Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that bought a new (gently used) phone and will now spend the next two weeks hoping like hell not to drop it until its custom case arrives

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 13 Going On 30

You have got to get in on this one, friends. At this point I think it may be safe to say we have a couple of regular attendees who bring their brass (trumpet and sax, to be precise) and their presence truly elevates both the proceedings in general and the variety of acts. Do not miss this if you value joy and creativity in your life!! There's no pressure to perform — you can simply join the almost ferociously friendly crowd in their appreciation for each wild new band that appears! Also, word to the wise: we're going for an 80s theme for this one, so dig out your brightest neon clothes. Trust me on this one!!

✨🪩✨
March 13 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

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after three+ 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 watched the Section 31 movie and my topline review is that I would like Paramount to continue experimenting with made-for-streaming Star Trek movies. Okay?? Please keep doing that!!

The rest of my review is not something anyone wants to read;* I will say that I think there are parts that could've used maybe 20% more effort, but there were other parts that maybe could've used 20% less effort. If you also watched it, you know what I mean!

* I will make it the subject of next week's Ramble if I hear that readers actually want to know what I thought, though, and that's almost a threat

#dadthoughts

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

Quentin's favorite stuffy since time immemorial has been a Jellycat bunny, which we got a copy of when it became obvious, just in case the Prime Bunny was ever lost and he became inconsolable. Occasionally we'd switch them out so they'd be equally weathered and thus not raise suspicion should replacement become necessary; this never happened, so at some point we dropped the charade and let Quentin know he actually had two bunnies, which was (thankfully) greeted as a delight instead of the revelation of a years-long shadow conspiracy of secrets and lies. Thing is, now that he's had these two bunnies for a while who are essentially identical except for extremely subtle differences in facial construction, I thought one day that I should introduce to Quentin the concept of perhaps naming them so they could be verbally differentiated. One of them has a slightly flatter face that Quentin thinks is chubby, so I said "What if you named the chubby one, oh I don't know, Frank or something?" Quentin refused — the bunny in question is now called Chubby Bunny — but the exchange gave Felix an idea. As you may recall, Felix has four bunnies, two of whom are little lilac guys who are essentially identical except for the color of their tails.

Anyway, both of those bunnies are now named Frank.

Their previous names — Brother Bunny (white tail) and Baby Bunny (lilac tail) — are also still valid, but both bunnies also definitely answer to Frank and should be referred to as such whenever convenient. One of Felix's Xmas presents was a Folkmanis bunny puppet that we think is still named HugHug, but there was a period of maybe a week or two where it seemed like HugHug was also named Frank. It's still not entirely clear. This past week, Quentin tried to sell Felix on naming one of the Franks Spencer instead (I have absolutely no idea how this name entered his mind), but Felix wasn't about it. Neither was Quentin, really: I tried to see if he wanted to rename Chubby Bunny to Spencer, but nah.

So, just to keep everyone fully in the loop, the current bunny population consists of:

• Felix’s

  • Baby Bunny/Frank

  • Brother Bunny/Frank

  • Big Bunny

  • Giant Bunny

  • HugHug (Frank?)

• Quentin’s

  • Bunny

  • Chubby Bunny

Thank you for your consideration in this matter; further updates as events warrant.

Fascination Corner

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

• Talia Lavin's got an incredible update of the seminal "Who Goes Nazi?" article from 1941 with "Who Goes MAGA?" Absolutely worth reading. (The Sword and the Sandwich)

• I'm not linking to any of the DeepSeek stuff except Ed Zitron's take, because that's the only one anyone needs. (Where's Your Ed At)

• While there's still an FDA let's thank them for approving the first non-opioid pain med in two decades. (Ars Technica)

• Those calorie labels on menus that nobody likes might actually be contributing to eating disorders. (King's College London) (Paper)

• Fed-up webdevs are starting to create tarpits for Machine webcrawlers with extremely good names. (Ars Technica)

• Contrary to the mewling of both the execs and the miserable racists who couldn't stop their complaining, it turns out The Acolyte was one of the most popular shows on Disney+ last year, which hmmmmmmmmmmm. I'll personally opine that of course it wasn't perfect, but it did have really good lightsaber fighting. (Kotaku)

• The Scientists confirm the presence of the literal building blocks of life (DNA and RNA nucleobases) in the samples returned from the asteroid Bennu. Daaaaaaaaaamn! (U of Hokkaido) (Paper) Not only that, there's organic molecules on the surface of Ceres and The Scientists are pretty sure they were delivered by impact from space. (Max Planck Inst for Solar System Research) (Paper)

