on castles and the destruction thereof

January 25, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that for some reason is rewatching the four Avengers movies in order, although not directly in a row 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayWe're gonna shake the dust off the recording machinery and get it rolling again soon!Now that we're almost into February, if you couldn't think of a New Year's resolution or just wanted one thing you could accomplish quickly and call it good, I've got one for you: just head over to Apple Podcasts and put a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in for the show. We're at 34, how about getting us over the hill to 40?Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberOkay! Vaccines exist! Let's wait til November and hopefully -- hopefully! -- we'll see you all at the next Instant Band Night.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.I would love some journalistic followup on whether it's OK to watch Bon Appetit's YouTube channel again or not. Because I have to tell you the print magazine seems to be trying very hard to center POC cuisine and voices, and a cursory examination of their YouTube channel indicates a nonzero amount of effort in this direction, but I don't feel great about it unless I know this new crew is actually getting paid equitably. And if they are, then great, but I want confirmation. Especially because, well, look: if it were that easy for their video arm to just pay everyone equitably, why didn't they do that the instant all their racist nonsense came to light instead of watching as the old crew abandoned ship????? Somebody please look into this and write a long-form explainer with plenty of quotes from everyone involved, old and new, higher-ups especially.This curiosity may or may not be extra-motivated by a) A shirt depicting the old BA Test Kitchen that I got as an Xmas present, clearly (and thoughtfully) purchased before all of this went down and which I now regard as a touching monument to all of our idyllic prelapsarian existence, a term I used only half-jokingly in a text threadb) The first batch of new Claire videos apparently coming to an end; when will there be more? What happens to this channel when the book promo stops?Are there more questions? There will always be more questions, but most of them for me boil down to "What's Priya up to?" because she's the one I miss the most, apparently. Surely I'm not alone in this?? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.This week was Quentin lowkey learning about the glory of destruction, in that he wanted me to build him castles out of blocks that he could knock down with a toy hammer.* I've gotten good at speed-building crappy castles with minimal thought to design, but my next trick will be to show him that he's already got the skills he needs to build castles himself, thus creating an endless cycle of creation and destruction that he can perform without my involvement. Thus far it's been something of a nonstarter, I think mostly because he sees that I can build him pretty good castles at no cost to himself fairly quickly. There were a couple times where we built castles together (I add a block, then he adds a block, then I add a block, etc); maybe I should try pushing for that as the new model.* There was a brief detour into building castles out of Duplo, but those don't really fall apart in the same satisfying way and I was able to get him back to regular wooden blocks reasonably easily.  

Fascination Corner

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

  • Your must-read about the social media mess for this week is from Katie Notopoulos: "These Brave Corporations Did What No Social Platforms Could Do, And I’m Weeping" (BuzzFeed News) 

  • We should at least give this list of Trump's 15 most notable lies a look if for no other reason than Daniel Dale has suffered incredibly as the nation's go-to Trump fact-checker for the last four hell years. (CNN) 

  • As of the night of January 19 2021, this is the best "bye Trump" thread currently in existence on Twitter. (Thread from @ItsTheBrandi) 

  • Some QAnon idiots are gradually waking up to the notion that maybe they were being fooled this entire time. (NBC News) 

  • Only a handful of diehard Trumpite dipshits showed up at the various state capitols, which is incredibly hilarious, but let's not forget there's more of 'em out there. (Vox) As long as they're busy worrying about "glowies," hopefully they'll be too busy to do anything concrete. (~$Atlantic) 

  • How to stay safe from the more contagious version of the rona: make sure your mask fits (maybe wear two), stay 6ft away, and don't fucking go indoor dining at any goddamn restaurants. (The Conversation) 

  • This is a couple years old and may be almost hilariously quaint given the whole "storming of the Capitol" thing, but read it anyway. It's a report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences containing lofty but theoretically workable proposals to restore some semblance of democracy to the country by 2026. Amanda Gorman appears on page 19, interestingly! (Our Common Purpose) (PDF) 

  • Leaving aside what I'm hoping is an array of orbital lawsuit cannons warming up and locking onto his position even as you read this, Trump's got financial troubles coming his way that should be extremely delicious to witness. I've read this article a couple times just for the endorphins. ($NYT) 

  • How Portland restauranteurs are dealing with ghost kitchens. (Eater) 

  • A calm, interesting longread on Avi Loeb and 'Oumuamua. (~$New Yorker) 

  • For fucksake, scientists have worked out a fucking inexpensive, high-capacity, quick-charging battery specifically meant to work for fucking electric cars, so can we goddamn fucking make a billion of them immediately or (Penn State) 

  • Actually, you know what, while we're fucking here, installing solar panels on just 1% of our farmland could supply 20% of the electricity we need while providing jobs for 117,000 people for 20 fucking years. (Anthropocene) 

  • Here, have what feels to me like extremely cursed knowledge about how new brands are using social media to drive engagement. (~$Digiday) 

  • A guy lived at Chicago O'Hare for three months and was just found out a few days ago. (Chicago Tribune) 

  • "Facebook Said It Would Stop Pushing Users to Join Partisan Political Groups. It Didn’t." (The Markup) 

  • Tests seem to indicate 3D-printed concrete is stronger if you do it the way lobsters grow their shells. (RMIT) 

  • "Coexistence Is the Only Option: Millions of Americans sympathize with the Capitol insurrection. Everyone else must figure out how to live alongside them." This article is actually better than it sounds, but woof, what a headline. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Why not grow lab meat in paper-thin sheets and then fold the fuckers to make tasty morsels? Scientists are geniuses. Also, "The researchers have formed a start-up company to begin commercializing the technology." Hell yeah, let's do this. (McMaster U) While we're here, what if you could also grow wood directly into the shapes you want in a lab? (MIT) 

  • The chances of there actually being a Trump Presidential Library don't look good, thank fucking god, although it would be nice to have one consistent location to vandalize endlessly until their money runs out. (Politico) 

  • Counting! Elephants! From! Space!!!! (U of Bath) 

  • It doesn't say how many people are doing this, which robs it of a nonzero amount of joy, but still: some members at Mar-a-Lago are quietly leaving, and the place isn't that great in the first place. (CNN) 

  • Scientists have brought some eelgrass back to a patch of coastal Virginia. (Hakai) 

  • "The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone" -- time to retrofit them for the good of basically everybody. (Vice) In California alone, we could create a huge amount of housing just by rezoning the land along El Camino Real and turning empty strip malls into places to live. (Bloomberg CityLab) 

  • Here's an interesting set of the 10 pieces of software with the most influence on the world of science. (Nature) 

  • This headline sounds like absolute madness, but take heart: there's an explanatory video. "Lasers create miniature robots from bubbles" (American Chemical Society) 

  • I just think someone clearly had a little fun with the illustration at the top of this one, which explains how burying beetles hide bodies from other animals that might want to munch on 'em. (UConn) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Tesla Sample, You Have Seven Chances 

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.