keep your tapes, everybody

February 11, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's finally about to run out of Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes (chocolate) and thinks that might be best for all involved. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway97 - Overmorrow"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Ryan North (@ryanqnorth) dig up some quality notions around theme parks, parenting, caffeination, and Star Trek appreciation."You'd have to work ridiculously hard to come up with a more interesting conversation than the one we had here, which ranged from the script used in the Codex Seraphinianus to a bizarre idea Ryan hit upon for consuming a manifesto written by an internet nutjob.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).Instant Band Night 9: PI DAYONE MONTH OUT. Tell a friend, bring several. It's gonna be a time.Eventbrite // Facebook 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.One of my best friends from high school happened to be in San Francisco last week for a work trip, and we met up one night for a drink and a chat. Long story short, I ended up discovering a vast database of Dave Matthews Band setlists, cross-referenced exhaustively by date and venue, and hunted down audio from a couple shows that I remember attending way, way, waaaaay back in the day and subsequently acquiring on cassette (because that's how we did it back then). Listening to them was like having a part of my brain taken out of its casing, polished, and put back in. A+ would recommend.I had a pretty decent collection of tapes of various kinds, all of which I threw in the garbage upon one day realizing that I no longer owned a device capable of playing them. This was a stupid move: technology exists for transferring that stuff to mp3, and I had a bunch of Soul Coughing concert bootlegs that I still can't find digital copies of out there in the wilderness: 

  • There's one from (I think?) the Black Cat(??) in Baltimore from the mid-90s that contains a rendition of "Down to This" during which they bust into a seemingly impromptu cover of "War Pigs" towards the end

  • They played a show at my alma mater Carnegie Mellon in ..... 2000? that was a crown jewel of my collection for (among other things) the amazing breakdown at the end of "Bus to Beelzebub"

  • I was at a show at Metropol in Pittsburgh in maybe 1999 that I never found a recording of (not even in cassette form) that was basically a religious experience

However. There is still some wonder to be found in the world, in the form of YouTube. They played one stone fuck of a live show on the 25th of July 1997, it looks like. How about that: YouTube is actually good for something! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Short updates this week:The latest on Quentin's expanding vocabulary is that we're 99% sure "mama" definitely means Mavis, but also any piece of art or photography on a wall or refrigerator. "Gukh" remains an all-purpose noun. While getting dressed a couple mornings ago, one of his random syllabic combinations finally came out as "aw, fuck" -- definitely not intentional, but still very funny.He's been standing more on his own. Not a whole ton, but enough that I feel the need to leap off the couch and be prepared to catch him should he tumble backward, a thing that admittedly he hasn't done very often -- he's gotten good at crouching back down when he starts to feel unstable. I don't know why I'm trying to hurry him along to walking when he's already enough of a handful in crawling/cruising mode???Quentin definitely knows what french fries are now. He's developed a healthy taste for potatoes in stick and chunk form, russet and sweet, with salt or dipped in hummus. Oh, he's definitely our kid. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Fact-checking on Facebook is fucked, but this person (who used to have the job) has good ideas for how to unfuck it. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES. (NYT) 

  • We can make brickmaking ecologically sustainable if we mix treated sewage into 'em. Really! (Anthropocene) 

  • Bees are better at collective decisionmaking than we are. Can we ......... learn from bees? (Undark) At least we already know how to do math. (Science) 

  • Dingoes could help solve Australia's extinction problem if everyone would agree to just leave 'em alone. (Anthropocene) 

  • DC's nightlife is being divided along party lines; quite frankly, I'm in favor of any reality where Trumpites get hounded from their leisure spots by angry mobs, no matter what time of day it is. (Esquire) 

  • There might be close to 10 million jobs in autonomous vehicles waiting to be filled once the industry gets going. (Brookings Institute) 

  • It's almost certainly going to be a long time before robots can truly replace us. (Aeon) 

  • Whoops: what if lidar for autonomous vehicles blinds the cameras also used by autonomous vehicles? (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • I don't know why, but I'm kind of surprised at this finding that vegans are more opposed to eating insects than vegetarians or omnivores. (U of Eastern Finland via EurekAlert) 

  • [pounds fists on table] Tax the rich. Tax the rich. TAX THE RICH (it turns out most Americans are increasingly in favor of this happening) (Politico) 

  • Holy fuck: scientists have been able to reconstruct speech from brain impulses with the help of machine learning. (Zuckerman Institute via EurekAlert) 

  • For some reason this has been a slow week for interesting links, so I've decided to finally publish a list I've been collecting of all the Miracle Uses for Graphene that I've noticed ever since starting this newsletter. Seriously, whoever figures out how to make graphene in big batches is going to be the Out-of-Control King of the World.

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Future Prevention Society, We Are All To Blame 

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.