in which more grifts are contemplated

January 11, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that hopes holiday card season extends to encompass all of January, because mail is nice, y'all 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNot gonna lie: our ability to record new episodes has been somewhat hampered of late by the absolute fucking nonsense going on in DC; in this, at least, we may be assured we're not alone. New recordings will happen soon. Soon!One thing you could do that would be extremely nice and low-effort would be to just head over to Apple Podcasts and put a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in for the show. Many thanks in advance.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Before I go into this one, I just want to take a moment to note that the fact Trump can't just blab his stupid shitty thoughts to the entire country on a whim actually does make 2021 feel just a slight bit better. Okay, on with it:So Parler's been booted from AWS (TechCrunch), which is great, but Beezy didn't claim personal credit for it, which I think is a missed opportunity. There's literally no downside. I mean yes, it's an unquestionable good to deplatform fascists and yadda yadda, but also

  • Bezos hates Trump

  • Bezos has to be aware he's unpopular just for being a billionaire who makes his workers subsist on food stamps

  • This would make us like him for a split second

I'm under no illusions. Jeff's money almost certainly shields him entirely from our opprobrium 24/7/365 to the point where he doesn't feel it or even notice it day-to-day, but picture it with me: Beezy personally boots Parler off AWS, and just for a second -- one beautiful second -- he almost certainly feels the approval of millions. For that one crystalline moment, he knows what it's like to be a hero. Maybe he starts to like it. Maybe????On the other hand, I'm slightly sad about it because I have a buddy who was actually on Parler for a bit just to monitor the madness, and they said the level of grifting going on in there prior to the announcement of the AWS cutoff was incredibly choice.* There were accounts peddling stupid commemorative Trump merch of all kinds -- apparently multiple fake Sidney Powell accounts went through Parler's shithouse version of account verification and were all hawking commemorative coins that will almost certainly never materialize. But why go to all the trouble of promising physical goods? Especially in the frenzy before the AWS shutdown -- why not attempt fundraising for "new servers for Parler" or even a whole-ass new app altogether? "Contribute to be part of this new Free Speech MAGA 1488 Heritage Community App that's definitely real and being built right now by coders" and just vanish into the wind once it gathers enough to be satisfying? There are actual "real" videogames that have raised millions of dollars for absolute vaporware. Why not a (snort) new (heheheheh) Parler alternative? At the very least it's less intensive Photoshop work.* The one actual downside of Parler going offline -- the fact that it's a treasure trove of data law enforcement can use to track down the people who stormed the Capitol -- has been handily mitigated. (Gizmodo) 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.It may not surprise you to find that we've got a shared note that we use to keep track of Quentin's more memorable utterances. Here are some of his 2020 highlights:

  • "Daddy's too much trouble."

  • "There was a pile of clouds and I don't want them."

  • Affixing flat Duplo pieces to the bottom of a car he was building: "I wanna put some boat business on the bottom."

  • In our previous apartment, which had benches set into a kitchen nook where we ate, while trying to get past me so he could climb down: "I'm not in a good space for this!"

  • "That sounds highly impossible."

  • "There's a food world in the fridge!"

Watching his language skills grow has been one of my favorite things about the whole "having a kid" experience thus far, probably surprising nobody. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Have a BuzzFeed News trifecta: "The Rioters Who Took Over The Capitol Have Been Planning Online In The Open For Weeks" (BuzzFeed News) Also, it wasn't as harmless or funny as we all thought. (BuzzFeed News) The sadly hilarious part now is watching all the Republicans who helped it happen make feeble calls for "unity" now that the Consequences Bus is headed their way to make a pickup. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • (I put this in here on January 5th and I'm leaving it here as a quaint monument) We're making a mistake by treating Trump's stupid post-election nonsense as performative. It's a fucking loaded gun pointed at our concept of democracy. (~$Atlantic) 

  • OpenAI has created a GPT-3 neural network that can create images from text prompts with surprising fidelity. (OpenAI) If you'd like something AI-based that you can play with, check out Blob Opera. (Experiments with Google) 

  • Let's see if this will also turn out to be a quaint relic by the time the newsletter goes out: Trump's potential self-pardon could backfire on him, if I understand this admittedly somewhat legally dense take. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Once again, scientists have worked out an inexpensive advancement for green tech, and I have to wonder if there should just be a whole-ass government department or venture fund or some goddamn thing whose only job is to boot scientific advances to scalable, business-ready technologies in the shortest time possible. (Ohio State) 

  • The entire Bean Dad saga has produced a good take on Twitter that I hereby share with you (said take also explains the Bean Dad saga if you weren't present for it, which I do not blame you for) (Garbage Day on Substack); there's a great followup tweet when you're done reading it. Finally, Bean Dad himself made an actual good apology. 

  • The chief content officer at Forbes is letting everyone know that if you hire any of the former White House press secretaries, they'll automatically assume your company is up to some shady shit and their coverage will not be kind. (~$Forbes) While that goes down smooth on its own, may I suggest a pairing of "here's all the big companies that are stopping donations to all the Republicans who voted against the electoral college cert" with it? (CNN) Lastly, how about a digestif of "even Deutsche Bank is dropping Trump's dumbfuck ass"? ($NYT) 

  • I see what you did there: "Gravity Energy Storage Will Show Its Potential in 2021" (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Speaking of, 2021 is shaping up to be a big year for basic income experiments! (Bloomberg CityLab) 

  • Mom brain. (@LucyKnisley on Twitter) 

  • Scientists have developed a high-density supercapacitor (basically a fast-charging battery) made with our old miracle buddy, graphene. Hi, graphene! I've missed you! (Technical U of Munich) 

  • Actual conspiracies can be differentiated from bullshit conspiracy theories given the right AI tools. What's more, the evidence seems to suggest that once the graph is built, the fakes are easy to spot. (The Conversation) 

  • I don't know what to do with this. Here, you take it. "'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns" (NPR) 

  • Mother-of-pearl is extremely strong, but how does it get that way when it's being built by a bunch of individual cells all doing their own thing with no apparent coordination? I mostly just wanted to link to this for the Starfleet technobabble-sounding technique they used to figure it out. Are you ready? Are you ready for synchrotron-based holographic X-ray nano-tomography??? (Technical U of Dresden) 

  • "The Only Strategy Left for Democrats After this week, the mandate is clear: Make people’s lives better. And stop trying to placate Republicans." (~$The Cut) 

  • The platypus genome has been mapped and scientists are starting to figure out where all of its bizarre traits came from. I knew about the poison spurs, but the fact that they ...... sweat milk? was a new one to me. (U of Copenhagen) 

  • Diving Into An Acidifying Ocean. (Experiments with Google) 

  • Will wonders never cease: rent actually did go down in San Francisco in all but a couple neighborhoods. (Public Comment) 

  • A cheap and effective method for literally drawing circuits onto surfaces (including skin) with a pen has been developed. (American Chemical Society) 

  • The universe is about 14 billion years old. (Cornell) 

  • There are still -- still!! -- a great many "Stop the Steal" Facebook groups in existence. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Bacteria seem to have light-sensitive circadian rhythms even if they don't photosynthesize. (John Innes Center) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHypnotrain, Because of All the Cat Hair 

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.