this week I just want to talk about Bake Off season 3

October 02, 2017

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, a brief moment's respite from whatever the hell else is gonna happen this week. Have a seat. Want a hug? You are hereby authorized to picture a hug if one is needed. I've been told I'm great at hugs. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway53 - Grad Student Heist Flick"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Felicia (@reelfeed), and special guest Patrick (@tintindelocean) debate carbonating hard liquor and invent an amazing app, among others. Visit oceanlab.org to see Patrick's idea; do it now!!!!"We also discuss an innovation in bedding concepts that might honestly be worth investigating; trust me, it makes sense when you hear it.You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/ 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.We will now discuss why Bake Off season 3 is fantastic.(Not to be That Guy, but I have to insert a note that here I'm talkin' 'bout the British season 3, which has no PBS/Netflix "Great British Baking Show" cognate as of yet -- a hideous shame, as you'll hopefully one day see. S03 of Baking Show is Actual Bake Off s06.(Just to make things even more confusing:Baking Show s01 == Actual Bake Off s05Baking Show s02 == Actual Bake Off s04Baking Show s04 == Actual Bake Off s07Actual Bake Off s08 is airing currently in the UK))As amazing as s06's Nadiya is, it's possible that Mavis and my favorite baker of the entire show across all seasons is Brendan. The best way to describe Brendan is that he's like an extremely organized, elderly gay hobbit: small of stature, exactingly precise in his movements and diction, displaying an understated personal flair while packing all of his accumulated style and experience into creations that would easily be the envy of every pastry chef in the whole of the Shire. The fact that he's an out gay man who seems to have gone through some vaguely-alluded-to strife earlier in his life because of it makes his successes on the show even better somehow, like he's striking a small but indelible blow on behalf of LGBTQ people everywhere every time Mary and Paul praise his work. The revelation in the next season's "catch up" episode that he started teaching a baking class after s03 never fails to delight, not in small part due to the obvious adoration of his students visible in the clip.There's a moment in s03e05 when Sarah-Jane is about to make a massive mistake with her Wellington; you can see Mary, Paul, and even Mel give her a look that just says STOP NOW, DO NOT, but they're bound by the iron law of Bake Off not to give her any sort of help. You can see the pain in their eyes as she explains the bad thing she's unknowingly about to do, but they cannot say anything, and of course it goes horribly. This is how I'm going to exemplify the ideal of the Prime Directive to non-Trek fans from now on.Cathryn is a lot of fun to watch, not just because she's very cute and makes great faces, but because she says things like "oh lore," which to be honest with you all I was at least partially convinced was something exclusive to Lottie from Bad Machinery.PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERDo we think John ended up getting therapy when this season was done? His family (at least as shown to us) seemed like a fucking weapons-grade nightmare of passive-aggressive scrutiny and withheld approval. When he won, did they finally relent and agree that he had done something praiseworthy? I hope to whatever gods that poor innocent cinnamon roll of a boy prays to that they did, and that he has since lived a life free from judgement and toil. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One month to go, people.Last week we experienced an extremely minor blip on the anxiety radar in the form of a brief moment of blurred vision on Mavis's part, which she of course did the responsible thing and called the advice nurse over, and nothing seems to have come of it. But for a few hours there, I had to keep myself from climbing into the worry hole, a thing I made up on the spot that I've come to picture as a person-sized hole in the side of a hill with crumbly dirt edges and the occasional twig poking out of the rim. I was kept out of it for the most part by a couple Slacks populated by some excellent friends, many of whom are parents of varying levels of experience who were able to talk me out of the worry hole. I don't really have a moral to this thrilling anecdote; just a moment of appreciation once again for (a) the friends I've accumulated in this life and (b) the various technologies that allow us to stay in touch. Slack, everybody: it's rad as shit. Now there's a tagline.When next you spy this newsletter, we'll be two weeks out from due date, and we'll have packed both the go bag and the post-natal bag. I've gotta hang two mobiles! I may be pressed for topics? What do you want to know about my #dadthoughts, people? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I'm actually super into the notion that it's possible for a website to hijack bits of its users' CPUs to mine off-brand bitcoins, because it implies that it'd be possible for a site to do the same thing for actual useful ends. Imagine if every time you went to a NASA site, it popped a notif saying "Hey, can we use a few cycles to process Kepler imagery?" What if webMD did some protein folding while you looked up maladies that invariably turn out to be cancer? I'm just saying.

  • Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is? No, really, this is an interesting question when you drill down the way this article does. This Wired piece makes good companion reading: Facebook Built Its Vision of Democracy on Bad Math.

  • It turns out potatoes really are the ideal food as long as you don't look too hard at the amounts you'd need to eat.

  • Honestly, why don't we just make shitloads of cheap robots like this and just litter the surfaces of the nearby planets with 'em? The ones that survive send back data; the ones that don't cost less than a kid's car seat base. (Look, I know why we don't, but I like asking rhetorical questions)

  • We're not gonna make racists afraid by being nonviolent. Sorry. I, too, wish it were not this way, but here we are. Sorry. Don't @ me.

  • Wired asks an extremely interesting question, namely What if America Had a Detective Agency for Disasters?

  • I just want everyone to look at this concept Honda EV and how weirdly good it is.

  • I would love to know if anything concrete actually came of the Juggalo March, which you may recall I was in favor of and still am. I said this in a tweet, but can you imagine what'd happen if the FBI decided to classify Radiohead nerds as a gang?

  • If you've ever wondered what the hell is actually going on in the brain of a computer doing machine learning, this article maaaaaay be for you? It turns out nobody really knows what's happening inside neural networks, so there are just really good theories?? What???

  • It turns out we can make cheap solar cells that don't break when bumped if we just base their design on insect eyes. This sounds like madness, but I promise you it makes sense/is very cool. Why isn't "applied biomimicry" just a required course at this point for anyone looking to build or design something physical?

  • I realize it's extremely basic of me to be charmed by the fact that Elon Musk officially named the next-gen SpaceX transport the Big Fucking Rocket, but a.) I'm still partially convinced he's an agent of Special Circumstances (I'll explain in another newsletter, I promise) and b.) the sheer audacity of this technology -- "It doesn't need legs, we'll just land it on its launch mounts perfectly" -- means if he can pull it off, he can call it whatever the fuck he wants.

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classesTempestOverlordJuggalo 

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.