Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that feels a little silly going into Costco just to buy milk but the price is truly hard to argue with

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

Instant Band Night 35: THE 35TH ONE

We're about a month and a half out from the best possible way to spend your Thursday night if you enjoy hearing or making music and/or really like surprises. Mark your calendars for March 12 and prepare for another series of onstage explosions of creativity and joy with the best audience in a 50mi radius!!!!!

✨🪩✨
March 12 2026
6p
$13
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

I'm cooking up some new weird little guys for the shop already, but did you know there are now enough purchases for the reviews down at the bottom to constitute some lovely little reads? It's nice beyond description to know that these things I'm making have found homes with the right people. Go have a look; eagle-eyed viewers may notice a new bunny has snuck in there.

Idea Factory Giveaway

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

A software professional has been tinkering with The Machine and has come to several conclusions, chief among them being "you still need people" and "this is more fun than you might think," and honestly he might be right.

Here's a story:

Ever since the inception of Instant Band Night, something we've run into is that the task of actually putting bands together is more of a combinatoric headache than you'd expect. If we put Molly (who sings and plays keys) in a band as the singer, for example, she can't be in the next band — she just went up! — but oh, we do need a keyboardist for that next slot, shit, check the bucket for who else is here, etc. It gets even more complicated if turnout is high and we want to put a band onstage while we put another band in the green room simultaneously, because now not only can Molly not be in the next band, she can't be in the one after that either! Now do this for a minimum of five roles for every band (six if you include the artist); try it sometime and you'll see it's not a task for the faint of heart.

At the same time, something about this problem has always whiffed mathy to me, and hence it's also always seemed like something we could make a computer program do for us, except (1) we don't know how to code that up (2) we don't have the budget to pay someone to do it. Realistically, this is a software tool that literally only one or two people on the entire planet will ever need to use for about 3h once every two months to solve what is, at best, a hassle and not a life-threatening problem. How much time/energy (and therefore money) do we want anyone to spend on it?

There's no harm in asking, at least: the first thing I did was write up a design doc for how we thought the tool should ultimately look and function. Over the next few years I asked a nonzero number of software pals to take a look at it and maybe see what they could do, making it very clear that (1) this was a volunteer charity project to which they could devote as much or as little time as they wanted (2) the very nanosecond it became any kind of aggravation to them, they should absolutely drop it and walk away and not feel bad in the slightest. Nobody ever delivered something final, which again was absolutely a fine and good outcome!

Quick cut to a few days ago: while on a call with another software pal, I mentioned this unfinished thing while he happened to have Claude Code open. He fed Claude the design doc I'd written, and in literally a matter of minutes I was able to load something in another browser tab that was 98% feature-complete. We did about 7 tweaks to it, half of which were cosmetic, and now the problem (as far as I can tell with the testing I've done) is solved forever. WHAT. I felt insane watching this happen: Claude chewed on it for what seemed like a handful of seconds and then spat out a fully complete HTML page; the rest of the time was spent setting up a place for it to live and waiting for the publisher to complete a cycle. I want to note that this absolutely would not have happened had it not been for the expertise of my friend Alexi, who actually knows what to do with code, where the end products need to go, and how to hook everything together — humans with knowledge (as the Ars Technica piece also points out) are unquestionably vital to the process. Indeed, Alexi pointed out that the design doc I'd written probably did the heavy lifting conceptually! But holy shit it was still crazy to witness. Based on this admittedly extremely limited and highly anecdotal sample, I feel like I should designate a third variant of The Machine — Code Version as opposed to Analytical or Generative — although who knows how often I'll need to use it. To be clear, the Analytical flavor also seems to work most of the time; it's the Generative one that we all know is the problem here. I'm just sayin'.

#dadthoughts

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

How well are we all doing on the battle of Kids' Media You Would Like To Allow Into Your House? I imagine a continuum from 1 to 10, where 1 is Absolutely Not and 10 is Yes Please, More of That. For our house, that looks like

• 1: Paw Patrol: Copaganda that will never breach the perimeter.

• 10: Bluey: Essentially perfect. Octonauts is honestly also probably a 10, especially when your kids are very little.

I'm putting Pokemon at like ...... high 7? Yes, it's essentially dogfighting, but the pokemon don't actually get killed, everyone takes care of each other, the little guys are very cute, there's a lot of lore to drink in, etc. Plus it's fuckin' everywhere, which is not to be underestimated as a way to establish common ground with kids who are as-yet unknown.

Question I would love to know the answer to: what show do I put on when my kids are starting to outgrow Spidey and His Amazing Friends, but aren't ready for, say, Batman: The Animated Series? Surely there's something for the 6-9yo who want superheroes but aren't quite ready for Bruce Timm-level action? Teen Titans Go maybe fits into this, but Quentin has no idea who the Teen Titans are. He does have some awareness of Batman. It's crazy to me that DC seems to have no answer to Spidey and His Amazing Friends; is there also nothing for kids one rung further up the ladder?

