not all grifters have to be good

November 18, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that seriously hadn't registered the fact that Thanksgiving is next fucking week, holy creeping Christ in the cornfield 

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 wait 'til next week happens! I am reliably informed next week is supposed to take place at the usual scheduled interval.Something I want to start doing that only occurred to me now: taking questions from listeners in the form of 5-star reviews! If you've got a question for us, go ahead and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and feel free to drop a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer!Instant Band Night: Lucky 13Was a tremendous success and if you missed it, mark your calendar for January 9th, 2020, you rock 'n' roll motherfuckers 😎😎😎😎 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.The sheer fucking audacity of this grift is impressive on its own, nevermind the fact that it actually worked for as long as it did because these fucking idiots didn't do even the baseline amount of checking that you'd expect. I strongly suspect that if I were a hot woman and didn't have the online footprint that I do, I could pretend to be a MAGA dipshit for just long enough to inveigle myself into some White House inner circle and get a job there, and stick around until I'd done some real damage to the administration from the inside. I could probably just tell them I wrote for Breitbart, and if -- IF!! -- they bothered to check and didn't see my name pop up, I could say "Google must be broken" and they would believe me. You can't say it's not possible. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin does this thing now where he starts a majority of his utterances with his name. Something I somehow failed to anticipate was that it would be incredibly adorable to hear him say his own name a lot. I think part of it might be that he almost always pauses slightly after uttering it, as though it was a lot of work to say and he needs to gather himself a little bit before he can continue his sentence:"Quentin. Read books.""Quentin. Ride stroller!""Quentin. Up?"Part of it might also just be that it's adorable to hear a 2yo say "Quentin" a lot. It's a good pair of syllables. I think we chose his name wisely; I can only hope he agrees as he grows up. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Hey, 3D printing in glass is now technically possible! (Nature) 

  • What -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- the fuck is going on in quantum physics right now? (The Conversation) 

  • The in-game economy of Planet Zoo is currently busted in an extremely hilarious way. (RockPaperShotgun) 

  • Kind of a reasonable question once you read the article: what if instead of having an endless parade of conferences about women's rights, we started doing things to give women those rights? (~$Quartz) 

  • At this point I think I need to just subscribe to this newsletter already (this particular issue features an interview with David J. Roth, he of the Only Good Trump Thinkpieces). (Welcome to Hell World) 

  • Actually, speaking of newsletters on Substack, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of A Woman to Know, and so should you. (A Woman to Know) 

  • Have you ever heard of John M. Ford? I definitely hadn't until I read this, and that is a damn shame. At least read until you get to the part about the Klingon wedding. (Slate) 

  • There's an account on Instagram that outs would-be hucksters who try to fake wealth and influence as frauds. ($NYT) 

  • Oxygen levels in the atmosphere of Mars fluctuate more than they should, and nobody knows why. (Science Alert) 

  • I never thought about this, but there's no good reason every single federal agency has to have its office in DC -- they could set up shop in areas where people really need the work. (Brookings Institute) 

  • Holy shit: there are people working on machines that make drugs on demand. (Nature) 

  • We should just use mountains for gravity-based energy storage; they're right there, for fucksake. (Intl Institute for Applied Systems Analysis via Science Daily) 

  • Having been to one, I 100% believe that Waffle House is the kind of place where this could happen. (AL.com) 

  • When you're testing animal behavior, how do you tell the difference between something genetically ingrained vs the animal's personality? (Weizmann Institute of Science via Science Daily) 

  • A good interview with the delightful Janelle Shane. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • We might have discovered a new class of antibacterial compounds that can break existing resistance. (Martin Luther U via Science Daily) 

  • "Too much democracy is bad for democracy" is sort of hard to argue with when you look at it; why do we need the primaries to work the way they do? (~$Atlantic) 

  • Identifying people by their internal bioacoustic signature seems to be possible, which: what. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Remember those UFO videos? Here's some testimony from the people involved. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Please enjoy imagining all the responses in this Werner Herzog Mandalorian interview in his voice, especially the part where he talks about Wrestlemania. Yes, I am of the firm belief that his guest appearance on Parks & Rec is one of the best cameos of all time, why do you ask. (Variety) 

  • I can't decide whether I'll be delighted or kind of disappointed if the entire Virgo supercluster turns out to just be a star in, like, an even bigger galaxy, maaaan. (Vice) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumWho Found Who, Not Actual Size 

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.