Quentin: Year One

November 12, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wants to thank you if you showed up to Instant Band Night 7, and if you couldn't make it, there's always next time.* If you happen not to live in the San Francisco Bay, that's no excuse***January 10; mark your calendar.** (j/k) 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway88 - After-Action Report"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special guest Genevieve reveal essential truths about bad sex with hot people along with ideas for costumes, crafts, and a vital public service."Genevieve is back for her second episode, it's goddamn great, and if you don't listen to it you are missing the fuck out.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal). 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I need to alert you to two things that have happened on Netflix:1.The Great British Bake Off series 3 has been released under the moniker "The Great British Baking Show: The Beginnings" season 1, which I suppose is sort of technically true, since it was only the third season of Actual Bake Off and hence near the start of it all. Still: it's a weird thing for Netflix to do. But worthwhile, since this is the season with Brendan and Cathryn, two strong favorites in our particular household, which if you've been a subscriber since last October you probably know already (CONTAINS SPOILERS).2.The Great British Bake Off series 10 (the second one with Prue and Noel and Sandi) also just got put on Netflix as The Great British Baking Show collection 6, which is amazing given that it just aired like a month ago. There's a background joke in what I'm pretty sure is the fourth episode that had me laughing so hard I drooled a little; I hope the American edit kept it. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin turns one today. He's a year old! What the hell?!?! I know this is a cliche, but fuck, that happened insanely quickly. And that's honestly down to two things:1. Quentin's amazingly chill natureWhich we are 100% aware is entirely down to the luck of the genetic draw. In many ways, this is the biggest surprise, since both Mavis and I were apparently colicky babies. Quentin is incredibly easygoing and we did absolutely nothing to instigate it: he done just growed that way. And we are thankful.2. We're in this togetherMavis is a goddamn fantastic mom by any measure, but the only one that really counts is the look on Quentin's face when she enters the room. We know she's good. Not to self-horn-toot or anything, but I'm not too shabby in this department either, at least so far. The key, or at least a key, is that we've committed to being here and doing the work, but it doesn't have to be the same work. For instance, if I had to characterize my part, a larger share of it goes to what I think of as "operations and logistical support." Mavis, of course, gestated, delivered, and nursed him, and is our household's primary breadwinner; as a result of the former, though, I also think she acquired a set of Quentin-attunement powers I lack that enable her to tell whether he's tired just from the sound of his crying (for instance). Together, we make an extremely powerful dual-brained, quad-armed parental unit capable of handling all manner of terrain physical and metaphorical.As of the time of this writing, we have a birthday card for him that we're going to write and wait to give him (obviously, being a baby, he doesn't give a shit about cards he can't read). Wait how long, you ask? We don't know either! "When the time is right" seems to be the answer for the moment. What'll we put in it? That'll be up to us individually. I think I plan on telling him a little of what he's like now, and maybe one or two of my hopes for him generally -- things I hope he takes to heart as a person, not career aspirations. Right now I think I've settled on: 

  • May you use your powers responsibly

  • May you not be an asshole

I think that's all I've got for this section for now. A whole year already! Holy shit! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Puzzle montage is a thing! (Boing Boing) 

  • This particular science project baffles me a little, though it is cool-sounding, namely "A bionic mushroom that generates electricity," but why a mushroom? It seems like literally any substrate would do. Or am I missing something? (Americal Chemical Society press release via EurekAlert) 

  • I'm extremely fascinated by this attempt at using robotics and machine learning to discover new materials and compounds. (MIT Technology Review) 

  • I find something disquieting about this study where researchers created simulated societies to examine them for sources of religious conflict: turns out a 60/40 mix is the most volatile. What if you replace "religion" with say, "political ideology" and then take a look at actual America? Obviously, there are some caveats -- who's to say the simulation is any good in the first place? -- but still. Still! (Quartz) 

  • Has the Poke Trend Peaked? God, I fucking hope so; we must be down to like three tuna in the entire goddamn ocean by this point. (Eater) 

  • Rewilding could help prevent huge wildfires. (Anthropocene) 

  • Cheap conference swag is bad for a lot of reasons, but is there an alternative? Fast Company says maybe. (Fast Company) 

  • Okay, look: this underwater hotel villa can only be rented for 4-night stays at a cost of $200K, so I need to find a bunch of people with whom to rob a bank and go on an extremely rad vacation afterwards. (CNN) 

  • If you've ever wondered how exactly are robots supposed to create rocket fuel from Martian soil for the theoretical return trip, here you go. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • There's a guy trying to make a time capsule for the whole world out of laser-engraved ceramics, and it's kind of a beautiful, quirky project. (GQ) 

  • Llama blood might be the key to making a treatment that can kill multiple strains of flu without needing to be refactored every time. (BBC News) 

  • Maybe we should be eating nuts instead of meat? (AHA press release) 

  • I have to admit I'm a little skeptical of LarvalBot, but at the same time, we fuckin' might as goddamn well give it a try, right? Given the alternative? (Motherboard) 

  • Speaking of robots, remember those mapping drones from Prometheus? Well, now we've got a crude prototype version. This seems like it should come in handy for the other autonomous robots that'll be exploring Europa or Enceladus someday, doesn't it? (New Atlas) 

  • Science is slowly starting to untangle ASMR. (New Scientist) 

  • Why Do White Women Keep Voting for the GOP and Against Their Own Interests? (Vogue) 

  • Just a heads-up that Logan Paul is going to attempt a comeback at some point. (Hollywood Reporter) 

  • The National Park Service has its own FBI. Seriously. It's goddamn fascinating! (Outside) 

  • VR really hasn't taken off. Will it later? Meh? (The Outline) 

  • BuzzFeed News is legit killing it these days: This Is How We Radicalized The World. (BuzzFeed News, obvs) 

  • Machine learning can be used to detect written lies, at least the ones in Spanish that are about robberies that didn't happen. Still, though: it's an interesting step forward. (Quartz) 

  • For a while now I've been vaguely uncomfortable whenever I see people bust out that "look for the helpers" line from Mr. Rogers after something awful happens, but never really tried to articulate to myself exactly why. Thankfully, someone else has now done it, and hit the nail right on the fucking head; the last paragraph in particular is [chef kiss]. (Atlantic) 

  • Let's take a trip down memory lane to approximately a thousand years ago: Halloween week, to be precise, when we all learned of the preposterously brazen dumbassery of MAGA idiot Jacob Wohl, long may his name be spoken in ridicule. (The Cut) 

  • A frank examination of Our GOP Problem From Hell, accompanied (thank fuck) by a suggestion for how to address it. (Crooked Media) A worthy companion read is this one on how There's Money in Fascism. (GQ) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumAstronaut Mannequin, There's a Story There Somewhere 

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.