Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's bracing for 96° heat today and hopes this is the last gasp of summer before fall takes hold

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

A little under two months from now we'll open the doors for the last Instant Band Night of 2024 and I think it's going to be a good one. You should be there for it!! As always, there's no requirement to get onstage — just show up and bear witness to the most concentrated explosion of joyful musical creativity you can cram into your eyes and ears! 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.

I'm still contemplating the revival of a game I invented many, many years ago called Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle, primarily as a way to honor an old friend of mine who died quite unexpectedly last week who was one of its most diehard adherents, but also because I suspect it'll be great. The thing is that I need to come up with a ...... let's just say a gentler version of the game than its classic incarnation. In brief:

• Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle (UTCFB for short) involves two teams who each build a fortress of cardboard boxes and hide a flag somewhere therein

• The goal is to destroy the other team's fort and capture their flag

• You just run at the enemy's fort and try your damnedest to wreck the place and find that flag

• How do they stop you? Or how do you stop them from doing the same to your fort?

• YOU TACKLE THEM

• Whoever pins the other person to the ground (face-up) for a count of 3 wins, at which point the loser goes to the penalty box and counts to 100

To this day I'm amazed that nobody was hospitalized and I remained unsued. I would like for this record to continue unblemished, but also our bodies are aging and we might die if we tried to wrestle somebody for longer than a few seconds, much less for rounds of 5 minutes at a time, even if there are 5-minute breaks built in. There has to be a better way. Or at least a nonviolent way. And I think I've got it!!

Alternate less-intense rules of combat for UTCFB:

• No tackling. Instead:

• You must tag your opponent on the back with both hands

• After tagging has been achieved, the two of you enter a duel of paper-rock-scissors

• Best 2 out of 3 wins

• Loser must go to the penalty box and count to 100

Right?? This way there's still a physical element that at least demands some agility (trying to dodge somebody who wants to tag you on the back) but eliminates the requirement of wrasslin' your opponent to the ground: instead your quarrel is resolved in the battlefield of the mind.

✨✨👉🤓👈✨✨

I'm eager to give this a try but the next thing I think I need to do is talk to someone who works for the parks department and find out if I need a permit or some damn thing. We used to just do this in Dolores Park back in my 20s, but I dunno if that's gonna fly anymore; I suspect it might not.

#dadthoughts

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

Last weekend Quentin was introduced to Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch by a friend of his at her house (with our permission, to be clear: her mom checked in beforehand, because she's great). Of course he loved it, so now we have it too — longtime readers may be aware that we own a Switch that up until now was mostly regarded as a machine for either playing original Legend of Zelda in Ratatouille mode (I move Link around and do everything, but Quentin tells me where to go and what to do) or for Untitled Goose Game (something I advise everyone with kindergarten-age kids to play in the strongest possible terms); it is now most definitively a Mario Kart delivery mechanism. Quentin's not great at it, but he's not too terrible either! In 50cc Grand Prix mode, he routinely comes in somewhere in the bottom third of the pack, but not absolute dead last. And of course he's having a fucking blast — evidenced by the breathless and excitable running monologue he maintains during every race about what he's doing, where he's going, what's happening to him, who's passing him, and which items he's acquired or using.

Mario Kart Time lasts for 30m a day only on weekends, but the extent to which it's captured his imagination is startling. Last night as we were getting ready for bedtime, he proposed to us a game that was essentially Mario Kart Minus Karts, so to speak, where the characters would just run along the tracks. We needed to move bedtime along, so I asked him to draw me a picture sometime later of what the courses and items and so forth would look like; I'll let you know if he follows through. Better-than-even odds he might!!

Fascination Corner

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

• Yes, absolutely: Kim Ye-Ji will be an assassin in an upcoming short-form Korean action series. (NBC News)
  

• How do we combat climate burnout? The Scientists are on it. (Flinders U) (Paper)
  

• There might be a whole bunch of rare earth metals inside extinct volcanoes, which is good news for all that technology we'd love to build in the future. (Australian Natl U) (Paper)
  

• Pretty compact: "The cultural power of the anti-woke tech bro: The aesthetic of Cybertrucks, energy drinks, and MMA, explained." (Vox)
  

• Did you know that captive tigers in the US alone outnumber the entire remaining wild population? The Scientists took a genetic survey just to see what's up, and their diversity is surprisingly pretty much fine. (~$Science)
  

