Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wonders if there should be a whole separate category alongside "extrovert/introvert" that comprises "people who derive energy from attending craft fairs"

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 34: NEW YEAR'S BALL III

Mark your calendar for the 8th of January and don't put away that fancy New Year's Even party outfit yet — take it out for one more spin in the company of the very best crowd in the San Francisco Bay area! 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!

✨🪩✨
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

🪓🐰 New little weirdos on sale NOW 🪓🐰

I made a bunch more! Due to circumstances previously described, the last batch of heavily armed bunnies sold out almost instantly. I've made these ones slightly more expensive in the hopes that they won't all be gone immediately — I did make another Tumblr post and the same thing happened when I Blazed it; as of the time of this writing the (truly ridiculously boosted) campaign is still underway and several have sold already, so if you had some holiday shopping in mind then you might wanna step on it. I am, you may rest assured, at work on yet more little weirdos, not all of them bunnies with weaponry. Shocker!!!!

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.

The headline on this article is horrific on the face of it, yes — "NTX men planned to murder men, enslave women on foreign island: Indictment" — but if you actually read it, the details are for the most part incredibly hilarious (minus the child pornography part), because these are the two absolute stupidest motherfuckers to ever live. Pop quiz: who would win, two dipshits who couldn't even complete fire training or 87,000 people just off the coast of the capital of Haiti?? Do you know if there's some kind of Dumbfuck Criminal Hall of Fame that measures the distance between the ambition of a plan and the actual skill of its planners? Because surely this has to crack the top five, if not the top three of all time. I hope someone manages to get a longform interview with these fucking clowns, because I have to know what flavor of brain poison they were chugging 24/7 to make this plan seem even remotely workable (real talk: probably an extremely depressing cocktail of right-wing manosphere slop). Will they be sent to the same jail, d'you think, or will the system decide it simply can't risk the possibility of these two masterminds teaming up to take over whatever prison they're sent to on the first day? I wonder.

#dadthoughts

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

This is just a PSA if your kid is coming to our house: send galoshes. You know how a timeless classic kid favorite activity is to just dig a big hole in the ground? We have one of those in our backyard right now; there's a whole zone of the yard between some garden beds and rose bushes that's just been fallow dirt the whole time we've lived here, and we've designated it a Safe Digging Zone. Trouble is, since it's literally just dirt, and the SF Bay version of winter has started to make its presence known (rain), it's now mud, and it's a fuckin' mess out there. It's fun for the kids and seems pretty harmless, but damn do they get dirty, and I've already hosed off a few pairs of shoes, so from now on we're going to start advising that any kids coming over bring a pair of boots. I'm not kidding!!!

Recipe Nook

No culinary adventuring for us this week due to, you know, Thanksgiving. I will say I was ....... surprised at the relative paucity of options at Berkeley Bowl when it came to ham, which consisted of

• Small uncooked hams that quite frankly did not look like they'd be enough, plus who wants to actually cook the damn thing

• Fully cooked but absolutely goddamn enormous hams that cost (no shit) $67 a pop

• Big ol' slices of ham steak, individually wrapped

I bought four of the latter. We're mostly doing chicken instead of turkey — you know that buttermilk chicken from Salt Fat Acid Heat? absolute perfection every time — but there are some Ham People in the mix (including myself) and having been tasked with supplying them, I refuse to disappoint. If you're a Ham Person or you know someone who is, let me share with you a wisdom I learned only in the last few years: don't bother putting the ham in the oven, not even to warm up a fully-cooked one. Don't do it! Dries it out. Just take slices off it as you like and microwave 'em. You likely need the oven for something else anyway!

Fascination Corner

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

• We probably don't need to panic yet: the guy who died from H5N5 sounds like maybe he had some other stuff going on too, and nobody else caught it. (Science Alert)

• "Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field: The Nuzzi/RFK Jr. mess and the revelation of Epstein’s journo pals lay bare a profound moral absence at the heart of our free press." Marisa Kabas ain't wrong!! (The Handbasket)

• Neuroimaging reveals people might be more likely to believe lies when there's a possibility of a reward. (Society for Neuroscience via Science Daily)

• The Scientists have invented ..... concrete that can store electricity?????? (MIT)

• I would love to see the usage data on this after a month or two: TikTok is introducing a "how much AI slop do you want to see?" slider in its settings. (TechCrunch)

• What an incredibly fucking stupid waste of everybody's time, energy, and well-being: DOGE has been shut down and the amount of money it saved the government was -$241.7 billion goddamn dollars. (The Daily Beast)

• Almost all of those systems The Scientists and Some Engineers keep inventing that pull water out of thin air end up holding it in some kind of substrate and relying on heat to evaporate it out for collection, which takes forever. Brainwave: shake the fuck out of it with ultrasonic vibrations and the water just drops out, enabling collection in something resembling a reasonable human timeframe!! (MIT via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Either our solar system is moving through the universe 3x faster than it should, or our entire model of how matter is distributed throughout reality is wrong, or something else is going on out there. (Bielefeld U) (Paper)

• Next time you're talking to a relative who refuses to change their mind even after being presented with compelling new evidence, consider letting them know they're literally dumber than a chimp. (UC Berkeley via Science Daily)

• The wetlands beavers create are better for everybody, it turns out. (Anthropocene) (Paper 1) (Paper 2)

• Some Engineers have invented a new ventilation/filtration concept that stops a truly surprising amount of pathogenic particles from ever getting to a human sitting in front of it. (UBC Okanagan) (Paper)

• Even art school kids sometimes want to make a sports team happen. (It's Nice That)

• The Scientists think kissing is probably about 21.5 million years old. (BBC)

• Bone marrow is where blood is made; this is known. The Scientists have managed to grow a lab version made of human cells that actually works, opening up huge opportunities for all kinds of research. (U of Basel via Science Daily) (Paper)

• People who look at Jackson Pollock paintings and scoff "my kid could do that" are weirdly more accurate than they think. (Ars Technica) (Paper)

• A technique that can only be properly called adversarial poetry turns out to be surprisingly effective at getting The Machine (Generative Flavor) to do shit it's not supposed to. (PC Gamer)

• The whole thing is worth reading but part 2 of "America Is Becoming Dallas" has The Pull Quote: "I walked all over Dallas and never saw any Sharia law. Maybe I missed it. Or maybe Texas is America’s most advanced example of what happens when you mix our famous racism and self-mythologizing with a fatal dose of internet poisoning and unrestrained capitalism. We sit in our gleaming new homes, fingering our weapons, aiming at enemies that exist in our minds." (How Things Work)

• Who wants to be the world's least exciting cyborg? One guy who put a chip in his hand but forgot the password is probably the leading contender right now. (The Register)

• Moss spores survived exposure to the vacuum and radiation of space for nine whole months. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• The revelation of the depth of sheer desperation on display here would in any other instance be sufficient cause for its subject to light himself on fire and walk into traffic, but because it's Elon he's just going to keep on being Elon. (404 Media)

• At least one species of monk parakeet makes friends the same way people do. (U of Cincinnati) (Paper)

• Yes, this study is about how unexpected events that cause people to pay more attention to their surroundings seem to increase prosocial behavior, but I think we can all agree the better phrasing is "When Batman gets on the subway, people act right." I would like to see this study reproduced with different superheroes to see who brings the most benefit. (PhysOrg) (Paper)

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 Erin says "The Eight Harmful Truths' 'What We're Looking At When We're Looking At Something' is a mid aughts EP that came together as a group project for a sociology class. All four of the songs are inspired by John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing,' and sound like The Shins. The male lyricist is definitely using his newly discovered feminism to flirt with women in the class."

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 the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!