Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that took a nice little family hotel trip to what seems like the most concentrated nexus of mass market restaurants this side of Breezewood (affectionate)

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Once again I regret to inform you that if you didn't make it to Instant Band Night 27 last week, you missed the fuck out. We had two saxophones show up. There was another violinist! One band called themselves "Train Death," and by the time they got done the whole crowd was chanting "Train Death! Train Death! Train Death!" — I sincerely hope someone walking by thought a fucking cult meeting was taking place!! Again: you could've had this but you missed it; fortunately, you have about 120 days to mark your calendar and otherwise prepare spiritually for the next one, because it's happening in November!* Shine your partyin' shoes and put them carefully in the closet next to your rockin' outfit, 'cause they're gonna see some use in four months!!!

*For reasons that are still a mystery to the entire Instant Band Night volunteer team, September is always extraordinarily underattended and so we decided to just skip it.

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: go check it out!

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.

I'll probably talk about this more in #dadthoughts below, but yes: we drove about an hour north of the SF Bay to stay at a hotel for a couple of nights, because (as we discovered on last year's trip down to Monterey) the kids love a hotel and it beats the hell out of trying to actually fly somewhere. So we're in Rohnert Park, just south of Santa Rosa, and if I look out the window of my hotel room I can catch a glimpse of

Burger King
Chili's
Chick-fil-A [spit]
Amy's Drive Thru
In-n-Out
Krispy Kreme

Out of visual range but within striking distance there's also

El Pollo Loco
McDonald's (inferred by takeout bag from fellow guest)
Dunkin (ditto)
Applebee's
Fucking Hooters

Just a little ways down one of the nearby side streets there's an Olive Garden — an Olive Garden that was, in fact, too crowded to eat at in the timeframe we had,* so we decamped for the Shari's across the street that was just the right speed for two hungry kids. There's something weirdly magical about this that I don't know how to place; I just like it. You know what I mean?

* It wasn't that the place was jam-packed and jumpin', but more that they seemed to only have enough staff to handle about a half dozen tables, which probably says something about The Economy that I don't want to dwell on.

#dadthoughts

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

If you've got little kids and are at all capable of getting yourselves to the city of Santa Rosa, CA, then you fucking owe it to your entire family to get over to the Children's Museum of Sonoma County as soon as humanly possible. I am here to tell you it's fucking magical and your kids will lose their goddamn minds.* It's absolutely jam-packed with hands-on fun activity/exhibit type things THAT ACTUALLY WORK AND ARE GOOD, and seem to have been designed to withstand the rigors of use by millions of tiny hands. You'll know what I mean when you go, but the space room on its own is worth the price of admission, and there's an interactive water exhibit in the yard that outclasses it by at least 5x. I want to tip my hat to the designers of the installations, who very clearly know exactly what they're doing and they should feel goddamn incredible about it. If you're anywhere within range, go now! I COMMAND IT

We might make this a yearly trip. We went for two nights this time just because we thought it'd be nice to stay at a hotel for two nights, and it has been, but who knows what we'll do next year? Just one night? Different hotel? (I wonder if the baseball thing happens here every year?) We ............ theoretically could just make the drive up in the morning, really, it's not that far away, but the getting-away of it all has really been something. We've got at least a year to talk it over.

What's the hands-down best kids' destination where you are? I'm feeling like I should build a list just in case.

* Here's where I reveal not really having checked out the Bay Area Discovery Museum yet despite its being much closer; it's on my mental list now, though, because I think/hope it's on the same level as this place.

Fascination Corner

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

• "Gambling In Casablanca: Being blamed for a world of political violence by the people who force us to live in it, and are now shocked-shocked!—by it. Navigating the daily trauma of living in a bully's paradise." (The Reframe)
  

• "Chinese factory owners are becoming TikTok comedians to find new business partners: Factory influencers are producing actually funny videos on TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat to increase B2B sales" (Rest of World)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a way to make multiple edits to a cell's genome simultaneously using molecules they call "retrons." (Gladstone Inst)
  

• Ahem: 34,000-yr-old termite mounds. (AP)
  

• The Scientists have made a medically interesting discovery about what triggers migraines. (U of R)
  

• Some Engineers have come up with a fast, stable, sustainable-sounding carbon capture technology that they're considering commercializing, which you know what? Good for them. (UT Austin)
  

• "Allies Against Democracy: Trump and Project 2025: Trump is not the mastermind behind Project 2025. It’s worse: The rightwing establishment has radicalized to the point where their plans are entirely in line with his vengeful desires" (Democracy Americana)
  

• The Scientists report promising results using The Machine to diagnose different kinds of dementia, even if multiple types are occuring at once. (BU) (Paper)
  

