relaxation: is it real?

January 02, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that declares we can keep telling everyone "Happy new year!" the first time we see them at least until February, full stop, no caveats or takebacks 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I will recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. 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 18: RECHARGEIf you didn't do anything for the 2023 changeover, then I officially pronounce next Thursday to be your invitation to ring in the new year proper. Get up onstage and do something, or come support your new friends who are about to!!We'll see you on January 12; bring a few friends and let's see what we're all capable of!!(BTW, you can add it to your calendar (venue address and all) by clicking here)In case you need a refresher: Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot to play a song they'll write in 5 minutes. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can chill and watch. I absolutely guarantee you've never seen anything like it.🎼 MUSIC! 🎼🚀 COURAGE! 🚀✨ CREATIVITY! ✨January 12 20236p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I think I may have forgotten how to relax.As far as I can tell, this is the result of both the last few years of pandemic + parenting small children, a combo that's probably relevant to a large swath of the population from whom I would love to hear. The basic, distilled essence of the problem is this: if you are in your house 24/7 with little kids and you see something that needs taking care of — dirty dishes in the sink, a pile of something that needs cleaning, we're about to run out of milk — you take care of it either at the moment you notice it OR at the earliest available opportunity, full stop. The result is that your house stays standing and your family isn't living in filth, which is great. Except: you become a relentless engine of getting things taken care of, which turns you into Marge Simpson in that one episode, keeping herself in a state of catlike readiness. Which isn't so good for relaxing when you actually find yourself with free time!!!!This little nuance has only just recently occurred to me. It's part of why my recovery from burnout has been so slow, I think: I haven't even been able to see the whole problem. Now that I can see it, I'm trying to wrestle it into submission or at least hobble it at the ankles a little: I probably don't need to do the dishes 3x a day, for instance — some of the non-critical items can wait in the sink until it's their turn during the evening kitchen reset.* This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I enjoy doing dishes; I find it oddly meditative, not to mention quality podcast-listening time. But this is what I mean: I'm trying to let some things go and really truly just step away for an hour or two a day here in this, the year 20 goddamn 23. I can do that, right? The world won't fall apart or anything? OK, great. I'm glad we had this talk.* If you have the time and disposition to do this, I heartily endorse making sure you've got a clean sink before you start your evening wind-down. It makes the morning so much better! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Covid continues its slow but relatively benign burn through Mavis's immediate family one town away, so we've delayed Xmas 2: The Second Half of Xmas until this coming Sunday; likely we'll be hosting, as I imagine they're entirely sick of looking at the walls of their own dwellings by now and would welcome a change of pace. I realized there's a present for Quentin still in the garage that I forgot to extract from its hiding place and wrap, so I need to deliver it to his aunt, uncle, or grandparents so they can give it to him.Felix's vocabulary continues to evolve:❔ Muh?: (1) If employed while on the floor, a request for feeding time to begin. (2) If employed while already seated at the table, a request for more of whatever has just been offered.⚽ Ready!: An announcement that Felix is ready to toss the object in his hand, usually a ball or stuffy, to whoever he's making eye contact with.🎃 Daddy: Me. How about that!There are some things he's repeated after prompting that I'm not ready to enter into his vocabulary until he demonstrates some contextual comprehension, like "apple." We're watching his mind build itself, folks; it's very good. Would endorse! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The Scientists think they've spotted why some people never recover their sense of smell post-covid: their immune systems seem to be attacking their nasal cells. (Duke) (Paper) 

  • Kate Beaton got to have a little afternoon off and thus are we all blessed with some vintage Xmas card comics. (Thread on Twitter from @beatonna) 

  • The Scientists think we can capture the water vapor coming off the ocean and condense it for drinking, which will be important as access to fresh water shrinks in the coming years. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • This reads like one of those bullshit "I forced an AI to watch 1000 hours of Seinfeld" tweets, but take a look: The Scientists fed 912 movie scripts to a machine learning system and it was able to identify divides in gender portrayal just from reading the descriptions of actions the characters were supposed to take. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • Speaking of gender differences: why are women still doing most of the housework? Put another way: why don't men see the housework that needs doing? Philosophy, of all things, may have an answer. (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • According to The Scientists, brown algae in the ocean are socking away nearly the equivalent of the entire annual carbon output of Germany in the form of brown slime that nobody else in the sea wants anything to do with. (Max Planck Inst for Marine Microbiology) 

  • A new study says singing can help people recovering from strokes get their communication skills back faster; as a side effect, group music therapy also just seems to help them have a nicer time overall. (U of Helsinki) (Paper) 

  • There's no other way to put this: Reddit helped solve a fatal hit-and-run. (The Drive) 

  • A new anti-cancer drug shows encouraging results in its initial Phase I trials. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • The numbers say people get the least sleep from their 30s to their 50s, and you know what? According to my own personal research, I can verify these results. (University College London) (Paper) 

  • Hertz says their profits went up this year partially because they went big on electric cars, whose maintenance costs are about half that of gas-powered ones. (TCD) 

  • Corsi-Rosenthal boxes can help reduce chemical pollutants in indoor air, too! (Brown) 

  • The Scientists think you might be storing your working memory as patterns of firing synapses. (MIT) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumCatstrummer, We Break Lives Not Hearts(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.