Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that didn't know about tilt controls for Mario Kart on the Switch until far too recently

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Three Thursdays from now we'll open the doors for the last Instant Band Night of 2024: let's make it a night to remember!! As always, there's no requirement to get onstage — if you don't feel like rocking out, just show up and bear witness to the most concentrated explosion of joyful musical creativity you can cram into your eyes and ears! 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.

This week we're just doing short unrelated updates because WHY NOT:

🤷 My birthday and Xmas are coming up and I find I'm having trouble thinking of things for people to get me. Not in a "Must CONSUME!! CAPITALISM!!" way — it's just nice to have an answer ready when someone asks "What would you like?" isn't it? Trouble is I don't have any concrete notions. What's the most beautifully-illustrated but also information-dense book about the Cambrian Explosion out there? Who would I even ask that question of? I don't trust Google these days. Is that something a librarian would be able to find out? Any librarian or a specialized one? See, this is what I mean.

🍄 I decided to finally start watching The Last of Us and it turns out it is pretty good, and in fact the third episode really is a goddamn beautiful little story. That's as far as I've gotten but I do intend to finish it, so I guess watch this space??

🦉 Craft Fair Season starts this weekend and I'm ready to assume my final form. Aside from whatever it is in me that gets spiritually nourished by these things, I'm also curious to see if I can discern what the Animal of the Moment is right now. There was a while forever ago where you couldn't fucking escape owls, and then it was narwhals. But I'm not sure I know what it is here in 2024. Foxes? Moths? I feel like those might be baseline mainstays of the craft fair world. Maybe there isn't an Animal right now, but my gut tells me I'm wrong and there's something I've been overlooking. If you're also a Craft Fair Person and you have a notion, feel free to voice it to me and we will plumb this mystery together.

#dadthoughts

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

This Thursday is Halloween and preparations have been underway for some time. Decorations are up; costumes were purchased and approved; candy for handing out* has been acquired. There's a street in our neighborhood that's, like, The Street as far as Halloween goes, and both kids seem primed and ready to actually go trick-or-treating this time. Quentin got a late start last year; he was hesitant to actually approach the houses unless he was with someone he knew who (crucially) wasn't a parent or relative, so the trick-or-treating didn't kick off in a big way until we fortuitously met up with his friend Cleo. This year Cleo should theoretically be with us from jump (thank you Cleo), so the Halloween haul for 2024 is going to be (in a word) unprecedented. For the record, we're all going to be sharks: Quentin and Felix have matching shark costumes in different sizes, and Mavis and I also have shark jumpsuits I got at Target. I will, of course, report back next week.

* Since we're all going on the trick-or-treating expedition, said candy will either be left outside next to a friendly note in a bucket I got at Daiso with the word CATHARSIS inexplicably printed across one of its faces or Mavis's dad will preside over the candy dispensing in person.

Fascination Corner

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

• "Demonize the Rich: Fascists offer a fake enemy. We have to offer a real one." (How Things Work)

• No matter what happens in the election, we can at least agree that Rudy can go fuck himself and I'm so glad this judge is with it. (CNN)

• COP16 is coming; based on how we're doing by COP15 benchmarks, I wouldn't hold your breath, but it should be at least interesting. (Vox)

• It does at least look like The Market rewards countries that participate in costly international climate agreements, so maybe we should be shouting about that a lot louder. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• I must report that I chuckled at this bit from the Goldfish people. (CNN)

• Instead of antibiotics, what if we slapped a patch on a wound and zapped it with extremely low-intensity electricity to keep pathogens away? The Scientists have achieved interesting results already with just one test device. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)

• "'The Kids Are Too Soft': Generational Bullshit Thinking about Work Ethic" (Culture Study)

• So The Scientists have run the numbers and we could cool the planet safely by throwing 5 million tons a year of diamond dust into the atmosphere, which would be much safer than sulfur due to diamond dust not forming acid rain. The only catch is it would cost uhhh $200 trillion, which is ........ a lot more than (much cheaper) sulfur. We should do it anyway IMO (~$Science) (Paper)

• The SFMTA is still running on floppy disks. Not the little ones, the big ones. The really old ones. The ...... floppy ones. But they're upgrading soon! (Ars Technica)

• Lithium-sulfur batteries would be great if we could figure out a way to make them stop degrading; fortunately, The Scientists think they might've done just that. (Southern Methodist U)

• The Scientists have demonstrated a shockingly effective system for removing pharmaceuticals and agricultural runoff from water with woodchips and "glorified sawdust." (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper)

