Many of Martin Gardner’s old books have chapters on Life and describe interesting patterns. Definitely worth a read. They tend to have pretty good library presence which is convenient.
It is in fact possible to build a Turing-complete computer on top of Life. Surprisingly enough, Linux has not yet been ported to it. 
Yeah, I knew that I was missing some isolated pixels, but the one I posted quickly evolves into the full spaceship. And as you might imagine, it took me a bit of time to construct that post. When I started, yours wasn’t there. Thank you for the wonderful page; I’m going to have to try some of those patterns myself.