Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that confesses to conflating The Beaches with Beach House in its mind and needs to do better; listening and learning

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

FOUR THURSDAYS UNTIL INSTANT BAND NIGHT

Get your ticket and spread the word!! Now more than ever we need something to do that brings genuine joy and delight, and there's a good chance there'll be cake!!! Come play or just watch; as always, it'll be like nothing else you've experienced.

✨🪩✨
Nov 13 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Partiful) (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 pottery is holding a sale this Saturday and I have, in fact, made a bunch of new little weirdos; should any of them still be hanging around subsequently, you may be assured they'll be posted to the store soon thereafter. Others will likely follow. I can't stop making strange little guys!! In the meantime you can scoop up one of the others that are already in there; get these out of my house and into your house!! Or garden!! Or the houses or gardens of friends of yours with excellent taste. Go see what's what!

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.

I haven't really posted anything on Instagram in a year. At some point I lost whatever taste I had for putting me or my kids' faces in there, and in fact the urge to delete all the kid pics I've ever posted is probably overkill but certainly nonzero. That said, I'm starting to feel the urge to post more sculptures, which makes me wonder whether I should just start a new account for all the ceramic work. Right? Should I be doing that? What do we think?

#dadthoughts

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

This past weekend saw the return of the yearly Harding Carnival, a one-day event in the park next to the school that features carnie games built by long-gone parent volunteers and staffed by current ones, plus hot food, two stages of entertainment, a raffle, and a prize booth stocked with a truly staggering variety of wholly donated trinkets, stuffies, and whatnots. This was my third year MCing the main stage as well as sitting in on the Carnival steering committee meetings, and I cannot stress to you enough how much this whole thing feels like a goddamn miracle from top to bottom: through the distributed efforts of several dozen people contributing at (rightly) differing levels of input, we manage to coordinate, stand up, and disassemble an entire event for over 1500 happy, excited attendees (the actual count is probably higher). A fellow parent and volunteer buddy of mine who does events at schools all over the place told me our school is something special, community-wise: other schools with more money just don't have it like we do for some reason. This is not to brag or tear anybody else down; I just want to take a moment to acknowledge our luck: what a truly incredible bunch of people we have around us right now.

Recipe Nook

Felix chose to sit the selection process out this time, but Quentin has approved ziti chickpeas with sausage and kale as the next candidate for a dinner recipe to be possibly incorporated into regular rotation. I think he likes the fact that we can eat it on garlic bread. We'll see what happens!

Fascination Corner

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

• The Scientists have begun a 500-year experiment to see how long two different kinds of microbes can really hold out. (Aeon)

• "Holes in the web: Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is shockingly ignorant too" (Aeon) Pair that with this paradoxically optimistic take on the apparent finding that about half of the internet is Machine-generated garbage. (Futurism)

• The Scientists are in agreement that we've fucked the corals and we need to reverse emissions trends now goddammit. (Nature) (Report)

• For nearly two decades The Scientists' theory of how smell works has involved smell receptors, each geared toward sensing one particular odor, working together to create a sort of symphony of smells that blends in our brain. Except now The Scientists have managed to grow smell receptors in the lab(!!!!) and their findings are ......... maybe different. (~$Science) (Paper)

• There's a short list of people whose perspective I want on the No Kings protests this weekend, and Thomas Zimmer's near the top. (Democracy Americana)

• College towns are coming up on a demographic cliff nobody's going to enjoy going over, but if we know it's coming maybe we can plan for it?? (The Argument)

• The people actually doing the work in Hollywood aren't buying the AI hype either. (MovieWeb)

• Republicans being Republicans. (Politico)

• The Scientists have come up with a treatment strategy that reverses the effects of Alzheimer's in mice. Highly promising!! (IBEC) (Paper)

• Here, have an interesting longread on probiotic architecture and what it could mean for human health in the built environment. (Nature)

• OpenAI says it's ready for ChatGPT to get sexy. This is going to go very well with no downsides whatsoever. We trust Sam Altman, right????? (TechCrunch)

• I don't know why this particular issue is collecting so many bummers, but if that's your thing, then it's time for "The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You: Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe." (Mother Jones)

• Some Engineers have proven that wifi signals can be used to detect and monitor peoples' heart rates with pretty cheap off-the-shelf technology. (IEEE Spectrum)

• As if we Californians didn't have enough to worry about, The Scientists want us to update our building codes because "supershear" earthquakes are a real risk that current codes haven't accounted for. (USC Dornsife)

• One reason why some people believe in clearly disproven, obviously stupid bullshit is because they care much less about being right than they do about appearing to be strong — that is, impervious to outside influence. Well, fuck. (The Conversation)

• I love when ball milling shows up in new places: in this case it's a method for using industrial pineapple waste to turn desert into viable farmland. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• Even David Brooks's clown ass is welcome in our movement according to Hamilton Nolan. Fine, I guess. Honk honk, motherfucker! (How Things Work)

• A faction of The Scientists have made some ...... some assumptions and determined that alien life might be extremely rare, like "they're on the other side of the galaxy from us" rare. (Europlanet)

• Good cancer news: a treatment that blocks cancer cells from growing or multiplying without damaging healthy ones is about to enter human trials. (Francis Crick Inst via Science Daily) The Scientists have also proved the concept for a different treatment that burns up cancer cells without hitting healthy ones using a combination of tin nanoflakes and LED light. (UT Austin)

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 Steven says: "The Brunch They Serve In Hell is a beautifully bleak title, and I think it must be a beautifully bleak album. Sparse arrangements, depressing lyrics, singer like Leonard Cohen having a really bad day. A tough listen, but you feel surprisingly good afterwards."

DON'T FORGET: I'm thinking of doing a 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)!