just wanna rewatch the last hour of Endgame for no reason

November 09, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that had a pretty goddamn good weekend, honestly. 

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 there'll be one next week; you know how it works.Now that you've voted in the big important election, why not flex that newfound muscle and push us over the hill to 35 or even 40 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts??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.All right. Okay. So. We won, but.This election was supposed to be a massive rebuke to Trump and Trumpites everywhere, a signal that We Will Not Stand For Your Hatred and yadda yadda. That didn't happen (BuzzFeed News). Turns out a lot of people in here with us are fine with all of it, with every last cruel and hateful thing that happened. We didn't even take the fucking Senate. Mitch is still fucking there, not that we had a chance of unseating him anyway.But you know what? I'm not tired. I'm still here, and I still hate every last one of these motherfuckers so much it's amazing even to me, after all this time. My hatred for Mitch McConnell alone, which if converted into actual energy could tear apart an entire G-type star, has doubled in the last 8 hours. By the time I send this newsletter my hatred will be powerful enough to destroy an entire solar system without breaking a sweat. I feel like I could happily -- happily -- butcher every single one of these venal fucking fascist toadies alive. There's a line in the last book of The Lord of the Rings where the armies of Rohan come to the surprise rescue of Minas Tirith and start to spontaneously sing(!!!) while they slaughter the city's besiegers, and I've never fully gotten it until just now. If there's a lesson to be learned, it's this: People who espouse cruelty and hatred should absolutely not be given room -- instead, they should be made afraid, because otherwise you end up with this, all of this. Trump and his vicious legion can't make me tired; they can only make me angrier. For four fucking years, these fuckers instigated and applauded the deliberate inflicting of suffering and misery on untold thousands of innocent people, children included, and that will never be forgotten or forgiven. I saw you fucking do it, you fuckers, and the results of this election have only served to sharpen my hate for you to a monomolecular edge. I feel such a totality of rage that it's almost serene, like I've ascended to some kind of nirvana state of fury. Please address all my future correspondence to this higher plane until further notice. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin likes to ask a lot of questions, but a surprising number of them don't have an answer because they're reflections on his own internal state.Me: Let's pick a book to read, buddy!Q: Which book do I want?Me: I don't know, pal.Q: Which one do I want?Me: Pick whichever one you like!Q: Which one is that?Me: Is there a book you want to read, buddy?Q: Yeah!Me: Okay, great, which one is it?Q: Which one do I see?Me: There's a lot of books here, bud, I can't answer that for you.Q: What's in it?Me: That answer depends on which book you're looking at, which I can't really determine!Situations like this usually continue until I remember I need to pick a few selections for him and get him to narrow it down from there, but there have been plenty of times where that's not an available option. It's just funny to me that he's inadvertently exposing advanced philosophical concepts he has no way to grapple with that still manage to impinge on his daily life. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • On Saturday Nov 11, the front page of Slate was nothing but goodbyes to the entire noxious Trump administration, but I'm going to single the Stephen Miller one out because, well, Stephen Miller. There's a link to the rest at the bottom. (Slate) 

  • This article is good, but a minor journalistic failure in that it doesn't tell us what the exact number for the Trump voter fraud hotline is. You know, so we can call it. And heh report haha some hahahahahaha voter fraud ahahahahahaha (ABC News) 

  • I was hoping it would be a "spit derisively when his name is mentioned" kind of legacy, but yeah: Trump is now indelibly part of the narrative of America. (~$Atlantic) Let's just go for an Atlantic one-two: this is just who we are now. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Here, a balm for your soul: an oral history of the monorail episode of The Simpsons. (Vice) 

  • Dogs: they're great. (The Conversation) 

  • Speaking of both oral histories and dogs, 2020's been such a fucking year that The Ringer put one out on Best In Show back at the end of September and we didn't even notice. (The Ringer) 

  • Here's one person's ideas for how to start healing the massive, chasm-like divide the election has exposed. (NPR) 

