Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's pretty sure stonefruit would be called Bruisables!™ if they'd been somehow not yet discovered until 2024

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 27: JULY, JULY

IT'S TWO WEEKS AWAY

Instant Band Night mixes music and spontaneous creativity to create a one-of-a-kind event that's almost unbelievably joyful to either participate in or just show up and watch. No, really, you have to see it to believe it! July will be the last one for four months, so if you haven't been able to make it this year thus far, this'll be your last chance for a while. I promise you nothing less than an explosion of jubilance in the form of music that will surprise and delight you every few minutes. Who could say no to that!! Get your tickets now and tell your five coolest friends.

July 11 2024
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 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 YOU

If you know somebody with almost aggressively whimsical taste, or just happen to be a person with an appreciation for playfully intelligent ceramics, then I know a very exclusive online store you should visit. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

All right, you know what? Here's your fucking AI use case; somebody put the entirety of Sand Hill Road on notice.

The other day someone in one of my Slacks brought up that lady who burned her entire marriage to the ground because she fell in love with notorious irredeemable piece of shit Martin Shkreli while he was still in jail for being a tremendous asshole. Remember that? She wrote a whole article. Whatever happened to her? Note that this is all the data my brain retained: I don't remember when it happened, where the article was published, or even her name. I had a brief moment of utterly fleeting curiosity: what's that one lady up to now?

This is what I would like The Machine to do: find out shit like this, using nothing more than the info I've already given. I don't want to expend a single additional mote of thought or energy on it, nor do I want any other living breathing humans to waste their time with it. This is something The Machine should do instead: go find the answer to my stupid, pointless question and give me one or two sentences of information. That's it. I'm going to call this service What's Uhhh? and its whole job is to answer exclusively questions that aren't exactly quickly googleable but are also of this utterly banal level of importance.

• What's uhhh that one girl up to? She caught the chair in that Waffle House video? She good?

• What's uhhh the status of that one movie I heard about forever ago with Daisy Ridley in it?

• What's uhhh the approximate number of fics on AO3 where Data and Geordi switch brains?

You get it. Or you don't, that's also fine. Either way I'm accepting bids for my $100M seed round and seeking a CFO. Me and my team (who are all chatbots) will see you in the pages of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks from now.

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Weirdly, this is the section I'm having trouble finding something to tell you about, which is probably either a good sign or a tremendously ominous one, in that it signals the calm before some unforeseen shitstorm. Let us pray it is the former.

Quentin's summer adventures at day camp continue; he's having a good time, he's getting good exercise, and he's learning more about how to be a person interacting with other people a little bit at a time every day. What more is there, honestly!

We're working on adjusting Felix's bedtime shenanigans; once it becomes clear which adjustments are working and to what extent, I'll try to share them! This is currently an in-flight project and milestones are meaningless at the current moment.

One thing I thought about for the first time the other day is that we're hoping to level the boys up to actual Legos (away from Duplos) in the near-ish future, aided by what I estimate to be roughly 16 cubic feet of Legos inherited from a friend's kid who outgrew them. We haven't really looked in the boxes since they came to our garage, and I think it would make sense to try to take some sort of general inventory; the previous owner of these Legos was an avowed Train Kid, so a large proportion of these Legos may be train-related, and I just want to see what we're lookin' at. I should inquire as to whether my own childhood stash can be shipped from the ancestral homelands of Syracuse, which I'm betting would add at least 4 cubic feet to the total but also incorporate a lot of diverse city/space sets. But how to take that inventory? With what free time/space? I must think on this.

Fascination Corner

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

• Lengthy but entertaining: "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (Lucidity)
  

• There is at least one (1) good rich person out there. (Robb Report)
  

• Here are the five questions you should ask whenever news of some new virus hits the internet. (The Conversation)
  

• The Scientists have figured out how the clusters of nerve endings in your junk work, or at least they've put concrete numbers to something sex toy inventors figured out a while ago. (Nature) (Paper)
  

• If you're looking for some more wild-ass theories about what UFOs are (or I guess "UAP" these days), there's a new paper out that sounds like entertaining reading. I went through the rigamarole needed to download a copy so you don't have to — just write back if you want me to send it to you. (Futurism)
  

