out here, in here

March 23, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's proud of you for maintaining proper social distancing. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway135 - I Put On My Robe and Wizard PastaJon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Shawna discover several exceptional ideas for food, last-minute delivery technology, and art (plus a bonus impromptu Book Critique Corner).This episode poses an intriguing question that we definitely invite you, the listener, to weigh in on; leave a review with your answer, I guess? Don't forget to drop in the ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating!!Instant Band Night 15: POSTPONEDWe postponed it until May 14! I live in hope that we'll be given the all-clear by then, but who the hell knows.This link still works, though. We'll see each other again: know this.It's also still on Facebook if you're there, too* * 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.We have a TV with a built-in Chromecast that displays random photos from selected albums of mine in Google Photos. It's a nice way to see moments from our wedding reception or photos of our friend's dog Paisley. It's also nice just to see our friends, honestly, but here I have to report a shortcoming: these pictures are now getting old. Our wedding was almost four years ago! I've been toying with the notion of asking pals of mine to send me a fun selfie so I can build a new album and put it into the rotation. I think it's as close as I'm going to get to hanging out with folks I miss for the foreseeable; let me know if you have thoughts.Utterly unrelatedly, it's been suggested that we as a society put our Xmas lights back up; it's cheerful, and it also gives people something to look at while they take appropriately socially-distanced walks or drives out and about. In Philly they're doing rainbow hunts for kids, which is also goddamn delightful. What else? There's gotta be other things we could do, too. I have this tiny little weird notion that we could start an entire tradition of putting a strange external detail onto our dwellings just for passersby to admire -- a little fake door with a miniscule pictographic sign hung on the knob, a small statue of a grasshopper in a top hat, etc. Look, people have been putting weird shit in front of their houses for a while now, I'm just saying there should be MORE so we can look at it! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's linguistic development seems to have taken some leaps in the last week or so; we both feel like his sentences are getting more complex. Also, we got our first "Why?" a couple nights ago, though it has yet to make a repeat appearance. Finally, a minor lexical mystery has been provisionally solved: we think "lala" is an intensifier. "I want a pickle lala" and "I want some milk lala" have provided additional clues; both of these are things he loves a lot and always requests at mealtimes. Some variant of "I'm messy lala" has also happened when he's eaten a particularly crumb-filled lunch and it's gotten all over his pants. So we're going with "intensifier" for now; should this change, you will be alerted.Something else that just happened today: Mavis asked me over dinner to tell her what's been happening in Star Trek: Picard -- like, the whole show up to now (9 out of 10 episodes have been shown thus far). So I did, of course, making a valiant attempt to condense and distill vital storyline elements that I think was overall pretty decent but extremely dense with Terminology: double-secret Romulan organizations and synthetic life, etc. Quentin apparently found this fascinating, and requested "Do again," so I expounded on a couple individual characters for the both of them. During post-dinner playtime (while I was washing the dishes), he asked Mavis to tell her a story, but he had very specific subject matter in mind: "Once upon a time about Romulans."Parenting: still good, y'all. Still good. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • My most excellent friend Amy has started a newsletter full of interesting and worthwhile things to do while under sparkling isolation from the comfort of your couch. Check out the back issues, too! (Together Alone) 

  • A concrete coronavirus policy proposal from an actual economist (and friend of mine) that's worth readin'! (Roosevelt Institute) 

  • So you worry less about catching the rona from your takeout: a comprehensive food safety FAQ from the experts. (Serious Eats) 

  • BEHIND THE SCENES OF GOURMET MAKES, Y'ALL (Bon Appetit) 

  • Inflatable soft robots are a great but inarguably weird-lookin' idea. (Stanford) 

  • Advice for working from home under these uniquely stressful conditions from someone who knows what's what. (Dr. Aisha Ahmad via Threadreader) 

  • As long as we're doing these, here's advice on perspective from someone who reports on the climate apocalypse. (Alex Steffen via Threadreader) 

  • Finally, here's why it's a complete fantasy to think journalists holding Trump's feet to the fire during his laughable bullshit press briefings would produce any meaningful or even halfway useful result. (Jay Rosen via Threadreader) 

  • Maybe don't click on this link if you're not a fan of seeing worms in fish, but parasitic worms that show up in sushi have increased by 283x since the 70s. (U of Washington) 

  • Trolls World Tour is going to be a big experiment in feature film digital direct releases, so it's important we rent it -- if not for us or the film industry, then for the McElroy brothers, who are (as it turns out) in it. (The Verge) 

  • The largest mass migration on the planet happens every day and we never see it. (Science Alert) 

  • Quarantine for poly people: what's it like being in isolation with your girlfriend and her other boyfriend? (The Cut) 

  • Perhaps not surprisingly, this would be a great time to close streets from car traffic permanently. (The Verge) 

  • Biodegradable wearable electronics displays could potentially be derived from fish scales instead of petroleum products. (American Chemical Society) 

  • Facebook's business model is predicated on the capitalistic usefulness of misinformation, which ........... isn't great. Just sayin'. (The Verge) 

  • Lego bricks that fall in the sea could last between 1-13 centuries. (Science Alert) 

  • I'm gonna need some time to really sit with this helpful-infographic-laden article on what we think the shape of the universe might be. (Quanta) 

  • Let's read a little about new projects set up to detect alien life, how about. (Knowable) 

  • Kinda hard to argue with: "Coronavirus makes it impossible to ignore the economic insecurity built into our labor market" (Brookings Institute) 

  • Automated sentiment analysis of thousands of studies on reintroducing threatened species to the wild concludes that we're getting better at it. Which is nice. (Cell via Science Daily) 

  • Instead of trying to geoengineer all of climate change away, what if we just shot for about half? Turns out it might be safer. (IOP Science) 

  • Things that I wonder when I hear about stuff like this "mantis-man" petroglyph: are we sure? What if whoever made it was just really bad at drawing? Don't get me wrong, I would love to believe in an ancient carving of a mantis-man, but I just wonder. (Pensoft) 

  • Robots that blast UV light are out there disinfecting hospitals. Thanks, robots. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Do you want a font that just turns all your letters into soothing colored dots? In that case, here you go. (And Repeat) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumTop Level Domain, It Seemed Like Such a Good Idea at the Time 

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.