in which i explain a daydream

December 11, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wants to know what kind of idiot puts the heat vents for a room in the fucking ceiling 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Instant Band Night 24: NEW YEARS BALLReal talk: It's time to put on that outfit you think is "too fancy" and come rock everybody's shit. Play in a band if you want, or just watch and have a goddamn great time! Bear witness to the most concentrated and joyful burst of musical creativity in the entire Bay, hands down, and bring a few friends along!!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.I need to tell you briefly about the daydream I have for the way we close out Instant Band Night.That "Hide and Seek" video I linked a few issues ago, as near as I can tell, comes from a group in New York called Gaia Music Collective that seems to know a thing or two about the soul-healing properties of just getting a bunch of people in the same room and singing. Granted, there are clearly a lot of extremely talented people in the room, but there seems to be a threshold past which it doesn't matter, given the right amount of direction/inspiration.There's a three-chord progression I like to close Instant Band Night with, based on the outro to "White Light" by Shura. I try to get every instrument in the room playing and everyone who's left in the crowd providing a choral envelope. It's been great every time, but what I really envision is having 

  • A big crowd

  • Organized into a loose, self-assembling choir

  • Filling the room with a symphonic wash of sound

  • While the instruments also play from the stage

I need to stress that even the somewhat more bare-bones version we've been able to do up to now has been goddamn fantastic. But I strongly, strongly suspect that with more people in the crowd adding their voices, it may go from fantastic to transcendent. I could use some help proving this out; please mark your calendar for January 11's Instant Band Night and/or forward this to anyone you know in the San Francisco Bay who likes making, listening to, or watching music!! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's fourth tooth came out last week, namely his last upper incisor, which meant it was time once again to summon the Tooth Fairy's Liaison. The previous upper incisor, having abandoned its post some time ago, is already being slowly replaced by its adult version, so who knows how long this gap will last, but it's pretty good.Felix's use of language continues to evolve extremely rapidly. Today on the walk home from daycare, he pointed out a plane flying overhead, and told us "It's heading to all over the place!" Extremely hard to argue with, buddy!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • We are fucked unless something changes drastically pretty much right now, according to yet another report from The Scientists on global climate tipping points we're currently blowing it on; did you know fossil fuel emissions are on track to hit a record goddamn high this year? 2023? How the fuck???? (Nature) (Report) 

  • That said, The Scientists say there are still paths to constrain warming to 1.5C in certain Platonically perfect dream worlds. In this one, we might need to start bludgeoning certain highly specific individuals. (Potsdam Inst) 

  • Sperm whale communication is more complex than we thought, according to the latest analyses. (Motherboard) 

  • "Native Americans are building their own solar farms" (BBC) 

  • Yet again, the patriarchy: pretty privilege is not only real, it works better for men than women, surprisingly. (PsyPost) (Paper) 

  • A worthwhile read: "How millennials learned to dread motherhood: To our generation, being a mom looks thankless, exhausting, and lonely. Can we change the story?" (Vox) 

  • Looks like wildfire ash can actually fertilize marine ecosystems? Good to know. (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper) 

  • Uhhhhh: electric eel zaps can transfer genetic material from the surrounding water into their victims. (Nagoya U) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have hit upon a design for a robot that could one day clean microplastics from the ocean, in a future where we can build like eighty billion of them, I guess? (Cornell) (Paper) 

  • I'm not sure how I missed this the first time; if it turns out I didn't, well, enjoy it again: "The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship: I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for “The Friendship Files.” Here’s what I’ve learned." This entire article series is a goldmine, btw. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Climate disinfo is currently more powerful than any of the counter-strategies we've been able to devise thus far, according to a disappointing new study. (Anthropocene) (Paper) 

  • Three Australian scientists who got bored during lockdown took a census of the animal, plant, and fungus species in their literal backyard and came up with astonishingly huge result. (U of Queensland) 

  • "The surprisingly robust careers of Star Trek stars who became video game voice actors: Yes, that really is Quark's voice you're hearing." (Ars Technica) 

  • Some Engineers have invented a 3D printing ink that hardens under exposure to ultrasound, meaning you can theoretically inject it into a living being and create helpful rigid structures inside their body without having to cut them open. (Duke) 

  • Please enjoy a nice longread on the literal world of potato chip flavors! (Guardian) 

  • The Scientists have been unable to make quantum theory and general relativity work together, but a new theory about "wobbly" spacetime might do the trick? It's theoretically experimentally verifiable, which is fascinating. (Guardian) (Paper on theory) (Paper on experiment criteria) 

  • Transparent wood! Transparent wood! Transparent wood! (Knowable) 

  • When the next pandemic hits, The Scientists have identified big financial players who could help it be less of a clusterfuck. (Stockholm Resilience Center) 

  • Speaking of pandemics, a self-amplifying RNA vaccine (the first of its highly promising kind) has been approved for use in Japan. (Nature) 

  • I swear to fuck this is the third or fourth one of these I've read about this year; all of these guys need to form a club and get a PR agency or something. Here's yet another solar-powered technology that can pull clean drinking water out of literal thin air!!!!!!! (AIP) (Paper) 

  • High-speed rail between LA and Vegas??? (Motherboard) 

  • Okaaaayyy: Some Engineers have designed a kind of concrete packed with bacterial spores that can heal its own cracks. (Drexel) 

  • By all appearances, Enceladus has a subsurface ocean that might host life, but The Scientists were worried the ice plumes blasting out of cracks in its surface are energetic enough to rip telltale amino acids apart; turns out that's not a worry, at least according to some lab experiments. (UC San Diego) (Paper) 

  • Seabird poop helps coral reefs recover faster from bleaching events (if they recover at all). (Lancaster U) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists think they've worked out a way to figure out which of your organs is going to fail first; naturally, it involves The Machine. (Stanford) (Paper) 

  • My first and pretty much only question is "What kind of game night can you host in it" — a mansion in DC is on the market, and it's got a SCIF in the basement. (Robb Report) 

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 Imad 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 Yauheni Hancharenka on UnsplashNo reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is the third album from a group that tried their best to pick up where Fatboy Slim and the Crystal Method left off around 2001 or so. 

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.