Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that got the last Soul Coughing tour shirt in the correct size, sorry to anyone else who wanted the yellow version in a size S

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

You missed the September one!!!! JUST KIDDING we skipped September — but see you in November?? November 14, specifically! Mark your calendar for 11/14 and prepare to either rock or be rocked at a minimum; as always, there'll be a mix of genres and performances guaranteed to surprise and delight!! Ticket link (including handy FAQ) is right here (as well as below) for convenient forwarding to your top-tier friends.

Nov 14 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

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: there has never been a better time than now.

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.

Mavis's birthday was about a month ago and I knew I wanted to make her something. Concurrently, I'd had the idea from Simone Giertz's Flamp video bubbling on a mental backburner for months — surely there was some way to execute the same notion in fired ceramic? I let it simmer until out of the blue the notion for LIGHT BULB CLAW came roaring out of some neural subbasement and it was time. So I made it. I spent some mental cycles trying to work out the color, knowing the end product would be glossy. Should it be black? White? Maybe making it green with multicolored spots would actually help it blend in once it had flowers in it? I decided to go for the most fun option. Thankfully it turned out, well, see for yourself?

Will I ever make another one? Maybe?? I have exactly one idea about how to improve the design of the claw, but otherwise this thing pretty much works as well as I thought it would, which is a nice little confirmation of my abilities, although don't get it twisted: I'm not getting cocky either. The ceramics gods are fickle. But I admit to some curiosity about what a black version would look like. If you also are curious, get in touch and let's talk designs and colorways; I have no idea what to charge for something like this, but I don't think it'll break anyone's bank.

#dadthoughts

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

Right up front I'm going to issue the blanket caveat that I am 1000% positive these kids have absolutely no idea what they're talking about and no plans to do anything meaningful, I just think it's mildly hilarious. Okay? Great.

There's a girl in Quentin's grade who's pestering him to be her "boyfriend." She keeps running up to him and gently pinching his cheeks like he's a squirrel or something. Do you like that? I asked him. "Sort of?" was his reply. These kids are 6. It's gonna be fine. Nobody is anybody's boyfriend or girlfriend or anything. But wow. Wow!!

The thing I actually want way more detail on is the ongoing kid-level imagination roleplay game scenario whatever-it-is they do at recess, and which I think has been continuously active since last year. Here's what I know, or at least what I've been able to piece together based on Quentin's descriptions:

• There's two sides

• One side is the nature protectors, led by one of the girls, mostly comprising girls

• The other side is the nature ...... destroyers??? led by one of the boys, mostly comprising boys

• I don't enjoy how gendered it is, personally

• Nobody imposed this on them, they ordered themselves this way

• It sounds, however, like the nature protectors sometimes have a boy on their side?

• It's unclear to me whether he's always there or if he frequently switches sides

• It also might not be the same boy week to week

• The goal of each side is to capture the leader of the opposite side

• The leader of the nature protectors has a personal guard, one of whom in particular is extremely fierce and frightening

• There's a bench that's the ...... jail? You capture the leader and put them in the jail and secure them with pretend chains

• HOWEVER, one of the girls has the power to break chains

• Unclear whether there's a similar jailbreaker on the boys' side

• I think there are also jailors? on both sides? who watch over the jail and make sure nobody gets released before their time?

I have now exhausted the sum total of my knowledge of the nature game. Despite my qualms about its gendered split, it sounds fascinating and I know there's lore I'm missing. One of the days I may try to sit down with Quentin and a sheet of paper and try to diagram it all out; if nothing else, it'll make for a great artifact of childhood for him one day.

Fascination Corner

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

• David Roth has another banger for us all on the current Republican presidential ticket's literal attempt to incite a racist pogrom against part of Vance’s own constituency. (Defector)
  

• Consider that while you also read "How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself: There are Enemies, and then there are Cowards." (How Things Work)
  

• Talking people down from conspiracy theories is time-consuming and irritatingly tedious, so it's a good sign that we might be able to hand this task off to The Machine and that it kinda works?? (Nature) (Paper)
  

• What would it actually take to establish a circular economy? (Vox)
  

• The NHTSA might actually be able to make all The Corporations pushing increasingly gigantic pedestrian-killing trucks on us calm the fuck down. (The Verge)
  

