Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that actually recommends you go see THUNDERBOLTS* — they're going for something different with this one and we should reward that impulse

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 32: BEACH PARTY

Holy shit we had a good time last Thursday holy shiiiiiiiiiiiiit

Great bands! Great songs! Great people! What more could you possibly want from an evening out! Let's get ready to do it again in July, this time in our most fabulous vacation outfits!! Tell your friends and mark your calendars:

✨🪩✨
July 10 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 + +
+ + S E E + Y O U + T H E R E + +

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.

It's been a crazy week so this one's going to be quick: I've got a little time in my work schedule opening up, so now's your company's chance to plug all those documentation holes you've left open all these years. Here's a little deck you can read and show to whoever you need to; get yourself a helpful elf right now!

#dadthoughts

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

Possible book rec for fellow parents of first-graders? Quentin came home last week fully obsessed with something called THE FIRST CAT IN SPACE AND THE WRATH OF THE PAPERCLIP (all caps seems warranted here), which turns out to be the third book in a series. Needless to say I've requested all three from the local library, and if fortune smiles upon us we should have them here in our house before the week is over. So I'll keep you posted on whether these are actually good or not!!

Fascination Corner

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

• China wants to get a sample of the Venusian atmosphere, an intriguing but significantly challenging idea for a space mission!! (IEEE Spectrum)

• FUCK: the world's richest 10% are responsible for 2/3 of global warming since the 90s. (IIASA)

• The results are unsurprising, but The Scientists took a stab at a global survey to see what helps people flourish. (The Conversation)

• All of the major cities in the US are sinking very slowly. (Columbia Climate School) (Paper)

• Based on the structure of a single bone from which The Scientists extrapolated an entire species of common ancestor (which I still think is a wild thing to do), they now think it's possible echidnas and platypuses evolved from an aquatic guy who came to live on land, which is funny because that usually happens the other way around. (UNSW Sydney) (Paper)

• The Scientists have evidence that fungal spores can get all the way up to the fucking stratosphere and still survive. (Science)

• Hawaii's about to implement a quite frankly long-overdue and practical climate change law. (HEATED)

• Certain breeds of cats and dogs are starting to look the same and maybe we oughta quit doing that. (The Conversation)

• They're explicitly not saying which one causes the other, but The Scientists are seeing evidence that teens with mental health problems are using social media differently than others. (U of Cambridge) (Paper)

• Bill Gates has 20 years to give away $200 billion (or at least his foundation does); maybe he should give MacKenzie Scott a call and see how it's done. (BBC)

• Different countries have different ideas about what constitutes a healthy amount of sleep! (UBC)

• A bacterium that can cause infections in hospitals also appears able to break down plastics, which partially explains why it's harder to get rid of. Uhhhhhh (Nature)

• Every week I inch closer to going through my archives to see how many of these there are; my offhand guess is at least a dozen by now? Anyway: Some Engineers have yet again created a device that can pull clean water out of the air without consuming energy!!!!!!! (RMIT) (Paper)

• Well hot damn: instead of flooding the body with antibiotics, The Scientists have run some very promising animal tests on a topical gel applied directly to an infected ear. (ACS)

• People often reject new rules (smoking bans, seatbelt laws) until they take effect, at which point they're more or less fine with it. Why, though? The Scientists have looked into it. (TUM)

• The Scientists have worked out a way to use ultrasound to cheaply and effectively recycle fuel cells and their PFAS components. (U of Leicester) (Paper)

• Ukrainian drone defense is getting a significant upgrade from a 200-year-old technology. (IEEE Spectrum)

• An absolute fucking madman of a Snake Guy who's been voluntarily bitten literally hundreds of times by different snakes has donated some blood to The Scientists, who've concocted a promising broad-spectrum antivenom candidate while reminding everyone this is an insane thing to do. (Nature) (Paper)

• Good news: The Scientists have invented a promising-sounding new way to help groups generate ideas that's better than simple text-based chat. Bad? News? It's called "Conversational Swarm Intelligence," which sounds to me like Hivemind Lite, and the writeup doesn't give any hints at all as to how it works. (CMU)

• Evidence suggests that our brains literally resonate with the music we hear. (McGill)

• That trick where you put a wooden spoon over a pot to keep it from boiling over does work for valid scientific reasons, but not for as long as you think. (The Conversation)

• A truly adorable-sounding experiment shows that kids as young as 5 have the neural tools to grasp the concept of map-based navigation. (Emory)

• Taking us one step down the road to solving allergies, The Scientists have built an instance of The Machine (Analytical Flavor) that can identify pollen grains with speed and accuracy beyond human capabilities. (UTA) (Paper)

• Biofuel production needs cheap sugars in order to work; good thing The Scientists just came up with a great way to make it out of corn leavings. (Washington State) (Paper)

• Some Engineers have hit upon a way to turn cow manure into basically anything you can make paper products with, which uhhh. Hmm. (University College London) (Paper)

• The Scientists used lasers to figure out how a musical triangle makes such a powerful sound despite its tiny size. (AIP) (Paper)

• People who truly need less sleep than the rest of us may actually have a legit genetic mutation. (Nature)

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 Gary says "Genuine Body Horror is made up exclusively of new parents and Poop Is A Problem is their first album.

"Everything else is irrelevant."

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)!