one month til Instant Band Night 21

June 19, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that just discovered you can essentially get a subscription to the good sunscreen (Banana Boat "Light as Air" 50) on Amazon??? 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded!!!! In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 21: MIXERLet this be your one-month warning: this is gonna be incredible. Get ready to rock out onstage with friendly strangers for a wildly receptive audience, or just be part of said audience and bear witness to creative genius several times in a row!! Mark your calendar now just to be sure you don't miss it!July 13 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUNew stuff alert: there's a bunch in the Etsy shop right now! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! It's all happening!! 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.This week's got nothing here because I'm putting this together the literal morning it's supposed to send; as usual I'm happy to take questions for any future editions if you've got 'em! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Felix's daycare is offline until after the Fourth of July for an incredibly well-deserved summer break, which means he's hanging out around these parts for a few weeks. This very morning I've noticed he's got kind of a runny nose. So that's well-timed, I suppose? Please join me in prayer and supplication to the various microbe gods that whatever's happening in there doesn't jump to Quentin; we just got over everybody having a cold. We just did this!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Some interesting results came out of a test where The Scientists deliberately infected a bunch of volunteers with the rona; did you know there are COVID "supershedders"?? (Nature) 

  • Cli-mate law-suits! [clap clap, clap-clap-clap] Cli-mate law-suits! [clap clap, clap-clap-clap] Let's fucking gooooooooooooooo (Vox) 

  • "Special counsel Jack Smith stared at Trump throughout historic court appearance, report says". I love this. Fucking haunt that motherfucker!!! (Independent) 

  • In other, less pleasant news of things that will haunt you, read this historian's take on why Republicans keep doubling down on Trumpism instead of just taking the goddamn exit ramps. This one's a must-read for the week, folks. (Democracy Americana) 

  • The Scientists are looking at baking soda as a component for hydrogen storage in the ongoing quest for clean energy. (Pacific Northwest Natl Lab) (Paper) 

  • Looks like E. Jean Carroll's gonna get to take a stick to the Trump pinata again; who wants to lay odds on him saying something stupid again and getting hit a third time? (CNN) 

  • US-made wind and solar components are cheaper — by as much as 30% — than imports for the first time in history! (Electrek) 

  • Reading this article on Vienna's social housing and the percentage of income they pay in rent will make you want to burn down everything around you, and you'd be right to do it. ($NYT) 

  • What if DARPA, but for infrastructure? (The Verge) 

  • "On the Moral Responsibilities of Political Spouses: People will die, and it will be your fault." Kinda hard to argue with, honestly. (How Things Work) Especially when you read this profile on him! (NBC News) 

  • The Scientists confirm that the subsurface ocean on Enceladus contains all the ingredients necessary for life. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Southwest Research Inst) (Paper) 

  • "The Gross Spectacle Of Murder Fandom: After four University of Idaho students were killed, TikTok and Reddit sleuths swarmed the campus. The community is still struggling with the wreckage they left behind." (~$Atlantic) 

  • If you don't have ADHD, so-called "smart drugs" like Ritalin will actually fuck your performance up: do worse, faster! (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • Speaking of drugs, this is almost certainly a one-off, but I kinda do want to know how many other white supremacists we could convert back into humans after giving them some molly. (Business Insider) 

  • Pew Research has published a deep dive on the top-ranked podcasts in the US; true crime still rules the school, but the "Other" category is surprisingly robust. (Pew Research) 

  • As a species, we've moved so much groundwater around that the rotational pole of the entire planet has shifted by almost a yard. (AGU) (Paper) 

  • There's a big squid down in the deep sea with lemon-sized glowing organs at the tips of two of its arms, and The Scientists would love to know what the hell they're for. (Nautilus) 

  • SPEED GEEKING. It's a great idea! Oh, I can feel in my very bones the need to organize one of these out in the world and not at a conference!!! (Nature) 

  • A writer for Vice UK tried to cut small talk out of his life and replace it with some suggested conversation openers from the Harvard Business Review; any guesses how it went? (Vice) 

  • At least one space publication wants us to keep in mind that "The Growing UAP Narrative Still Lacks Hard Evidence". (Supercluster) 

  • How much social interaction do you really need? Depends on who you are, of course, but also the kind of interactions you're having. (Vox) 

  • Seeing dead fruit flies makes living ones die faster; The Scientists have now identified the neural mechanism responsible. (The Conversation) 

  • Some Engineers have created a hydrogel that can pull water out of the air just about anywhere, even the desert. (MIT) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated the first design for a solid-state, liquid-free rechargeable battery. (Waseda U) (Paper) 

  • Ed Zitron says he can smell the wind starting to change on the concept of venture capital. (Where's Your Ed At) 

  • There are microbes in the water deep underground right now making oxygen in the dark. (Marine Biological Lab) (Paper) 

  • Twelve star systems involving at least one planet orbiting a pair of binary stars have been discovered; the latest one's got two planets! No word thus far on the presence of moisture farms, droid-exclusionary bars, or a place called Toshi Station. (U of Birmingham) (Paper) 

  • "A storefront for robots: The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other." (The Verge) 

  • The orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar seem to be escalating, but it's unclear whether they're out for revenge or just want to horse around with us. (Business Insider) 

  • If you wanted a perplexed longread on the lunatic QAnon shithead who calls herself the "Queen of Canada" and how the small towns she rolls into deal with her, this one'll do just fine. (Vice) 

  • A lot of optical illusions actually are the result of your eye parts doing what they do, not your mind. (U of Exeter) (Paper) 

  • The Kids are running with the "canon event" concept from the new Spider-Verse movie and you know what, it's pretty good. Maybe don't read this if you haven't seen the new Spider-Verse? (Guardian) 

  • I love it: a new English dialect peculiar to south Florida appears to be emerging, according to linguists. (The Conversation) 

  • Remember those cool robots from Interstellar? Maybe they should've been triangle-based instead of stick-based. (EPFL) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Ivan Maljarenko on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Photo by Marco Giesuppe Timelli on UnsplashAnother week without any reader interpretations, which leaves me free to note that I think Instant Beard was the side project for half of a soft-spoken folk-adjacent duo similar to Kings of Convenience; this album was full of songs too angsty for the main band. 

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.