Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's keeping careful tabs on the house's stonefruit supply

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

It's true: we're gone til November, but that just means you have a couple extra months to build up delicious anticipation for the last Instant Band Night of the year — more time to mark your calendar and tell all your very coolest friends to save the night of November 13 for something INCREDIBLE. Come play or just watch; as always, it'll be like nothing else you've experienced.

✨🪩✨
Nov 13 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 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 + +

Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

🎃🌴SUMMER SALE/NEW LITTLE WEIRDOS🌴🎃

That’s right, there’s new little guys in there!!! I've been experimenting with new glazing techniques and I have to say I think I've hit upon a winner! Also I have too many things on my "finished work" shelves and it's time to move some inventory, so I've put everything on incredibly deep discount. Decorate your garden or anyplace else that needs a splash of color or whimsy; they also make thoughtful and unique gifts for that special discerning someone in your life.

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after three+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

August somehow got the drop on us and is closing in fast; I'm now That Guy looking at the 10-day forecast trying to spot the coming of the hot weather with gritted teeth and clenched fists. Thus far all seems clear — it really truly has been kind of a spectacular low 70s Bay Area summer — but that doesn't mean I'm about to let my guard down. In this house we regard the months of August-October with deep suspicion.

A lot of the windows in this house we rent have those interior swing-in doors with the louvered movable shutters on them, which work pretty great for blocking light but are a pain in the ass when trying to consider an in-room AC. Sometime this year it finally occurred to me that you can just take the fucking things off by hammering up the hinge pin (and reinstall them reasonably painlessly in reverse), so I think that's what I'm going to do when it comes time to put the portable AC and its exhaust hose back in the kids' room. It will involve installing a curtain rod and unearthing the blackout curtains from storage, but I know where they are and I fear no curtain rod, for I am a Dad With Tools. Let's hope this statement doesn't become a monument to my own hubris!!

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Quentin is at what I'm going to call a complicated age for something like Star Wars, in that:

• He more or less knows what a lightsaber and an X-wing are through playground osmosis

• Mildly frightening imagery in books or movies scares him*

On the one hand I can tell he wants to know more about all the spaceships and whatnot, but actually showing him Star Wars of any variety would scare him to death. I thought I might get around this by getting one of those STAR WARS VISUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA books, but upon flipping through it I realized that

• Yes it's got pictures of all the tech and ships

• But also there's a huge amount of lore that may not be interesting (and also spoilery)

• Also some of these alien beasts are kinda terrifying-looking even just as still images

I think(?) I've solved this in the short term by getting a book that's just a visual compendium of only the spaceships, of which there are a metric fuckton. I wish there was an equivalent volume for Star Trek, but none of my googling has returned useful results. Did you know there's an entire-ass book of Star Wars ships that's just incredibly detailed cross-sections?** Nobody put one together for Star Trek? C'mon, guys, what are we even doing here.

* The boys went on a library run with me recently and one of the selections was a picture book that includes a spread where some islanders are being menaced by some kind of giant bat-ghost from the sea, and Quentin was not happy about it despite the problem getting resolved on the very next page.

** I figure that could be next on the list for Quentin if he likes this simpler one.

Fascination Corner

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

• "Is Kissing Trump's Ass, Real Nice and Slow How He Likes It, a Good Strategy? A case study from organized labor." (How Things Work)

• Under very specific conditions, The Machine is making interestingly useful contributions to experimental physics. (Quanta)

• That said, maybe don't trust The Machine with your vibe-coding project. (PC Gamer)

• Floss as a vaccine delivery mechanism. Floss!!! (~$Science)

• This is from four years ago but still: "Never Forget That ‘VeggieTales’ Weren’t Allowed to Show Jesus as a Vegetable" (Relevant)

• Shit is getting heated out there in Library World and they need our help. (~$Publishers Weekly)

• [PROMETHEUS_JOKE.TXT] (Popular Science)

• The Scientists have come up with a surprisingly simple way to make sheets of biodegradable bacterial cellulose that could replace plastics for packaging and lots of other applications. (Rice U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Optimistic people do appear to share patterns of literal brain activity according to neural scans. (Nature) (Paper)

• The only alien invasion story we are currently accepting at this time, thank you no questions (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

• Well fuck: an early assay estimates there's 27 million tons of nanoplastics — not microplastics, even smaller little bits — floating in the ocean. (Royal Netherlands Inst for Sea Research) (Paper)

• If you're going to run a scam where you pose as an ambassador from a fake country, I suppose using made-up nations like "Seborga" and "Westarctica" help you hone in on your client base the same way spam emails with awful English do. (AP)

• The Scientists have come up with a new kind of plastic that degrades a lot better down in the deep ocean. (Shinshu U) (Paper)

• So is it ....... is it a good sign that a historian teaching at Georgetown specializing in fascism decided to get the fuck out of the country or?? (Democracy Americana)

• The progress we're making with renewable energy is real. (Guardian)

• RSV is the goddamn worst, but if you vaccinate moms while they're still pregnant, you can cut hospitalizations for it by 72%, holy shit. (U of Edinburgh via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Trying to keep mangoes fresh on an industrial scale is a nightmare, but The Scientists have discovered One Cool Trick involving ozonated water that helps them last up to two weeks longer. (Edith Cowan U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Speaking of the cold chain, why does romaine lettuce keep getting contaminated? (Cornell via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Literal made-to-order DNA is getting cheaper to produce. (Nature)

• Decrepit world leaders with decaying brains making bad choices should be a real fucking concern for us all, given that lots of them have access to nuclear goddamn arsenals. (U of Otago) (Paper)

• The Scientists have run the numbers just related to corn and found that a nuclear winter would fuck over 87% of it, which sounds: pretty bad! (Penn State) (Paper)

• Everyone wants to believe dogs are good judges of character, but it's not even clear they make evaluations of us at all, although The Scientists admit they may have designed the study wrong or that dog feelings might just be hard to suss out experimentally in the first place. (Kyoto U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• You know what, though: hobbyist dogs can absolutely detect spotted lanternfly egg clusters by scent. Hell yeah. (Virginia Tech via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Everybody forget about that stupid California Forever future-city being planned in Solano County over the objections of basically everybody who lives there; now the billionaire dumbasses are thinking smaller — like at the scale of an industrial park instead. (Gizmodo)

• The ICJ has issued a unanimous but non-binding opinion that essentially paves the way for some kind of accountability for nations that continue to not give a shit about their carbon emissions. (AP)

• So if people with ovaries are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, how the hell do they stay fresh for literal decades?? The Scientists think it has to do with cellular metabolism, which I mean ..... yeah. (Center for Genomic Regulation via Science Daily) (Paper)

• I don't like any part of this, but especially not the term "corn sweat" if I'm being honest. (Axios)

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 and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible)

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which for some reason strikes me as "Crystal Method, but with a lot of traffic noise mixed in."

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. If you received this as a forward and would like to subscribe yourself, you can do it at the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!