Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that very thoughtfully received another starship ornament this year for Xmas and has purchased a string of incandescent lights to power its fleet 11 months hence

You'll Like This

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

THIS THURSDAY: Instant Band Night 29: NEW YEAR'S BALL AGAIN

It's TIME

We're kicking 2025 off with an explosion of musical creativity in our most fabulous clothes!! We all deserve to have at least one source of unalloyed joy in our lives that cannot be touched, do we not??? Also, for real, it's going to be a fucking blast if the last 28 of these are any indication, and it's time! to! make it happen!!! Come play onstage or just be in the crowd for a new debut of a brand new act every five minutes or so; there's nothing else like it in the entire Bay and possibly the world??? Send everybody you know the link, put on your red shoes (metaphorical or otherwise), and let's fuckin' do this

✨🪩✨
Jan 9 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Partiful) (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

Excellent 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.

Reader Christie had a good question for me, which is "To whom do you owe a debt of gratitude this year?"

Which is why I've called this press conference; thank you for coming. Hold your questions please, there'll be time for that at the end. Thank you.

I've called you all here so that I can come forward and name names; I've been silent too long. That changes. It changes now! Change starts with me, in this, the year 2025, which I'm going to go ahead and mentally treat as a new Year of Luigi personally, and which I urge you all to do in your own lives going forward.

That's not the point.

Okay, here's the point: there are people to whom I feel incredibly grateful and who have not been officially named. I'm putting them on the record now, so now they know, and so will everyone else! As I look at this list, I'm realizing that it would be self-indulgent bordering on obnoxious to go into every last detail about how each of these people have helped individually, but I have to paint some kind of picture for everyone, so this is how it is: I'm just plain goddamn grateful for every person on this list. Yes. They've been there for me or with me in some way. They've helped shoulder a burden, or shared good times — a laugh, a hug, a connection remade or simply strengthened — or provoked a smile or a chuckle without even being physically present. It's true; it happened! Have you ever traveled back in time to look upon a past version of yourself and the time you were having with a wry smile and a shake of the head and thought "I hope this motherfucker had any kind of idea how fucking good this was," because I've had that opportunity multiple times this year because of some of these people. Some things were lost (boy howdy were there fucking ever), but there was a lot of love to go around, and I felt it, and I hope they did too. So it's time to name names!!!! The person or persons who caused all of this include (but are almost certainly not limited to)

• Mavis!

• My kids!

• Mavis's best friend Maya!

• My best friend Avery!

• Mavis's family!

• All the friends I met for lunch or dinner or a walk or something else, and the friends I ran into while I was out doing something, which is a nonzero number!

• The friends I did actual work with!

• My book club!

• The amazing people who help me pull off Instant Band Night every two months!

• The friends I maybe didn't actually physically see this year, but who I talked to over Slack or email or text!

• The friends I traveled across the country to see!

• New friends I made (it seems wild that I'm still making those)!

• My brother and my mom!

• The friends who sent me things in the mail, which admittedly is a set already covered by the aforementioned categories!

• The friends who have unexpectedly died or been killed over the past few years, which is an unfortunately nonzero number, but whose memories I treasure and attempt to honor!

• The person who singlehandedly built Stardew Valley almost a decade ago!*

I think that's everybody, but I can't be sure. We may have to reconvene, so please keep your phones handy in case I have to send a text alert. Thank you for coming, I'll take your questions one at a time please. I said one at a time!!

* Earlier this year I spent a little time trying to think of a videogame that Mavis would like, and somebody suggested Stardew Valley (which I'd never played) and holy shit you should see what she's done in there. It's incredible!!!! Just watching Mavis play Stardew Valley and being her li'l knowledge helper with my laptop and wiki open is a highly enjoyable pastime and I recommend this to everyone wholeheartedly

#dadthoughts

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

We are fucking clawing and limping our way across the Winter Break Finish Line here, but goddammit we did it: the kids [gasp] are back [pant] in school!! [collapses into a pile of dust]

Xmas truly was magical: the kids had a fantastic time and I have been thanked very sincerely by Quentin at least three times for the Legos alone, which were (in his words) "a really good present, Dad," and I feel tremendous pride not for being The Best At Xmas, but for doing whatever part I had in raising someone who sees the goodness of a gift and is moved to comment upon it to the giver with no prompting.

I have to hold moments like this close to my heart and mind because the rest of the last two weeks has been A Fucking Lot.

• Quentin and Felix (but mostly Quentin) were subjected to some sort of Oscillating EverCold that unpredictably produced fevers, coughs, and enough snot that we went through a minimum of four (4) full-sized boxes of tissues

• This made it impossible to plan playdates or leave Quentin at the day camp he was ostensibly attending for a couple days out of each week

• The fevers really knocked the kids down, but were also highly responsive to the usual OTCs (acetaminophen, ibuprofen)

• So sometimes there was just a whole afternoon of cartoons on the couch

• Other times both kids were Up And Atom™, yelling and running and jumping all over the place

• Imagine this for two entire uninterrupted undiluted weeks

• Now also add Mavis catching the same EverCold toward the end of the second week and not just getting knocked down, but also losing the use of her voice, just straight up fucking gone

• I love my kids but if you have them, you know what the last two weeks have been like

We had help, though! Mavis's parents and Maya and Avery probably prevented me from walking into the sea to start Whales II, and they deserve all the accolades you could care to pile upon them. I ............. did my best. I'm still amazed the EverCold didn't come for me in any significant way.* (we tested; it wasn't covid) But maybe it will now that school has started up again and I'm thinking about letting my guard down for a split second. We'll see!!!!!!!!

* I did wake up one morning at 330a with a blinding headache that took 4 ibuprofen to tame and left me wobbly for the next 18 hours, but as it came unaccompanied by any other symptom I'm inclined to blame it on a random caprice of some vengeful and unspecified god

Fascination Corner

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

(This section turned out a little light again but I think once everyone gets back to work it’s going to start being crazy again; still, as always, there are some real gems in here)

• Unfortunately, it appears that Adrian Dittmann is a real person and not in fact Elon, which is — if anything — infinitely sadder. When we thought it was Elon sockpuppeting, we could at least write it off as Typical Elon Brain Rot, but this? This?? God in heaven: try to picture the blasted desolation that is this man's internal landscape for even a yoctosecond and the sheer blazing horror of it would flash-burn a whole layer of skin cells off you instantly. Poof: I cast exfoliation!! (maia arson crimew)

• A Vox writer tried the "75 Hotter" challenge, which I've never fucking heard of (for reasons that make sense); what did she learn? (Vox)

• Dark energy might not actually exist! Thankfully the new theory is equally (if not more) bonkers, and can be summed up as: what if time runs faster in emptier regions of the universe?? (Royal Astronomical Society) (Paper)

• The Scientists have figured out a way to get gold out of e-waste and use it to make a catalyst for turning CO2 into useful compounds. (Cornell) (Paper)

• Are there too many men or not enough women in this space? The way you frame the disparity can affect not just your perception of it, but how motivated you are to fix it ........ at least for some of us. (NYU)

• Some Engineers are making a real run at undersea habitats, and they sound cool as hell. (IEEE Spectrum)

• Here's a very good experiment about sad bananas. (The Conversation)

• "One place to start in delivering solutions to a divided and distrustful nation: The hyperlocal level" (Brookings Inst)

• We're doing cyborg insect swarms now???? (Nanyang Tech) (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:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which has a singer-songwriter vibe to me along the lines of that one Gotye song that was well-nigh inescapable howevermany years ago that was.

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)!