Recipe Nook

Quentin selected the quick pasta and chickpeas for recipe testing this month! As seems to be the case with most of these, they turned out pretty good, but the kids didn't go wild for 'em. Felix refused to try, and while Quentin initially assessed them as "delicious" he downgraded it later to "they tasted kind of funny," so I don't know if they'll make a return visit or not. On the bright side, the kids have been asking for a previously-tested recipe our whole house now refers to as Yesterday's Macaroni because of the Magic Woods podcast, so that's a win.

Fascination Corner

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

• "We must love one another or die" contains a very good kids' drawing that I would be proud to wear on a shirt. (Welcome to Hell World)

• Thomas Zimmer took down the paywall on his writeup on "The Limits of Violent Authoritarianism" which I think is pretty much a must-read at this point. (Democracy Americana) Actually while we're at it, here's his followup. (Democracy Americana again)

• Cow tools real: this is not a drill!! There's even a "video abstract" on the paper, which is a nice touch. (Cell Press via EurekAlert) (Paper)

• Here, have a must-read and unironically excellent guide to the rapid response networks of the Twin Cities. (CrimethInc)

• This interview with Min-Liang Tan of Razer is wild, and not in a good way for Tan, especially when they get to the holographic anime waifu in a cylinder. Nilay Patel will always have at least a baseline level of respect from me for his 2023 Best Printer article, which it turns out he's been rehashing every year since with just a bit more exasperation each time. (The Verge)

• "Andrew Tate Is The Loneliest Bastard On Earth" (default.blog on Substack)

• Some Engineers are reminding us that if we're gonna make quantum computers the next big thing, we should think about building security into them now rather than try to cram it in later, because it may not be physically possible otherwise. Just sayin'!! (Penn State)

• The Scientists have run the numbers on seaweed farms and they look promising for boosting not just carbon capture, but ocean alkalinity, which would be extra great because the ocean turning into acid because of all the extra carbon is currently a big goddamn problem. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• A new clinical trial for an implant that zaps your vagus nerve as a treatment for extremely bad, resistant depression shows real promise. (WashU Medicine) (Paper)

• I mean, yeah: "Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media" (Guardian)

• The writeup's a little light on details and the paper's paywalled, but Some Engineers have apparently invented Much Better Carbon-Absorbing Bio-Inspired Concrete, which would be fabulous to start testing and using immediately! (WPI)

• Having your friends around is literally better for your brain!! (Guardian)

• Speaking of brains: shrews can shrink their brains by almost a third during the winter and then regrow them. Seems like it might be useful to know how they do that?? (Science Alert)

• Fucking what: The Scientists have managed to put a cluster of atoms about the size of a very small virus into a state of quantum superposition, which naturally leads some of us to wonder if you could actually do that with a literal very small virus. Nothing in the rulebook technically says you can't, so who knows!!!!! (Nature)

• So I guess there's a mushroom that makes you see the Borrowers?? In any other year we'd be crowning 2026 as the year we finally cracked their memetic camouflage, but instead we have [waves around in the air] (BBC)

• Crown-of-thorns starfish are a giant pain in the ass to control because you can't chop them up (just makes more) and going around injecting them individually with poison is wildly inefficient and time-consuming when they spawn in the millions; good thing The Scientists have come up with a great way to lure them to their deaths! Let's hope it passes muster in the field. (bioGraphic)

• Just being cold doesn't magically make you sick, but cold air is a slightly easier environment for some pathogens to live and hang out in, and breathing cold air makes you slightly more vulnerable to infection, so I dunno, you do the math on that one!!!! (The Conversation)

• "Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity: 70% are hesitant to trust “the other side.” The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer offers “trust brokering” tactics—but no clear path back to a shared reality." (Agents of Influence on Substack)

• The Scientists are out here starting to assemble synthetic bacteriophages?!?!?! (New England Biolabs via Science Daily)

• A long-running, wide-ranging study on dog aging also happens to be collecting a shitload of behavioral data that's showing some patterns in dog breeds that we should all find intriguing. (Scientific American)

• The Scientists now think it's possible nutrients could reach Europa's subsurface ocean from the outside, which I think just goes to show nobody has any fucking idea what's going on under there and we need to go see it ASAP, but maybe that's just me!! (Washington State) (Paper)

• While you sleep, your body kind of swishes your cerebrospinal fluid around your brain to help clean it out, basically; turns out that if you don't sleep, your body will try to do that anyway while you're awake, and those are the moments when your attention zonks out. (MIT via Science Daily) (Paper)

• I mean I guess: The Scientists now argue that Prototaxites (a prehistoric life form that unfortunately looked basically like a giant featureless dildo growing out of the ground) wasn't a plant, animal, or even a fungus as they thought, but rather its own special and long-extinct branch on the tree of life. (Science Alert) (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 straight-ahead Springsteenian arena rock that just needs a proper arena.

I still could use some more submissions to build out a notional Reader Submission Month for band/album/artwork combos! Feel free to send something in; just tell me how you want to be credited!

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 this page right here (which also has the archive)!