Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wants to know if anybody out there needs a set of extremely fun Starfleet-themed coasters (if so, hit REPLY)

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 27: JULY, JULY

Instant Band Night will return in July and then take a four-month hiatus, so if you've missed the previous installments, this really truly will be your only chance for a good long while. I promise you nothing less than an explosion of joy in the form of music that will surprise and delight you every few minutes. Who could say no to that!! Get your tickets now and tell your five coolest friends.

July 11 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

If you know somebody with almost aggressively whimsical taste, or just happen to be a person with an appreciation for playfully intelligent ceramics, then I know a very exclusive online store you should visit. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

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.

If you're ever at a party where there's a photobooth comprising a backdrop and a dedicated human with a camera (or an automated camera at sufficient distance from the backdrop to accommodate a large group), I have the perfect prompt for you and your friends. This will require one (1) of you to be willing to be both a total ham and the putative villain of your photoset. Put simply, this prompt can be summed up as The Diva And Their Increasingly Exasperated Entourage, and it's an absolute goddamn killer. Core elements are as follows:

The Diva must be out in front, personality turned up to 1000%, absolutely sure from the bottom of their soul that the camera exists SOLELY to capture them AND ONLY THEM in their pure unadulterated glory for the next four shots. Think Jazz Hands, but More

The Entourage, who are standing behind the Diva, cycle through different variations on exasperation, such as:

Shock
Incredulity
Outrage
Frustration
Disgust
Weary acceptance

Everybody gets to make really good faces/poses, and the pictures are always, always incredible. Pro tip. Now you know!

#dadthoughts

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

This one's brief just because it feels like there's not much to report [frantically knocks wood], so we're just keeping everything on track until school comes to an end and summer day camp begins again. Have I talked about this before? We're sending Quentin to the city's summer day camp all summer, no variations, nothing else, and I feel incredibly serene about it. Other parents I know have signed their kids up for all kinds of stuff, which you know what, great for them, but I cannot get out of my head the conversation I had with one such kid's dad forever ago: they signed their boy up for a series of two-week summer camp things, which sounded great on paper, except that by the end of the summer he was getting increasingly bummed. Why? Because he had to keep making an entirely fucking new set of friends every two goddamn weeks and then saying goodbye to them forever, over and over. Sounds bad!!! Am I just justifying some inherent laziness here? Maybe, but also this legit sounds like not a good time!!!

In other news, Quentin lost his fifth tooth just a couple days ago, so we busted out the Tooth Fairy's Liaison once again and he got his fifth shiny gold coin.

That's all I've got this time around; I told you this one was lighter!

Fascination Corner

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

• What sounds to me like a Machine-assisted research effort says that viruses can swap genes across species or even families if they're all hanging out in the same animal, which is ............. worrisome for future pandemic reasons. (DKFZ) (Paper)
  

• School segregation has been getting steadily worse for the last 30 years. (Vox)
  

• The Scientists are finding cheaper, better ways to turn captured CO2 from industrial waste gases into valuable chemicals. (NUS) (Paper)
  

• If you're in the mood to be harrowed this morning, here's a long and heartbreaking read about Elliot Rodger's mom and her quest to help investigators prevent more of the kinds of massacres he essentially pioneered. (Mother Jones)
  

• An exoplanet orbiting WASP-193 is 1.5x the size of Jupiter but has the density of cotton candy, confounding The Scientists' planetary formation models. (U of Liège)
  

• The orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar are at it again, this time sinking a 49ft yacht by ramming its hull repeatedly. (Reuters)
  

• What in the flippity floppity fuck is going on over at OpenAI? (Vox)
  

• Coal fly ash — waste from power plants — can be incorporated into a new kind of low-carbon concrete Some Engineers have invented that reduces emissions in two ways, really. (RMIT) (Paper)
  

• "Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world: Decades of citizen science are finally translating into clinical trials for psychedelic pain treatments." (Vox)
  

• Have an interesting read about how The Scientists approach smashing potentially dangerous asteroids off-course. (Undark)
  