• Some Engineers have built a robot that can roam around a room and 3D print useful objects right onto the floor wherever they're needed. (U of Washington) (Paper)

• When plants are under attack, they emit chemicals that their neighbors pick up and interpret as a signal to bolster their own defenses; The Scientists are starting to look into whether we could conceivably use those instead of pesticides for agricultural purposes. (Tokyo U of Science)

• Research strongly suggests spinal cord injuries could be treated with cells from inside a patient's own nose; the trouble is that prepping the cells is tricky. The Scientists think they've cracked it, and a Phase I human trial is beginning! (Griffith U)

• The Scientists have built a proof-of-concept device that can detect prostate or colorectal cancer in an hour and can be built with just a few bucks' worth of materials; now it needs extensive testing. (UT El Paso)

• Speaking of cancer, is there a pattern to which animals are more susceptible than others? How come big animals (who have more cells in their bodies) don't get it as much as the math says they should? The Scientists have completed the biggest-yet study and it's interesting (also kinda funny that the lead researcher's name is "Boddy"). (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper)

• Text messages that sound like they come directly from political candidates are duping cognitively-fragile elderly people into giving truly alarming sums of money to their campaigns. One guess which party is mostly doing it. (CNN)

• I've never heard of this bonkers-sounding flipping research vessel before and I'm glad it's been saved. (gCaptain)

• If you look at climate change through the lens of "how many nice days outside are you going to get," which regions see the biggest swings? (MIT) (Paper)

• The Scientists are investigating the bonkers-sounding notion of reengineering plants to subsist on acetate instead of sunlight so we could make farming ridiculously efficient; sure, it sounds nuts now, but why do I feel like I can see this getting tried a century or two down the road if things don't go well. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)

• I don't want to think too much about the stupid fucking Cybertruck being the third-best-selling EV in Q3 2024. (TechCrunch)

• A phase 2 trial of "give your brain some little zaps to feel better" has actually produced some promising results for treating depression, though at no point in either the article or the paper do we get a picture of the device participants used at home, which is disappointing. (UT Health Houston) (Paper)

• Europa Clipper's not landing on Europa, but Some Engineers are already working on the truly staggering next-step challenge of building autonomous explorer drones that can melt through the ice and look around down there without fucking everything up. (Supercluster)

• I've lost count of the number of times similar devices have been announced, but I'm happy it's happening and would like for all of these technologies to have a little race to mass deployment among themselves: Some Engineers have built yet another technology for pulling water out of the air. (UNLV) (Paper)

• Humans fucked the habitats of African penguins, but we've been trying to fix it by providing them with artificial burrows of varying designs: which ones have worked? The answer is unsurprisingly nuanced; the different shelters sure look fun, though. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• "I Bought Tech Dupes on Temu. The Shoddy Gear Wasn't Worth the $1,260 in Savings: My journey into the shady side of shopping brought me to the world of dupes — from budget alternatives to bad knockoffs of your favorite tech. I put three dupes to the test to see how they compared to the real thing." (CNET)

• The Scientists have found complex carbon molecules in space again; did life originate out there? Maybe??? (The Conversation)

• We already know this, but just so everyone knows I'm also aware, The Machine comes in two flavors: generative AI, which nobody likes, and analytical AI, which is genuinely useful. The Scientists are using the latter version to listen to recorded forest audio and pick out which bird species are in it, which is great. (Hakai)

• A big satellite just fell apart for utterly mysterious reasons, adding to an already serious space junk problem. (The Conversation)

• How exactly do we replace the PFAS forever chemicals in everything? (Chemistry World)

• The Scientists have been trying to figure out how to get bacteriophages to cluster together so they can hunt their targets better, and a recent breakthrough has the side benefit of being extremely aesthetically pleasing. (McMaster U) (Paper)

• Microbes, not fossil fuels, may be driving fully half of the methane emissions helping to cook the planet. (CU Boulder) (Paper)

• I've never thought about zipper maintenance before but maybe that's a sign that I should. (Outside)

• One of The Scientists working on coral reef restoration has a message for us. (Nature)

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:

Reader Stuart wants us to know:

"Live Action Enemy were clearly signed to be the next Jimmy Eat World during the Midwest Emo craze, but changing tastes and label management led to them never really breaking through to mass commercial success.

"Despite this, The Illusion of Sanity provided a brief uptick not normally seen from a dependable road act who spent nearly a decade at the precipice of success without imploding, although much of the press was devoted to the lawsuit brought on by otherwise forgettable B-side Prozac Nation."

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)!