Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that puts Alien: Romulus at a solid #3 behind the first two and does not acknowledge the existence of Prometheus, much less Covenant

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Ordinarily this is the spot where I'd tell you about the upcoming Instant Band Night in September, but we're skipping it and headed straight for the November one instead. So mark your calendar for the 14th of November and get ready for an explosion of musical joy the likes of which you've never seen in your life (unless you've been to Instant Band Night before, in which case you probably have, but the sheer genius of Instant Band Night (if I do say so myself) is that it's different every time with every band by design)!!! Ticket link (including handy FAQ) is right here (as well as below) for convenient forwarding to your top-tier friends.

Nov 14 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

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: there has never been a better time than now.

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.

The sound I make when I see a Cybertruck in real life is a combination of annoyance + injury. The sight does a small but perceptible amount of psychic damage and I think I know what it is: nobody likes to be reminded of the true depths of human stupidity. Nahmean? It's extremely dispiriting to see something that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the person behind it is unquestionably a colossal fucking idiot, not just an absolute mark for the world's #1 biggest stupid person's idea of a smart person (or maybe #2 behind Joe Rogan; he and Elon probably trade this spot on a week-by-week basis), but an ignoramus on a scale incomprehensible to anyone with a functioning cortex. You want to believe better of people, you know? But there it is! There he goes! There goes the literal dumbest guy in town, and the worst part is he paid to advertise that exact fact to everyone else around him without the slightest clue that he was doing it. "I spent a hundred grand of my own money on this rolling steel dunce cap" is a tough pill to swallow. Once it starts to rain around here, those stupid fucking cars are going to be an actual danger to everyone else on the road, and then what? Do you think their drivers will start to notice people slowing down and swerving to get out of their line of sight, and wonder what's going on? This is a rhetorical question. I know in reality that would require a Cybertruck owner to notice something, which is a categorical impossibility.

#dadthoughts

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

Felix's bedtime routine has changed somewhat over the course of the year, but he's doing a new thing that I hope sticks around for a damn long while. Now instead of accepting a hug, he wants to give the hug:

1. He sits up

2. I lean in without putting my arms up (at his direction)

3. He puts his little arms around me

4. (At this point I am sometimes permitted/directed to give hugs)

5. I kiss his head

6. He lays down

IT'S VERY GOOD

THANK YOU

Fascination Corner

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

• "Begone, Panty-Sniffing Ghouls of the GOP" (The Sword and the Sandwich)
  

• Unvaccinated people who catch covid run a higher risk of mental illness, surprising nobody. (U of Bristol) (Paper)
  

• A side benefit of agrivoltaics is that you have to hire herds of sheep to trim the grass instead of deploying lawnmowers or whatever, which is both greener and kind of cuter if you like sheep. (Canary Media)
  

• But why stop on land? How about aquavoltaics? Eh? Taiwan's giving it a shot. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The Scientists fed 50,000 brain scans to The Machine and discovered five distinct patterns of aging. (Nature)
  

• Nobody likes reading legalese, not even lawyers, but everyone writes in it because they believe it conveys a sense of authority even though it's fucking incomprehensible. Incredible. (MIT)
  

• Tools for making convincing fake photos are becoming almost cartoonishly simple, which means "No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke." (The Verge)
  

• The Scientists are getting good mouse results from a new universal flu vaccine they're testing; rock the fuck on. (American Society for Microbiology) (Paper)
  

• A surprisingly advanced humanoid robot torso is poised to enter commercialization. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• "Why I changed my mind about volunteering: My generation was taught to change the system. That lesson came at a cost." (Vox)
  

• This house is incredible and I wish I knew anything at all about how it was constructed. (Colossal)
  

• Food doesn't taste as good in space, and The Scientists studying the problem theorize that it may have to do with the way it smells (some aromas are more intense), but also the isolation of being in space itself seems to be a factor. (RMIT) (Paper)
  

