someone make this amusement park for me

August 20, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's not going to Burning Man and kind of misses living in San Francisco during the week thereof, when the place becomes noticeably less crowded. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway78 - International Bureau of Tacos"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Geri-Ayn (@geriayn) both unearth and create (on the spot) ideas for games, food, and a truly groundbreaking amusement park."I'm serious when I say I want someone to do the amusement park we talk about in here, and I strongly suspect I am NOT ALONE. It can't be that hard to get off the ground. Should I make a business plan?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).More Tales From Ten ForwardTales From Ten Forward is essentially Drunk History but for Star Trek episodes. We'd love to make more, but it turns out making videos is surprisingly expensive, so we're crowdfunding. We are absolutely not going to try to build a movie studio or print merch or run away to the Caribbean or some other such nonsense -- we just want to feed our cast/crew and buy the props we inevitably turn out to need. If you can, help or signal boost as you see fit!More Tales From Ten ForwardAlternatively: this is also covered in the GoFundMe text, but if you've got a bunch of Star Trek junk you don't need and think we could find a use for it, get @ me. You won't be getting it back, but hey -- it'll be out of your house!Instant Band Night VI: The Undiscovered CountryThe sixth Instant Band Night is happening in just about a month:Thursday September 13507 55th St 946098p$5/personBYOBInstant Band Night is a pet party concept of mine 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!!!!!!!Here's what it actually looks like: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: if you like a good time, or know someone in the SF Bay who does, you know where to send 'em. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Scorching hot take incoming: the fact that people release live episodes of podcasts is conclusive proof that nobody actually needs fancy Radiolab-level Studio Sound Quality on their shows. Live episodes are usually technically "worse" sounding, but does it matter? It does not. At least not to me: I cease to notice sound quality of any kind after the first 30 seconds. My brain just wants to know: can I understand the talking? Great -- end of line. I suspect the vast majority of shows are over-engineering. Just make it so we can understand the talking; anything after that is bonus credit, but not actually necessary. I'm just sayin'. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We inherited an assortment of wooden blocks from a friend whose kid has outgrown them, and they've been an instant hit. They're painted in cheerful primary colors; some of them have shiny bits stuck to them, or interesting features built in (a jingly bell, a rail with some colorful beads on it), and they just feel solid and good. I have no idea who made them -- they seem to have come from an age before Ubiquitous Branding™ -- so whoever you are, my metaphorical hat is off to you. Between these, the letter blocks we also got from the same source, and an array of small plush toys, we have a lot of great material to pile into a small square Tupperware and place in Quentin's lap while he sits on the rug. It's goddamn excellent: he seems capable of amusing himself endlessly as long as he's got the Tupperware of toys, a rattle, and a blanket or something else floppy to try to mangle. For all I know, this phase may be brief -- he might be crawling next week, who the hell knows -- but it is almost unbelievably precious. He's so happy; he's my happy little guy. Where'd this happiness come from? We must be doing something right; this isn't a self-backpat so much as a thank you to wherever the instincts I've used to hold up my end are coming from, which I suspect is a cocktail of my parents, friends, and various media I've absorbed throughout the course of my life. Now all I have to do is mix a cocktail of the same quality for Quentin. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • MIT Technology Review shows us four big vulnerable spots Russian hackers might use to target our election systems, which honestly just boil down to one: the whole goddamn thing. 

  • Elizabeth Warren had a fucking incredible idea, y'all. 

  • In this hellhole economy it's bad form to make fun of people for moving in with their parents, but it will always be right to make fun of Nazi scum for doing it, especially if their parents yell at them while they're trying to make their stupid videos. 

  • Everyone's going to have to read this vivid and damning illustration of The Three Bay Areas. Sorrynotsorry. 

  • Somehow it's not surprising to hear that America is terrible at summer vacation, but the truly awful implications of that simple statement don't become apparent without a little analysis that this article is happy to provide. 

  • If I'm reading this right, scientists might've found a new to stop HIV from becoming dangerous by fucking up the way it assembles after replication. 

  • What It Means That the Far Right Sees Pedophiles Everywhere. 

  • So that Boston Dynamics SpotMini is becoming a real product, but ......... what are we gonna use it for? 

  • Is good design elitist? A fascinating read. 

  • Oh fuck yes, a code of ethics for programmers! 

  • [POUNDS FISTS ON TABLE] Videogames that can teach empathy are cool and needed! Videogames that can teach empathy ARE COOL AND-- 

  • My Twitter bubble is such that I only saw the very edges of this phenomenon, but The World of MAGA Thirst Traps is a real thing and the fact that it works is both utterly predictable and surprisingly disheartening. 

  • Quantum computing might actually be a thing at some point? 

  • How alarmed do I really need to be about "snapchat dysmorphia"? Why am I reticent to believe it's as widespread as the article claims? This is probably work I need to do on myself. 

  • Stop, wait, hang on, hold everything: a park in France trained crows to pick up trash. 

  • Until I read this piece, I'd never heard of this anonymized corporate social network before, and I have to wonder about what the article's author sees as the role of HR. If I were somewhere in the HR stack, wouldn't I at least be interested in this as a way to learn what people might actually think about working at my company? 

  • Some of the engineers who've built (or are building) the gig economy worry they've created a monster. Okay, great. What are you doing about it, then??? 

  • A small, scrappy student team beat one from Google research in a machine learning challenge. 

  • It's too bad the cops didn't announce the moment those cowards slunk out of there on some kind of loudspeaker, so the assembled masses could chant the "na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye" song at them. 

  • I both do and don't know the answer to the question this 538 piece asks, namely Can Science Save Politics? Or Will Politics Ruin Science?

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Hidden Weapons, Both the Rabble and the Rousers 

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.