Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that is now up to season 3 of THE BOYS and will not be stopping anytime soon

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 13 Going On 30

THURSDAY!!!

Holy shit, don't you just want to just leap up into the air and punch/kick in 22 different directions simultaneously?? Well, you can't, but I have the next best thing lined up for you this coming Thursday: it's Instant Band Night and you're gonna have a goddamn incredible — dare I say cathartic — time even if all you do is come watch, because every band is new, every creative impulse is honored, and we can just fuckin' go for it. Do not miss this if you value joy and creativity in your life!! There's no pressure to perform — you can simply join the almost ferociously friendly crowd in their appreciation for each wild new band that appears! Also, word to the wise: we're going for an 80s theme for this one, so dig out your brightest neon clothes. Trust me on this one!!

✨🪩✨
March 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

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

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.

I would love to be more active on Bluesky but I can only get about two or three scrolls down before I take too much psychic damage from whatever headlines are being shared and I have to close the tab. "They're counting on your exhaustion" is a thing I hear a lot. And it's true, they are.

But I don't close the tab because of exhaustion. I will never be exhausted by this. I physically cannot be exhausted by this.

The actual problem is that whenever I read a new headline about some awful, pointless, cruel shit Trump and his lickspittles are up to, the sheer force of the hatred I feel for them and the damage they're doing threatens to overwhelm me. I'm serious: I can feel a fresh energizing wave of fury and loathing course through every cell in my body; if you could only see the face I make.

But there's nothing I can actually do with it, so I have to let it wash over me and past me yadda yadda you know the score, we all read DUNE or saw the movies.* And I do, and it does. But I sometimes worry that every time the wave passes over me, it erodes something.

Currently what it's eroding — and here I have to stress that erosion is an extremely gradual process that can take literal eons — is my resistance to just saying "FUCK IT" and going for the laziest, lowest-effort Trump grift possible. I'm not saying it would be no effort, but it would be low effort, and it would be something along the lines of using various flavors of generative AI to stand up a website for a fake organization called something like The Tradition of American Freedom Heritage Foundation Stands With Donald Trump whose only active page is a big donation intake form, then running off with the money.** I'm not going to do it, but I worry that my resistance to something similar is very very gradually being worn away, molecule by molecule. I'm also aware this grift has probably already been run and is indeed probably being actively run right now by hundreds if not thousands of people who've had the same admittedly very basic idea.*** But I still think about it. And that's not all: I'm also reasonably certain I'm not alone in this. Who else is feeling the erosion? Is it happening the same way, in the same areas, for all of us? I wonder about this sometimes. So no: I'm not exhausted — the opposite, if anything — and that's why I'm just not on Bluesky the way I used to be on Twitter. Anyone else in this boat with me? Do we need to get a bigger boat?

* Yes I know it's the litany against fear and not hatred, but they're both kind of a mind-killer, it turns out

** I'm laying it out here precisely so that I'll never do it, so nobody rush to hit Reply and try to warn me off a clearly self-destructive path

*** I've done no research, I'm just guessing that if I can think of it, so can any number of other people with slightly more moral flexibility than I currently possess

#dadthoughts

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

[stage whispering] I'm just going to be very quiet in this part and say very softly that Quentin read an entire Dragon Masters book to himself after bedtime last night (plus the first two chapters of another one) and I am so excited about this development that I may explode but I have to keep it very chill (although I did congratulate him this morning) (I held up my hand to hi-five him and he slapped it so hard he said his hand hurt but he said it was worth it)!!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• "Why you should make your phone boring: Screen time reports won’t help you put your phone down. Here’s what can." (Vox)

• As usual, Ryan Broderick captures our frustration with the inability of Democratic leadership to even pretend to meet the moment. (Garbage Day)

• What: a human-brain-cell-powered "biological computer" just went on sale??? For about the cost of a low-range SUV??????? (New Atlas)