• Hamilton Nolan was at the DNC and has some hope to report, but he also notes that the Dems have (as he calls it) an Omelas problem. (How Things Work)
  

• The venom of the ridiculously deadly cone snail contains some compounds that greatly interest The Scientists who are trying to help people with diabetes and hormone disorders. (U of Utah) (Paper)
  

• Environmental laws don't do jack to stop deforestation if everybody keeps getting exemptions!!!! (U of Queensland) (Paper)
  

• What? The Scientists have discovered that zapping ocean sand with electricity essentially turns it into a rock instantly, which uhhhhhh sounds like a real game changer for fighting coastal erosion. (Northwestern U) (Paper)
  

• More data from the Jimmy Dubs gets us a little closer to resolving the problem cosmologists are having where nobody can agree on how fast the universe is actually expanding. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• Climate change misinfo has the potential to sound more convincing to you, a smart person, if it gets repeated sufficiently; even one repetition can get the ball rolling. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• "We Have Updated Our Children’s Menu Options to Better Reflect What We See Your Children Doing in Our Restaurant" (McSweeney's)
  

• Military swarm robots, huh. At least they didn't goddamn try to give it a Tolkien name, although I suppose they'd've had to have Thiel involvement for that to happen. (TechCrunch)
  

• The Scientists report truly surprising results in experiments with growing crops in recycled glass fragments. (ACS)
  

• You're going to read about the hydrogel that learned to play Pong anyway, you might as well read it here. (Science Alert)
  

• Chappell Roan and all the other famous artists out there would really like everyone to chill the fuck out, and they have a point. (Defector)
  

• When you think about it, trying to kill a 9-ton mammoth by throwing a spear at it with your puny human arm sounds like a good way to get yourself trampled by a pissed-off 9-ton mammoth; fortunately, it seems our ancestors were actually a lot smarter than that. (UC Berkeley) (Paper)
  

• Do birds have accents? (PhysOrg)
  

• "The most powerful company in tech is a niche Dutch business you've never heard of: Without ASML — whose machines weigh as much as two jets and are precise to 8 nanometers — AI as we know it wouldn’t exist." (Sherwood)
  

• Everybody look at some interesting sculptures. (Colossal)
  

• Swiping quickly through online videos instead of just sticking to one and watching it all the way through can actually increase boredom, according to a new study. (APA)
  

• It is now time to read about an incredibly powerful woman who became a neuroscientist in her 50s to help her youngest child with his rare neural development disorder. (Nature)
  

• The Scientists have found a new species of choanoflagellate in Mono Lake, one of the simplest organisms on the planet to host its own microbiome. (UC Berkeley) (Paper)
  

• What do you do when you've brought a bird species back from the brink of extinction and none of them know how to migrate? You get in a microlight and show them the route yourself, waving your arms and yelling encouragement through a bullhorn. YES THERE ARE PICTURES. (AP)
  

• An industrial fermentation facility in Japan is turning food waste into pig feed that ultimately produces higher-quality pork; hell yeah. (BBC)
  

• Relatedly, The Scientists are doing important and fascinating work on figuring out how to turn plastic waste into food through bacterial consumption. (Undark)
  

• Someone out there is doing some next-level thinking about guitar capos. (New Atlas)
  

• Couldn't be me, but I'm happy for them: tarantulas are out there making more friends more often than we think. (U of Turku) (Paper)
  

• We've known for a while that dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate at night, but now Some Engineers want to adapt the idea for drones and robots. (U of South Australia) (Paper)
  

• Here's another one of those studies that seems to show placebos work even when the people taking them know they're placebos, which is wild. (Michigan State) (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:

Alternate universe music critic Steve wants us to know "Poopcrystal is a supergroup made up of two people who wish they were Neil Cicierega or Weird Al. They are not quite as funny or talented as they think they are. They have made an album that is like Math Rock Tenacious D; nobody asked for it, and no-one seems particularly pleased that it is here. The producer did her very best, and it's better than it could have been because of her hard work. It's still not very good though."

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.