Instant Band Night 20 is THIS THURSDAY

May 08, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that needs to let you know immediately that this is not a drill: Instant Band Night 20 is happening and you should be there 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life sometime in 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 20: DOUBLE XIT'S HAPPENING THIS THURSDAYYou could find yourself onstage with a mic or an instrument in your hand, a list of chords in front of you, and the goddamn best crowd in the entire Bay shouting for joy in your ears. Or you could just sit at home. No judgment, but you could probably do that any other night this week. I'm just sayin'. Come play a song with a thrown-together band of friendly strangers, or just watch new bands debut every ten minutes or so! This is the best thing you're going to see or do for the entire month of May, folks, and that's a guarantee.May 11 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$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 YOUI've finally put up an Etsy shop where you can find some of my sculptural output; the announcement at the top of the page and the About section at the bottom really encapsulate the entire vibe, so I advise checking it out for either of those if nothing else. Watch this section for new drops, or just follow the shop. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Not much to report here this week, folks; I've got one of those big ideas swirling around in my head right now that I need to snag with a rope and wrestle into submission before I can present it. Let's see if that happens before next week? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin has become absolutely fascinated by Pokemon even though he hasn't watched any of the cartoons or played any of the games — video, CCG, nothing. Well, he might've watched maybe one or two episodes of something or other with his older cousin at some point, but that's about it; he has no idea there's a Pokemon spigot in the form of streaming video* that we may or may not have access to, which could be turned to a full torrent at any (theoretical) moment. It's wild to me that even with the fragmentary, etiolated knowledge he's gleaned from the cards from his cousin's collection that he's glimpsed and the guidebook he and his friends have flipped through at post-TK aftercare, the Pokemon universe has acquired an impressively solid grip on his imagination. Quentin's school just had a Scholastic Book Fair — remember those? — and with the ten bucks I gave him, he came home with two (2) Pokemon books: a comic and a beginning reader storybook, both clearly based on episodes. One of his school pals gave him a Pokemon card that's become a treasured, almost totemic possession. I was a little too old when Pokemon hit the scene and never played any of the games, so I don't know where to start introducing him properly; suggestions are welcome, though whether we operationalize any of them is still an ongoing matter for thought.* I don't even know which show The Kids are watching these days. Netflix has tried to sneak us something in its menus whose title I don't even remember correctly — Pokemon: Master Journeys? or something? but we treat it like it doesn't exist. Netflix is a delivery system solely for Octonauts or Magic School Bus or Puffin Rock or occasional Waffles + Mochi in Quentin's mind right now. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • We may simply have to resign ourselves to a constant series of covid mini-waves from now on. (Nature) 

  • I .............. thought I knew how big supermassive black holes are, but it turns out I did not. By a long shot. (Science Alert) 

  • Some Engineers have repurposed bone conduction mic technology to create a sensor that can turn anything on your table — including the literal table itself — into a high-quality touch interface. (U of Michigan) (Paper) 

  • The FDA has approved the world's first RSV vaccine; this one's for people over 60. (Nature) 

  • Germany has clinics for burnt-out parents that offer a 3-week health retreat; doctors can prescribe it every four years or so. (BBC) 

  • What does Earth's radio leakage look like to a potential alien civilization observing it? (SETI) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have proposed a method for turning discarded polyester scraps into useful coatings for other fabrics, which would be great for helping create a circular economy of fashion that we desperately need. (Cornell) 

  • Some Engineers have built a generative AI that can actually create legible, intelligible text that they call DeepFloyd. (TechCrunch) 

  • But that's nothing: The Scientists have built a AI that can design plausible proteins using image generation techniques, which sounds fucking bonkers, but they validated its output with a different AI and also some actual lab work. (U of Toronto) 

  • Let's keep this train rolling: The Scientists built a machine learning system and hooked it up to an actual machine for running experiments on bacteria to see if it could figure out the specific amino acids two bacterial species need to survive, a mathematically complex and time-consuming problem; it did it in just nine days. (U of Michigan) 

  • "The Foul Chartreuse Sea: Researchers in Kotzebue, Alaska, are investigating why their town is increasingly playing host to harmful cyanobacteria." (Hakai) 

  • People who fly on private planes make up about 16% of all flights, but only pay 2% of the taxes that keep the FAA running. Fuck that! (Heated) 

  • Some Engineers have built cheap, reliable, environmentally friendly piezoelectric nanogenerators that can harvest power from everyday vibrations to power useful sensors. (U of Waterloo) (Paper) 

  • What happens to dogs that flunk out of guide training? (MEL) 

  • The first cell-cultured, 3D-printed fish fillet has reportedly been successfully created. (Reuters) 

  • Going from daylight savings to standard time where you gain an hour actually fucks your sleep up more, according to a new study. (American Academy of Neurology) 

  • "Serving Meals to Young Children or Working in an Upscale Restaurant?" (McSweeney's) 

  • Zero-deforestation commitments from companies that run gigantic livestock operations really do have a measurable impact on reducing the destruction of the Amazon. (Anthropocene) 

  • God I fucking hope so: is hustle culture starting to lose whatever appeal it may have had to braindamaged victims of capitalism? (BBC) 

  • Some Engineers have invented something they call "image-free single-pixel object detection" that enables a computer brain to locate and identify objects much faster with way less energy. (Optica) 

  • What is it with single-x detection? Some Engineers also created a system they named "quantum lidar" that allows them to see objects in turbid water with shitty lighting; it relies on something called single-photon detection. (Also Optica) (Paper) 

  • Everyone knows looking at art is good for your soul, but does it also work if you do it online? Turns out yes. (Max Planck Inst for Empirical Aesthetics) (Paper) 

  • Has anybody bought that crypto house yet or what? (Kotaku) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

According to reader Steve: "I reckon Auxiliary Chinatown is the alternative universe version of Tin Machine, where it was Mick Jagger's new project that never really caught on instead of Bowie's. A bit rocky, a bit electronic, nothing really wrong with it but people resent the band for not being Keith and Charlie." 

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.