in which the ritual is solidified

September 20, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that hopes this latest bout of hot weather is the true last gasp of summer before 🍁FALL🍁 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week, but you can still call up the back catalog on just about any podcatcher you've got and enjoy literally any episode in there; they're all good. All of them!!!While you're at it, why not go to our Apple Podcasts page and give the show a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review just because you're an excellent person and that's what excellent people do? I thought so.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberI'll be honest: I don't know if the Delta variant has fucked our plans for November 11th's return of Instant Band Night. At this point I'm assuming everyone reading this has gotten their shot, so what's left to do but wait, cross our fingers, and also run through the streets forcibly vaccinating everyone we can get our mitts on? I'll see you out there.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I'm at the point of the post-move settling-in where I'm now contemplating ordering the books that I just threw on the shelves willy-nilly. Admittedly, there was some semblance of a plan in that roughly all of the comics were jumbled together, and there's definitely one shelf of just small mass-market paperback fiction (mostly sci fi) that I created because I needed to hoist one shelf up to make room for the truly ridiculously-sized items in the collection like the various DC Absolute Editions I've accumulated, the Cool Tools compendium, the Complete Far Side, and the Codex Seraphinianus. Step one, I think, will be to unshelve literally all of the comics and reshelve them alphabetically by title. All told, I think that's nine shelves' worth of books. After that I think I'm going to be content to let the shelves be chaos for a while; there's a whole scheme that needs to be worked out that I think will end up something like: 

  • Jon books

    • Fiction

    • Nonfiction

  • Mavis books

    • Fiction

    • Nonfiction

  • Kid books yet to be revealed (we've been able to accumulate a small library of books for the kids that for one reason or another we've yet to deploy, so they're just waiting for their moment in the sun)

  • Oversize (a total fucking mishmash)

All of this reordering is also causing me to think about the ones I want to physically keep around in the first place. Right now I still think it's valuable to have physical copies of certain books for various reasons including but not limited to 

  • I want one of the kids to be able to pull this off the shelf serendipitously one day and just start reading

  • There's art in it that doesn't translate in black and white

  • This is a very good bathroom read

  • No Kindle edition exists in any case

That first reason's a big one. A recent conversation with a friend made me realize that part of what I'm doing when I read Kindle books is that I might be auditioning them for making the leap to the physical library, so they can one day be plucked from the shelf. That's one thing ebooks don't have going for 'em, I have to say. The same conversation reminded me I need to get another copy of The Player of Games, because the one I had ran off and it's the best intro to the Culture books (my opinion on this is very firm).Do you want to tell me how you organize your books, or just want to drop me a line and say how you're doing? You are absolutely invited to do so; I've been getting a drip-feed of these for a while and they're stellar. Talking to friends! Who knew?! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.All other elements of bedtime aside, which can include a fair amount of chaos depending on how tired Quentin has become, there's one thing that has emerged from the new soup of rituals that I think has some staying power. At the very end, when we're at the door to his room about to close it, there's a new litany that must be recited word-for-word that goes as follows: 

Good night! Sleep tight! I love you! Have a good bedtime! Sweet dreams!

Usually the parent says it, and then Quentin says it, and this recitation is always followed by an "I love you Quentin," to which he invariably replies "I love you Mama/Daddy" and then we close the door. It's very good.Quentin still sometimes emerges from his room a couple times after tuck-in to profess a fear of the dark. There's a brief ritual for this, too, my version of which is to just sit on his bed with him and, in the glow of his nightlight, watch the bubble timer I had the brainwave to purchase a week or so ago. He loves watching the bubbles drip and plop down the ramp, and sometimes we count them as the interval between bubbles lengthens. Then I tuck him back in and we say the ritual words before I close the door. Sometimes he's so tired there are zero emergences, but on the more restless nights he can still go up to maybe 4-5 before he finally falls asleep. It still beats the shit out of the 8-9+ we sometimes had before!Felix turned 2mo old yesterday. He's definitely taking notice of his high-contrast mobile now, and very much enjoys looking at the high-contrast board book we showed Quentin approximately 80 billion times during his babyhood. His little face is very good, and admittedly to my eye is nearly indistinguishable from Quentin's at that age. I'm very curious to see at what point he'll begin to diverge; my guess is that by the time Peak Baby hits around the holidays, we might be getting an idea of what he'll look like. Aside from perfect, of course!!!!!!!!!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • If you have any MIT Technology Review clicks left this month, spend one on this. Here's the first sentence: "In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms." There's a copy of the internal report at the end you can download, too; it's a hell of a read. (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Might as well pair that with "Social Media Is Attention Alcohol: A fun product has the same downsides as booze. Instagram’s own internal research makes the case better than any critic." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Making batteries out of bacteria has thus far yielded pitiful outputs, but researchers are getting much better results by infusing them with silver ions. (UCLA) 

  • I can't tell whether these right-wing dipshits are just running a grift on their even stupider marks, or if they're honestly trying to execute on a harebrained idea it seems even they themselves only understand about 5% of at best. Even in its shabbily-explained state, they got 19 people to go in on the $1000 level; imagine what you could do with $19,000. (Gizmodo) 

  • Future astronauts may live in the most metal housing ever built, using concrete formed with literal human blood (U of Manchester) 

  • Speaking of astronauts, we did manage to send 4 civilians into space without fucking it up. (CNET) 

  • 24 underrated websites: a thread (Lucy Hughes on Twitter) 

  • Researchers have successfully grown pancreatic organoids, which should be a huge help in pancreatic cancer research. Pancreatic cancer specifically is one of the nastiest varieties, also responsible for taking Iain M. Banks from us. (MIT) 

  • Before we get too excited about this, let's all take a deep breath and absorb that this is acoustic cloaking, not visual cloaking. (ETH Zurich) 

  • We all know exercise and eating fruits and vegetables can make you healthier, but now it seems there are demonstrable causal links to making you happier, too. (U of Kent) 

  • Scientists are taking the first steps toward creating artificial organelles like mitochondria. (Institute for Basic Science) 

  • This is an extremely clever tool, but I wish there was an equally clever way to deal with stripped screw heads rather than stuck screws. (Gizmodo) 

  • The Australian wildfires blasted a shit ton of carbon into the atmosphere, but surprisingly, phytoplankton energized by nutrients from the smoke sucked up an amount equivalent to about 95% of it. Nobody knows yet whether that carbon's going to stay in the ocean or go back into the air, though. (~$Scientific American) 

  • An Alphabet project has successfully demonstrated open-air point-to-point laser internet connectivity at the 20Gbps level over a distance of almost two miles across the Congo River. (Ars Technica) 

  • Kiwi schoolkids discovered a new species of giant fossil penguin; yes there is a rendering. (Massey U via Taylor & Francis) 

  • Pocket gophers biofluoresce and nobody's really sure why. (U of Georgia) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumLIGHTNING SQUID, Oh, The Horror(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.