you make me happy when skies are gray

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship; 2017 is still happening, but then again so are we. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway54 - The Turian Situation"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Jen (@jennifermarie), and special guest Thomas (@thomasthecat) go deep on weird implementations of fandom and the logistics of hitting on people at their job."This episode covers a lot of ground, including a theoretical database or other tracking system that matches the insanely wealthy with the fandoms they're part of; trust me, it makes sense in context.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.Nerds, let's talk about Star Trek: Discovery for a second.I'm in. I am 100% down for whatever it is they're doing and wherever it is they want to take us. I do want to talk for a second about two continuity-based complaints I've heard and why I think they hold very little water."Spock never mentioned Michael." Spock never mentioned Sybok, either. Spock didn't even tell Jim and Bones that Ambassador Sarek was his fuckin' dad until after they met the guy. Spock's just not a "talk about the fam" kind of person. This is known, people."The original Enterprise never had replicators." I don't think the Discovery does either. You've seen how replicators work: the requested item appears in a swirl of light. That is not how the device that made Michael's new uniform works. Note that it takes pains to say "synthesis" instead of "replication." We do know the Enterprise had food synthesizers -- those slots in the wall of the mess hall from which they took fully-formed trays of food (mostly colored cubes). Are you pickin' up what I'm puttin' down here?There are those who complain that Disco doesn't seem super interested in the exploration of space, either, but that's just not the story they want to tell right now. You may recall DS9 wasn't about exploration, either -- it was about holding shit together on the frontier, until it became about a full-blown war. Disco's another war story, just much weirder and cranked to 11 on a lot of dials. I'm here for it -- to the point where I'm even paying for a CBS All Access subscription (which I will cancel the instant Disco finishes its run). My friend Avery kicked in an extra couple bucks a month for the commercial-free version, too, because the commercials are some bullshit: stuttering, stopping, even freezing altogether to the point where I had to restart the stream at least once per episode. Eliminating the commercials, of course, eliminates the problem. That seems kind of tacky, doesn't it? Whatever; we're not paying for it forever. There are, after all, only ten episodes remaining -- for this season, at least. Do we know if there's going to be another one yet? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I hung a pair of mobiles over Lemon's crib this week and found myself unexpectedly tearing up. I don't know how to explain this other than to say a wave of irrepressible perfect happiness washed over me at the thought of getting to introduce a tiny new person into the world who shares part of my genetic code, a tiny person who hopefully will find delight in the shapes and colors above their head, and the music they make (one of the mobile hooks came with a little wind-up attachment that autorotates whatever is suspended beneath it to the tinkling music-box tune of "You Are My Sunshine" -- this honestly was a sort of unlooked-for bonus, as I only wanted the hook for its height and wasn't really paying attention to the rest of it). This is something I get to keep, right? This feeling of anticipation and total delight at simultaneously not knowing what sort of person Lemon's going to be while also knowing that I 100% get to find that out?We're coming down to the final few weeks, folks. There is, in fact, a nonzero chance that Lemon may be born before the next edition of this newsletter comes out (the prophesied date is 11/1, remember). Should that happen, you may be informed via this very channel -- we'll see how much time I have to update you all! (That sound you hear in the distance is probably other parents laughing at me) 

Fascination Corner

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

• Cities and Suburbs Are Becoming Pretty Similar. Are they really, though? He said, from his Bay Area vantage point. I'd be curious to know if this is at all true.

• Have you, like me, wondered what the fuck we're going to do if it turns out Mueller finds something incredibly fucking shady about the 2016 election that's basically not ignorable, not even by Republicans? Does Vox ever have an uneasy read for you, then. Chase that with this beautiful daydream from Lawrence Lessig.

• Nobody seems to have asked this question, or if they did nobody is publishing the answer, but what would happen if you aimed one of these drone-killing lasers at a person? For even just a fraction of a second? Is there enough heat to matter? I'm guessing not, but I'd love some confirmation.

• Should we all just subscribe to the Atlantic already? I'll do it if we get to keep reading stuff like this.

• I find the notion of energy storage in literal molten metal to be kind of nuts. How is that efficient? On the other hand, we should all be thankful physics makes weird shit like this even theoretically possible.

• Someone did a study on whether crowdfunding actually rewards true innovation; read this for the methodology if nothing else, 'cause the results they got both are and aren't surprising.

• Since the advent of online dating, interracial dating has gone incontrovertibly up. Nice.

• Anybody who's been watching Star Trek: Discovery should take a look at this article about a newly-discovered network of filaments linking galaxies together. Huh.

• "Humans had to evolve to acknowledge octopus consciousness" really kind of says it all, doesn't it? For the record, I've never liked eating cephalopds.

• Reading this surprisingly contemplative longread about Olive Garden just makes me want to go there now.

• On the flipside, this other Eater piece talks about the death of casual dining chains at the hands of Those Damn Millenials, or more accurately Larger Economic Forces Expressing Themselves Through Millenials. It's worth a read.

• This random corporate hype bullshit generator is pretty good; for some reason I want to turn this into a weirdly-constrained improv night where people have to deliver this nonsense as an onstage pitch, paired with randomly-generated slides, and the audience determines which company gets "funded" at the end.

• I love a good indoor mini-farm for urban spaces, but I love it even more when it turns out to have been designed by IKEA.

• Uh: 3D-printed synthetic soft muscle. What? 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumDamage Per Second, Everything’s Wrong, Nothing’s Fine 

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.