you can't disappoint a picture

June 03, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will goddamn find a way to watch the new Black Mirror season despite having a tiny child without being spoiled, you animals 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway111 - Lord of the Onion Rings"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Marri (@marri) uncover highly elegant notions for reinventing warfare and social interaction, as well as a Lord of the Rings idea that civilization truly deserves."Marri is a goddamn delight and you should probably all be aware of that fact by the end of this, her second episode. Also, let me know if you want to contribute to the LotR project, which I admit I still think about a lot. That and the grad student heists -- the angle she uncovered was not something I'd even considered! Genius, I tell you!!If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 7-11We're just about a month+week away and that means the ✨🚄 HYPE TRAIN 🚄✨ is about to pull into the station, so hold onto your butts!!Or just mark your calendar for July 11 and make sure all your friends know about it; that'd work too. Thanks. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.All right, so if you listened to episode 110 last week, you heard all about my "email a celebrity and they have to read it" idea. Is it just me, or does the entire notion hinge upon finding a famous person who'd be game for it? I have no way of knowing how hard that actually would be -- I know next to nothing about the actual heat a famous person draws on a day-to-day basis just by existing. Are their inboxes a total fucking ruin? I can't imagine how Chris Evans checks his Twitter mentions, even. Also, I have to think it must be wildly different for different famous people based on their race, gender, and age. Right? No matter the platform, I assume women have to swat off a constant rain of flopping dicks, while POC need to bat away a constant barrage of racist froth, etc. I also assume that volume-wise it's worse for women -- i.e. there's just more gross dudes trying to nose their way in there -- but maybe men get an equal amount of weirdness? What does Carly Rae's fanmail look like compared to, say, Robert Pattinson's? Or Clooney's? Maybe there's nobody out there who'd agree to have, say, five random people who won a lottery email them. Does anyone out there have a sense of this?Flipside: one buddy of mine pointed out that this idea "is like a less-exciting Omaze," which I think we did touch upon in the episode. BUT: that's good, actually?? Do you remember the episode of Community where Troy meets LeVar Burton? I'm not 100% positive I could make it through, say, a 1:1 dinner at an elegant restaurant with Patrick Stewart without having a meltdown before or after. But I could almost certainly handle sending him an email that I know he'll read. I'd be willing to wager there are a lot of people who would prefer confirmed, asynchronous, non-face-to-face contact with their fave over actually meeting them in person. Thoughts?? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Just in the last couple of weeks, Quentin has started to acquire what I guess is a sense of stranger danger: if you put him in a new room with too many new people, his instinct will be to cling to you and not want to be put on the floor in any way/shape/form. This also holds true for places he's been -- like a park -- if it's too crowded. This is all normal, of course, but it's interesting to see that switch flip. He also hates baths again. That'll probably change at some point, too? Kids!!In accordance with prophecy, I did in fact create the ultimate magnetic letter retrieval tool out of a straightened coathanger and rescue the 4 from its hiding place deep, deep under the fridge; he'd also shoved the X, L, and N in there at some point, although none of them were anywhere near as far back. So right now there's ....... no Missing Object of the Week??? Incredible. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The last paragraph of this article is where the (depressing) money is: What if America had 6 political parties? (The Week) 

  • How the fuck do you publish a press release on the positive results of a concussion recovery protocol for rodents involving zapping the brain with magnets and not release a picture of the device? The text just says "laptop-style" -- the fuck? Is anyone else picturing a rat with a fucking Macbook tented open above its tiny body? Or is it a device that's laptop-sized proportionate to the size of said rat, balanced open on top of its tiny head? (U of Saskatchewan) 

  • Here's a progress report on Stockton's universal basic income experiment. (Atlantic) 

  • There's a useful concept in this article that describes what we're wading through on the internet as "digital pollution." (Washington Monthly) 

  • It's not like we didn't know this already, but: a study by Deloitte indicates that millenials spend about the same fraction of their income that previous generations did on so-called "luxuries," but that works out to less overall because, well, they just don't make as much. Again: obvious to everyone but previous generations. (Business Insider) 

  • How about don't plan every single yoctosecond of your summer and let yourself get bored instead because it's actually good for you? (Quartzy) 

  • You're probably going to get linked to this a lot, so let's save you the trouble: "San Francisco is not dying. San Francisco is not rotting. But things are bad, and they may never get better." (Mission Local) 

  • Hmm: the case against grit. (Atlantic) 

  • It looks highly technical, but I still want to point us to this paper by a research team that taught a team of AIs to play Quake 3. (Science) 

  • Correlation, causation, etc, but: this Canadian study implies that if you're a stoner when you're a teenager, it makes you kind of a dumbass later in life. Anecdotally, do we agree or disagree? (Canadian Association for Neuroscience via EurekAlert) 

  • It might actually be possible to increase empathy under the right conditions with the use of VR. Huh. (Nautilus) 

  • So is this "new compound that kills gram-negative bacteria" a ....... you know ........ an antibiotic? Or what? (U of Sheffield via EurekAlert) 

  • You know what, yeah: the Algorithmic Bill of Rights. (Vox) 

  • Yeesh: I assumed Citizen worked differently than ........... this. Maybe it's not too late for them to change their slogan to "It's like Nextdoor, but worse!" (BuzzFeed News) Pair that with this writeup on a paper that theorizes the advent of cellphones brought homicide rates down by reducing violence between gangs battling for turf. What's interesting is nobody seems to fully know why crime has gone down the way it has. (Atlantic) 

  • Is it possible the quality of predictions has worsened recently because the world is changing faster than data can tell us why? (Quartz) 

  • Income inequality is real, in case anybody didn't already know that; here are seven guidelines for policies that oughta help. (Brookings Institute) 

  • As takes go, this one is at least medium-to-high heat: are autonomous vehicles a terrible idea from jump that we should simply abandon? (Vox) 

  • Positional tracking for smart devices using miniaturized radar is now technically possible. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • We're not completely fucked if China decides to mess with our supply of rare earth metals. (Fortune) 

  • Well, shit: there's antibiotics in the rivers basically everywhere, which is a problem if we ever want to get a handle on microbial resistance, or deal with the resistant bugs that exist now. (CNN) 

  • Electrolyte beers, huh? (Gear Patrol) 

  • Just for the record, we talked in episode 12 of the podcast about an idea I had for an American version of Eurovision, which might eventually become a thing? (Hollywood Reporter) 

  • How would humans in deep space respond to a disaster? Heads-up that this article does talk about 9/11 if that's a thing for you. (Slate) 

  • Is it a good idea to try to use algorithms and big data to figure out which movies to make? No. Is it an interesting idea? Yeah. (The Verge) 

  • [FUTURAMA_JOKE.TXT] (Fast Company) 

  • I read this and can't help picturing a future where we're asked to lick our watches every now and then to determine how stressed-out we are. (U of Cincinnati press release) 

  • What we talk about when we talk about commercializing low Earth orbit. (The Verge) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumDay of the Scorpion, No Rest for Sharper Knives 

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.