Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will not accept the end of stonefruit season until maybe after Halloween has passed, may these pluots sustain us all forever amen

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

In just about a month 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 gonna hit this in both sections but from slightly different angles: this is the last week of pledging for a yearly PTA fundraiser called the Tigerthon, which I can talk about more below, but listen. Look. If you're not a parent or an American, this may or may not come as a surprise to you, but the USA is the kind of runaway capitalist hellscape where public schools are forced to rely on their parent-teacher associations (PTA) to scrape the funding together to pay for things like field trips and art supplies and in some cases actual staff. Let's be clear that this is a fucking societal-level failure and I hate it, but it's the system we have right now [long, drawn-out sigh]. So I'm going to put a link to the pledge page for Quentin and humbly ask that if you've got a spare dollar or two, you could certainly do worse than to fund a food pantry and classroom supplies and so many other heartbreakingly vital things for a school that really does work very hard to provide as enriching and magical an environment as possible for its kids. Thank you — I'm sorry it's like this — thank you!!

#dadthoughts

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

In case you didn't read the Medium Ramble this week, it's the Tigerthon at Quentin's school this week, which is one of those fundraisers where the kids pledge to walk around the track based on donations from kind and generous folks out there in the world. It's actually a lot of fun, apparently — there's music and stickers for every lap and so on — which is nice for them, because god damn do I hate that something like it is even necessary!!!!! The state of public school funding in this country, I fucking tell you!!

A discovery I made during the first (and hopefully only?) Trump administration is that I have a boundless well of rage within me that is ever-renewing, self-regenerating, blue-white in the heat of its hatred. But I can't get my hands on the people who long ago decided that public schools in this country would have to beg, bow, and scrape for the ability to supply books and music classes, nor can I physically reach the people who right now have the power to change this abysmal status quo and choose not to. None of us can; there are laws, apparently. But something that we do have that nobody can take away is spite. So I urge you — if your wallet can support it — to head to this page and make a donation of whatever size feels good. No matter what size it is, know that you are restoring some measure of color to the world of children who are otherwise being robbed by heartless Republican fuckwads in express defiance of said fuckwads' deepest-held beliefs, and feel the spark of spiteful joy that comes from thwarting evil in a way they can't do jack shit about. I thank you, and more importantly, so do all the kids, even though they don't know why we're doing this in our heart of hearts. Thank you!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• "Hurricane Helene and the ‘Fuck It’ Era of AI-Generated Slop: The era of politically-motivated AI slop is here and it sucks." (404 Media)
  

• Oil executives have known for almost half a century that climate change would trigger worsening hurricanes. Yes there’s documentation. (HEATED)
  

• Europa Clipper's on its way!!!!!! (CNN)
  

• The Scientists are fucking hammering on that clanging alarm bell: this time 25 out of 35 planetary vital signs they're tracking are in the red, and they have concrete policy recommendations we need to adopt ASAP or it's going to get worse. (Oregon State) (Paper)
  

• How about something fun: if you don't have a Dropout subscription, fix that immediately, because Gastronauts is extremely special and I know this having watched exactly one (1) episode. (Polygon)
  

• Some Engineers have demonstrated a truly wild-sounding technology they call "holographic direct sound printing" that uses acoustic holograms to print wildly complex shapes — what's more, it could theoretically be used to print structures inside a body (provided you could inject the substrate first, of course). (Concordia U) (Paper)
  

• How is it 2024 and I'm only just now finding out about the incredible powers of placental grafts (rhetorical) (I know why) (NYT gift link)
  

• "Scientists are becoming ocean hitchhikers to fill data gaps: Research cruises can be prohibitively expensive, so cargo ships, fishing vessels and yachts are being enlisted to help understand the ocean" (Dialogue Earth)
  

• Just FYI, there's a Marburg outbreak going on in Rwanda right now, but (like its cousin Ebola) it only spreads through body fluid contact and it burns pretty hot, so the likelihood of it becoming a globe-encircling pandemic is low. This'll happen more often as climate change continues, though, so just a heads-up. (Nature)
  

• Uhhhhhh: fungal networks appear to be capable of a kind of functional cognition, at least as far as shape recognition goes. (Tohoku U) (Paper)
  

• Give it a set of exterior walls and The Machine can help design floor plans for the living space inside that are functional, theoretically nice to live in, and carbon-reductive. Let's try it! The paper looks interesting, too. I mean they all do, but the "hypergraph" concept it presents is fascinating. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• Speaking of machines, everybody seems to love Marty. (Boston Magazine)
  

• "Why do divorced guys dress like that? The aggressively, brutally companionless divorced guy aesthetic." (Vox)
  

• The Scientists used The Machine to go through existing genomic samples and uncovered over 70,000 previously overlooked RNA viruses that live basically goddamn everywhere. What??? (Nature) (Paper)
  

• Huh: sandbar cultivation. (Reasons to Be Cheerful)
  

• Some Chemical Engineers have come up with a tough but also fully recyclable plastic!!!! (Osaka U) (Paper)
  

• Oh HOLY SHIT there was a REASON why those terrible old Halloween costumes had a picture of the character on them!!! Also this article is good for other reasons, but WOW (Chicago Tribune)
  

• "Hacked Robot Vacuums Across the U.S. Started Yelling Slurs: 'It could have been worse,' one owner incredibly concluded." Remember, the S in IoT is for Security! (Gizmodo)
  

• A single mathematician who does all his work with pen and paper solved two deep math conjectures that have puzzled apparently lesser minds than his for decades. (Rutgers)
  

• Testing shows CAR-T cell therapy might work on autoimmune diseases and not just cancer?!? (Nature)
  

• Some Engineers have built a solar desalination technology that doesn't require batteries or any other kind of power management, so it can be deployed anywhere the sun shines and work just fine. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• Ghana has to deal with some of our e-waste and it's ........ complicated. (NPR)
  

• The Scientists have been assuming all this time that lobsters love to eat sea urchins, but it turns out there are some sharks who are doing the real work. (Scimex) (Paper)
  

• People tend to naturally assume they have all the information they need to form opinions even when they really don't, so watch yourself when you're formulating your next hot take (or just ask whether you have all the facts first). (Ohio State) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists are out here inventing literal Spider-Man web fluid, friends. (Tufts)
  

• Mass timber construction is starting to take off? It sounds (and looks) so damn cool. (Knowable)
  

• All of our showerheads and toothbrushes are positively boiling with viruses previously unknown to science, but don't worry about it: they're after the bacteria that are also present in teeming multitudes. (Northwestern) (Paper)
  

• If you've ever wanted a visual filing system for your computer files, it looks like SOOT's got you covered. (It's Nice That)
  

• The Scientists announce promising results on using biochar to remove microplastics from farm soil, but then what do you do with the plastic-ridden biochar? (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• At least as far as hot sauce goes, expecting to like something that includes some pain can actually reduce how much your pain centers light up — but the reverse is also true. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have merged two protocols together to create a kind of wifi that works over a quarter fucking mile on off-the-shelf hardware. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• Remember when NASA crashed an impactor into an asteroid to deflect it? ESA is following up to see what it looks like and what it's doing now. (Supercluster)
  

• Talk about a disguise that only works as long as it's not publicized, but it's still a cool idea and execution. (Laughing Squid)

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'm pretty sure is like ...... okay, try to imagine a medieval European peasant somehow being exposed to the Backstreet Boys? This is like that, but for Backstreet Boys fans. I can't explain it any better than that.

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 the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!