Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that knows you have many entertainment options available to you and thanks you for choosing this one

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 26: SPRING FLING

Instant Band Night 26 is THURSDAY. Have you bought your ticket? Told your fun friends? Then all that remains is to prepare to rock.

May 9 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

If you know somebody with almost aggressively whimsical taste, or just happen to be a person with an appreciation for playfully intelligent ceramics, then I know a very exclusive online store you should visit. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

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.

There's no other way to say this so I'm just gonna say it: last night I dreamed an idea for a board game. Details are understandably fuzzy, but at a high level it's some kind of ....... territory defense dice rolling game? You control an "egg ranch" and you're trying to protect various zones of it against "egg rustlers" — the whole thing had a real cowboys-but-with-eggs vibe. The only other thing I can tell you is that the presence of Bela Fleck grants a bonus to whatever zone he's in, but the players don't control him. I don't know why my brain decided to drag Bela Fleck out of the subbasement of the late 90s/early 00s Dave Matthews Band tour where he lives or why the rest of the Flecktones didn't make it to the game or even why he's important to this egg ranching concept in the first place. Am I going to try to work this game out to at least the level of a crude prototype for no other reason than to see something I dreamed made real? Probably!!!

Also, if Bela Fleck turned out to be some kind of sex pest or something else heinous in the two decades since I last thought of him and his banjo, somebody please tell me before I take this thing to market, thanks.

#dadthoughts

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

A newly-made parent friend of mine shared with me recently a bit of received wisdom I've never heard before: that having two kids is definitely much harder than having one at first, but it also balances out later because at some point they become capable of entertaining each other and thus your day-to-day burden is eased. Meanwhile if you have just the one kid, you're the only game in town for them forever unless (until?) they learn to amuse themselves eventually. I don't know if this is true or not; parents out there in readership land, what do you think?

I say this because we're starting to get glimmers of that future more and more: Quentin and Felix are sometimes able to play together for many minutes at a time without a major incident unfolding that requires adult intervention. Quentin still attempts play concepts that are much too elaborate or require more hand/eye coordination than Felix can handle, but I think that gap is eventually going to close. Will I know when the day finally arrives? Probably, right??

Fascination Corner

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

• Nobody, and I mean fucking nobody, does it like David Roth. Read "They Are Insecure For A Reason" and do it now!!! (Defector)
  

• The sun's corona is a million degrees hotter than its surface. Why? The Scientists think they've finally figured it out. (Quanta)
  

• I admit right now to not being a Finance Guy, so I have no idea how to evaluate the claim that "Carbon markets could finance green wastewater infrastructure for a huge win-win-win" (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• 101 bits of good advice from a 72-year-old human (Kevin Kelly to be precise). (The Technium)
  

• The Scientists have made a kind of plastic that incorporates bacterial spores that will break it down in compost, and as a bonus, the spores make the plastic stronger. (Ars Technica) (Paper)
  

• I got this one from Tumblr: a slightly old paper insists that despite the pop cultural prevalence of dating as a means of landing a relationship, the friends-to-lovers path is not only the preferred one in the real world, it's the actual most common way. I don't know if the n on this one is big enough, but still: What (Paper)
  

• The new bird flu jumped from cows to cats via raw milk on a farm in Texas, just FYI. (Science Alert)
  

• Market research claims the ideal movie runtime is 92m, but commercially successful movies have been getting longer and longer. (Guardian)
  

• The rate at which we're generating e-waste is rising 5x faster than the recycling rate; the way the math works out, we could break even if we recycle 38% of our electronics, and the opportunity thereafter is all profit — like $38 billion (with a B) a year if we hit 60%. That's money for somebody, might as well be one of us! (Ensia) (PDF of report)
  

• Mounting evidence indicates bumblebees understand what teamwork is. (U of Oulu) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have laid out a roadmap to achieving net zero carbon emissions, even when you take into account the parts of the economy that are hard to electrify. (PNNL) (Paper)
  

• Is it ....... really a good idea? to just pump our sewage .............. deep into the ground?? (The Verge)
  

• There really should be pharma for animals. (U Michigan) On the other hand, on a long enough timeline, maybe they'll figure out medicine on their own. (Max Planck Inst of Animal Behavior) (Paper)
  

• Sure, why not: "16 Easy Ways to Create More Meaningful Memories With the People You Love" (Lifehacker)
  

• The collapse of the planet's magnetic field may have been responsible for the emergence of the Ediacaran biota. (U of R) (Paper)
  

• At least one Paleolithic society was super down with plants; somebody tell the paleo diet people. (Max Planck Inst for Evolutionary Anthropology) (Paper)
  

• The forests of Europe are going to have a real problem sustaining themselves as more and more tree species succumb to climate change. (U of Vienna)
  

• Some Engineers wonder whether robots even need hands when they could potentially accomplish highly useful tasks just by casting wind spells, or as they call them, "jet-induced airflow fields." (Aalto U) (Paper)
  

• This will only matter if you're local to the SF Bay, but the Bay Lights are coming back next year and this time they'll be visible from both sides of the bridge. (SF Standard)
  

• E-bike incentives worrrrrrrk! (UBC)
  

• The Scientists think it should be possible to use viruses to help recycle the wastewater produced by fracking, which is apparently full of corrosion-happy bacteria. (U Texas El Paso) (Paper)
  

• NASA used the Jimmy Dubs to characterize the weather on an exoplanet 280 light years away(!!!!!!). (NASA) (Paper)
  

• Have all of our conservation efforts been going to waste? The first ever global-scale study says "Hell no," which is encouraging! There's definitely stuff we could be doing better, and we need to do a lot more, but still: nice. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• At least astronauts on the moon would have a cool-sounding option for reducing the loss of bone and muscle mass. (Guardian)
  

• Working out how to bind anything to human proteins has been a non-starter for a long time, but The Scientists have given it a highly promising go with the help of The Machine. (CeMM)
  

• Speaking of proteins, The Scientists have hit on what might be a powerful way to treat degenerative diseases, provided the protein interaction they've discovered is universal and messing with it won't have any weird knock-on effects. You know, the usual. (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper)
  

• An artist collective in LA staged a knowing recreation of the viral Wonka-themed disaster event and got arguably its most important figure to reprise her role; if you're gonna do it, this is unquestionably the best way. (NBC News)
  

• Trying to figure out what real people worry about the most from a moral standpoint, a group of philosophers turned to one particular subreddit for data; you can probably guess which one. (Vox)
  

• Oh god: I almost certainly lived in a "boy room" for longer than I care to admit and I apologize retroactively to anyone who saw it. (Guardian)

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.

A band and their album

Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

(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:

Photo by Dennis Yu on Unsplash

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is an all-instrumental strings+folk music effort from a band trying to bring a sarcastic global warming message to a world that just plain wasn't ready for it.

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.