Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's pretty happy with this Pixel 6 and is fairly confident phones can't really improve that much beyond this one, so let's just stick with it for the rest of time

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 13 Going On 30

You have got to get in on this one, friends. At this point I think it may be safe to say we have a couple of regular attendees who bring their brass (trumpet and sax, to be precise) and their presence truly elevates both the proceedings in general and the variety of acts. Do not miss this if you value joy and creativity in your life!! There's no pressure to perform — you can simply join the almost ferociously friendly crowd in their appreciation for each wild new band that appears! Also, word to the wise: we're going for an 80s theme for this one, so dig out your brightest neon clothes. Trust me on this one!!

✨🪩✨
March 13 2025
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 + +
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Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

Idea Factory Giveaway

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

A nonzero number of you wanted to hear my thoughts on the Section 31 movie, so just know that it was you that armed this battlestation!! Light spoilers; I'm going to try to keep it vague and brief but who knows how well that'll go.

To the minds and hearts that gave us this movie, with love and respect, I have notes:

I understand that you had a big budget, or at least it sure looks like you did — everything was visually sumptuous, which was kind of a problem only in that I spent the entire movie furiously trying to figure out what era we were in. Yes I know you put a stardate at the beginning, but that was meaningless to me, and also y'all put Rachel Garrett in here as a lieutenant, presumably many years before she commands the Enterprise-C (best-looking Enterprise), except all the tech and settings look easily post-PIC era, as well as the ships. Again, I understand the impulse to be fancy with it, but someone should've said something. When was the last time you saw ALIEN? The look of it still holds up even though the movie is comparatively ancient. Hell, the original Trek movies still hold up! Bring us back to Undiscovered Country aesthetics, I promise you we wouldn't mind!!

I humbly submit that more attention needed to be paid to the fight scenes, friends. You had Michelle Yeoh in there. It would've been nice to watch her moves. As is, the fights were ....... fine, but I was a little disappointed. Hand-to-hand combat felt disjointed, or cluttered (all that fancy cloth flapping around in the hotel room, for instance), or far away and disjointed (the ...... hover-barge chase?). That's one of the world's greatest kung fu stars!! Get someone who's made a kung fu movie to handle those bits, maybe?

The script was .......... okay, look. This whole movie suffered from a weird thing where it seemed like some parts needed 20% more effort (fight choreo and cinematography) and other bits could've maybe used 20% less. Maybe a little less quippy? Did you really have to make the Starfleet character Rachel Garrett? That didn't feel like putting a hat on a hat to you? Also I feel like the nano guy represents a real story problem; how come those dudes aren't everywhere taking over the whole quadrant with what they can do? You've got a lot of alien races you can pull from already, I don't know that you needed to make up a whole new one. I'm just sayin'.

Overall it was ........ fine. It was a good idea, even! Streaming movies represent a huge amount of space (heh) the Star Trek Industrial Complex could play around with and I would love to see it. You know what would go down real smooth, people, would be a Lower Decks movie. Or — or!! — you could kick off Star Trek: Legacy (an idea the fandom thought of and subsequently could not shut up about after the end of PIC s03) with one: give us something that lets us see the TNG folks settle down and really truly retire, so we can feel like they're resting comfortably and aren't always waiting for them to pop up in Legacy (a show which, again, does not exist and has never been so much as hinted at since the end of PIC s03, which we all liked so much after the bewildering miserabilist nonsense of s01 and s02) so the new characters we met in PIC s03 can do their thing. You know, in that show you're hopefully going to make??? Hopefully???? Do you remember how happy we were with PIC s03, guys?? Anyone? Is this thing on [static sounds]

#dadthoughts

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

All is well for the time being and I'm going to just knock on the nearest available wood to request of the universe that it be always so. One thing I will note briefly is that the kids have a table for Legos and it's just covered in spaceships in various states of finished, being modified, having been stripped for parts, etc. "Wouldn't you like to have space on the table for building?" I asked Quentin, and he said yes, but inertia is hard to overcome. Should there be some sort of display shelf for finished works? A bin in which completed vehicles may live? Maybe there should just be a big base for all the ships to park at, as well as a setting for adventures?? As far as I remember, when my brother and I were kids, we basically built a Lego city on our table and incorporated it into our play; I may try to introduce this idea, but I may also investigate a simple display solution of some sort. There's no rush.

