welcome to february

February 03, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's been having some truly interpretation-defying dreams lately. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week because, well, I didn't have the time to edit a new one, but there are more coming! BELIEVE.We're still sitting at 28 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, which is so very tantalizingly close to 30. So close! You can push us over that edge and into new territory! The power is yours! Do it now!Instant Band Night 15: NUMEROLOGYIf you're one of the few reading this who doesn't yet know what Instant Band Night is, click on the link and prepare to fire up your email, 'cause you're gonna want to invite some people to come with you.http://bit.ly/instantbandnight15Facebook's doing a thing where I can't invite any more people, so it's up to you: you're my only hope.* * w e ' l l   s e e   y o u   t h e r e * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I feel like I might be in the market for another podcast. Who's got one for me? Criteria: 

  • Not about news

  • Not a D&D show

  • Should include at least one woman

  • Entertaining banter prized over informative content unless informative content is very interesting

For example, here are some recent subscriptions of mine: 

  • This Podcast Will Kill You

  • Never Seen It (I skip eps for movies I haven't seen or that lack a female guest)

  • Decoder Ring

  • Punch Up The Jam

Consider the podcast gauntlet thrown down. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.So Quentin has an ear infection, and we're on day 1 of the antibiotics. His sleep has been a little ragged, which means so are we, which means this week's edition of #dadthoughts is a short one. In fact, I should be going to bed soon myself; Mavis thinks she might be coming down with something, which (hopefully) should still leave me standing and able-bodied. This is why I made chicken soup and froze it in single-serving containers weeks ago, folks (pasta in little saran-wrap packages on top of the lids, even). Cross your fingers for me! ✨🎃🤞 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Now that the ISS is open to accepting commercial bids, they need some more space (heh) up there, so in about four years, it's getting what looks like a nice, comfy addition bolted on. (MIT Technology Review blog) 

  • You might as well burn one of your free monthly Atlantic clicks on this one: The Outsize Influence of Your Middle-School Friends. (~$Atlantic) Relatedly: during adolescence, new networks of neural connections come online, presumably to help process and manage new social signals and skills. (U of Cambridge) 

  • Here's a relatively short read on "shit-life syndrome,"* how it drove people to Trump, and the correct strategy to employ on people who suffer from it (hint: there's a lot of them) to get them to not vote Trump again. (CounterPunch)* A friend points out that it's counterproductive to label this a "syndrome" -- it's not a dysbiosis so much as a set of awful circumstances imposed on people by the unfair distribution of wealth. 

  • Evidence exists that YouTube does radicalize people toward right-wing nonsense. (TechCrunch) Here's the paper itself. (PDF) 

  • Holy fuck? Researchers have found a way to take ...... anything that contains carbon?? ........ and turn it into graphene?? Inexpensively????? (Rice U) 

  • Our search for aliens may be hobbled by the fact that we're looking for beings who are somewhat comparable to ourselves. (Space dot com) Relatedly: which religion will likely be the most accepting of the entire concept of extraterrestrial life? (Gizmodo) 

  • According to a recent poll, the average American visits the library twice as often as the movie theatre in a year. (Gallup) 

  • Well, fuck: the ocean is acidifying hard enough to do damage to the shells of dungeness crabs now. (CNN) 

  • Here's an article about how the ground we walk on is crammed with protists that gobble bacteria just like Pac-Man, but disappointingly, no pictures are included. Why. (Smithsonian) 

  • Small changes to available infrastructure to improve sustainability can have amplifying ripple effects; it's a good thing! (Intl Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) 

  • The results of this survey on loneliness are interesting. (NPR) 

  • It's probably time to start mining our garbage for gold, seeing as how there's probably something like $11.2 billion worth of it in there, all told. (Aeon) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumBaron Bulletproof & The Orchestra of Harm, The Order is Given 

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.