• McDonald's — a company that I have to imagine has the money to throw around to make a really serious go at it — is giving up on its Machine-powered drive-thru ordering experiment. (Guardian)
  

• "It shouldn’t be so hard to live near your friends: Americans are more socially isolated than ever. Here’s how we can reconnect." (Vox)
  

• Not these monoliths again. (Sky News)
  

• The endings of kid names are subject to powerful trending forces, it turns out. (WaPo gift link)
  

• Solid-state batteries are theoretically great but practically a while from commercialization; in the meantime, how about semi-solid-state ones? Eh? Batteries filled with goo? Eh? (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The Scientists have hit upon a way to turn wool and hair into graphite, a critical component of lithium batteries that currently mostly just comes from China. (ABC News Australia)
  

• Using lidar and The Machine, Some Engineers have worked out a method for reconstructing an entire 3D scene based on a single picture (and the shadows it contains). (MIT)
  

• Pasteurize your goddamn milk, idiots. (Natl Inst of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) (Paper)
  

• "Boosted Breeding and beyond: 3 tech trends that could end world hunger" (Freethink)
  

• An entirely new class of materials has just been invented by The Scientists; they call them "glassy gels" and they sound wild as hell. (The Debrief)
  

• The Scientists have run the numbers and it looks like non-native species are spreading much, much faster in this warming world than natives, and it's our fault. (UMass Amherst)
  

• New shape just dropped. (Gizmodo)
  

• Theory says that a real-life warp drive could maybe emit gravitational waves that we could theoretically detect with ground-based instruments if they were powerful enough. Huh. (Universe Today) (Paper)
  

• How many bare-nosed wombats are there, really? Are they in trouble? The Scientists are trying to figure it out. One thing we do know: they're not soft to the touch — more wiry if anything, according to trusted reports — which I will never stop considering a betrayal of nature considering how cuddly they look. (Knowable)
  

• Judging by the complexity of stone tools thus far uncovered, The Scientists guess that we as humans hit upon the notion of "learning from the achievements of others" a little over half a million years ago. (Arizona State)
  

• The Scientists have taught The Machine to recognize the emotions of tennis players based on body language with better-than-random accuracy. (KIT) (Paper)
  

• Okay: wood appears to have natural antiviral properties that vary by species; pine starts fucking up viruses after just five minutes, for instance. (ACS) (Paper)
  

• I'm glad somebody's doing it because I really want to see the tech advance: Singapore's going hard on cultured meat. (Rest of World)
  

• Here's another argument against the existence of dark matter made by the macro behavior of galaxies themselves. (Case Western Reserve U) (Paper)
  

• "Concerning Local News Weather Team Promos" (McSweeney's)
  

• Some Engineers have worked out a navigation method for robots that relies solely on language, which sounds insane but is actually kind of a cool idea. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• Adding nitrogen to concrete cuts down on the environmentally harmful compounds it would otherwise blast out; let's fucking do this. (U of Birmingham)
  

• The IRS would really love to close a tax loophole used by ultrarich assholes worth billions; let's hope it actually happens. (Dept of Treasury)
  

• "It's not just vibes. Americans' perception of the economy has completely changed. The pandemic upended the factors that used to predict consumer sentiment." (ABC News)
  

• The hydrocarbon lakes of Titan may have waves, which doesn't mean much if you're looking for aliens, it's just interesting to picture mentally. (MIT) (Paper)

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 and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible)

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Reader Simon has the goods:

Casual Friday is a kind of classic "singer, guitar, bass, drums" band doing a 90s-revivalist take on the sort of albums that Teenage Fanclub used to make. In other words, a lot of 3-part harmonies and overly-bright guitars.

​"Everything Went Wrong" is, of course, the hit single from the album "Everything Went Wrong", which is really annoying when you're searching on Spotify. It has one of those classic choruses where the whole band cuts out at the top of the chorus, and the singer acapella wails "Everything went" before the band drops back in with a big clanging guitar chord, and 3 harmonized voices warble out "wro-o-ong".

​They originally wanted to be Radiohead; like, Bends-era Radiohead. But everything kept coming out sounding more Teenage Fanclub.

​Classic stuff!

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.