• Thomas Zimmer argues that while anti-Trump Republicans can have our respect for the moment, they certainly can't have our trust. (Democracy Americana)
  

• It doesn't seem to have broken through into human health in a meaningful way, but The Scientists want us to know that microbes and fungi can apparently travel hundreds of miles through tropospheric wind currents and still remain viable. (Barcelona Inst for Global Health)
  

• Also, just a heads up that fur farms might be the next source of a species-jumping pandemic. (Nature)
  

• "Bitter aftertaste: the fraught world of branding cultural food products" (It's Nice That)
  

• Republicans seem to be embracing raunchiness, but if you look at the pattern for more than about two seconds it becomes clear that it's in the service of objectifying and subjugating women as per usual. (Vox)
  

• The Scientists have demonstrated a way to turn waste cooking oil into industrially useful chemical precursors by dunking a catalyst in it and microwaving it, boosting production while slashing carbon emissions. (Kyushu U) (Paper)
  

• I need to sit down and read this at some point because it sounds great: "Finding joy, creativity and meaning through unusual interdisciplinary collaborations" (Nature)
  

• The Scientists have worked out a way to incorporate — and I quote — "non-canonical amino acids" into proteins by making RNA work with four-nucleotide codons instead of three. What in the HELL (Scripps)
  

• Some Engineers have done the math and suggest using The Machine to run the climate control for indoor farms could cut energy costs by 25%, which is pretty damn good. (Cornell)
  

• Methane emissions have actually gone way the fuck up in the last five years instead of down like they're goddamn supposed to. (Stanford) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a new treatment for bone cancer that has an astonishing success rate. (Aston U) (Paper)
  

• A little over half of the cities in the world get significantly more rain than their surrounding rural areas. What does this mean? (UT Austin) (Paper)
  

• NASA has cleared the Europa Clipper mission for launch next month. (Nature)
  

• All right, so your cells don't all die simultaneously the instant your brain does; you can even take some cells out and make functioning quasi-organisms with 'em. What, uh .......... what does this mean? Not just for how we think about death, but the medical possibilities this implies? (The Conversation)
  

• There are just two Shakers left. (NYT gift link)
  

• Some Engineers have built a prototype flexible wearable that harvests body heat to power itself. (U of Washington)
  

• Jesus creeping Christ in the cornfield: Zach Weinersmith has rendered unto us the ultimate Charlie Brown comic. (Brown)
  

• The Scientists have built what sounds to me like a working Machine-powered simulation of a fruit fly brain? That can't be right; can it? (HHMI Janelia) (Paper)
  

• "Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars" (Defector)
  

• Juvenile Japanese eels can escape predators after being eaten by backing out of the stomach and out through the gill, and The Scientists have finally captured video evidence. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have built a proof-of-concept artificial electrohydraulic muscle for a robot with some real advantages over regular ol' motors. (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• Can ................ can algae be surprised? The Scientists seem to have gathered some evidence pointing to yes????? (Paper)
  

• I'm not gonna do better than this opening: "Earth will only remain able to provide even a basic standard of living for everyone in the future if economic systems and technologies are dramatically transformed and critical resources are more fairly used, managed and shared, according to an international research team including scientists from The Australian National University (ANU)." The report is 48pp long and I'm gonna read it. (ANU) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have discovered an interesting feature of an antidiabetic compound that makes it highly promising for treating (and potentially eliminating) HIV in combination with other drugs. (CRCHUM) (Paper)
  

• It might take a while, but there's at least one tactic for convincing a climate skeptic that has a reasonable chance of working. (Nature) Failing that, you could just use nationalism to do it! (NYU)
  

• The Scientists say the term "self-control" conflates a couple different things and is thus confusing, especially because the two different things being conflated have differing outcomes depending on how present they are. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper)
  

• "The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is a Google Doc: Although Google Docs and Maps are simple to share, the creators who spend years perfecting their magnum opus docs are often selective about who gets access." Having received one from a particularly well-traveled and eloquent friend for our Paris trip years ago, I now feel even more special. (Thrillist)
  

• WRATH OF ZEUS: lightning strikes are becoming more common and more costly in a warming world. (WIRED)

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:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is a lush, keyboard-heavy garage rock record, like early Death Cab but if they had a guy on a Rhodes just going to town.

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.