where'd this flying fairy school even come from

April 03, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that maintains a list of certain snack foods that need at least a two-bag stockpile in the house at all times 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's Apple Podcasts presence here, which includes a back catalog over 150 episodes long chock-full of excellent ridiculousness, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that could almost be their own show if I had the time to make yet another podcastInstant Band Night 20: DOUBLE XWe're a month + a week out. I can feel in my bones this one's gonna be good. DO NOT MISS IT. If you aren't sure what Instant Band Night is or whether you want to go, this link will explain everything. Everything!!May 11 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook) + +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I've kept up with my pandemic hobby of ceramic sculpture and I think the time is drawing nearer when I'm going to have to open an Etsy shop and start selling some of these guys, because while I absolutely delight in making them and giving them to friends (a thing I'm not yet done doing), I am still making what seems like a lot of them and they're starting to pile up a little, and I want to see if there's a market out there for my weird little hobbyist creations. I'm still trying to figure out what to charge for them, although I suspect it will be somewhere in the Pretty Penny range: they are, after all, handbuilt, fully-fired ceramic art pieces that could theoretically last for decades, if not centuries or even millennia under the proper conditions. What might end up happening is I open the store and just tell a relatively small circle of folks (which now includes you); there might be some sort of exclusive "opening the shop" sale. I'm still mulling it over; if you have any thoughts, feel free to share! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I just realized I don't remember if I've ever talked about the TV our kids watch (I say "our kids" when I mosty mean Quentin; Felix doesn't have the attention span yet). If you're a parent of small kids and you're also trying your damnedest not to let Paw Patrol breach the perimeter, I have some Netflix-based media recommendations to make. Individual mileage may vary, obviously, but thus far we've been able to hold the line (Quentin is 5 and Felix will turn 2 in July).🐙 Octonauts is a show about a group of animals who live in an underwater base shaped like an octopus. Their motto is Explore! Rescue! Protect!* and every episode will teach your kid at least one fact about a sea creature. Episodes have two stories, each about 13m long, and every one ends with the same song that will become an earworm, but at least it's not Paw Patrol. There's a spinoff called Octonauts Above & Beyond where they expand staffing and learn about land animals, too. There are also some specials, including two movie-length ones that you may end up seeing a lot in your house. The danger is mild, teamwork is high; all good things. Lots of kids end up watching this for a reason.🚌 As of the time of this writing, Netflix has a season of the old Magic School Bus cartoon, which is fine but probably works better if you've been reading the old books to your kid, too.🚀 Netflix also commissioned two seasons of a relaunch called The Magic School Bus Rides Again that's pretty good. The gimmick is that the original Ms. Frizzle became a research professor and passed the Magic School Bus keys to her little sister, who's voiced by Kate McKinnon. This one also has three double-episode-length specials that might get played a lot. Earworm potential for the theme song (an updated version of the original) is high, so watch out.🐧 There's a very gentle Irish cartoon called Puffin Rock that comes as half-hour episodes with three 10m stories each. It revolves around a family of puffins who live on a tiny island with some small mammals, a seal, a crab, and a bunch of cranky gulls. Absolutely benign and great if your kid's a nature lover.🧑‍🍳 Quentin's watched all of Waffles & Mochi a few times; it's a live action show where two puppets who live in a semi-magical grocery store run by Michelle Obama learn things about food ingredients from real life industry celebrities. No notes, honestly. There's a spinoff where they also run a restaurant that I haven't gotten Quentin to jump to, so I can't say if it's good or not.🐯 If you have tiny children, I advise getting into Daniel Tiger at the earliest possible opportunity, not just because every episode tries to teach kids useful lessons about how to behave, it also models how the adults should react when they're still picking it up. Yes! This is something you're gonna have to either pirate or subscribe to through Amazon, though.🐶 We haven't gotten on the Bluey train yet but I imagine it's inevitable. I'm just scared because I'm still very, very tired.Does anybody know when Sesame Street decided to switch formats? [creaky old man voice] Back in my day, Sesame Street was mostly a parade of disjointed minute-long animated bits that each taught a different letter or a sound or something, loosely strung together by an overall narrative that was told in short chunks. I turned on a more recent one the other day — 2012 or so? — and it was a series of what seemed like 10m stories, all with their own theme songs, that utterly failed to hold Felix's attention. Fuck your flying fairy school! Go away Elmo and your stupid friend the talking theatre curtain or whatever! At least come back in much shorter versions! Does anyone else know what I'm talking about, or have I been taking crazy pills?* Don't think it's escaped my notice that this could also plausibly be the motivation behind just about every mission a Federation starship undertakes, minus the ones where they're just shuttling diplomats around. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "The Nashville Shooter’s Arsenal Makes a Mockery of US Gun Laws: The school shooting in Nashville, like most mass killings in the U.S., was carried out by a perpetrator using legally purchased weapons." (Vice) 