• Here's an interesting rundown of all the different ways our cells can die. No, it really is interesting!! (Knowable)
  

• There's a spell in D&D called Tenser's Floating Disk that conjures a giant hovering frisbee next to you that you can put your stuff on, and it will follow you around and carry your crap for you. It always seemed like it might be useful, right? Anyway, Some Engineers have essentially built this IRL. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• Google's bad AI-generated mushrooms are going to fucking kill someone before the year's out, possibly multiple someones, in a very bad way, unless they quit it with this bullshit right now. (404 Media)
  

• Why do highly impulsive people make rash decisions when they're bored? A new study suggests that not only do they get bored more easily, boredom literally stresses them out more than it does others, which is probably a high contributor. (U of Portsmouth) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have discovered a tiny tree frog that gestates in very confined environments and therefore has a vested interest in not fouling its immediate surroundings, so! It just doesn't poop. For months. (Nagoya U) (Paper)
  

• "Chappell Roan and the problem with fandom: The toxic stans aren’t the problem, it’s fan culture itself." (Vox)
  

• It ....... kind of sounds like The Scientists might've cracked the whole "artificial spider silk" problem? (ACS)
  

• The ICON guys are 3D printing a hotel now. It's a small one, but still: fascinating. (Reuters)
  

• You can change your personality if you want to. (The Conversation)
  

• We have to upgrade our power grid in a hurry, and Some Engineers are championing a different solution than laying down untold miles of new lines: just replace the wires on the existing poles with better ones. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• I don't care what the numbers say, I would still think about buying a house with some pals now and forever. (Sherwood)
  

• Because Capitalism, insurance companies are starting to recognize that climate change is real, which is going to set up an ugly and uniquely American dynamic. (How Things Work)
  

• The Scientists asked The Machine to help them with surveys to see if there were any ancient Nazca glyphs they were missing, and it turns out (1) there's a shitload of them and (2) they're pretty great. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• Night parrots? Night parrots. (IFLScience)
  

• If I — me, Jon Sung, personally — heard about it, then I think we can agree that Ellen DeGeneres being a huge asshole behind the scenes was probably the worst-kept secret in Hollywood, and it sounds like this new Netflix special of hers doesn't do the job she wants it to. (Vox)
  

• The dark matter gospel this entire time has been that dark matter and regular matter don't interact except through gravity — only now some simulations of distant dwarf galaxies that are mostly dark matter suggest otherwise. Oh great!!!! (Universe Today) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists think we could transform agriculture into a carbon sink instead of a source, but uhhhh unsurprisingly it would take a level of oversight that's quite frankly unprecedented and probably impractical in These Modern Times. (Intl Inst for Applied Systems Analysis) (Paper)
  

• Actually, here's another one: The Scientists have done the math and conclude that we could induce positive climate tipping points that would lead to cascades of good outcomes, but it would take strong regulation instead of the relatively weak tax incentives that have mostly been tried thus far. (Guardian)
  

• Definitive and fascinating video footage confirms that at least in one part of the ocean, octopuses coordinate different groups of fish species to find everybody food, and even drive away moochers by punching them. (Nature) (Paper)
  

• Evidence strongly suggests first impressions are indeed very powerful, and if we have to make an important decision, it's probably a good idea to sleep on it first to avoid being biased. (Duke U)
  

• The 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Award finalists are here. (Science Alert)
  

• "A method of ‘look twice, forgive once’ can sustain social cooperation: Using mathematical modeling, researchers from Penn and Princeton found a way to maintain cooperation without relying on complex norms or institutions." (UPenn)
  

• Sales really are getting crappier! (Sherwood)
  

• Try for a second to imagine a black hole big enough to blast coherent jets of radiation and particles into space that are 140x the diameter of our entire fucking galaxy holy SHIT (Caltech)
  

• As someone whose traitorous prediabetic bloodstream prevents him from stress-gobbling an entire clamshell of Safeway pumpkin chocolate chip cookies but nevertheless still wants to, I feel like I should share this article on how to avoid emotional eating. (The Conversation)
  

• Microplastics are completely fucking some species of freshwater plankton while others coast by unbothered, and The Scientists are trying to figure out why. (Lund U) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have uncovered a motherlode of Carboniferous-era fossils in New England. (Science Alert) (Paper)

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 "Dapper Werewolf: Swing Revival Revival meets J-Pop. Don't ask me how it works, you can add a peppy two piece brass section to anything and everyone's having a good time."

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.