the birthday month is upon you!!!

December 06, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter looking at this week's forecasts of rain and crossing all available fingers 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayIt's now December and that means I have a month left to make good on the edit to the last episode we recorded back in who-knows-when. THE CLOCK IS TICKING.At this point I know I risk sounding like a DJ Khaled soundbite ([ANOTHER_ONE.OGG]), but nevertheless I feel compelled to shout praise and congratulations from the rooftops to another marvelous human who's gone and left a review on our Apple Podcasts page, and whoever else it was that raised our total of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings to 43: you are unquestionably the most powerful humans on Earth for the next week.Instant Band Night 15: Probably In MarchI think at this point we should probably reschedule for March, because it doesn't seem like there'll be a vaccine for kids under 5 by the time mid-January rolls around. I'm now taking nominations for the name of the March version; since it was supposed to be March of 2020, maybe we can do somethin' with that. I'll update the event pages accordingly. (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.On Friday I turned the Douglas Adams Number of years old, and am choosing to celebrate with little gatherings with extremely excellent friends. There have been two thus far, and I'm hoping to schedule more; the one I'm struggling with conceptually is the one with all my pals who are now parents. 'Cause there's a fuckin lot of us all of a sudden, and nobody has the ability to just fuck off from parenting for a night and go hang out someplace. Should I just designate a local park with a big enough playground and say "Hey, let's gather here: the kids can climb on the stuff and we can just keep an eye on 'em and hang out with each other for an hour or two without any kind of ceremony or ritual"? Maybe that????I can't wait until all our kids are, like, 12, and we can go do a big laser tag hangout that involves everyone. That'll be a thing we can do, right?? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Felix is currently going through what I've mentally dubbed The War On Naps (From 3-7p). He'll nap fine in the mornings, and even in the early afternoon can be persuaded to snooze for his usual 30-60m, but after a certain time of day there's just no point in trying. We have to just give up and let him hang out or put him in his car seat and go for a walk or something. At night he still sleeps more or less from roughly 10p-6a, which is extremely good, but the flipside is that it's like a betrayal when he doesn't: he pooped himself awake around midnight one night this week and the process of getting him back to sleep was mildly harrowing. It's compounded by the fact that he really, truly prefers Mavis to be the one to soothe him back down; often I can't even get him to stop yelling. Oddly, I was able to crack the puzzle and get him to sleep for good that night, but I don't yet know if it was the ineffable hand of fate or if I finally figured out that pacing while bouncing him is the magic key.If midnight wakeups are incurring a few points of psychic damage, there are also reliable healing spells. This evening I was holding Felix in the kitchen with Mavis standing next to me, and this kept happening:10 Felix turns his head away from Mavis20 I rotate my body so all of a sudden he's facing her30 Felix makes eye contact with his mama and SMILES40 GOTO 10This restores at least 5 hit points every round, and is good from now until approximately forever. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • You know, a world pandemic response pact is a shockingly sensible idea that I'm surprised is going anywhere at all. (Nature) 

  • "The Democratic Party's Guide to Keeping Your Rights" cuts to the bone and I don't know if I like it. (McSweeney's) 

  • Amazon's been skirting supply chain issues by basically building its own, which probably isn't a great sign for companies that don't have Amazon's kind of walkin'-around money. (CNBC) 

  • Philip Rosedale, who started Second Life, has some thoughts for us about this whole metaverse thing. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Uh: The Scientists have created a working camera about the size of a grain of flaky salt. You read it right. (Princeton) 

  • Obviously it would depend on the exact mix of people, but I can fully believe getting snowed in at a bar for days on end could be a highly convivial, even cozy experience. (ITV) But to get to do it in an Ikea? The fucking dream. I wonder if anyone's priced out -- from a provisioning/laundry/liability standpoint -- offering people the opportunity to pay to do this for real. (BBC) 

  • New dinosaur dropped! This one's got a sword tail. (AP) 

  • Up until now, we didn't actually have a super solid idea how much plastic is being made in a given year and where it's all going; one of The Scientists figured it out for 2018. (U Pitt) 

  • White supremacists are actively recruiting anti-vaxxers, which is a hilariously self-solving problem given a virulent enough disease. (Vice) 

  • Which crypto fuckup do you want to hear about first, the platform that's begging the hacker who pantsed them to return the money he stole (Motherboard), or the self-identified "most trusted crypto trading platform" getting $150M minimum stolen from under their noses? (Motherboard) 

  • Blair Braverman has good advice for someone who tried to do a Walden. (Outside) 

  • Where did the water we currently enjoy on Earth come from originally? Would you believe someone if they told you some of it was from the sun? Yes, the ball of fire in the center of the solar system. (Curtin U) 

  • I love that there's apparently a way you can test someone for wisdom, and that it can be done in seven questions. (UCSD) (Paper) 

  • If you're trying to start a business that trades on eco-consciousness, try aiming for something like a college town, maybe. (Anthropocene) 

  • Couldn't have put it better than the headline, so: "The success of MrBeast’s Squid Game is its own dystopia" (Polygon) 

  • The Scientists have made an absurdly resilient hydrogel because why not. (U of Cambridge) 

  • There are basically three factors that can influence how likely you are to seek information about something, and whichever one of them is the most prominent seems to be stable over time for a given individual. (University College London) (Paper) 

  • A neural network has proven itself capable of creating entirely new, legitimately folded protein sequences from scratch. (U of Washington) 

  • There are some things we're literally not going to ever be able to know. (Gizmodo) 

  • Exercise in a pill???? (Australian National U) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumOperation Fishpunch, You, Your Momma, Your Whole Damn Town(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.