  • The Scientists are sounding the alarm about a crucial deep ocean current that's getting fucked up by climate change. (UNSW Sydney) 

  • Deepfake porn is an industry all on its own at this point; an AI content monitoring agency estimates 96% of deepfakes are nonconsensual porn. Great. (NBC News) 

  • Pair that with this piece about people using generative AI to make realistic images of fake historical events; sure, it's for jokes now, but you can see where this is going. We can all see it. Feels bad! (Motherboard) 

  • Maybe that's why some of the players on the field are trying to call for a time-out. (The Verge) 

  • Compared to other countries at its technological level, the American life expectancy is in the toilet, for a variety of interconnected and uniquely American reasons. (NPR) 

  • Sounds good to me: "First Directly Elected UAW President Vows 'War Against Our One and Only True Enemy: Multibillion Dollar Corporations': Shawn Fain, running as part of a reform slate of candidates, swept the ballot to take control of a union that has been marred by corruption." (Motherboard) 

  • The Scientists have invented a brain implant that seems to enhance the formation of new memories. (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • We need more seeds. (The Conversation) 

  • The thing about LED lights is that they're good for energy efficiency, but have you noticed how bad their actual light is? Has anyone tried the transparent amber nail polish trick? (~$Strategist) 

  • "13 Adaptations Better Than the Books They’re Based On" (LitHub) 

  • Once again, The Scientists have invented yet another plastic that's recyclable and doesn't come from fossil fuels!! (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Student robot design competition. No further words needed. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The James Webb has taken the temperature of exoplanet TRAPPIST-1b; it's very hot. Not surprising since it's the innermost one, but still cool (figuratively speaking). (NASA) 

  • Speaking of the JWST, it's also looking at gas giants around other stars, and it turns out they come in a wide variety. (Cornell) 

  • One of The Scientists decided to render the emission spectra of the elements into sounds. Sure, why not! (ACS) 

  • Here's an interesting blog full of short insights on why things are the colors they are. (Colour Studies) 

  • Do ........ do plants scream when you cut them? The Scientists have now discovered that plants definitely make sounds when injured, but they're still not sure if it's a reaction or just something that happens. (Science Alert) 

  • "How to save America’s public transit systems from a doom spiral" (Vox) 

  • Food loss and waste make up a truly shocking portion of the industry's carbon emissions. (Anthropocene) 

  • This sounds like a book us nerds should check out. (Ars Technica) 

  • The Scientists are doing their best to figure out where art hits you in both the feelings and the body. (U of Turku) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have built a drone with a metal detector on it that can sniff out mines without having to touch the ground, which is nice. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • I'm not a baseball guy, but this? This is good. (CNN) 

  • It sure looks like little kids would rather learn from a competent robot than an incompetent human, at least according to this study. (Concordia U) 

  • It's at least theoretically possible that the remains of alien life from other planets could have rained down onto ours — could in fact still be falling — but actually finding them would be incredibly tricky. (Motherboard) (Paper) 

  • Who wouldn't want a glimmery rainbow-colored film layer to stick to their car or house that would keep it cool in the heat? (American Chemical Society) 

  • Agility Robotics is really getting somewhere with its bipedal tote-carrying guys. (IEEE Spectrum) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

🔥 Reader Seraph is pretty sure they're "super leftist explicitly anti-racist Viking metal!"🎸 Reader Steve says they're "a super group made up of the second most famous guy from a bunch of rock/metal bands, and they sound a bit like Aerosmith did before they got into ballads." 

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.