• Oh shit, Arizona beat us to the solar-panel-covered canals! (Canary Media)
  

• If it feels to you like your day is increasingly consumed by meetings, you're not wrong. (~$Atlantic)
  

• The actual cause of lupus might just have been found (?????). (Northwestern U)
  

• Money would help collect more plastic bottles for recycling, according to a study run by Some Engineers. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists confirm that oyster sanctuaries in the Chesapeake Bay not only have more oysters, they're more biodiverse environments in general. (Smithsonian)
  

• Romantasy is going fucking nuts out there in the bookstores, which means we need to both write more of and come up with a good name for science fiction romance immediately. (Publishers Weekly)
  

• The Jimmy Dubs has found an exoplanet 48ly away in its star's habitable zone that might even have liquid water on its surface!!!!!!!! (U of Montreal) (Paper)
  

• A Twitch controversy-that-shouldn't-be-a-controversy appears to be teaching homophobes about empathy in real time. (Kotaku)
  

• We're putting too much fertilizer on our fields, which is actually a gigantic problem! The Scientists have discovered that zinc, of all things, might be the key to getting plants to absorb more nitrogen from the soil, which would be a huge help. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have discovered a good way to recover a rare earth metal from e-waste (mostly old fluorescent bulbs), which is great because we really need more ways to recycle all that stuff. (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• A small study makes the therapeutic potential of blasting specific parts of the brain with low-power ultrasound seem promising. (U of Arizona) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists, after doing some interesting-sounding math, have worked out that the Last Universal Common Ancestor must've appeared 4.2 billion years ago, less than half a billion after the formation of the planet Earth itself. (U of Bristol) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers are pretty sure that teaching humanoid robots to dance can help them learn other movements and increase humans' trust in them, which I suppose could be either bad or good; someone please pitch a movie that combines THE TERMINATOR with BREAKIN immediately. (UC San Diego)
  

• One of the more uniquely exhausting aspects of living in California is the fact that we're all forced to become economists and regulatory experts every goddamn time there's an election; here are all the godforsaken propositions we need to decide on come November. Some of them are obvious goods! Some of them are ........ less so! Once again I'm asking for a proposition to take these propositions out of our fucking hands and under the purview of actual experts. (Berkeleyside)
  

• The Scientists made a breakthrough on storage, delivery, and testing of bacteriophages for all kinds of exciting applications. (McMaster U) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers demonstrated a prototype for a soft, flexible, cheap robot actuator that works like human muscles. (Northwestern U) (Paper)
  

• Anyone out there pitching a new idea to an audience should tailor it according to how much of a leap it is, says a new study. (City U of London) (Paper)
  

• War Thunder players have once again leaked sensitive military documentation on the forums to prove a point. (Dot eSports)
  

• The Scientists wanted to figure out what the world's fungi are up to: where are they? Do they have seasonal growth cycles like other organisms? So they just ........ sampled the air all over the world and ran DNA analyses, which is honestly a pretty fantastic idea. (U of Jyväskylä) (Paper)
  

• Aquaponics wastewater seems fine to grow lettuce in for human consumption, according to a new study. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper)
  

• The Corporations are starting to figure out that lots of us like to subscribe to a streaming service just long enough to watch whatever show we're interested in before we bail, so look for more of those bundles in the future. (Hollywood Reporter)
  

• We react differently to events with different emotional flavors — a barking dog coming our way vs a cute little kid, for instance — but where in the brain is that response coming from? The Scientists have an idea. (Trinity College Dublin) (Paper)
  

• If we're talking movies or TV (mostly Star Wars tbh) and I mention something about "slop," this is what I'm talking about. (Garbage Day)
  

• Sunflower sea stars went functionally extinct about a decade ago and the resulting sea urchin explosion has been devastating for kelp forests; The Scientists are working on bringing them back. (Vox)
  

• The Scientists have built a prototype bioelectronic virus detector that can be tailored for individual viruses, including covid variants. (Cornell) (Paper)
  

• Why are so many crayfish so brightly colored when they spend their lives in underground burrows without being seen by others? It seems to be an evolutionary accident, essentially, and it's happened 50x since crayfish first appeared 260 million years ago. (Science)
  

• Some Nordic Engineers have done the math and concluded that hydrogen fuel cells could power 97% of all flights in their neighborhood. (Chalmers U) (Paper 1) (Paper 2)

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 Lauren says Girl Bunny was an "impossibly cool all fem-coded punk band with surprisingly tender lyrics every third song. They all agreed early to never sell out as a group and played exclusively dive bars in Seattle for years; members went on to be decently successful side players in other more prominent bands but there is talk of a one-off reunion show on the 15th anniversary of this album."

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.