roll 1d20 and call me in the morning

August 06, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's glad to be back and hopes you've been well in its absence. Seriously. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway76 - Show Me What You Got"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and return special guest Jessica Zollman (@jayzombie) dig up promising ideas around food, parties, and apps before getting into humanity's inevitable brush with extraterrestrial sexual relations."This episode contains a spoiler for The Office that's technically now five years old, but also (more importantly) a lot of talk about banging aliens.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcast app 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).Instant Band Night VI: The Undiscovered CountryThe sixth Instant Band Night is coming. It's true this is most relevant for SF Bay area residents, but if you don't live here, you might have friends who do, so keep readingThursday September 13507 55th St 946098p$5/personBYOBInstant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot.(1)The first rule of Instant Band Night is: 👏 YOU 👏 DON'T 👏 HAVE 👏 TO 👏 PLAY 👏 AN 👏 INSTRUMENT 👏 TO 👏 ATTEND 👏 (2)The second rule of Instant Band Night is: We guarantee you (the audience) an astonishingly excellent time.(3)The third rule of Instant Band Night is: Invite your friends!!!!!!!The Nitty Gritty™:1. The stage has a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard, and mics.2. We draw names out of hats to make instant bands that get 10 minutes in the green room to plan an 8-minute set.3. A hat-drawn artist will also take the stage alongside each band to draw their gig poster on a meeting room easel pad.Come play or come watch; you'll have fun either way! Bring your people, crack a beverage: let's do this. Here are convenient links to Facebook and Eventbrite; invite your pals! Forward this email! Make fliers and contract a skywriting service??? I'm not here to tell you what to do. I AM here to say: odds seem very high indeed that you're great, and I hope to see you there if you're in the SF Bay area. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.About a week ago, I ran a one-shot, single-night D&D adventure* for a group of dear and distant friends over the internet (using Roll20, which actually worked pretty damn well for our purposes), and they had such a good time I'm now being lovingly railroaded into DMing an entire campaign for them. I think I've worked out the setting: 

  • The usual fantasy trappings (elves, halflings, magic, etc)

  • A seaside town crawling with thieves, assassins, and smugglers

  • The group of players is seven(!!!) strong, eclectic enough in race and skillsets that I've taken to calling them a Fantasy Fast & Furious crew

Here's my question for you: got any ideas for jobs they could pull? Even if it's just a single sentence or even a fragment of a notion, I'd be happy to hear it. Seriously, go nuts. If there's anything I've learned, it's that my single mind working on its own is nowhere near as creative as many minds, even if not all of them are concentrating 100% on the task. I bet some of you out there have some real crazy ideas, and I would be ecstatic to hear them.* It wasn't anything you'd find in a sourcebook; I like to make up my own D&D adventures, even entire D&D systems. I once ginned up a lean & nimble Star Trek D&D-ish ruleset that I've gone so far as to write a few adventures for, the craziest of which was surely a Stranger Things-inspired one that I ran some friends through for a series of bonus podcast episodes:Part 0 (explaining the system, making characters)Part 1Part 2Part 3 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We've learned that Quentin is actually a pretty good plane traveler! Between that and his sleeping habits, it would seem we've won some sort of genetic lottery without even trying. Although it's also becoming clear that he's not super great at road trips, so we're not 100% blessed by the universe.Quentin is also definitely starting to become more mobile, having mastered to various degrees the following maneuvers: 

  • Flip onto tummy

  • Scoot backward

  • Pivot in place

And although we've witnessed him perform the tricks below to a small degree, he doesn't yet seem able to perform them at will: 

  • Flip onto back

  • Scoot forward

In the face of the terrible-day-that-comes when he learns to propel himself forward at will and thus will no longer stay where I put him, I've been advised that it's possible to halt a baby's motion fairly effectively by just putting a pillow in front of him. I'm hoping this is true, and will work long enough for us to get babyproofin'. We've got some cords to manage, but they'll require a little couch-moving and rug-lifting, so it's going to be a Thing. Further updates as events warrant. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters. This is complicated, because on the one hand it's satisfying to think that these credulous morons have bought into something obviously ridiculous and stupid that it turns out our side engineered, but on the other, the part where some of the more credulous morons run around in public with weaponry threatening bystanders is ....... less satisfying; more dismaying. 

