contains one (1) heartwarming story

October 14, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that finally in this, the year of Luigi 2019, signed up for a Spotify account. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway126 - Intellectually Cuddly"Jon (@ferociousj), acting co-host Kelly, and special guest Steve Woyach peer into each others' files for fabulous new ideas in consumer products, cool parties, ingenious cultural practices, and more."I hope episodes like these become the norm, where I get to rummage through other peoples' mental junk drawers just like they do mine; they're fascinating as fuck.This is your gentle but insistent reminder that it would be truly helpful of you to open us up in your podcast app of choice and deliver a 5-thing rating like this:🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷which would really be amazing. Additionally, should you be moved to leave a nice review, all the gods of fortune and luck will smile upon you for precisely 6.72 seconds.Instant Band Night: Lucky 13More or less exactly a month away, and I've got a truly convenient link you can click that'll add it right to your calendar. Do it! If you don't live in the Bay Area, think of a few fun people you know who do and forward this whole thing their way IMMEDIATELY🍟 All the details are here 🍟✨ http://bit.ly/instantbandnight13 ✨ 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.My birthday's coming up in a couple of months, and I want to do something a little unorthodox -- in fact, it's an idea that dear friend Molly brought up in episode 121 of the podcast: CLAY PARTY. Basically, I need to find a ceramics studio that's okay with bringing in a group of 6-10(?)* people for a few hours to make basically whatever they want out of clay, and then bring them back again some unspecified number of days or weeks later so we can glaze whatever we made. There's a place called Clayroom in San Francisco that seems to do a more structured version of this, but it's important to me that it be as unstructured as possible while still having one (or two? or howevermany seems appropriate?) instructor-type people onhand who can provide advice or instruction as needed. I took ceramics back in high school and I feel like I have enough baseline knowledge, but who knows? Have there been advancements in clay since the 90s??The other thing is that I don't know what I want to make. I'm having trouble breaking myself of the notion that whatever it should be capital-U Useful. We don't need any more mugs or bowls. What should I make? A tiny statue of myself? Little statues of our whole family? Crude currency tokens from a primitive lost civilization that never actually existed? Totems that would be interpreted as "items possibly meant to ward off demons" if they were ever to be unearthed by archaeologists centuries from now? A fake fossil of some sort? A disc inscribed with the family sigil that I still haven't invented?** As you can see, there's a rich vein of possibility to mine here, for varying values of "rich."But anyway. Does this seem like something that should be possible, or have I had a truly insane notion? I welcome thoughts on literally any aspect of what I've put up here, especially if you have ideas about what to make or what my family sigil should look like.* An important detail is that I haven't actually explicitly asked anybody I know if they'd be interested in this concept, so I have no idea how many to plan for.** Should I just go to Fiverr for this or what? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.So here's a first:We're trying out more grown-up foods on Quentin, so on Sunday night I made a chimichurri chicken & rice with roasted carrots that was partially successful (we of course like it a lot; Quentin was an absolute fiend for the carrots, a yes on the chicken, and lukewarm at best on the rice). When Mavis put him on the floor, she asked him, "Can you say thank you to Daddy for a nice dinner?"He put his arms up and said "I lub you!" and came in grinning for a hug, which of course he got.Folks, I think this whole starting-a-family thing might've been a pretty good idea. Just a heads-up on that. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Change is coming everywhere, even to investment culture. I don't know if this counts as a weird flex, but I know Rachel, and she's cool as hell. (WaPo) 

  • Huh: UCLA is establishing an institute to study human kindness (and the knock-on effects thereof). (LA Times) 

  • Da Vinci designed a bridge five centuries ago that was never built; turns out it's real good. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • This is verifiably the worst use of "zoom and enhance" possible: a stalker tracked down a pop star by examining a reflection in her eye to figure out her usual train stop. Fucking hell. (BBC) 

  • Would a national service like the old Civilian Conservation Corps be a good idea? These guys looked at a bunch of studies and conclude "Yes." (Brookings Institute paper) 

  • Lunar regolith can be converted into oxygen and useful metals. (Science Alert) 

  • Is designing for the Instagram pic damaging the practice of design itself? (Fast Company) 

  • Meat has been grown (or more like printed and then grown) in space. (Space) 

  • Your thought-provoking read for the day is this one about how the wilderness isn't "for" us no matter how much we think it is. (BuzzFeed News) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumChurch Trip Girlfriend, Progress Comes in Fits & Starts 

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.