Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that one day is going to look up how a dehumidifier works

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

Instant Band Night 34: NEW YEAR'S BALL III

If you don't have any huge plans for New Year's Eve this year, that's fine, honestly — wear your finest party outfit to Instant Band Night instead!!! Hit the stage and flex those creative muscles or just hang back and watch an explosion of musical inspiration roughly every 9 minutes; I guarantee you've never seen anything like it before.

✨🪩✨
Jan 8 2026
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

The Xmas deadline has most assuredly come and gone but if you think you missed the mark on a gift for someone with extremely esoteric or quirky taste, why not invent a tradition of New Year's Makeup Gifting just for them?? Come 2026 there will be new little guys; I've already hit a rich vein of ideatic ore that longs to be mined.

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.

Nothing for this week, but who knows! Maybe next week will see a big long weird one!!

#dadthoughts

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

As many readers of this newsletter will no doubt remember, we gave the kids 4 cubic feet of (inherited) Legos for Xmas last year. This feat will not be repeated in a few days. We only have so much room, and there are so many toys, and no one has invented a pocket-accessible infinite storage tesseract dimension to my knowledge, so we're trying to go with less toy business this year. I am bequeathing to the kids the last of the Excellent Childhood Building Toys, which will always be in my eyes (as I am a child of the 80s and 90s) a holy trinity comprising

• Zaks (perfect for surfaces, armor for stuffies, flexing shapes)

• Legos (we all know what Legos are good for, which is to say almost — almost!! — everything)

• Construx (great for vehicles for stuffies, human-scale rayguns, structures)

We didn't accumulate a whole lot of Construx, so they all fit into a single bin that will integrate quite handily, but there's certainly enough there to fire the imagination!! Or not?? Who knows what they'll make of 'em! I'll report back next week!

Recipe Nook

I still have yet to deploy the chosen recipe for this month, but look: December's been kind of a wild one, I don't know if you've been around these parts in a bit. I should have the time for it before the year ticks over, though, I swear!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• Anne Helen Petersen has a good one for us on why the holiday season bums us out so much. (Culture Study)

• To that end, here's a suggestion that might help. (The Conversation)

• And for the rest of us: rejoice, for the 2025 Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog is here!!!! (Defector)

• "Why is time going so fast and how do I slow it down?" (The Conversation)

• A new company called Everbloom is using The Machine (Analytical Flavor) to help zero in formulas for turning fiber waste into artificial cashmere. (TechCrunch)

• Comet 3I/ATLAS will have made its closest approach to Earth and be on its way out of the solar system by the time you're reading this; farewell, cosmic snowball(?) friend. (Science Alert)

• What sounds to me like a reasonably comprehensive look at exceptional performers in their fields suggests we should be encouraging gifted kids to explore lots of different things instead of specializing in whatever they're good at right now. (RPTU via Science Daily)

• Thirty authors talk up the books they give as gifts. (Guardian)

• Which is better: a few big ants with thick armor, or lots of littler ones with thinner armor? Evolution seems to have landed on a definitive answer. (U of Maryland via Science Daily) (Paper)

• "The year ‘post-woke’ broke: In 2025, bigotry was trendy, and we found out who our friends really are" (Xtra)

• Are polar bears evolving to handle climate change??? When you put it like that it sounds dumb — of course they should, that's how it fucking works — but it seems somehow odd to be able to witness it at the genetic level. (The Conversation)

• Yikes on bikes: if a solar storm fries the satellites currently operating, low Earth orbit will become unnavigable in less than three (3) days. (Universe Today) (Paper)

• The Scientists report progress using The Machine (Analytcal Flavor) to derive comparatively simple equations that explain and predict previously mind-shatteringly complex systems. (Duke U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Every home washing machine makes about a pound of microplastics a year, but filtering them out of the outgoing water stream without clogging is tricky; Some Engineers have designed a self-cleaning microplastic filter that never clogs based on the way anchovy gills work. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• Let's read about "Eleven clinical trials that will shape medicine in 2026" (Nature)

• The Scientists theorize that after the planet heats up, an ice age seems likely. (UC Riverside)

• Some Engineers demonstrated a fascinating 3D printing method by making a little Xmas tree out of ice without any kind of refrigerant or cooling system. (Ars Technica)

• The actual percentage of people posting nasty nonsense on places like Reddit and Facebook is much smaller than we think it is. (PNAS Nexus via Science Daily) (Paper)

• You know what, here, watch this bear make himself a bed in the ground and take a nice nap. (YouTube)

• Survey says, somewhat unsurprisingly, that most Americans think the best decade of their lives is whatever one they're living in right now. (YouGov)

• "The Horns and Whistles Work: What it’s like to watch community activists stand up to a Border Patrol raid." (Mother Jones)

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 submissions came in for this one, which looks to me like the first effort from an incredibly heady instrumental math-rock group trying very hard to disguise their output.

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)!