the hell else are we gonna do

May 09, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes it could time travel sufficiently far back to tell a certain younger self to cool with the candy and cookies just enough to be able to still enjoy them without incurring prediabetic restrictions in this, the extremely vexing year 2022 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe thing about having a 4yo and a baby who doesn't yet sleep through the night is that you can't put them in the same room together overnight, and it's also not possible to put yourself in the room with him without causing even more sleep complications. Long story short, we're sleeping in the office (the house's third and possibly actual master bedroom, considering it has the attached half bath) on the pull-out couch, which is also where my computer is, so the edit on the last episode we recorded (which admittedly was last year) still isn't quite complete. But it'll get there someday!As of the time of this writing, there are still not only 43 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings, but someone managed to slip past the perimeter and enter another lovely review, which I only just saw now! Whoever you are, you have not only our thanks but our favor should we ascend to the throne. The rest of you: a new standard has been set!!Instant Band Night 15: TIME WARPJuly 14th! The line must be drawn here and no further!! We WILL have an explosive celebration of musical creativity that must be seen to be believed, and you! will! be! there! (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.You know, in India they have a word for this concept of not letting a politician have a moment's peace until some shit happens: gherao, or "encirclement." Frankly it's both stupid and embarrassing that we don't do this here with the conservative SCOTUS judges, Mitch, or any of the other hundreds of Republican shitbags at the state and federal level who can all see in broad fucking daylight trying to literally undermine the concept and execution of democracy as we know it. We can see it! We can see what they're doing!! They're not even bothering to keep it a fucking secret!!!! Not only that but we know who they are! We know what their faces look like! They have homes that are attached to streets! There should be a goddamn stadium's worth of angry people howling bloodcurdling invective into their ears at every hour of every day and every night no matter where they go! FUCKThis ties into the other rant I always keep in my back pocket about what a piss-poor job we've done making white supremacists and killer cops scared to try their bullshit on the public stage, but that one's probably not fit for print. Probably.* Kavanaugh's house is a good start, but why not give the fucker an unofficial motorcade that surrounds him and forces him to go 20mph under the speed limit everywhere he tries to travel? It sure feels like there are enough of us with enough free time who also hate his fucking guts that we should be able to get this done, and that goes for all four of the other fucks, too. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.For the entirety of the last week, Quentin would slide himself, his bedding, and a selection of stuffed pals off his bed after we tucked him in and set up what he called a "floor bed" on the rug instead. This sort of coincided with it getting a little warmer outside, which was making his room hotter at night;* rather than sleep on his bed with the fan pointed at him from the side, he instead elected to sleep directly in front of the fan with its vector aimed at his head, down the length of his whole body. This became gradually less logically supportable as temperatures dropped, but he stuck to it all the way up until Sunday night. It wasn't a Problem per se, but I was mildly mystified that I wasn't able to convince him to just sleep in his regular-ass bed even after I'd gotten him to admit that it was comfier than the floor bed. I guess he just wanted to exert control over something, and his sleep environment was a good candidate.Felix's top front teeth continue to come through verrrrrrry sloooooooowly, but we can definitely see 'em. It might be happening at a glacial pace, but it's happening. Also, his scooting proficiency has increased somewhat, he can more or less rotate in place when he's sitting up, and he can even sometimes raise himself to a sitting-up position from his tummy. Still elusive: intentional forward locomotion of any kind. We took the precaution of buying a collapsible plastic baby jail that I erect around his floor blanket and fill with toys in the morning. Containment should hold for a while; fingers crossed!* The position and color of the exterior wall basically turn the place into a time-delayed, low-intensity solar oven; one wall of his room and an entire closet radiate low but steady heat for a while after the sun has gone down, which of course is getting later and later. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • A helpful doc from activist Alison Turkos: "How to Show up For Abortion Access" (Google Doc published to web) 

  • This heat wave in India is how that book The Ministry For the Future started (and it was equally horrific); I would therefore like to skip to the part where we as a global population start murking the heads of corporations that won't change their operations. "The World Has No Choice but to Care About India’s Heat Wave: How the country meets an escalating demand for energy is a problem the whole world must reckon with." (~$Atlantic) 

  • WHO thinks the rona death toll is probably 3x higher than we thought worldwide. (BBC) 

  • Meta created a writing AI similar to GPT-3, except they trained it with a sea of unfiltered Reddit posts, and it's got some Problems. They released a paper with their findings, at least? (Arthur Holland Michel on Threadreader) (Paper) 

  • Data tells us that a surprising percentage of medium-to-heavy-duty trucks out there could be replaced with electric ones without changing their routes. (RMI) 

  • What if we've been wrong about the pace of economic growth for the past couple centuries? (Vox) 

  • Research bias might be why we think city rats and pigeons are filthy and disease-ridden. (Science Alert) 

  • El Salvador's national crypto rollout has ............... not gone well. (Rest of World) 

  • The math says if we just skipped eating meat just a couple days out of the week, we could cut deforestation in half. (Nature) 

  • Time to watch brief footage of a swarm of drones successfully navigating a forest. (Science Alert) 

  • Here's an actually interesting article about the current showrunner problem going on in Hollywood. (Vice) 

  • So there are moons and whatnot with subsurface oceans: how much of that is actually liquid, given how cold we expect some of them to be? (U of Washington) 

  • How about a longread on the appeal of Hot Ones. (Eater) 

  • Studies in mice seem to indicate fecal transplants from young mice to old ones can reverse some of the cellular effects of aging. (U of East Anglia) 

  • The Scientists ran a meta-analysis of studies on reducing car use in cities and managed to boil the successful interventions down to about a dozen strategies. (Anthropocene) (Paper) 

  • Seems like it's not quite my place to comment on this, so I'm just going to put it on the table and walk away: "The cult of the dissociative pout: Why this lobotomy-chic, dead-eyed pose is taking over your Instagram feed, and becoming the duckface of a nihilistic era." (i-D) 

  • Huh: the Salton Sea is a potentially huge source of lithium. (CNBC) 

  • A machine learning system was able to absorb officer complaint data in Chicago and point out a small bunch of them who were responsible for a full quarter of all complaints, payouts, and shootings; it seems to not only be a "bad apple" detector, it's more of a "rotten tree" sniffer. (Vice) (Paper) 

  • I ........ what?? "A Surprising Number of Genetic Mutations Occur Thanks to a Quirk of Quantum Physics" (Science Alert) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsWhiskeyfingerPHR3SHTYPESpermcat(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think one or all of these bands sound 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.