Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's wrapping up a truly wonderful little vacation

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 26: SPRING FLING

Instant Band Night 26 is in just about a month. You have a month to tell everyone you know!! And why wouldn't you, honestly: it's the best time you can have on a Thursday night. If you've been, you know. If you haven't, it's time to change that, friend!!

May 9 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 aggressively whimsical taste, or are yourself a person with an appreciation for intelligent but playful ceramic objects, 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.

It's Question Month — or I guess now we'll have to call it Answer Month — and the first one up* is: "Any pet peeves?"

Maybe it's because I'm traveling (see #dadthoughts), but right now the biggest one that comes to mind can be summed up as "people who seem to actively ignore their surroundings" or "people who have no idea why they're where they are," mostly encountered at airports. What the fuck are you doing! Get your stuff out of your pockets BEFORE you get to the end of the security line! Think about where you're putting all the crap you brought with you!

It may not surprise you to know that I have a System for the airport security line, which I will gladly attempt to sum up for you: I usually have a coat of some kind, a blazer or a winter coat or whatnot. Everything in my pockets + watch + ring + belt (rolled up) goes into ONE of the outside pockets WELL before I get to the part where I need to start putting things in bins. Yes it makes a bulge but who cares, I'm taking the coat off anyway. Coat + shoes go in one bin, computer + Kindle go in another bin, and backpack usually goes in a third one. Carry-on goes on the conveyor belt independently. Done! I can reassemble myself after coming out the other end pretty efficiently, too. Why do it any other way! Don't tell me, I don't want to know.

* The rest are here, and you should absolutely feel free to reply and ask me any of these!

what are 3 things you’d say shaped you into who you are?
show us a picture of your handwriting?
3 films you could watch for the rest of your life and not get bored of?
what’s an inside joke you have with your family or friends?
what made you start your blog?
what’s the best and worst part of being online/a creator?
what scares you the most and why?
any reacquiring dreams?
tell a story about your childhood
would you say you’re an emotional person?
what do you consider to be romance?
what’s some good advice you want to share?
what are you doing right now?
what’s something you’ve always wanted to do but maybe been to scared to do?
what do you think of when you hear the word “home”?
if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
name 3 things that make you happy
do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens?
favourite thing about the day?
favourite things about the night?
are you a spiritual person?
say 3 things about someone you love
say 3 things about someone you hate
what’s one thing you’re proud of yourself for?
fave season and why?
fave colour and why?
any nicknames?
do you collect anything?
what do you do when you’re sad?
what’s one thing that never fails to make you happy/happier?
are you messy or organised?
how many tabs do you have open right now?
any hobbies?
do you trust easily?
are you an open book or do you have walls up?
share a secret
fave song at the moment?
youtuber you’ve been obsessed with and why?
any bad habits?

#dadthoughts

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

I'm in New York at the moment having a nice bit of a break from parenting,* but that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about the kids anyway.

One of the party guests brought a set of Jello shots in big plastic syringes — one set for the grownups and one without any booze for the kids, color-coded — and I immediately set a couple used ones aside to wash and bring home on the theory that they'd make good toys for the kids. Just from a bath toy perspective alone I think they'll be a hit, but Quentin (and now Felix) likes to do something he calls "water experiments" where we sit him at the table with a pie tin (to catch the slop), a few plastic takeout containers, some water, and all the food coloring in the house. It keeps them both busy for up to an hour, maybe more if they're really in the swing of things, and all it costs is a few bucks to get more food coloring every now and then (Felix especially hasn't figured out that really just a drop or two of any color will do just fine).

I did also get something else from a place in Astoria called the Museum of Nostalgia:** back in the 80s, an educational toymaker who wanted in on the transforming robot craze put out a series of capital letters and numbers that transform in just a few steps into surprisingly cute little guys. I missed them at the time, but that's what specialty shops are for!! I got an F and a Q and I think-slash-hope the boys'll get a kick out of 'em. I'll report back next week.

* An old friend from the college days has thrown a big turducken-centric party annually for years, and I've decided to start actually making it out here for it because it turns out it's great. It's also a good excuse to run around New York for a few days, mostly wandering art museums and food halls solo and seeing the friends I think I can fit into the schedule without too much stress. It's a rotating cast every time, so if you live here and I haven't seen you yet and you'd like to catch up, let's talk about 2025!!

