Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes the weather would just stay at "70 and sunny with a little breeze" for the next 6 months and then transition directly to fall

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 two weeks. Tell everyone you know they're in for a Thursday night they won't goddamn believe. 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 still Answer Week around here,* and I hope this one doesn't make me sound like a lunatic; it's "any recurring dreams?"

There are two answers.

1.

I'm just going to say it: there are at least one or two dream cities that I'm positive I've visited multiple times over different dreams. One of them has a flourishing transit system that involves trains and buses; it's sort of a compacted version of San Francisco crammed into a much smaller surface area. The other one has a lot of outlying boroughs with more warehousey-type buildings, as well as a bewildering array of very very tall highway bridges and overpasses snaking into and out of its center. Most of my interactions with both of these cities involve finding and sitting down to food of various sorts; one time I visited a food court, another time a sort of linear food hall that was literally a long hallway with stalls along just one side. Occasionally there are driving missions; the highway city is fun for those. They're all pretty nice dreams!

2.

I don't know that this counts as recurring dream so much as a recurring theme, but somewhere between 1-3x a year I have a dream where a xenomorph from the Alien movies is stalking me (alone or as part of a group) and nobody has adequate weaponry. I have to be honest: I don't like those dreams as much.

* The remaining questions are below, so this is your last chance to ask me one of 'em before they vanish and I need to think of another thing to put in this section:

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?
tell a story about your childhood
would you say you’re an emotional person?
what do you consider to be romance?
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
any bad habits?

#dadthoughts

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

Felix is still emerging from the room a lot right after bedtime, so we're trying an experiment where we really try to get the ritual going at 645p so they're in bed close to 7-715p, and then curtail Book Light Time to a set interval immediately post-tuck-in. Otherwise — so the theory we're currently operating under goes — he shoots into Overtired Mode and then it's emergences every few minutes until 9p, a thing which has happened twice and we would like to happen much less going forward.

Something else that's happening is Quentin and Felix can sometimes play together for as much as 5-10 minutes by themselves without something going disastrously wrong! The age mismatch is a problem in that Quentin has expectations for or interpretations of Felix's behavior that are drastically miscalibrated, resulting in issues. Hopefully that will minimize as time passes? He said optimistically???

Fascination Corner

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

• We should probably start thinking seriously about H5N1. (Science Alert)
  

• "They're Looting The Internet" — a long one but a good one from Ed Zitron. (Where's Your Ed At)
  

• Brain privacy is starting to become a legislative reality, which is not only objectively a good idea but also brings us one small step closer to becoming the Culture. (Vox)
  

• The Scientists have identified a nitrogen-fixing organelle that evolved in some marine algae relatively recently — like 100M years ago — which is pretty amazing considering what we got the last two times this happened, namely mitochondria and chloroplasts. You know, the basis of essentially all life on the entire planet? (UC Santa Cruz)
  

• I admit this is a good method for large space junk removal, but we also need to scale it up by like a thousand if we want to keep our orbital environment usable. (Quartz)
  

• At least some of the bacteria that infect the bloodstream do so because they have a hunger for human blood serum specifically. (Washington State) (Paper)
  

• Would you like to guess how well most countries are doing at meeting emissions reduction goals set back in 2009 for the year 2020? (University College London) (Paper)
  

• Climate lawsuits do work! (Nature)
  

• A growing number of The Scientists are starting to think way more animals are sentient than we thought. (NBC News)
  

• Poetry Camera is, I will admit, a pretty good use for The Machine. (TechCrunch)
  

• "Historical markers are everywhere in America. Some get history wrong" (NPR)
  

• Eastern bumblebee queens can survive for a week hibernating underwater, something The Scientists would've never found out had it not been for a lab accident. (Guardian)
  

• Tesla's extremely stupid truck is getting recalled because the accelerator pedal can get stuck, which sounds pretty bad to me, but what do I know. (TechCrunch)
  

• Wind power is a much more efficient use of land than we thought. (McGill U)
  

• The original model of the Enterprise has come back to the Roddenberry family. (Ars Technica)
  

• "Chocolate chipless cookies" are what happens when a recipe developer wakes up and chooses violence. (Bon Appetit)
  

• The Scientists have put together a tool that uses The Machine to help people (particularly non-native speakers) write funnier captions for blank New Yorker cartoons. You know what, sure. (U of Sydney) (Paper)
  

• Can animals count? The Scientists think the answer might be "yes" for rats. (City U of Hong Kong) (Paper)
  

• You've got about a month to submit a proposal for a new plan to get those rock samples off Mars and back to Earth before 2040. (Nature)
  

• Why are people moving from red counties into blue ones? No, really: why. (Stateline)
  

• The Scientists have crunched the numbers and figured out the places where children have the most opportunity (and the least); any predictions on how it correlates to racial equity? (Child Opportunity Index) (Report website)
  

• Oh fuck yes: 4.5 million people playing a minigame in Borderlands 3 helped The Scientists understand the evolutionary relationships of the human microbiome. I love everything about this, holy hell (McGill U) (Paper)
  

• Battle of the Books is a cute and good idea. (Oaklandside)
  

• Have a fascinating longread about one ship out of the tiny fleet dedicated to undersea fiber optic cable repair, without which the internet as we know it would quickly come to a crashing halt. (The Verge)
  

• Some Engineers have built an "e-tongue" that can detect signs of white wine spoilage a month before humans. (Washington State) (Paper)
  

• The global economy stands to shrink by about a fifth even if we cut emissions drastically starting now; it would be six times cheaper just to make the cuts and limit warming to 2°. (Potsdam Inst for Climate Impact Research) (Paper)
  

• How exactly do tardigrades survive hellish doses of radiation? Their bodies somehow evolved an innate response that dumps a ton of DNA repair compounds into their bodies after high radiation exposure, basically, but it's still kinda weird that they "know" to do that. (UNC Chapel Hill via EurekAlert)
  

• The Scientists used a field of mathematics called knot theory to quickly work out the best routes between planets that minimize fuel use. (U of Surrey) (Paper)
  

• Graphene is ....... fine, I suppose, but how about: GOLDENE (Linköping U) (Paper)
  

• Artifacts in a Saudi Arabian cave indicate it's been used off and on by humans for a hundred centuries. (Nature)

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 Annie Spratt 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 James Dimas on Unsplash

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I strongly suspect is a kind of mathy electronic business that's like ...... imagine someone who's only listened to folk rock being exposed to Squarepusher for the first time. This band sounds like that to Squarepusher fans.

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.