  • A Spanish stonemason hid a selfie in a cathedral he was helping to build 900 years ago and now we've finally noticed it. (Guardian) 

  • "What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?" (~$The New Republic) 

  • Star Trek nerds: load this tweet, but start reading at the top of the thread. I know it's dangerous to worship a politician and she will inevitably disappoint us in some way, but let's just enjoy right now how good AOC is. (@AOC on Twitter) 

  • While we're at it, actually, here's an extremely incisive take from AOC about the perceived "riskiness" of progressivism being absolute horseshit. (@AOC on Twitter) 

  • Take a breath to celebrate now, but the next motherfucker they run instead of Trump might actually be good at it. Stay frosty. (~$Atlantic) 

  • There's a case to be made that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were at war with each other for about 100,000 years. I know how it sounds; read the article. (The Conversation) 

  • "This Is ‘I Wish a Motherf*cker Would’ Week for Black People: White folks: Tread lightly. This election is testing what little patience we have left." If you have a Medium click left this month, use it now. This piece is a good snapshot of, well, you'll see. (~$Medium) 

  • You know what, sure: luminescent wood. (American Chemical Society) 

  • Is polling just fucked from now on? (~$Atlantic) 

  • Danish scientists have built a machine learning tool that can ingest huge microscopy datasets and figure out how the proteins it sees move around, shrinking a process that used to take many people several days down to just clicking a button and waiting a few seconds. All right! (U of Copenhagen) 

  • Republicans cannot be forgiven for this brush with fascism. The work, as ever, is ongoing, but do not forget what these chucklefucks tried to pull. (~$Esquire) 

  • Three ideas for how to live a fuller life. (BBC) 

  • As a Californian, I feel in my very soul the absolute fuckedness of the ballot propositions system (especially since 22 passed). (Vox) 

  • Contact has been reestablished with Voyager 2. (Science Alert) 

  • Dressers are vanishing from hotel rooms. Good! Why are they even there in the first place? (Conde Nast Traveler) 

  • GPS doesn't work underwater, so engineers are figuring out a system for pinpointing location using reflected sound -- yes, it sounds like sonar, but it isn't. (MIT) 

  • Algorithms are making economic inequality worse. (~$Harvard Business Review) 

  • Microbiologists have figured out the molecular mechanisms that let a particular bacterium survive in space, which is simultaneously straightforward-sounding and also completely nuts; how do mechanisms like this evolve in the first place??? (U of Vienna) (Paper) 

  • When it comes to affecting your happiness, how you use social media matters more than just whether or not you're on it in the first place. (U British Columbia) 

  • You might've heard about the scientists who 3D printed an extremely tiny boat, but what most of the headlines didn't tell you is that they also printed an extremely tiny but very recognizable Federation starship Voyager! Fortunately, CNN's got us covered. (CNN) (Paper) 

  • For a lot of reasons, it would be a really great idea to put sensors on trees, but that gets harder to do the higher up you go; why not load a drone with sensors on darts and get it to fire them at the trees instead? (Imperial College London) 

  • It's possible to trick fake news detectors by flooding the articles in question with comments that sway the detectors' opinions. (Penn State) 

  • Scientists have invented something they call "self-watering soil" without telling us how hard or expensive it'd be to manufacture at scale. Thanks, scientists? (U Texas) 

  • Volunteers in Sri Lanka saved 120 pilot whales after the poor fools beached themselves. (Science Alert) 

  • Private jets are starting to see more middle-class customers in These Unprecedented Times. (Wired UK) 

  • Getting praise helps people learn; turns out praise from robots is just as good, and even better if there's more than one. (U of Tsukuba) 

  • The question isn't "should Manhattan's empty offices be turned into housing?" but "how big of a pain in the ass will it be?" (Bloomberg CityLab) 

  • Transparent solar cells! Transparent solar cells (Incheon Natl U) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some names that came unbidden to my mind that I was unable to assign to anything, although I feel like at least one of these is a law firmSmorgan Elephant GruverungMountbassett & ShropshireRanston ShoolachreMousebacher 

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.