** Another old friend took me on what I can only describe as the most ideal bike tour you could possibly have of very specific bits of midtown and Queens, plus Central Park. I'm definitely an e-bike convert now, btw

Fascination Corner

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

• Nature posts an interesting review/rebuttal of the scary-sounding book by the author I linked here a week or two ago about how social media is ruining The Kids' lives; it turns out most, if not all, of his claims are unsupported by actual science. Relief?? Maybe??? (Nature)
  

• "What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible? Limitarianism questions the idea that individual wealth is ever individual." (Atlantic gift link)
  

• Pair that with this one: "An Academic’s Grand Unified Theory on Why Things Are Getting Worse: After studying how societies crumble, Peter Turchin has a warning for America’s elite." Spoiler: we gotta get some of the money away from these ultrarich motherfuckers, but it'll still take years before we start to see things improve. (Mother Jones)
  

• If we'd like another way to get some money, grifting conservatives has been a time-honored tradition for longer than you probably think, and their mindset makes them comparatively easy prey! (Vox)
  

• Terraform Industries has built a proof-of-concept device that synthesizes natural gas from air-captured CO2. (TechCrunch)
  

• Elon's shitty personality is actively damaging the Tesla brand. (Reuters)
  

• Remember when we wanted to save the spotted owls? They still need saving, this time from their aggressive cousin the barred owl, and if we're going to actually follow through with it, it sounds like a barred owl bloodbath is the only way to go about it, which is ........... giving folks some pause. (NPR)
  

• Sam Bankman-Fried going to jail hasn't moved the needle in any meaningful regulatory way, so there'll inevitably be more of him (and more victims) to follow. (Guardian)
  

• It sure looks like a potentially globe-crippling cyberattack was stopped before it could start by one curious guy. (NYT gift link)
  

• Here are some interesting stats on Americans' use of TikTok. (Pew Research)
  

• We've been trying to crack wave power forever, and now Some Engineers have radically improved on one design just by shifting where the electrode goes. (ACS)
  

• At this point why would anybody move to Florida, honestly. (NBC News)

• Emerging evidence makes The Scientists think it's possible dark energy may not be a constant — that it might actually even be weakening slightly, which would be wild. (Quanta)
  

• The Scientists have made a plant-based plastic that releases 9x less microplastics than conventional ones. It's better, but it's not, you know, zero. (U of Portsmouth) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have figured out a way to use your smartphone's compass magnetometer to measure incredibly tiny concentrations of glucose in what looks to me like a generalizable way. (NIST) (Paper)
  

• Why the hell are there so damn many beetles?? (Knowable)
  

• There is now a sequel to the best article about printers of all time. (The Verge)
  

• Gary Shteyngart gave the solo cruise thing a try in the great literary tradition of you-know-who, and it doesn't sound like he had a better time. (~$Atlantic)
  

• The Scientists estimate there might be 11 million tons of plastic on the ocean floor. Great. (CSIRO)
  

• Diversified farming yields enough benefits that we should stop monoculturing ASAP, according to a huge study. (U of Colorado Boulder) (Paper)
  

• Prairie voles can get depressed if they get bullied enough. You know, by other voles? (UTEP)
  

• Do we even understand water? (Chemistry World)
  

• Research covering over a century reveals that raising your state's income taxes don't help as much as you'd think because the rich people just move somewhere else. Fuck you, I guess? (UC Riverside)
  

• Vertical wind turbines are great, but vulnerable to strong gusts of wind; Some Engineers used The Machine to design a better one. (EPFL) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have figured out a way to make The Machine give you answers to dangerous questions just by asking a whole shitload of them. (TechCrunch) (PDF of paper)
  

• Fifth Matrix movie? Really? [puffs cheeks, blows air out] Okay, sure, why not. (CNN)
  

• If space flavors are hot right now, I'm calling "interdimensional flavors" as the next trend whenever The Brands are tired of this one. (Eater)
  

• The Scientists think this study means talking politics with strangers isn't as painful as we think it's going to be, but I wonder if that's just because we're trained to be polite to strangers. (Assoc for Psychological Science) (Paper)
  

• Conservation efforts have gone so well that Botswana now has too many elephants, way too many elephants, and would like for them to go somewhere else or they say they're going to have to start hunting them. (BBC)
  

• Some Engineers have invented a way to power smart contact lenses with tears and blinking. Sure, why not. (IEEE Spectrum) (Paper)
  

• This is going to make me sound like a greedy Ninth House necromancer (iykyk) but Europe had, uh, a lot of wars in the 18th and 19th centuries — where'd all the bones go? Seriously, there should be shitloads of them, but they're all gone. The Scientists theorize that they were all dug up for industrial use. (~$Science)
  

• I guess it makes sense: the Moon is getting its own time zone. (Science Alert)

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.

A band and their album

Photo by Chris Zhang on Unsplash

(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:

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Reader Lauren says "Someone is definitely hitting an anvil rhythmically in this album, I just know it."

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.