on the mutability of ritual

September 06, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that more often than not has a baby strapped to the front of its body when it's sitting down at the computer these days 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawaySomething resembling a routine is starting to come into focus, so it's possible I might be able to get around to editing the new episode in about a month. Progress, right?? Progress.A new study came out today that links giving our show a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Apple Podcasts to living longer, healthier, and happier. No you can't see a copy, it's undergoing peer review.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberI'll be honest: I don't know if the Delta variant has fucked our plans for November 11th's return of Instant Band Night. At this point I'm assuming everyone reading this has gotten their shot, so what's left to do but wait, cross our fingers, and also run through the streets forcibly vaccinating everyone we can get our mitts on? I'll see you out there.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Notes on the new house:The new house has less overall space than the old one, which had the benefit of a truly enormous family room that was added on at some point during its lifetime.However, the new house has more rooms: there's a genuine third bedroom, which we've turned into an office, and a strange under-the-house basementy-crawl-spacey sort of room that we've taken to calling the Hobbit Hole. Part of the Hobbit Hole has a clean cement floor, but over where some of the ventilation(?) equipment lives, you can see raw dirt, and there's a square grate that looks directly out onto the side yard at ground level. The Hobbit Hole is therefore great for storage, but only for things that are in sealed plastic tubs or things that live in cardboard boxes that don't give a shit if they get accidentally wet (like dishes). Sorting out which things are which is a project for the near future, because right now the garage is almost unusably cluttered with boxes and things that could probably go into bins (I've bought a bunch of bins).Something that averages out to neutral is that there are hardwood floors, which are nice, but they creak like a motherfucker, which feels extremely loud when I'm going upstairs at 3a to get Mavis for a nighttime Felix feeding. Discovering what spots to step on that might yield less creakage is an ongoing project.The new house is a definite upgrade in all other senses aside from space. Electrical outlets are plentiful and have three prongs. The kitchen faucet operates smoothly, even though there's a quirk to its facing that I think I might have to make a sign for in the inevitable event we have company over and they activate what they think is the cold water. The shower curtain rod has a pronounced outward bulge to it whose purpose seemed opaque until I actually took a shower and realized how much more space it gives me. The showerhead itself is also great, combining directionality with the generosity of a rainfall-style spray in just the right amount. The toilet is one of those water-saving ones, but was designed with an eye toward maximizing flow that has shown no mercy to anything we've put into it thus far, which I can't say for the old place. There are also three small, circular skylights that pipe light into the kitchen, stairwell, and main bathroom to a surprising degree.I don't have a moral to this story, if it even counts as one; I'm just observing. But the upshot is that I like this house, which right now is enough.I once again want to use this space to briefly shout out everyone who's been sending me catching-up emails of whatever length seems right; they're great and so are you. Thanks! I really do appreciate them. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Update on last week: Quentin's rona test results finally came back at 1a on Tuesday: negative. But he passed whatever it is he had to us, and even though it was fairly mild as colds go, it was still kind of a pain in the ass to deal with for the few days we each had it.Felix gets a feeding around the 9p range, and these days more often than not we can get him to sleep reasonably easily afterward. His wakeups following this feeding seem to be slowly but steadily migrating later and later: first it was around midnight, then 1a, then 2a, and now the norm seems to be somewhere around 3a. A couple nights ago, he slept all the way until 5a, but has yet to repeat that particular feat. Fingers crossed for current trends holding?Quentin's own bedtime ritual has become slightly more protracted; as a result of a pileup of transitions (Felix's arrival, moving houses, a return to preschool after two whole weeks of "home days"), he's been demanding a nightly exchange of "air hugs" and "air kisses" to be transmitted from the threshold of his room before we close the door. For the past few nights running, a new element has been added to the end: the invocation of ritual words, which are some combination of "Good night, sweet dreams, sleep tight, I love you" (tonight he forgot the "sweet dreams" part). These words must be spoken first by us, with no deviation, at which point he says them back before we close the door; once it's safely closed, our hearts are free to melt. I don't know where he picked it up from, but it's great. No further questions at this time. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I don't love this: hard-line Trumpites are starting to take over the machinery of the Republican party at the county level. (ProPublica) 

  • The way we respond to disasters is going to have to change, because disasters are going to start piling up regularly thanks to climate change. (The Verge) 

  • "Our Never-Ending Empathy for Everything Is Backfiring: Here’s what to try instead." (Slate) 

  • Zuckerbergian syntax is a linguistically identifiable phenomenon. ($NYT) 

  • Evidence seems to suggest we could increase crop yields by up to a fifth by ditching monocultures and introducing some diversity into agricultural landscapes. (Anthropocene) 

  • This is probably a drum I've banged on before, but the world really truly did get pleasantly quieter for marine life while we were all on lockdown. (Hakai) 

  • If you haven't kept up on sci fi microtrends or managed to read the latest Becky Chambers book yet, here's a primer on solarpunk, the literal most hopeful subgenre that exists right now. (Vice) 

  • "OH MY FUCKING GOD, GET THE FUCKING VACCINE ALREADY, YOU FUCKING FUCKS" (McSweeney's) 

  • Flying humanoid robots? Why not, honestly. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Scientists are testing something they call "marine cloud brightening" to provide some protection from the sun for the Great Barrier Reef. (Nature) 

  • Take a look at these movie posters generated by a neural network and see if you can guess which ones they're for. (AI Movie Posters) 

  • It's time to rethink air conditioning. (Vox) 

  • "What Your Favorite 90s Rock Band Says About The Type Of Bored Suburban Dad You Are Today" (McSweeney's) 

  • An extremely smart Irish kid has come up with a way to pull microplastics out of water with ferrofluids. (BBC Future) 

  • If a magical genie appeared in front of you and offered to grant you a wish, what's the difference in how you think it'd behave if it were a good genie vs. an evil genie? Your answer reveals something about how you view humans, at least according to this study. (U of Waterloo) 

  • There's a whole category of potentially hospitable exoplanets we didn't think of: big ones with hydrogen atmospheres and liquid oceans, which the science world seems to have already decided to call "hycean" instead of "hydrocean," which I think is a more satisfying portmanteau. (Science News) 

  • According to a recent study, people who are assholes in person are also assholes online, and in fact, nice people generally tend not to talk about politics online at all. (Gizmodo) (Paper) 

  • Scientists at my alma mater have invented a machine learning algorithm that can digest video and identify discrete behaviors taking place in-frame, which saves researchers entire worlds' worth of work. (CMU) 

  • Here's a fascinating longread on the missing billion years of geological history that predate the Cambrian explosion. (BBC Future) 

  • What if there were wood floors that generated electricity whenever people walked on them? (Cell Press via Science Daily) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumArmy of Cats, We Came to Brag 

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.