Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes it hadn't thrown out its old cassette collection for so many reasons

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 26: SPRING FLING

Instant Band Night 26 is NEXT WEEK. Tell everyone you know they're in for a Thursday night they won't goddamn believe. If you've been, you know. If you haven't, it's time to change that, friend: forward this to a dozen of your coolest pals and make a night of it!!

May 9 2024
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 know somebody with almost aggressively whimsical taste, or just happen to be a person with an appreciation for playfully intelligent ceramics, then I know a very exclusive online store you should visit. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ 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.

We're wrapping up Answer Month and it's been fun! I might bring the remaining questions out next year sometime and see if we eventually work our way through all of 'em because why not.

"3 films you could watch for the rest of your life and not get bored of?"

🗡️ I have at this point probably memorized ALIENS, but that's because it's damn near perfect. No notes. Let's throw it on right now.

👁️ I've only watched it a few times total, but there's a reason I own EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE on blu-ray; if you've seen it, you know, and if you haven't, what is wrong with you.

🍿 Call me insane for this one, but I have a lot of space in my heart for a movie that throws everything at the wall unapologetically and doesn't hold your hand or slow down for even an attosecond to ask itself what the fuck it's doing; I speak (of course) of JUPITER ASCENDING, which I've watched easily half a dozen times. I still have no idea what two out of the three villains(?) want. Does it matter? It does not.

"any nicknames?"

Because of the era of the internet in which I came to power, I have friend groups who simply call me "Ferocious" because of "ferociousj," the handle I grabbed more or less everywhere I was able after settling on it as a forum ID at the literal turn of the millennium (don't look at me!!!!). But does that count as a nickname? I don't know if it does.

In high school — and I swear this is true — I was given the nickname "Big Daddy" at some point during maybe sophomore or junior year for no apparent reason (irony maybe? I wasn't tall). "Big Daddy" mutated eventually into "Large Father" but both saw some use up through senior year. I can't explain it any better than that; its true origin is a either a mystery lost to time or a moment of truly random inspiration. You know how nicknames are!!

#dadthoughts

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

What fool on what corporate team decided Octonauts on Netflix should have a goddamn expiration date?? Who are you? Turn on your location, I just want to talk!!!

In the meantime, until this person is located and brought to justice, I wanted to put in a plug for Storybots Answer Time if you're looking for a show your little kids might like. I may be the last person to know about the Storybots, so if this is old news, feel free to skip ahead! The basic conceit is that there are these little robots who live in a computer who field questions from curious children all day, and every now and then they have to field a "level 3" call that takes more or less a whole episode to answer, like "how do lasers work" or "how does GPS work" or (weirdly) "what's a budget" — level 3 calls always come from a celebrity guest, which is sort of hilarious because my kids have no idea who Danny DeVito or Scarlett Johansson or Anne Hathaway are, but I sure do. The thing is that there are also little animated detours into other unrelated quick questions/answers that are fun; oddly, it's the closest thing to old-style Sesame Street that I can think of, now that Sesame Street seems to be more about long-form segments that don't engage younger viewers as much (or at least the newer Sesame Street I saw was doing that — maybe they course-corrected). It's worth checking out!* One thing I do want to know if anyone considered, though, is why do the Storybots look like ....... bullets? Do you see what I'm seeing? What's going on there?

* An earlier incarnation of this show called Ask The Storybots doesn't hit quite the same; I think they took the format and fine-tuned it for Answer Time.

Fascination Corner

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

• The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching while you read this; it's the worst one yet. (Nature)
  

• Here's the declaration from The Scientists I talked about last week who are hoisting the flag on animal sentience. (New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness)
  

• We've all heard by now about aphantasia, but did you know about hyperphantasia? How vivid is the picture your mind's eye draws? The quiz tells me I'm hyperphantastic (which all other considerations aside is kind of an incredible-sounding thing to be), but I have doubts about the wording of the quiz itself. Or do I?? Take it and tell me what you think! (Guardian) (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire)
  

• "College administrators are falling into a tried and true trap laid by the right" (The Conversation)
  

• Somebody tell The Corporations that it appears the market rewards companies that proactively respond to climate risks compared to the ones that don't. (Anthropocene)
  

