in which I invent a new national pastime

July 02, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's happy to be back in the so-to-speak saddle on a weekly basis for the foreseeable. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway72 - Game of Startups"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special guest Emily (@emilyrspeer) unveil some surprisingly solid ideas for armchair investors, online dating consultants, and in-flight staff."I'll be honest with you: I think there are some actual solid ideas in this episode that someone oughta try to pick up and run with.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcast app of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night Five for FightingThe fifth installment of Instant Band Night is still happening on Thursday, July 12, and you should either come or invite your friends if you can't. Do it! Do it now!!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.You absolutely do not have to be a musician; just come have a good time, which I 100% guarantee.Thursday July 12507 55th St 946098p$5 doorBYOBSeriously: if you can't make it or you don't live in the Bay, invite your friends who do (Facebook / Eventbrite) -- the event's design dictates that it kind of lives/dies based on attendance, so help pack the place out and you will earn a place among the ascended masters of all things fun. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.What follows is adapted from an angry tweetstorm I wrote but ended up not sending:That tweet from forever ago was right: we fucking biffed it by not taking to the streets when McConnell blocked Garland (then again, we thought Hillary would win, so why bother); let's take that as read for now. What I would love would be to wake up tomorrow to an America that realizes there's almost certainly enough of us out here to balance the karmic scales a little and just make the rest of Mitch's accursed, worthless life as fucking miserable as possible.In my most beautiful fantasy, I see a world where Mitch is followed 24/7 by a furious roaring involuntary entourage of hundreds that materializes from surrounding sidewalks, summoned by location-announcing twitterbots that spawn & die on random servers too fast to be countered, hurling ruinous invective and leading mass chants of contempt and derision.In this blessed imagining, every communication device within 10ft of Mitch is phished, hacked, or spoofed in minutes, ringing/buzzing constantly and denying his aides and family even the remotest possibility of coherence or connection with the outside world.In this holy and ineffable daydream, Mitch's house is surrounded by a constantly self-replenishing human moat that emits nonstop livid, fiery shrieks of reproach and degradation. For every person that gets exhausted and leaves, five more take their place. As his security cordon pushes outward from his yard, the moat only grows correspondingly louder and larger. Neighbors pack up and move away as more and more people stream to the site, offering food, water, Port-a-Potties on truckbeds. Mitch-heckling becomes an unofficial national pastime. Plans are uploaded for a "howler drone" consisting of glider wings, simple avionics package, and cheap greeting-card speaker. Howler drones are printed and assembled by the tens of thousands and lofted into the sky by balloons to self-release at the appropriate altitude, using a combination of GPS and accelerometric dead reckoning to steer themselves unerringly to Mitch's front lawn blaring messages of hatred until their batteries die.I don't have a good ending for this dazzling fantasy; it just felt nice to articulate in the hopes that at least one other person out there might imagine it for themselves (even if just for a second) and feel their heart lighten fractionally. Thanks. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We've got a little babbler on our hands and it's amazing. He'll talk to himself while he's playing with his toys or sitting in the Technocradle, or during the hours of roughly 4-6a when he wakes up and rolls around in his crib,* or lately while I'm feeding him. I mean, he doesn't do it all the time nonstop, but he definitely has a lot of sounds he likes to make, and it's goddamn adorable. Of course, it doesn't mean anything yet -- it's just random syllables that must be fun to make -- but it's great to see evidence of more and more of his future self coming online.* If it's on the earlier side of that window, I'll go in and replace his pacifier, and we can get a little more sleep out of him. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • As much as conservatives like to yell about being censored, it seems the opposite is actually true. Who fuckin' knew? 

  • Here's your Vox read for the week; the subhead is the real kicker here. 

  • I would love for any historian friends to provide comforting analysis for these quite frankly HIGHLY UNSETTLING comparisons to South Africa and the Marcos-era Philippines. 

  • We could all use a nice long Fab Five interview right about now; thankfully, Vulture provided one. 

  • I love Netflix's tech blog even though I only truly understand at best about 25-50% of it. For instance, check out this article about what seems to be a system that helps their engineers design and deploy algorithms faster for all kinds of interesting uses. 

  • FLYING. TRANSFORMING. ROBOT. DRAGON. PROTOTYPE. 

  • I didn't realize concrete even has a carbon footprint, so I'm glad somebody's working on a way to reduce it. 

  • At least IBM recognizes that building bias into algorithms is both bad and possible; good on them, says I. 

  • The truck driver shortage in the US is approaching crisis. On the one hand, it's understandable to not want this job if you've got a family and whatnot, but on the other? For a certain kind of person, this might be ideal: you just drive and drive, and you get all the time in the world to catch up on podcasts and audiobooks. I'm just sayin'. 

  • I don't really know if “Time Banking” Is Catching On In the Digital World the way the Smithsonian thinks it is, but I fuckin' want it to, 'cause it's a great idea. 

  • It's a good thing to hire autistic workers in places where their skills are useful and appreciated, right? I've got an exploitation alarm half-cocked in the back of my head, but honestly I can't really see the harm. 

  • I'm glad to see someone's taking space junk removal seriously enough to start testing a system for it, but the whole "harpoon" concept isn't thrilling me. 

  • What do we think the ratio is between scenarios where this Belgian megabrothel works out fine for everyone involved vs. disasters of various kinds large and small? 

  • If they're going to make an AI that can spot a faked photo, how long until there's an AI that can generate or process fake photos in a way that would fool the first one? I'm just askin'. 

  • Here's an interesting interview with someone who organizes robot trials for defense and rescue operations. 

  • Automated air traffic control for drones. We're gonna need this, we might as well start figuring it out now! 

  • Oh good, Facebook finally hired a "what if .... bad things?" team. 

  • This article on How To Get Your Kids To Do Chores (Without Resenting It) is something I'm just gonna bookmark for, uh, no reason. Later. Down the line. 

  • I wonder if that docuseries on Fyre Festival is going to include this bit where the guy got arrested for a whole new scam while out on bail for the Fyre Festival debacle. 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumCat Dentist, Not By The Laws Of God Or Man 

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.