Instant Band Night 8 is upon us (you)

January 07, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that hopes your new year is already treating you fuckin' spectacularly. That's right, LET'S DO THIS 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway93 - The Chronicles of You"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy explore a panoply of ideas for improving the internet, car rentals, merchandising, and blogging before diving into even more excellent notions from Amy herself."Not only does Amy remain a goddamn delight, but I'm dying with curiosity about her remaining airplane-based concepts, so we're going to have her back again (hopefully sooner rather than later).If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher 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). Honestly, it would make a great New Year's resolution, if only because it'd be easy to do, and then boom! You've already completed your New Year's reso! Nicely done.Instant Band Night 8: The Eighth OneIt's this week. See you and/or the people you invited in your stead!!Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot, and you're gonna have a good time whether in the audience or up onstage rocking the fuck out of something you just made up with four other people a few minutes ago. HARK YE THE THREE RULES OF INSTANT BAND NIGHT:(1)The first rule of Instant Band Night is: 👏 YOU 👏 DON'T 👏 HAVE 👏 TO 👏 PLAY 👏 AN 👏 INSTRUMENT 👏 TO 👏 ATTEND 👏 (just come watch, no need to get up there if you don't wanna)(2)The second rule of Instant Band Night is: We guarantee you (the audience) an astonishingly excellent time.(3)The third rule of Instant Band Night is: Bring a friend or three!Oh, you wanted details? Here's your details: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 7 minutes in the green room to plan a 5-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.Come play or come watch; you'll have fun either way! Bring your people, crack a beverage: let's do this.January 108p507 55th St 94609$5/personBYOBYou can use these handy links to Facebook or Eventbrite to invite folks if you're feeling fancy. Or you could just forward them this email; that works, too.* * *  w e ' l l * s e e * y o u * t h e r e * * *F.A.Q.Q: Do I need to be a musician to show up?A: No. Absolutely not. Hell no. Come see the show and have a good time; you don't have to get onstage.Q: I'm a musician; am I guaranteed a slot in a band?A: We literally draw names written on slips of paper out of coffee cans, so there's a chance you may not be called; in a purely mathematical sense, it's a function of how many musicians of each type show up that night (there are five musician cans -- DRUMS, GUITAR, BASS, VOX, MISC -- and one can for artists who'll be picked to draw the bands' gig posters). We say: surrender to the spirit of random chance, or maybe slip the MC a bribe of some sort.Q: Do I have to be an amazing musician to throw my name in a can?A: Probably not. Your band's only gonna be onstage for 8 minutes, anyway; how bad can you possibly be?Q: Do I have to pick my cover tunes beforehand?A: Listen. You and your band (who you've JUST MET) have 5 minutes onstage to do whatever the hell you can think of in the 7 minutes prior to walking up there. You wanna try to pick covers everyone can agree on? Great. You wanna try writing something new? Fantastic; it can definitely be done. You wanna pick a key and tell each other to just fuckin' wing it up there? You are a RAGING PSYCHOPATH and we love it. We'll see you in 7; get in the green room!!!!Q: I play an instrument other than what'll be onstage, like the sax or trumpet. Can I bring it?A: Hhhheeeeeelll yyyeeeessssss you can bring it. PLEASE DO. We had a guy bring a bassoon once, and he rocked the living shit out of it -- and, by extension, us. Woodwinds and brass, which tend not to need extra amplification for a space of this size beyond being pointed vaguely at a mic, are most welcome. If your instrument requires an amp, that's cool, but you should get in touch with Jon about showing up early for setup.Q: What does BYOB stand for?A: We don't sell drinks at Instant Band Night, so you gotta bring your own. Get a cheap sixpack of something. Maybe a bottle and some cups. We're not here to godmod how you get down.Q: Is this in the East Bay?A: It is. Do not be alarmed: it's within walking distance of MacArthur BART, and as a bonus, you get to tour the lovely and scenic Temescal district on your way over. Or you could just take a Lyft from SF (or the BART station if you fancy). Got a car? Drive on over; parking around the East Bay Community Space is pretty simple. You can do this. We believe in you. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.New year! No resolutions. I'm not sure I did any last year beyond "keep baby alive," which I did manage to pull off with some aplomb. Why mess with success?Did you make any resolutions this year? I mean aside from the one you made above to rate/review/subscribe to the podcast. If you did, feel free to tell me what they were, so you can be accountable to at least one person -- though let's face it: if you don't get around to it, it's not like I'm going to judge you too harshly; 2018 was one hell of a millenium (he said, from the bottom of the Trump time dilation well). If anything, you deserve congrats just for making it out the other side!So: congratulations to you. Seriously.There's an annually-revisited comic that makes the rounds on Tumblr every year that I feel the need to point out, because not only is there a new installment, there's also commentary that explains it, which I like/need because I'm a bad/lazy reader. It's worthwhile, I promise. The new end-of-2018 addition is also weirdly appropriate for the theme decided upon for 2019 by those McElroys, which I'll put in an endnote* just in case you haven't listened to MBMBAM 440. There you go. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin has favorite books. The jury's out on what exactly he's getting out of them at this stage, but he definitely has preferences. We'll be reading him something, and he'll just squirm out of our grasp, grab a different book, scoot back over, and press his selection into our hands. His top three are as follows: 

  • Botany for Babies (Jonathan Litton, Thomas Elliott): A colorful book that explains what plants and seeds and such are.

