Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that evidently isn't able to resist anything resembling a food hall even if it's in the Terminal C concourse at Logan International

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 mixes music and spontaneous creativity to create a one-of-a-kind event that's almost unbelievably joyful to either participate in or just show up and watch. No, really, you have to see it to believe it! July will be the last one for four months, so if you haven't been able to make it this year thus far, this'll be your last chance for a while. I promise you nothing less than an explosion of jubilance 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.

I've literally just returned from a trip to the Boston area to help an excellent friend get married to a truly astounding person, so I'm that combination of tired and wired where you might get a long story out of me or this might be the end of the paragraph. I do want to urge everyone within range of this writing to visit Rockport, MA at your earliest possible convenience, if only so you can experience the vibe of the place and see if you can tell me why it's maybe the most charming little coastal New England town that exists??? I may muse on this further in a future installment when I've had a chance to sleep on it; suffice to say I visited the place every day I was on this trip and regretted not a millisecond of it.

#dadthoughts

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

For a while now we've been wondering how and when we were going to wean Felix off his nighttime/naptime pacifier use when the issue was solved for us: he cracked the bulb of his only remaining one and it started to do that fragmenting thing that makes us nervous, so we told him it was broken and to say byebye paci. We think it's ........ more or less worked?? ........ for nighttime, but since it happened over the weekend, now his daycare has to deal with refusing him his naptime paci, and it looks like it's going to be a bit of a process. Everyone is professional and we're going to get through it, but that's what's happening right now!

Fascination Corner

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

• Which climate policies actually work? The Scientists are gearing up to answer this question by combing through mountains of data to create an "evidence bank" that sounds quite frankly essential to solving the whole damn mess going forward. (Nature)
  

• Your very good David Roth read for the week is "Google's Got Nothing But Wrong Answers" (Defector)
  

• The Machine is getting pretty good at weather forecasting, which is going to be handy because this year's hurricane season is shaping up to be a motherfucker. (Ars Technica)
  

• Maybe the rent is too damn high because there's literally been a goddamn rent cartel operating in the US for the last four years. (Popular Information)
  

• It's 2024; have we figured out any newer/better ways to make friends and hang out? (Guardian)
  

• Evidence of the first rainfall on Earth has been found and dated to half a billion years before we thought it was possible, which is forcing The Scientists to rethink their assumptions about what the surface of the planet was even like back then. (Science Alert)
  

• What: a Japanese company says they're taking a shot at building a space elevator. (Science Alert)
  

• The Scientists think there might be new sources of antibiotic compounds in the microbes that live in the Roman Baths. (U of Plymouth) (Paper)
  

• Molly will likely not be coming to a PTSD treatment program near you anytime soon, but that's mostly down to the unfortunately flawed trial studies; in all fairness, I can't imagine how the hell you're supposed to do a placebo for MDMA in the first place, and apparently neither could anybody else. (Ars Technica)
  

• A neutron star is emitting signals weird enough to baffle The Scientists. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• There are far dumber uses for The Machine than seeing if it could find space-based weapons platforms hiding in plain sight. (Axios)
  

• On the one hand, this is the stupid shitty car the cops deserve, but on the other, you hate to see anybody contributing to Cybertruck sales. (Popular Science)
  

• Irrespective of whatever ecologies happen to have established themselves there, a back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that some countries (like the UK) could get literally all their electricity needs met by just floating solar panels in some of their lakes and reservoirs. (Bangor U) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have built a computer model that can, with some regularity, predict the emotions users are feeling during an interaction, which would be a real game changer for oh, literally anything having to do with chatbots, for a start. (U of Jyväskylä) (Paper)
  

• Commercial mushroom growers compost nearly a third of their output because nobody would buy it; a new study shows they should feed at least some of it to chickens instead and save everybody some money. (PhysOrg) (Paper)
  

• Pour one out for Deer 255, the preeminent ultramarathoner of the deer world. (High Country News)
  

• Metal 3D printing is currently being tested aboard the ISS. (Popular Science)
  

• Here, have a compulsively readable ranking of 51 postapocalyptic movies ranked by individual survivability! (The Ringer)
  

• A community heating/cooling experiment that sounds pretty damn great is underway in a small Massachusetts town. (AP)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a better way to make chocolate that uses more of the cocoa fruit, making it not only more sustainable, but slightly healthier. (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• Did burrowing worms kickstart the explosion of biodiversification that happened during the Ordovician period? Really? Worms?? (Johns Hopkins U) (Paper)
  

• Using a human speech model, The Scientists have reported promising results trying to get The Machine to interpret the sentiment behind dogs' barking. (U of Michigan) (Paper)
  

• New evidence suggests that if you want people to buy sustainable meats, tell them about the animal welfare aspect instead of the actual sustainability part. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have identified an oceanic fungus that can break down polyethylene, provided it's been exposed to sunlight first. (Royal Netherlands Inst for Sea Research)
  

• Stretchy OLED displays??? (IEEE Spectrum) (Paper)
  

• A new cement company trying to get its low-carbon product out into the world landed its first big client, and construction is underway. (Canary Media)

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:

Nobody sent in an interpretation for this one, which I think is an artifact from the "downtempo" era of Thievery Corporation and Kruder + Dorfmeister, before all that stuff simply became known as "lo-fi beats to study to or walk around inside a mall store with classy understated vibes."

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.