Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's essentially basking in the rain like some sort of reverse lizard of hydration!!

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 35: THE 35TH ONE

One month remains until the best possible way to spend your Thursday night if you enjoy hearing or making music and/or really like surprises returns!! Mark your calendars for March 12 and prepare for another series of onstage explosions of creativity and joy with the best audience in a 50mi radius!!!!!

✨🪩✨
March 12 2026
6p
$13
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

I'm cooking up some new weird little guys for the shop already, but did you know there are now enough purchases for the reviews down at the bottom to constitute some lovely little reads? It's nice beyond description to know that these things I'm making have found homes with the right people. Go have a look; eagle-eyed viewers may notice a new bunny has snuck in there.

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after four+ 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.

Spoilers if you haven't watched or heard anything about the show Pluribus. Of course if you don't care, then read on!!

Am I wrong for thinking the world is unquestionably a better place post-hivemind integration? Like: sign me the fuck up. Is that weird? I would join immediately. And I was thinking about this even before I saw the show! You may have gathered that I'm still on Tumblr — I will in fact never leave Tumblr, ever, it's easily the best mass platform left to us in this benighted age — and found myself reading someone's Very Interesting Star Trek Take. "Damn," I thought, "people are still out here having Very Interesting Star Trek Takes. I wonder how many of these are out there that I'm not reading just because they haven't crossed my dashboard yet, or that I'll miss entirely simply because I'm not following the right account? Wouldn't it be better if — ah, that's the Borg. That's the Borg hivemind I'm thinking about. HILARIOUS." Seriously, though: wouldn't it be at the very least interesting if not outright fun to be instantly connected on an instinctive level to everybody else in the world and their personal universe of hot takes? Or is that not what the experience of a hivemind would be? I guess the only way to find out would be to try, right??

#dadthoughts

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

I don't know if this is a thing your PTA does, but one of the more bizarre and endearing fundraisers our PTA puts on every year is the Flocking. For a couple weeks in February, there's a roving flock of plastic lawn flamingos out and about, and for a nominal donation you can have them sent to an address of your choosing; a team of people basically sneak onto the appointed lawn sometime in the dead of night (or perhaps the very early morning?) and decorate it (there's also an informational sign explaining what's just happened). I've always thought it was at minimum a fun concept, but now our very own house has been flocked, and I can confirm it is in fact delightful for no concrete reason I can pin down. By design, the fundraiser has no provision for informing the flocked house who sent the flock their way; although there's been some loose talk about adding a separate and entirely voluntary donation stream that will unlock the info for the curious, I don't know that I want it now that it's happened to us. Is that weird? Some things should remain a mystery, is all.

Recipe Nook

No time this week to put together another prospective recipe trio; I have had some truly spectacular meals at friends' houses that in no way would fly at home, but maybe in a few years the kids will be ready. Or more like when they're teens.

Fascination Corner

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

• ProPublica has a collection of letters from kids in one of the ICE concentration camps and you don't have to read it, but you do have to acknowledge that it exists. Future historians: we knew. (ProPublica)

• Speaking of things we knew, Ring cameras have long been an attempt to establish a surveillance state, but good news: bullying works! Ring and Flock have canceled their integration after the entire internet erupted over that dystopian-ass Super Bowl commercial. (ABC News)

• Thomas Zimmer says we should take patriotism back from the MAGA chuds and he's right. (Democracy Americana)

• I will accept four seasons of Severance if Apple wants to make that many, but I draw the line at a goddamn prequel; nobody needs that. Who keeps thinking we need that??? Although I can't deny it would be nice to see employment of humans in the entertainment industry for the foreseeable. (Deadline)

• The Scientists think it's possible that instead of a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, there might be a huge blob of dark matter instead, which would actually explain a lot about the way our galaxy hangs together. (Royal Astronomical Society) (Paper)

• New research suggests that using The Machine at work doesn't make it any easier; instead, by "enhancing" your capabilities, it just makes you work more and burns you out faster. Fuckin' great. (TechCrunch) (~$Harvard Business Review)

• Related: Hamilton Nolan argues persuasively that we should at least have "Minimum Standards for Taking AI Seriously: Disaster planning for our economic future." (How Things Work)

• Funnily enough, one Cassie Pritchard had a similar take out there in the depths of Twitter, and another person liked it enough to enshrine it somewhere not on Twitter; it's not very long and it's worth reading. (Leaflet)

• I'm glad someone out there is looking at doubles luge and asking the same questions any reasonable person would ask. (Defector)

• The Scientists have made a huge breakthrough in experimental paralysis treatment using lab-grown spine organoids. (Northwestern U)

• Artists are struggling with a different question than you might think: not "should I sell to MAGA chuds" but "how do I keep my art out of the hands of MAGA chuds without wrecking my bank account?" (Hyperallergic)

• That "wolves helped Yellowstone regrow" narrative we've been hearing for a while may, uh, not exactly be true if you look at the math again. (Utah State via Science Daily)

• One way to get rid of plastic might be to mix it in with asphalt for roads, which makes them stronger and more heat-resistant. (The Conversation)

• This is just going to be the "circular economy" issue of the newsletter, I guess: The Scientists have worked out a seemingly simple way to turn cigarette butts into carbon suitable for making high-density supercapacitors, which rules?? (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• No shit: Americans paid 90% of Trump's tariffs last year. (CBS News)

• The Scientists have worked out a very specific kind of brain zap that appears to make people slightly more altruistic in experimental settings. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Everybody shut up and look at the Fictional Brands Archive!!! (Fictional Brands Archive)

• I don't know if this sounds right; does this sound right? A new study asked 10,000 people between 18-99 how many times they've fallen passionately in love, and the answer more or less seems to be "roughly twice". Seems ........... low??? Right????? (Kinsey Inst via EurekAlert) (Paper download page)

• The Scientists say the non-biological processes they can currently imagine don't fully account for the presence of trace organic compounds in a Mars rock they've been analyzing. Hmmmmmmmmmm! (NASA) (Paper)

• Meanwhile, out in the asteroid belt, that sample return mission from Bennu points to whole new weird ways amino acids — those basic building blocks of life itself — could be formed in the cold depths of space away from liquid water. (Penn State) (Paper)

• White South Africans have a message for the pro-ICE MAGA dipshits who are super excited about establishing their very own ethnostate: you're not gonna like it either. (The Dial)

• The more I read about Tiny Bookshop, the more it sounds just right for a game to get into while we wait for the next Stardew Valley content update. (It's Nice That)

• Maybe there just aren't any rules when it comes to planetary system formation. (U of Warwick)

• How can slime mold have a memory when it doesn't even have a brain? (Knowable)

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:

Reader Lauren says "Minimal Dildo's 'All The Hounds of Seven Hells' prog rock odyssey is a musical exploration of the guitarist's dad's erstwhile science fiction novel from the 70s that never made it into publication but was nevertheless an important part of their upbringing. It's messy and poorly recorded, but there is still something quite charming about it."

I still could use some more submissions to build out a notional 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 this page right here (which also has the archive)!