

  • It's 2018 and we need to fucking grow up and realize that online speech needs regulating, is the point of this Verge read, and it's kind of inarguable. 

  • You and I aren't the only people tired of pith-helmeted expeditions into Trump Country, so take a nice trip to Anti-Trump Country for once. Funfact: this exact neighborhood is home to some college friends of mine who happen to be amazing people, so. 

  • Drew Magary is right about Michael Wolff and the entire journalistic approach to the White House. He's right. 

  • I don't know what's going on with The Verge right now, but they're on fire with sharp commentary on the internet itself. I realize there's some irony in linking to an article that's in part about TinyLetters inside a TinyLetter, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

  • Just click this and prepare to cackle with true schadenfreudic glee. 

  • You know what, no one individual part of this technique to predict how a neighborhood votes is a giant leap in and of itself, but the way they were all put together is [chef kiss gesture] and now I want to know what other street-level insights can be gleaned this way. 

  • I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one out here excited about vat-grown meat. No more factory farms, people! 

  • If blockchain tech is so great, why the fuck has nobody come up with a good use for it? This Hacker Noon read is tremendously entertaining. 

  • Cloudflare's lava lamp-based encryption system is fantastic and I want every company to adopt something similar. A fishtank. A kitten cam. A big ol' puppy enclosure. C'mon! 

  • You and I and probably everyone else thought legal weed would give rise to a bunch of great small businesses, but 538 has some cold water in a bucket for us on that score. 

  • A Nobel Prize-winning economist makes the interesting point that economic inequality and unfairness aren't the same thing, but there definitely are some things that can be positively identified as being some bullshit. 

  • If you read nothing else in this Deadspin list of Everything That Should Die in 2018, at least look at the "Investor Culture" bit. 

  • Just in case you were wondering, this article on a cataclysmically stupid conspiracy theory and the idiots who buy into it was what started me down that whole train of thought in the Medium Ramble above. 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumBitchbone, Nuts to Your Feels 

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.