Fascination Corner

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

• David Roth doesn't fucking miss: "Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government" (Defector)

• Sherrilyn Ifill reports that people are doing things, and you will meet them when you start doing things, too, which feels .......... hopeful? (Sherrilyn's Newsletter) Is it time to check in with the Indivisible folks, who seem to have updated their resources? (Stop the Trump-Musk Coup) (Guide 2.0)

• Is ...... is Buffy coming back?? If this actually happens, we can at least be relieved Joss Whedon's not involved. (Deadline)

• Climate change is fucking with the circulation of nutrients in the ocean; just a heads-up. (UC Irvine) (Paper)

• A new drug for childhood brain cancers works great in mice, so The Scientists would like to move to human clinical trials ASAP. (Emory U) (Paper)

• It only took Hugging Face 24 hours to more or less clone something that OpenAI presumably burned a skyscraper's worth of cash to build. (Ars Technica)

• Some Engineers have found a shockingly simple solution for breaking down PFAS forever chemicals. (U of Missouri)

• "Bonobos can tell when you don't know something" sounds like a mundane finding, but it means they're capable of modeling the knowledge in your head independently of the knowledge that's already in theirs, something we thought only us humans could do up til now! (Johns Hopkins) (Paper)

• The Scientists tried a study to find the best way to arrange people for generating ideas (large groups? small groups? etc) and a lot of the results surprised them. (SUNY Binghamton) (Paper)

• "You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism: Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes." (404 Media)

• Is it actually possible to just recycle the plastics we have now? A plant in England is about to prove the concept, hopefully; cross your fingers. (Nature)

• Sound is a complex and surprisingly poignant aspect of skateboarding. (U of Exeter) (Paper)

• The Scientists are really serious about turning the world's fiber optic cable network into a vast and powerful earthquake detection grid. (Royal Astronomical Society) (Paper)

• On a comparatively miniscule budget, this person turned their guest room into a miniature boutique hotel restaurant and it looks surprisingly convincing. (Architectural Digest)

• Lots of disease-causing proteins are impervious to treatment due to their chaotic spaghetti ball shape, but The Scientists might be about to change that with a Machine-powered tool that can design custom-tailored weapons to break them down. (Duke) (Paper)

• Anne Helen Petersen revived her old post about the Friendship Dip and it's worth looking at. (Culture Study)

• The Scientists think they might have a working theory for the fundamental underlying cause of Alzheimer's. (Arizona State) (Paper)

• We all know already about mantis shrimp and their punching ability, but it never occurred to me to wonder how they can do that without wrecking their own bodies! (Nature)

• Putting it here so nobody has to send this to me: some spiders in Northern Ireland are getting in on that Last Of Us action, it looks like. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• It's at least worth playing around with clinically: are gut microbiome products regulating our anxiety? (Duke-NUS) (Paper)

• Everyone needs to see the Golden Girls as Warhammer 40K minis if you haven't already. (Polygon)

• Have a look at this perfect Einstein ring. (Science Alert)

• The Scientists have been doing some simulations with Enceladus and it's possible alien worlds that have subsurface oceans with life might not be spraying the evidence out into space for us to see. (U of Reading) (Paper)

• Preserved collagen? In dinosaur bones??? What?!?!?!?!?! (U of Liverpool) (Paper)

• I'm not a motorcycle guy but I did watch Akira and this thing is extremely cool-lookin'. (Gear Patrol)

• Forensic evidence suggests word is starting to get around in the global orca community about how tasty great white shark livers are. (Flinders U)

• "That traffic jam ate up the time I wanted to use cooking, so I'll just go pick up some fast food instead" sure sounds like something we've all thought, but now The Scientists have the numbers to back it up. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper)

• Why don't the batteries in your headphones last? Some Engineers are on the case. (UT Austin)

• Some Engineers worked out an efficient and highly scalable algorithm for helping swarms of drones avoid crashing into each other and anything in the vicinity (like people), which would be really nice to have for, say, those big drone-based light shows that are getting more common out there. (MIT)

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 to be fair looks like an instrumental jazz trio that somehow manages to be preachy without ever having a vocalist, and who wants to listen to 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)!