  • Sometimes I Like to Curl Up in a Ball (Vicki Churchill, Charles Fuge): A wombat tells us all about its favorite daily activities in rhyme.

  • Quentin's Family: A spiral-bound custom board book gifted by Mavis's cousin Kate that features pictures of that whole side of the family + their names. It's quite frankly ingenious, and Quentin loves flipping through it.

That's another thing: he doesn't necessarily go through these books at what one might call a reading pace. What he likes to do is flip pages, sometimes before we're done reading him the words, but I try to keep the page down until I get to the end of the lines. If I had to put money on it, I'd say what he's getting out of it is more visual than anything: colors, faces. Today he put the Ezra Jack Keats classic The Snowy Day into my hands, so that one might be climbing the charts soon. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Here's a full paper from researchers working out how to build a 3D printer that lays down molten fucking glass. (Liebert) 

  • Coyotes, wolves, and dogs are combining to make a whole new species that's radder than any single one of them. (Raw Story) 

  • The Atlantic's list of 83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018 is a good 'un. 

  • Comics artist Ramon Villalobos decided to watch through all(?) the performances from Woodstock 99 and livetweet the whole thing, and it's an experience. 

  • Do you actually want to be happy? Or satisfied? There's a difference. (Quartz) 

  • Did you know there are 4G antennas on manhole covers? They're talking about doing it with 5G, which is how I learned the fact in the previous sentence. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Guess. (NYMag Intelligencer) 

  • Your Vox longread for the week is this one on the actual threat posed by AI. 

  • Here's a pair of articles that'll put your madface on but good: The Year of the Old Boys (Slate), which deploys a term ("childish masculinity") I've never heard before but is entirely apt, and The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women (Atlantic). 

  • You know what, why not genetically engineer houseplants that can clean the air? (U of Washington press release via EurekAlert) 

  • Why are all brands starting to look the same? Because one company is designing them all according to a particular set of principles. (Fast Company) 

  • Tectonic plate activity sucks a shitload of water into the planet, and it's not clear how it gets back out. What? (NSF via EurekAlert) 

  • We only think government is bad at doing things because it's usually bad at using evidence to design policy. It could be better. (Vox) 

  • How much would someone have to pay you to stop using Facebook for a year? Most people say about a G. (Tufts U press release via EurekAlert) 

  • Here are The 5 Most Important Trends That Will Shift Retail's Balance Of Power In 2019 (Forbes). 

  • What counts as a good job and where are they? Brookings looked into it. 

  • Electricity speeds healing (though exactly why still hasn't been determined), so electric bandages could be a thing we'll see eventually. (Engadget) 

  • Bees as sensor platforms?? Bees as sensor platforms (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Scented candle sales have gone completely insane. Why? (Guardian) 

  • The last couple years haven't been awesome, but it turns out the year 536 really was the worst year to be alive thanks to the plague and a "mysterious fog" that dimmed the sun. (Science) 

  • Turns out your peers probably think the same way about you as you do about yourself. (U of Toronto Scarborough press release) 

  • If we can make a fancy concept hotel out of shipping containers, surely that means we can make actual reasonable mass human housing out of them? Or am I being crazy? (Wallpaper) 

  • Huh: 2018 was The Year Workers Stood Up to Big Tech. (Gizmodo) 

  • We might as well turn human waste into renewable fuel with the help of bacteria, right? Right. (Anthropocene) 

  • Another contemplative piece on the effect Facebook has had on our lives centers more on mourning the internet-that-was, a thing that I almost forgot about. (The Ringer) 

  • Preposterously, the internet has actually been good for physical books. I know at least one indie bookstore that's closed, though, so maybe grain-of-salt this one. (Vox) 

  • I wonder if Charlie Warzel is starting to feel increasingly like he's yelling into a gale-force headwind or what (BuzzFeed News), but at least he has company (TechCrunch). 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumFoxes Won't Fuck, The Point Is, No One Is Happy 

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.* The theme for 2019 is "Frankensteinteen: BE THE MONSTER."