my big fat teenage romantic fuckup

August 29, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wants you to know you can have garlic toast at any time of day if you've got bread, butter/margarine, and that Trader Joe's garlic spread-dip in your house 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is on that list. Until then, you have over 150 episodes in the back catalog to amuse and delight, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that I would quite honestly and happily make into a whole 'nother show if I had the time!Someone out there has left another incredible review, btw: thank you from the bottom of what remains of my heart. Should anyone else feel inclined to make my day (and Besha's too, probably?), you can drop your 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 at the usual place with the knowledge that it will add at least 5HP back to our health stats.Instant Band Night 16: SWEETWe're a week and a half out from the next Instant Band Night, and if you've never been, now is the time to attend a friendly party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. Nobody's forced to play; you can just come watch. See something new every five minutes! One of the links below will tell you literally everything you need to know. EVERYTHING.Sept 86p$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.It's 8th grade and I'm at a new school, which I don't have to tell you is a lethal combination. But whatever; I'm there, I'm surviving, I've made a few friends, even. And there's this girl: let's call her Penny. Penny's in a lot of my classes and she's beautiful and I can't stop looking at her, which is highly unfortunate because she catches me doing it a lot.* At least I think that's what must've happened, because barely a month or two into the school year, Penny's friend Griselda,** who's sitting in the seat ahead of me on the bus one day, peeks over her seat back at me and asks point-blank "Do you like Penny?"To reiterate: I'm in 8th grade. To discuss my feelings openly is not just a foreign concept, it's actively anathema and must be avoided at all costs on pain of death. So of course I say something to the effect of "Uhhh no, what're you talking about, who even is Penny," which I can only assume is even less convincing than it sounds.Nothing happens.Time passes. Classes shuffle around. Suddenly it's Studio Art and I'm in a room with about eight other people. One of them is Penny. We sit in a circle, painting, drawing, and we all talk endlessly.Weeks in, the topic of our banter turns to romance, or at least what passes for it in 8th grade. The conversational ball is passed to me and I talk in some joking way about how I don't have a girlfriend. There's a beat. I go to get supplies of some sort from a corner of the room outside the painting circle.And then Penny looks up from her painting (not at me because I'm behind her somewhere) and quietly announces into the companionable silence "I'll be your girlfriend, Jon."TIME DOES NOT STAND STILL. In fact, time moves too fucking fast because I have absolutely no idea what to do because I'm in 8th grade and the girl I've had a blazing crush on all year is ...... what?? WHAT IS HAPPENING: is she fucking messing with me? Am I being messed with?? Do I take this seriously?! What if it's a trick. It must be a trick. Surely she can't be serious. Right?? No?? WHAT DO I SAY. Should I say something???? But it's a trick, rightAnyway, I blow it completely.Looking back, I have no memory of what I said, but it must've been some combination of dismissal + humor that managed to defuse(???) the situation without hurting Penny's feelings (at least I think?????) and we all moved on, conversationally. Penny and I remained friendly acquaintances, and when high school started the next year, she moved to a different school somehow. I'm positive it wasn't because of me. But sweet creeping Christ in the cornfield, when I think about the blunders I've made in the course of my exceptionally bumbling romantic life, this one is at the top of the list. Why did I do that.Having told this story now means I'm free of the weight of it, right? That's how it works? Does anyone want to tell me one? Okay, great, thanks! THANK YOU* Looking back on this literal decades later, it only now occurs to me that it's possible she might've caught me looking because she also looked at me a lot, a circumstance that I would never have imagined in a million years and indeed only just thought of basically five minutes ago.** All names are changed because of course they are, the statute of limitations on this excruciating story will never ever expire. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.A while ago my mom asked if there was anything she could get Quentin for his birthday, and I asked her to pack up and mail us the Zaks we used to play with as kids. If you weren't a kid at the end of the 80s, you missed the fuck out: Zaks were great. Eventually my brother and I hit upon the notion of using them to build armor and cybernetic upgrades for our stuffed animals, a use case which I did pass on to Quentin. Being essentially in mint condition, they're still a little stiff and slightly difficult for a 4yo kid to snap together on his own, but he did manage to more or less figure it out for himself about a week ago. Meanwhile, Quentin's big cousin* Sam has caught the Pokemon bug and keeps trying to tell Quentin all about them, which I think has resulted in Quentin amassing a fantastical, etiolated collection of loose Pokemon lore in his mind. He's repurposed, tweaked, or built from scratch a phantasmagoric menagerie of Zaks creatures with names that sound right, but bear no resemblance to their namesakes whatsoever: a giant rolling centipede named Charizard, a cube with spikes called Pikachu, etc. I hope this continues for a long time.In other news, Felix has reached the stage of development where he likes to toss things out of his crib, but is also not big or coordinated enough to get said things back. We have to be careful how we reintroduce them to his crib, too, lest he think it a game that we're all going to play instead of, you know, naptime. He also doesn't quite understand language yet, so when he throws vital nap supplies like his pacifiers and his purple bunny out of the crib, he will not abide suggestions that he simply hang onto them instead. Our efforts in this area are ever-ongoing.* Who's also technically his half brother, genetically, since their moms are identical twins. I will never stop finding this fascinating. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The math says Americans vastly underestimate how popular fighting climate change is among their fellow countryfolk. How 'bout that. (Princeton) 

