Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that knows just enough Affinity Photo and Designer to be a danger to itself and others

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 29: NEW YEAR'S BALL AGAIN

We hereby resolve to kick 2025 off with an explosion of musical creativity and extremely good outfits because we all deserve to have at least one source of unalloyed joy in our lives that cannot be touched. Also, for real, it's going to be a fucking blast if the last 28 of these are any indication, and you've gotta get in on it!! Come play onstage or just be in the crowd for a new debut of a brand new act every five minutes or so; there's nothing else like it in the entire Bay and possibly the world??? Send everybody you know the link, put on that fancy party outfit, and let's do this

✨🪩✨
Jan 9 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

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.

My birthday's this week and I will be exactly in my mid-40s, which is a crazy number to contemplate. What do I want for my birthday? Funnily enough, there is something that you could potentially help with if you'd like.

One of the functions our TV still has, despite a software update that made it actively more inconvenient to initiate, is a Chromecast idle function that pulls pictures out of specified Google Photos albums to display. I realized sometime during the initial stages of covid lockdown that this meant it could be used as a giant frame for showing pictures of my pals in an ever-changing randomized slideshow, and it's been good for that ever since. It's been a while since the albums were refreshed, though, which is where you come in (if you want): I would love to add not just more pictures of friends, but pictures my friends have taken or simply enjoy, which means

• Travel photos

• Hangouts

• Quality memes

• Art you enjoy (the idle function will also display Fine Art From Around The World which is very interesting, but annoyingly it doesn't let you combine this feed with your Google Photos, so you can't have both, which is extremely dumb)

The only caveat I have is that whatever you have for me should be something you could let a 3-year-old see by accident and not have their mind be scarred for life.

Should this challenge be accepted, just hit Reply and say hey — don't send me any pictures yet though, because the way replies to this newsletter work means they'll be stripped out; I have to respond to you first from my actual Gmail, and then we're off to the metaphorical races. Make sense? Hell yeah, let's goooooooo

Regardless of whether you participate, I'm glad you're here and still reading; wild to think I've been doing this for seven years now??

#dadthoughts

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

Operation Banestar — the details of which I went into a few issues ago — continues apace, and my best guess is I'm down to two staging bins' worth of Legos. All boxes have now been opened and their contents roughly sifted for non-Lego toys (of which there were a few) and obvious train parts, which have now gone into their own box.

There were also a fair number of intact constructs of some sort or big chunks thereof, which needed to be disassembled. I tackled this task today with the help of the truly indispensable "brick separator" tool that came in Quentin's birthday box, and which we're going to get more of for Xmastime, but even with the tool, there was a lot of thumb work, and I can really feel it hours later.

I have it on good authority that my own Lego collection is even now en route from the ancestral homelands, and I'm very curious to see how it fared in closet storage — at the very least there won't be any cat business to contend with, so maybe I'll be able to deploy them more quickly?? I can tell you now that I definitely had the old-school Galaxy Explorer set, and I've located a copy of the relevant directions in an online archive — they might even be legible once printed. I'm strongly inclined to keep my Legos separate from the others, at least initially, only because I think it'll make it easier to search for the right parts should Quentin want to recreate the ship. I'll ask him, of course; I wonder what he's going to say!

Fascination Corner

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

(This one's a lot shorter than usual; I think there just wasn't a lot going on last week while everyone was on Thanksgiving break.)

• A24 is in the candy business now. (IndieWire)

• There are heat wave hot spots on the Earth's surface that are wildly outperforming any climate model we can put together, and it's troubling. (Columbia Climate School) (Paper)

• Nvidia's trying to get The Machine to make entirely new sounds, and the results are ......... mixed, but at least interesting. (Ars Technica)

• What's with all the celebrity lookalike contests? It just might be something we as a culture do during Times Like These. (Vox)

• Read this one: "Bad influence: One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?" (The Verge)

• Do you have to be a hot person to be a successful artist? What do you think. (Dazed)

• When bacteria turn out to be resistant to antibiotics, sending a virus to kill them is a great idea as long as you know which one to use; The Scientists got The Machine to figure the matching part out and it works pretty well. (Pasteur Inst)

• Neolithic people might've been eating something surprisingly similar to focaccia nine millennia ago. (UAB) (Paper)

• Pour one out for the sheer optimism of the World Timecapsule Project. (Supercluster)

• The fact that TikTok accounts like @dollartreedinners even exist is a massive indictment of the current system we have, yes, but until we can dismantle it and put something better in its place, at least this lady's helping the people who need it for the holidays. (Mashable)

• Ringtones are still a thing, it turns out. (Sherwood)

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 light bright rock in the vein of HAIM with breezy lyrics that would be easy for high school kids to memorize, obsess over, and think about getting tattoos of that they never follow through on.

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)!