• "Selectively advantageous instability" may be a newly discovered general rule of biology that underlies how adaptability in organisms works. (USC Dornsife) (Paper)
  

• Natural vanillin is getting increasingly hard to come by, but The Scientists have created an enzyme that can produce it at room temperature from a common substrate at a highly promising ratio. (Tokyo U of Science)
  

• US policy goals around clean energy outstrip our ability to physically mine copper out of the ground by a fair margin. (U of Michigan)
  

• Some Engineers have worked out a 3D printing technique that could allow people on multiple medications to take them all in just one pill instead of a whole bunch. (U of Nottingham) (Paper)
  

• Using nothing but recorded brain activity without letting the participants move their mouths in any way, The Scientists were able to retrieve and decode a handful of words. (Nature) (Paper)
  

• The latest survey shows 90% of Floridians believe climate change is real; you can probably guess how the demographics of the whole thing break down. (Florida Atlantic U)
  

• Making things like glass and steel and cement requires high temperatures, which there isn't really a good green way to produce — you just have to burn something — but Some Engineers are cracking the problem using the Sun and some synthetic quartz. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• It didn't seem to do much except irritate their eye, but The Scientists confirm that H5N1 did jump from a cow to a person back in March. (Texas Tech)
  

• Eater's got a whole series of interesting articles about the proliferation of chain restaurants and the changing economic (and gastronomic) American landscape. (Eater)
  

• Some Engineers have created a proof-of-concept for a pretty decent battery made from zinc and lignin, a paper industry byproduct, which would be great for poorer countries trying to get access to electricity. (Linköping U) (Paper)
  

• Idiot asshole Elon laid off the entire Supercharger team at Tesla and now he has to rehire a bunch of them because he told everybody he was spending half a billion building the network out. I wonder what those employment agreements look like! (Ars Technica)
  

• One of the reasons we may overindulge could be succumbing to distraction while doing something we like, which makes us want to do it more. (APA)
  

• Deep sea sponges can pull water through themselves using no energy even in very slow currents, which is giving Some Engineers ideas about ventilation and hydraulic systems. (NYU)
  

• The Scientists confirm used coffee grounds can soak up a surprising amount of a widespread agricultural pollutant. (Anthropocene)
  

• Some Engineers created a bio-based, fully recyclable resin for photopolymer 3D printing. (U of Birmingham) (Paper)
  

• It's not practical, nor does it move at FTL speeds, but The Scientists say they've done the math for a theoretical warp drive that's at least slightly more plausible than the "exotic matter" version they dreamed up last time. (Science Alert)
  

• Rats ran riot on a tiny island's seabirds for centuries before a French intervention wiped them all out in a month. Twenty years later, the birds are back and they've brought friends! (Hakai) (Paper)
  

• Sedans as a concept are going away and that's going to be a huge issue for everybody whether they know it or not. (Fast Company)
  

• The Scientists are teaching The Machine to recognize sarcasm. (Acoustical Society of America)

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:

Alternate universe music critic Steve says he knows EXACTLY what this album is:

This is the Mariachi El Bronx style metal side project of a twee indy band like The Decembrists or Belle And Sebastian, which is called "the Minor Aches".

Driven feral by years of breathy singing and minor chords and niceness they've gone full balls to the wall Angry Metal. No death metal vocals but a lot of shouting.

Critics described it as "bracing".

Reader Erin takes us on a brief time travel journey:

The Fucking Agony's "You Spit When You Talk" is definitely the EP made by your friends' proto-post-punk band in early 2001. It's mixed really poorly, with the drums and bass only coming through the left channel. They have a show at the UU church to celebrate the release. The cover is a photo Corey took while he was doing a semester abroad in Amsterdam. You listen to the album in your car using a discman with the attachment that you shove into the tape deck. The lyrics are about how the sky was orange and purple when Patty dumped you at the old movie theater. Hearts are compared to stale popcorn and sticky floors. That one's called "Showcase SINema." The chorus for another song is just, "you tore the wings off a butterfly/WHY"

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.