you are now free to move about the cabin; don't open the door

September 27, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that had a nice little outdoor brunch the other day and is contemplating more patio furniture for what's proven to be a pretty nice-sized deck for things like that going forward 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayAt some point I'm going to put a Top Ten list here of what I consider to be gems of the back catalog, but honestly, they're all outstanding in their own way -- that's the beauty of the format. There's only one way to see if I'm right or wrong!!Every week I check our Apple Podcasts page to see if someone new left a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating or a nice review; will this be the day YOU make our week???Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberI'll be honest: I don't know if the Delta variant has fucked our plans for November 11th's return of Instant Band Night. At this point I'm assuming everyone reading this has gotten their shot, so what's left to do but wait, cross our fingers, and also run through the streets forcibly vaccinating everyone we can get our mitts on? I'll see you out there.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.My climate anxiety has essentially taken this form for a while now and I know it's not the most productive angle possible (also, it's two years old; the Onion is always ahead of us all), so I'm going to suggest everyone in the range of my voice read How to Blow Up a Pipeline instead. I haven't cracked it open, but the ebook's only $5 and it sounds extremely interesting. We've spent $5 on far more frivolous things, haven't we? Let's see what it has to say. And take heart: we're not alone, apparently -- 10,000 people ages 16-25 across 10 countries were surveyed, and they don't like all this either.Look, this energy has to go goddamn SOMEWHERE, doesn't itIs it weird to ask how you've been dealing with your climate anxiety? Or hell, want to talk about something else? I'm open to questions as prompts for this section! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Weirdly, I don't have a lot for this section right now, judging by the amount of time I just spent staring at the wall trying to think of what to put here. It feels like we've established a decent routine and now we're cruising at altitude, which of course now that I've said it means we have days left at best before some new child development milestone pops up out of the ........ the sky of this metaphor I've just built.But it'll be okay; there are tools. I'm getting better at reading Felix's cues, or maybe it's just that there's an extremely limited set of them: milk, burps, overstimulation/tiredness, possible diaper. He's having fun looking at his high-contrast mobile and the playmat with the hanging bird toys. He'll even go down for the occasional nap in his cosleeper instead of one of us having to strap him to our bodies, though those don't seem to last too long. His nighttime sleep habits have been reasonably well-established: last nurse between 8-10p, sleep until roughly 330-4a, nurse again, sleep until around 7a. He's not a Quentin-level sleeper yet, but hopefully he'll get there.So that's where we are this week, essentially: cruising altitude. I'll take several hundred more of these, please!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter" (~$Atlantic) 

  • Pfizer's got promising vaccine data for 5-11yo kids; fingers crossed we'll be getting the younger age group data by the start of November. (Ars Technica) 

  • With every day that passes I can feel my belief solidifying that asshole vaccine refusers should simply be denied medical care when they contract the rona, doubly so if they tried to "spread the word." There's an entire subreddit called r/HermanCainAward that tallies the loudly public COVID deniers who end up dying from it, and Choire Sicha has a short thread on it that's more nuanced than it sounds. The subreddit itself is -- and there's really no other way to put it -- cathartic reading. (Choire Sicha on Twitter) 

  • At least somebody's saying it even if ultimately it won't matter: "Political journalists are both-siding a “crisis” caused entirely by the GOP" (Press Watch) 

  • Your David Roth must-read for this week is about cryptocurrency: "This Is All Exactly What It Looks Like". I would put a quote from it here, but I'd end up copying and pasting the entire thing. (Defector) 

  • Nobody can seem to agree how high the global population will go, but at least it's for sort of interesting reasons. (Nature) 

  • New York is getting ready to pass some laws for food delivery workers that are actually humane-sounding. Maybe the rest of us should get on board? Just an idea. ($NYT) Especially since it's becoming clear how much gig work is setting back the gains labor has made in the last century and a half. (Rest of World) 

  • What we talk about when we talk about the supply chain. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Early research says intermittent fasting might help manage chronic metabolic conditions like diabetes, which my prediabetic ass is now interested in. I used to do this back in the day; maybe I should give it a shot again -- it's not very hard to do. (Endocrine Society) 

  • The takeaway quote from this one is "But I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone." (~$New Yorker) 

  • Are there finally enough cars? (Big Think) 

  • There's no way to catch up with the amount of plastic getting dumped into the ocean; we should be focusing on stopping that rather than the cleanup. (Hakai) 

  • "Why everybody’s hiring but nobody’s getting hired" (Recode) Pair that with this read on how restaurants are trying to actually make their jobs seem palatable to prospective workers. ($NYT) 

  • I'm just putting this in here so nobody else has to send it to me: augmented reality might actually help people with arachnophobia. (U of Basel) 

  • If you, like me, occasionally worry whether we're headed for another civil war, here's some comforting(?) reading. (Brookings Institute) 

  • Designing plastic bottles so they could theoretically be used to construct disaster relief shelters is a real solution-in-the-era-of-climate-change vibe, which doesn't necessarily mean I'm automatically against it. (Fast Company) 

  • Here's a meditation on the proliferation of those cutesy political kids' books. (The Drift) 

  • I have literally never thought about it this way, but the fact that possums deter predators by playing dead means that animals must have some ability to grasp the concept of death itself. (Aeon) 

  • It seems The Kids These Days might have a dwindling idea at best of what a file system is??? (The Verge) 

  • Just about everything on Earth reproduces sexually because it keeps our genes fresh, except for a species of beetle mite that's been doing it differently for probably eons; wild. (U of Cologne) 

  • Charlie Warzel is thinking about our national buildup of simmering rage, too, it turns out. (Galaxy Brain) 

  • "I Am An Anti-Racist Feminist, Except When It Interferes With My Career As An Academic" (McSweeney's) 

  • An interesting experiment seems to indicate that collective violence like riots and vandalism are more down to inequality than some people just being assholes, which has implications for how we might want to improve society going forward. (University College London) 

  • How about some sensors you can toss into the wind that float 10x longer than snowflakes? (The Verge) 

  • Shocker: doing kind things can actually have mental health benefits. (U of British Columbia Okanagan) 

  • This is old, but I'm sensing some Discourse happening out there about ugly produce, and it should not be happening because Dr. Sarah Taber set us all straight a while ago: "Farms aren’t tossing perfectly good produce. You are." ($WaPo) 

  • Some scientists think they've worked out exactly three (3) numbers that explain how well an ecosystem is functioning. (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumBrand Identity, The Earth Reaches for Us All (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.