• Longtime readers might have discerned a certain frustration on my part toward our elected Democrat officials; I'm going to let Luke O'Neil do the talking here: "Going into battle despite great odds: People love that shit!" (Welcome To Hell World)

• The Scientists simulated half a billion years of evolution to design a novel fluorescent protein using The Machine, and it actually does work. (Science Alert)

• Apple Books customers can download a putative audiobook excerpt of Ricken Hale's THE YOU YOU ARE from Severance, which sounds pretty funny. (Variety)

• Do cold water plunges really do anything? A meta-analysis says: yeah, a little. (U of South Australia) (Paper)

• I was unaware of Cabel Sasser's attempts to document new snacks, and due to its length this one is more of a photographic tone poem than a ranking, but it's still fascinating. I was, for a while, the Oreo Guy of my friend groups before my bloodstream betrayed me by going prediabetic, so this is almost nostalgic for me. (Cabel Sasser)

• There's at least one species of penguin out there who absolutely do not mate for life. (Monash U) (Paper)

• Looks like heat pumps are starting to gain momentum in the household market! (Canary Media)

• The Scientists have spotted a super-Earth-style exoplanet whose orbit dips in and out of the star's habitable zone, which is wild. (U of Geneva) (Paper)

• It would be really great to use hydrogen as a fuel source except for the Hindenburgy part where it burns and explodes (and also needs to be transported under pressure); The Scientists have come up with an interesting lignin-based solution that would be sustainable and pollution-reducing. (Washington State) (Paper)

• The Scientists (and some chefs) are working on algae- and microbe-based foods. (Undark)

• Here, have a printable zine you can put in any or all of those little free libraries we've all got popping up in our neighborhoods: "Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism" (It's Going Down)

• Some Chemical Engineers made a breakthrough on a more environmentally friendly version of refrigeration, which is great because that biz hasn't been updated in about 70 years. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Brennan Lee Mulligan and Ally Beardsley have a brief but poignant guide to NYC that we should all read. (Polygon)

• Thermoset plastics (bowling balls, hip joints, etc) are tough and also impossible to recycle, but The Scientists have come up with a new version that not only recycles, but breaks down into biodegradable components. (Cornell)

• It's not a planet-killer, but The Scientists have flagged a small asteroid that's got a minute chance of hitting us in about 7 years that they're gonna keep an eye on; thankfully, the DART mission proved that we have the capability to deflect rocks like this should the need arise. (Science Alert)

• The Scientists have run the numbers and we need to rethink how the world's botanical gardens are allowed to work if they're going to have a shot at saving rare plants from extinction. (U of Cambridge) (Paper)

• How come bats end up being the reservoirs for so many nasty viruses without ever getting sick themselves? The Scientists hypothesize it may have to do with flying, weirdly enough. (Nature)

• DARPA is trying to figure out how many robots one person can control at a time before being overwhelmed, and the results are ......... surprising. (IEEE Spectrum)

• Take your damn vacations!!!!!! (U of Georgia)

• Five Swedish professors have had a (possibly even now ongoing) bet for 17 years over who can sneak the most Bob Dylan song titles into their publications. (American Songwriter)

• The Scientists have successfully created mice with two male parents that lived to adulthood, although they weren't without, uh, some problems. Still, that's crazy, right? (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)

• What sounds to me like a Machine-powered system for finding Officially Weird Shit in radio telescope imagery is already delivering great results incredibly fast. (ICRAR) (Paper)

• Life, uhh, finds a way, especially three miles underground where you might find microbes that divide once every thousand years — The Scientists now think somewhere between half to 80% of all microbial cells on Earth are in the damn ground. (U of Chicago Marine Bio Lab) (Paper)

• If you didn't already know, Tom Hanks has been collecting typewriters for decades, and now there's an exhibition of part of his collection just called Some of Tom's Typewriters in a gallery at the tip of Long Island, open until March. (The Church at Sag Harbor)

• Have a nice longread on our fascination with the colossal squid. (BBC)

• The Scientists are zeroing in on the mechanisms your brain uses to essentially wash itself while it sleeps, and they've also discovered it might not be a great idea to use Ambien a whole lot because it can interfere with the process. (URMC)

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 Eden says "The latest guttural release from AUM makes the new direction of this group clear. Critics keep fighting it with worded reviews but the album's been released already and people are listening. It wasn't until the third track that I realized it wasn't meant to be recorded in mono, but I don't want to find another copy."

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)!