• International Women's Day happened; Science Alert made a good list of women science communicators that's worth checking out if you weren't already aware of them! (Science Alert)

• NASA's gradually been shutting down the instrumentation on the Voyager probes to save power, and the next one's going out in a couple weeks, which both makes sense and is sort of insane to contemplate, given that the signal has to traverse 15 billion miles to hit a target about the size of a Jetta moving so fast it could go from New York to LA in five minutes. (PhysOrg)

• The Scientists are working on ways to teach kids to become better citizens, and they have at least one good idea. (Ohio State) (Paper)

• New term for you: "greenhushing," which is when you do stuff that's good for the climate but you downplay it on purpose to avoid scaring away the chuds so you can keep operating. Honestly: regrettable but understandable. (Bloomberg gift link)

• Some Engineers have proven you can make good electrodes for high-energy supercapacitors out of pine tree sawdust, which we have a lot of lying around. (U of the Basque Country) (Paper)

• The Scientists are zeroing in on the gut microbes that work best to fight off C.diff infections, at least in mice, which would be great because we could just cultivate and introduce those instead of having to do an entire fecal transplant. (Penn State) (Paper)

• Going against your own advice makes you blame yourself that much more when things don't go right, according to a new study. (Cornell) (Paper)

• Oh great: if you have any 20-yr-old DVDs from WB on your shelf, maybe take a look and see if they're still good, 'cause they might not be. (Ars Technica)

• That "woolly mouse" you might be hearing about isn't literally a woolly mammoth gene transplant, but it is pretty damn cute. (Nature)

• Here's a good writeup on the songs that get used most frequently in TV and movies and their contexts, although tragically it doesn't go into the most confusing use of "Fade Into You" ever recorded (the fistfight scene in Starship Troopers, if I remember correctly). (Stat Significant)

• Some Engineers have made a robotic hand that mimics the human ability to sense whatever it's grasping and pick it up without crushing it. (Johns Hopkins) (Paper)

• The world's biggest clone is probably a bunch of seaweed called bladderwrack growing across over 300mi of coastline in the Baltic Sea. (U of Gothenburg) (Paper)

• It sure looks like anxiety and apathy can affect the way you make decisions, but in (probably to be expected) wildly different ways. (U of Minnesota) (Paper)

• Sea turtles appear to be adjusting their nesting times to accommodate a warming ocean, which is both good and bad news. (Oceanographic) (Paper)

• If we ever bring back rock samples from Mars, how are we going to detect any potentially nasty alien microbes in there before an Andromeda Strain-type situation kicks off? The Scientists are already thinking about it. (U of Tokyo) (Paper)

• Some Engineers built a robot arm that uses The Machine (Analytical Flavor) to help interpret signals from a paralyzed man's brain for seven months, which is a new record! (UCSF) (Paper)

• Pour one out for the poor folks at Intuitive Machines who just can't seem to stick a Moon landing. Maybe don't make a tall one next time? (Science Alert)

• After running some models, The Scientists conclude we could stop a pandemic before it even gets going by paying closer attention to our smartwatch data and isolating earlier. (Aalto U) (Paper)

• Initial human trials on a stem-cell-based process to fix formerly irreversible corneal damage have gone pretty damn well. (Mass General Brigham) (Paper)

• What makes a bacterium activate its self-defense systems (which can include nanoscale spearguns)? The Scientists did some testing. (U of Basel) (Paper)

• Urban bird nests are like little time capsules of trash, which is simultaneously kind of cool and tragic. (Science) (Paper)

• A company called Sesame is doing some fascinating audio work with The Machine (Generative Flavor) that you kinda gotta hear. (Ars Technica)

• Seems like it might be useful: here are "Five essential strategies to master your habits" (The Conversation)

• New evidence suggests our pre-human ancestors were capable of making tools (and probably abstract reasoning) a million years earlier than we thought! (University College London) (Paper)

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 I think is a standard two-guitar four-piece rock band with a real growly sound; this is their only album.

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)!