let's all improve online recipe writing together

December 12, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's finalized its holiday card design and now needs to face the task of asking everyone whether they've moved in the last year 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayAs we slide into the 2022 holiday season I still hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast remains on that list. In the meantime, you can find its 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 18: RECHARGEJanuary 12! It's only a month away! And it's gonna be great! You should come join us, and bring a friend or two. You can add it to your calendar (venue address and all) by clicking here!In case you need a refresher: Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot to play a song they'll write in 5 minutes. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can chill and watch. I absolutely guarantee you've never seen anything like it.🎼 MUSIC! 🎼🚀 COURAGE! 🚀✨ CREATIVITY! ✨January 12 20236p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I forget where it was exactly that we learned online recipe writing is Like That*, but that doesn't mean we can't still dunk on it. There was a tweet at the end of last month that I found inspiring, for certain values of inspiration: 

And there I was, at 21, broken that I'd never hear my sister laugh again. I held her limp hand, my eyes playing cruel tricks as I swore I saw her breathe. In that moment, all I could think about was the lava cake we'd bake together. For this recipe, you'll need a double boiler.@elle91

I wanted to play immediately: 

It was a vast wall of angry metal too wide and too tall to take in at a single glance; every move of its tentacles churned entire cities to rubble. I turned to her and swore I would make the zucchini fritters again someday. First, put flour and 1 tsp pepper in a medium bowl@ferociousjAs the final seal cracked, a forest of bonelike shards bloomed from the sarcophagus in intricate, upsetting patterns, already bleeding and dripping with caustic ichors, and I knew the time had come to make the meatloaf again. Dice your bacon into lardons and fry in a skillet on m@ferociousj

Those were the only two I managed before getting distracted (you can see what happened in the rest of the thread), but I still think this is a rich vein of creative comedy ripe for mining. 

He raised his sword again, rain running off the tip of the notched and battered blade, and I winced as I brought the plasma projector's barrel up. "It doesn't have to end this way," I pleaded. His grip shifted, and he charged. This meatloaf requires a pound each of beef and turkI was frozen in place, unable to believe what I was seeing as yet another goose landed, finding space somewhere in the endless carpet of them that now blanketed lawns and houses as far as the eye could see, their collective gaze tracking my every move. You'll need a quart of olivThe thinning air rang with blaring alarms. Every control panel still drawing power throbbed with blinking red status alerts. We'd wrestled ourselves into pressure suits, but the emergency O2 tank only showed enough for one person. We stared at each other. Turn your air fryer to 3

If you end up writing some of your own, please send them to me and know they will find a receptive audience!!* A standalone recipe without adornments cannot be copyrighted, so writers have to put a rambling story at the front for ownership reasons; also SEO is in there because of course it is. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.A Visitor's Guide to the Local Dialect of Felix👩‍🦱 Mama: Anything Felix likes; usually applies to Mavis and/or the small lavender bunny stuffy that never leaves his side and is Required for peaceful sleep.🥤 Wawa: Water; typically a request for a drink of same.✋ No: Refusal, usually of some meal item that's not desired at the present moment.🏃‍♂️ Go go?: (1) If employed near the couch, a request to be lifted onto the couch for Mischief. (2) If employed while sitting inside the baby fence we've set up in the middle of the living room, a request for the fence to be opened so that free-range activities may commence.🙋‍♂️ Bye bye!: A cheerful farewell.🌝 Nigh nigh: "Night night." Often repeated during pre-nap and pre-bedtime procedures such as zipping him into his nap bag or changing him into a sleeper.Language acquisition: the most adorable phase???In other news, Felix has started to take some unassisted steps, but is as yet unconvinced of the superiority of walking as a mode of locomotion, so he's still mostly scooting around and cruising from handhold to handhold. I'm taking bets on when this will turn. Anyone have a guess? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Time for the year in charts. (Vox) 

  • The Scientists have proven that fusion as an actual productive energy concept is technically possible. Sure, it's just 5sec right now, but it's a start. (CNN) 

  • Gotta say I don't love this!!!! "Critics Call It Theocratic and Authoritarian. Young Conservatives Call It an Exciting New Legal Theory. ‘Common good constitutionalism’ has emerged as a leading contender to replace originalism as the dominant legal theory on the right." (Politico) 