• Almost 2/3 of all known physical materials follow an uncanny "rule of four" and The Scientists cannot figure out why. (NCCR) (Paper)
  

• "Lawmakers are overreacting to crime: Crime rates are falling. Why are lawmakers passing tough-on-crime bills?" Why the fuck do you think? (Vox)
  

• NASA fixed Voyager 1. Maybe that doesn't sound impressive to you until you remember Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles away and traveling at 38,210mph, which translates to 10.6 miles per second. (JPL)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a promising candidate for a vaccine against certain highly pernicious antibiotic-resistant bacteria. (Michigan State) (Paper)
  

• Hear ye now the rules of walking upon the sidewalks of New York City!!!! Honestly, these all make sense to me. (Gothamist)
  

• A quarter of the traceable plastic pollution on the planet comes from just five corporations. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• "The changing demographics of business ownership" (Brookings Inst)
  

• Somebody give me ten grand. Don't ask why and don't click on this link. (Gizmodo)
  

• The Scientists are super optimistic about replacing wild-caught ground-up fish with vat-grown microbial protein cultivated from soybean wastewater. It's win-win, seriously! (Nanyang Tech) (Paper)
  

• There are some big, big caveats, but there's at least a nonzero chance we might've hit peak emissions last year and are starting to cut 'em down. (Vox) (Report)
  

• I, uh. Huh! "Bodies Don't Decompose as Normal in This Colombian Town, And Nobody Knows Why" (Science Alert)
  

• Your pupils dilate in response to the level of light in the room, but they also do it when you're concentrating on a task. (U Texas Arlington)
  

• I know we're hearing a lot about The Machine helping to design molecules lately, but The Scientists have built a new guy that can design a chemically valid molecule based on the shape of the protein it's meant to interact with, and it seems to work pretty well. (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• Robot parts, in general, are better and stronger than biological parts in just about every way. So how come nobody can build a robot that even comes close to outrunning an animal? Some Engineers have looked into it. (Simon Fraser U) (Paper)
  

• An investigation into "what kind of fucking asshole wants to make their car even louder" yields some ....... mostly unsurprising results. Mostly. (Psychology Today) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists are looking into whether it's possible to grow seaweed expressly to extract and concentrate rare and precious metals from seawater in probably the weirdest mining method yet invented by humankind. (Hakai)
  

• Once more it appears that going for a walk really can help your mental health. Again. (Anglia Ruskin U)
  

• What in the technofascist motherfuck is Balaji Srinivasan talking about now. (New Republic)
  

• How come American cars are so goddamn big? (Vox)
  

• String theory was hot for a while, but we haven't heard much about it lately because it turns out the math behind it is brain-wreckingly complex; The Scientists have given The Machine a crack at it with surprisingly good results. (Quanta)
  

• It sure looks like people are just as anxious about reaching out to old friends as they are to strangers. (Simon Fraser U) (Paper)
  

• Here, have an interview with the Boston Dynamics CEO about the new electric version of their Atlas humanoid robot. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• If you were a squid, you'd have a biological basis for taking whatever the squid equivalent of the zodiac is very seriously. (U Tokyo) (Paper)
  

• "Compassion is making a comeback in America: A decade ago, research showed a troubling dip in empathy. A new study provides more hope." (Vox)
  

• We should maybe be looking more closely at Venus just to give ourselves a better idea of the boundaries around the conditions where life can arise. (UC Riverside) (Paper)
  

• Just following a different set of Instagram accounts can nudge your eating habits toward the healthier end of things, at least according to this one study. (Aston U) (Paper)
  

• Data from the Jimmy Dubs still hasn't helped The Scientists resolve the question of the Hubble constant, because they arrive at different answers despite starting with the same numbers. You may think this makes them sound dumb, but I find this fascinating. (Nature)
  

• My main takeaway from The Pudding's big flipbook experiment is "no matter what you start with, odds are good you'll end up with a squiggly line writhing in the right-hand half of your space," which is still a result! (The Pudding)

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.

A band and their album

Photo by Dennis Yu on Unsplash

(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:

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is an indie effort from a solo singer-songwriter who for whatever reason dated three guys named Brad in a row and wrote this suite of songs shortly thereafter.

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.