Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's at best suspicious about the unseasonable warmth occurring outside right now

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 35: THE 35TH ONE

It's happening in just about two months: the best possible way to spend your Thursday night if you enjoy hearing or making music and/or really like surprises. 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
$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

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.

Maybe Pokemon just weren't meant to evolve, folks. There I said it

I regret to inform you that the "That's Just A Guy" scenario presented in Pokemon Horizons has, if anything, escalated since last we checked in. Liko's Pokemon buddy — who I'll remind you went from Sprigatito, a little green kittycat, to Floragato, a grown-ass little man with a checking account who needs to be set free to live his own life and get that car he's been thinking about — has now evolved into Meowscarada, who looks like, well:

That's a full-on superhero, Liko. He's even got a cape and a Batman-equivalent grappling hook! C'mon Liko!! You're keeping a superhero in captivity when he should be out there saving his city from the forces of darkness.

This is now basically a hostage situation. Liko, you have to let him go. For the good of the city!! The people need their protector!! Liko, please!!!

#dadthoughts

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

It almost feels like I'm jinxing it by saying anything, but the whole house appears to have passed through the wavefront of whatever that cold was, having only touched two of us. Will that be the only cold of the winter? Almost certainly not, so I must remember to stay humble.

Recipe Nook

All right, this time I'm going to put some recipes in front of the kids and see which one they pick:

• Quick pasta and chickpeas

• Crispy baked tomato-oregano chicken

• Chicken rice with buttered onions

We'll find out what happens very soon!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• "'What Is Going to Happen?' How to reject a new normal." (How Things Work)

• The Scientists have run the numbers and come up with three things the airline industry could start doing more or less immediately that would really cut down on emissions, one of which is simply impractical from a time/supply standpoint, another of which would seemingly make the experience much worse, and another that would be more or less fine with me since I never fly first class. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• Iran seems to have figured out a way to block Starlink, which uhhhhh should be concerning for a number of reasons. (Rest of World)

• Hey, there's gay primates basically everywhere! (Nature)

• I suppose we have to thank the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician period for our existence, since it killed almost everything in the ocean and cleared the way for things with jaws to take over abandoned ecological niches. (OIST) (Paper)

• "I’m a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping. Scientific research has shown that their tactics can undermine the conditions that lead to violence." (MS Now)

• Longstanding theory has always held that the particles that make life possible are gently pushed throughout the galaxy by solar winds, except new data shows the dust grains in question are far too small for light to affect them, which is: a real headscratcher! (Chalmers U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Fuck RFKjr and his antivax bullshit: major healthcare providers are going to take their vaccine cues from the American Academy of Pediatrics, who have their heads on straight. (STAT)

• No, really, go ahead: a new study suggests that we care way more than our tablemates about whether it's cool to start eating, but it's so hard to overcome the feeling that restaurants really should try to serve everybody at the table simultaneously. (City St. George's, U of London via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Speaking of restaurants, I agree with the Today in Tabs guy that this TikTok channel is the only good thing on social media right now; watch the Bhutan and Tajikistan episodes at the very least. Note that they don't rank anything; they're just there to experience the food (and by extension the culture), and it's so pure I need these guys to be protected. (@tastebuds_nyc on TikTok)

• Here, have a good Vic Michaelis interview! (PV Guide) Oh shit, actually, this guy did good little interviews with Ania Magliano and Maisie Adam, too! (if you know, you know)

• Some Engineers used The Machine (Analytical Flavor) to enable a robot to teach itself to sync its lip movements with its utterances in an attempt to cross the uncanny valley. (Columbia Engineering)

• If the US simply became like an average peer nation, the changes at the everyday society level would be earth-shattering. Not the best peer nation, either — just, like, an average one. Jesus. (On Data and Democracy on Substack)

• The Scientists have come up with a highly efficient slime-mold-derived way to make a great sugar substitute that even bakes like real sugar, which would be great news for me personally being able to once again stress-gobble an entire clamshell of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from Safeway someday in the future. (Tufts U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Scott Adams has at long last lost the battle against his own monumental fucking stupidity (no mercy for Dilbert Guy; he turned into a real asshole a while ago). The article doesn't mention it, but it turns out ivermectin isn't actually a good treatment for an extremely treatable prostate cancer, which is obvious to most people who aren't gigantic MAGA dumbshits! (People)

• While we're talking about cancer, here's a little warning from The Scientists that cancer is exploding all over the world and our current medical + policy setup is not equipped to handle what's coming. (The Lancet via Science Daily)

• Cybertruck sales took a nosedive in 2025; maybe 2026 will be the year we kill it entirely? We must live in hope, friends. (Inside EVs)

• The Scientists ran an experiment on flu transmission that seems to show it's fine to hang out with sick people as long as nobody's coughing and you've got some air circulation going, but it also probably helped that everyone involved was a college student. (U of Maryland) (Paper)

• We learned about Marie Tharp and her ocean maps not too long ago, but any discussion of plate tectonics should also include (still-living!) Tanya Atwater; here's a fascinating read. (~$High Country News)

• The best(?) scifi short story of the year thus far is this thread on Bluesky, which unfortunately is too long to be read in the usual way where you open the final post and simply scroll up; you'll have to start with the first one and keep unrolling the replies. You'll figure it out. I believe in you!! (@ceej on Bluesky)

• It, uhh, it kinda looks like there's way more microplastics in the air than we thought. (Chinese Academy of Sciences HQ) (Paper)

• That said, The Scientists are reevaluating a lot of those studies that talked about microplastic buildup in the human body, citing false positives as a real problem. (Guardian)

• Zuck burned $77 billion and renamed his company for the stupid fucking Metaverse that they couldn't convince anybody to use for even a second, and now they're calling it quits. Imagine what that $77 billion could've been spent on and try not to fly into a rage; maybe go lie down for a second. (Futurism)

• Cory Doctorow says "AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage" (Guardian)

• You probably should read this unpaywalled version of Laura Jedeed's almost hilariously disturbing experience being hired by ICE with basically no oversight. (archive.org)

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 "The CS Lewis Reference is a band full of fantasy geeks who never caught on to the overt Christian allegories until they were too old to care anymore because they just liked talking lions and shit. Stand Back I Have a Plan is an album full of alt-rock songs inspired by their latest DND campaign. It rips, frankly."

Meanwhile, Reader Laura is pretty sure "The CS Lewis Reference is a Christian band disguised as indie pop, confounding everyone. And indeed, the shadowy bottles being held on the cover are sodas."

Alternate universe music critic Steve reports "I am pretty sure that this album by the CS Lewis Reference is 'if Half Man Half Biscuit were from East Portland'. I am not accepting any follow on questions at this time."

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)!