  • All it took to accelerate renewable energy uptake was a global crisis. (The Verge) 

  • What in the motherfuck, this is amazing: Some Engineers have created lightweight, flexible, printable solar cells 100x lighter than conventional ones, and they even think the manufacturing process is scalable. Damn!!!! (MIT) 

  • "The obscure calculation transforming climate policy: After long debate, economists and philosophers are reaching consensus on how to value future generations" (Knowable) Pair that with this one that gives the broad strokes for how to achieve degrowth. (Nature) 

  • We're all stuck in 2022 while the Irish are living at least a century ahead of us. (Irish Examiner) 

  • Fluidic devices are everywhere: engines, pumps, etc. Some Engineers have built a computer brain that can design surprisingly good ones in basically no time with a minimum set of inputs. (MIT) 

  • The FDA has approved a fecal microbiome transplant product for C.diff infections! (Reuters) 

  • Speaking of microbes, The Scientists have discovered some weird new ones, or rather some very old ones that we just got around to noticing. (U of British Columbia) 

  • Actually, you know what, in ocean microbe news, The Scientists did some math and concluded that a surprisingly tiny percentage of marine microorganisms are responsible for the majority of oxygen/CO2 exchange in the ocean. (Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences) 

  • Some Engineers have built a working prototype soft robot that can detect damage and heal itself. (Cornell) 

  • Fodor's published their No List for 2023, a set of tourist destinations that we should consider skipping for very valid reasons. (Fodor's) 

  • If you've been unaware of constant froth of The Discourse on Twitter, consider yourself lucky: it's the goddamn worst. (Vox) There is, however, one more or less unequivocal good thing about Twitter, and it's that sometimes — only sometimes!! — the collective Eye will turn a benevolent gaze upon you and cause literal gods in your field to offer kind words of encouragement. (NPR) 

  • The Artemis I test flight is complete! (Nature) 

  • Have you seen purple streetlights anywhere? The El Cerrito Plaza BART stop parking lot is full of them, and it turns out there's a reason why. (Insider) 

  • You ............. may not want to know how far lidless public toilets can project plumes of tiny droplets. (Inverse) (Paper) 

  • "One Of Steam’s Most Popular Games Is About Watching Rubber Duckies Float" (Kotaku) 

  • The Scientists have found the toughest metal alloy known to science; interestingly, it actually gets stronger as it gets colder, which is highly unusual. (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) 

  • Samples of two, uh ........... two-million-year-old DNA have been discovered in northern Greenland. (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • Cusses share a set of common phonetics across languages. (Science Alert) 

  • The Scientists have determined that potatoes don't actually have a negative diabetic effect as long as you boil them and don't mix in all the other stuff (butter, cream, etc), but then what would make them worth eating? (Edith Cowan U) 

  • Here's a roundup of ugly holiday sweaters The Brands are doing this year. (Dieline) 

  • "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk Fast Food's Chicken Sandwich Wars" (BA) 

  • There's a shocking amount of gold about to get tossed into the garbage in the form of e-waste that we should probably try to retrieve. (Anthropocene) 

  • Ah ha: there actually is a concrete reason why we catch more colds when it's chilly, according to recent findings from The Scientists. (Mass General Brigham) (Paper) 

  • I love everything about agrivoltaics, but I especially love this discovery by The Scientists about the colors of light that might be most useful for crops and energy production because it makes me picture farmland that looks like a disco floor. (UC Davis) 

  • Some Engineers have figured out how to move an object around with ultrasound, but the catch is they have to carve a metamaterial pattern into its surface first. (U of Minnesota) 

  • Parkour!!!!!!! "Pedestrians choose healthy obstacles over boring pavements, study finds" (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists may have uncovered a key mechanism behind cancer cell metastasis and how to stop it. (U of Alberta) (Paper) 

  • Crabs aren't the only thing nature keeps making, if you really look around. (The Conversation) 

  • The Scientists have been testing a treatment for metastatic melanoma that involves amplifying the patient's own T cells to attack and kill tumors. (Netherlands Cancer Institute) 

  • "Middle School Party Games, Revised For Thirty-Five-Year-Olds" (McSweeney's) 

  • The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered an extremely faint ghostly glow surrounding our entire solar system. (NASA) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHoly Damn Moly, You Got a Problem or What(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.