  • It looks like "prebunking" — forcing people to watch brief, snappy "inoculation" videos that explain misinfo tactics — actually has a measurable effect?? Sounds good to me, folks! (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • Is Adam Neumann up to some fuck shit with this new startup of his? Sure looks like it. (Forbes) 

  • If we don't do something — which I interpret to mean "legislation" as opposed to "dragging CEOs from their cars and beating them to death with tire irons" but language is ever-mutable — odds are good everything's just going to stay expensive for the foreseeable. (Motherboard) 

  • A couple of 8" rubber bands can make a simple surgical mask fit much, much more effectively. I'm just gonna link to the paper because it actually has pictures. (Paper) 

  • "Quiet quitting" is a stupid term for a concept that should be universal standard practice everywhere. (NPR) 

  • "How to raise kids who give back to the world: Optimism, not despair, is the way to inspire kids to help the future." (Vox) 

  • Is ............. did Congress quietly admit that they believe not all UFOs are man-made?? (Motherboard) 

  • [BANGS DRUM] There might be an ocean planet in the Draco constellation! (U of Montreal) 

  • "The Money Is In All The Wrong Places" (Defector) 

  • Let's read about the guy who does the butter sculptures at the Minnesota State Fair. ($NYT) 

  • Getting rid of used wind turbine blades is actually kind of a problem, because they're fucking massive. The Scientists have invented a new resin that could be used to make new blades that are subsequently recyclable into anything from countertops to diapers to actual edible gummi bears. (American Chemical Society) If that's not enough, The Scientists have also figured out a better way to upcycle existing plastics and not new wind turbine blades! (Pacific Northwest Natl Lab) And you know what??? If that's not good enough for you either, how about a way to recycle polystyrene that's already been mathematically modeled to be economically worthwhile!!! (Virginia Tech) 

  • It looks like brain zaps can help people form and hang onto memories long-term, which is interesting, but I'd love to know if there's a way to use them to help recall memories that were already formed a while ago that we've just lost. (Nature) 

  • HBO Max and (to a lesser extent) Netflix have been going on a killing spree in the world of animation that's been straight up hideous to witness. I would like to believe the creators are meeting even now to plan a heist of whatever server room they need to raid in order to rescue their projects from eternal mothballs. (Motherboard) 

  • Termites are tiny, but they routinely build mounds that are equivalent in size to a human house the size of Mount Whitney: how?? It's not like they're checking blueprints! The Scientists have created a model for construction that mimics the rules they think termites are following more or less instinctively, and it's fascinating. (CalTech) 

  • A small study shows psilocybin has real promise for treating alcohol addiction. (NYU Langone) 

  • "Too many Americans live in places built for cars — not for human connection: How urban planning contributed to the great undoing of modern friendship." (Vox) 

  • Huh: The Scientists did a meta-study that seems to show there are some crops that actually grow much better in urban farms than out in the country. (AGU) (Paper) 

  • Cargo shipping companies are starting to add sails and other wind-catching structures back onto their ships for emissions reduction purposes. (~$Bloomberg) 

  • Liquid refrigerants like the ones used in ACs are a Problem; The Scientists have hit upon a new class of solid refrigerants that sound bananas. (American Chemical Society) 

  • The rabbits that overran Australia might've originated from a single shipment of about two dozen from the southwest of England. (Nature) 

  • If 2022's storm season turns out to be a big one, we're fucked unless we can magically locate a new source of electrical transformers. (E&E News) 

  • Four scientists decided to say "no" to 100 requests within a year and see what it taught them; turns out a surprising amount. Let's all learn! (Nature) 

  • There's a new Girl Scout cookie coming?! (NPR) 

  • Some Engineers have built cheap large-scale batteries that seem competitive with lithium ion models; they're already starting to commercialize the design, even. (MIT) 

  • Ask kids where their "gamer rage" comes from and they'll be able to tell you with a high degree of accuracy. (U of Eastern Finland) (Paper) 

  • It's highly possible that getting less sleep really does turn us into assholes; perhaps we should rethink Daylight Savings Time. (UC Berkeley) 

  • According to a study of about 489 students, thoughts of suicide correlated with surprisingly specific differences in their saliva microbiome. If you read the paper, there was also apparently an inverse correlation with regular consumption of nuts and fruits, though, so who knows if that means anything. Or maybe those are all significant?? (U of Florida) (Paper) 

  • Huh. The environmental review process we put in place to protect the environment from harmful and unnecessary development might be strangling the creation of infrastructure and housing we legitimately need and could use some revisiting. (Motherboard) 

  • The Scientists have hit upon a way to degrade CO2 into useful chemicals using sunlight and a remarkably effective, cheap photocatalyst. (Tokyo Inst of Tech) 

  • Doppelgangers who aren't related turn out to actually have some similarities in their DNA, although they differ on the epigenetic and microbiome level, which honestly? It would be worrisome if they didn't. (Cell Press via ScienceDaily) 

  • The Scientists have been talking to people who've had near-death experiences and people who've tripped balls on psychedelics, and both groups have a lot of overlap in the "lessened fear of death" zone, which is interesting; the paper has a lot more detail on their survey responses. (Johns Hopkins) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSEXBLADE, The Last Place Left on Earth(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.