  • Look. We know Republicans don't care when you expose their hypocrisies. We know this. It's practically part of their goddamn brand at this point. But even so, this is next-level. 

  • Is it possible the alt-right tactic of drumming up fake outrage to get someone fired over "questionable" tweets is already shot? We won't know for sure until James Gunn gets rehired, honestly. 

  • Fortune makes (to me, anyway) a reasonably convincing case that the economic boom is likely to end sometime soon. 

  • What if urban planners treated green space like a drug? No, really, the data is intriguing. 

  • Wait, yanking CO2 out of the air to make fuel is possible? 

  • City or suburbs? Where do millenials really want to live??? Where????? 

  • We have data that proves open offices don't work. Are we going to stop making them a thing? Probably not. This is one example of the kind of problem Joi Ito's doctoral thesis wants to talk about, I think (more on that below). 

  • Well, then: After 15 years of trying, scientists successfully transplanted lab-grown lungs into pigs. 

  • If a robot spends a hundred virtual years training itself to manipulate a cube and does just okay, what happens if it spends 200? 1000? 1M? Can we see that curve plotted out? I'm curious. 

  • Every time people try to make humanoid robots, they keep falling down, so making centaurs instead seems like a great plan to me. 

  • Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason. Hard to argue with, honestly. 

  • If you read that Wired article about the top-to-bottom clusterfuck of a tech-enabled middle school in San Francisco, this one about Lebron James's public school in Akron will give you hope. 

  • Should we talk to bigots and try to feel empathy for them? Maybe? Or maybe not? 

  • Joi Ito wrote his doctoral thesis on the problem-solving value of human networks and I'm hip-deep in it right now. It's interesting! 

  • Scientists have figured out where the Devil's Kettle waterfall goes, and the answer is anticlimactic but still kind of neat. 

  • A new plastic-like material made from chitin and cellulose that's compostable? Can we get it tomorrow??? I wonder if "scaling specialist" is a job that should exist across all research departments, or if the challenges of scaling new materials vary so wildly from instance to instance that it would be meaningless? 

  • LIQUID WATER ON MARSTHIS IS NOT A DRILL 

  • This on-demand cookie business was actually profitable, but shut down anyway because .... why? Their investors weren't getting a big enough return? Fuck that, and fuck you. Shut down a failing startup, fine, but this really grinds my gears. What about the people you employed, you colossal fucking assholes? If I ever meet these founders, I'm going to punch them in their stupid faces. 

  • God damn, but I want to live in a future where I can say my house is powered by a bacterial stack on the roof. Let's get there, people. 

  • Your CB Insights brief for the week is about six online stores that counterintuitively opened brick & mortar locations and are (just as counterintuitively) crushing it. 

  • Overall I like this explainer on the roots and effects of toxic videogame culture, but I could do with a longer solutions section. Unless it's that short for, you know, a reason. 

  • Here's a pretty good Queer Eye thinkpiece that takes a while and is kind of uncomfortable, but probably for good reason. 

  • If this weren't in the Washington Post, I would not have believed America had ever in its entire history had an idea as smart as these childcare centers of the past. 

  • Is there not such a thing as a common-sense Title IX exception for these girls-only trade classes? 

  • Here's a tally of all the (cough) completely legitimate cryptocurrencies that were endorsed by celebrities and where they are now. Seriously, who wants to help me get Woke Points going? 

  • This landmine-munching machine seems great and all, but how the fuck do you get the dirt in the hopper in the first place?

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsVibe MinimalSkeletons With ProblemsBeardmother 

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.