Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that thinks it might be time to make another animal lamp

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

INSTANT BAND NIGHT IS NEXT WEEK

Get your ticket and spread the word!! Now more than ever we need something to do that brings genuine joy and delight, and there's a good chance there'll be cake!!! Come play or just watch; as always, it'll be like nothing else you've experienced.

✨🪩✨
Nov 13 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

You're just going to have to wait until next week for the shop update because it's been nuts around here and I am but one man — one man who admittedly will never stop making little ceramic weirdos. I think you can follow or favorite the store or something like that and Etsy might tell you when new stuff drops? Otherwise why have that functionality, Etsy? ANYWAY

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.

I opened up one of my old high school yearbooks the other day to check something and immediately got sidetracked reading through some of the signatures left in it. Holy shit. You know what we don't have in our lives anymore as adults? An annual way to set down in writing what our friendships mean to each other.* Can we start something like this again? How about a fancy book we can pass from friend to friend where they can just write to you about how great you are and core memories you share and whatever else comes to mind, without having to squeeze it in around extraneous text and pictures (so many pictures). The current rate at which I see all my friends means it would probably take at least a year to make the rounds, so we could even still call it a yearbook! Hahaha I'll show myself out (but seriously, should we do this)

*There's likely an entire gender studies paper in here on the differences between the ones the girls wrote and the ones the dudes wrote. Right? God almighty. Robin Diamond, wherever you are, I hope you're doing amazing.

#dadthoughts

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

Halloween 2025 went great; Felix didn't make it to quite as many houses as Quentin did, but I did ask Quentin to try getting extra candy for his little brother. It's unclear to me whether he pulled it off — his haul is definitely bigger than Felix's, but then again Felix didn't hit as many houses personally. We haven't yet tried to see if they're interested in equalizing their stashes, but the possibility cannot be mathematically excluded!

Both boys decided to reuse their shark costumes from last year, since Quentin's still obsessed with sharks and Felix wants to do whatever Quentin is doing. Mavis and I also reused our adult-size shark onesies from Target, which are still the exact right level of comfy outer layer for the briskness of Bay Area Halloween night. I'm pleased to report the Big Trick Or Treating Street in the neighborhood, which saw a bizarre dip in homeowner enthusiasm last year, was back to normal this year — they even closed off a couple blocks of it to traffic, which was VERY smart. This is a good place for a kid who likes Halloween to grow up.

I took our front porch Halloween decorations down on Sunday morning, and Felix asked me if I was going to put the Xmas lights up immediately thereafter. I said no mostly because things were kind of dewy in the morning and that means the tape I use doesn't work great, but I was tempted. Still am, honestly. Couldn't we all use the dopamine???? Watch this space to see if I decided to be That Guy on our block 🎅🎃🎅

Recipe Nook

Last week was mostly a week for just kinda chillin', so I don't have anything for you here today, but there's always next week!!

Fascination Corner

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

• The Scientists have had promising results treating generalized anxiety disorder with a low-dose pharma-grade version of LSD and they're looking for more participants for the next trial. (UCSF)

• You probably didn't read that stupid "Deciding To Win" report — lord knows I fucking didn't — but here's a good summary of its many flaws just in case. (The New Republic)

• While trying to work out how a soil bacterium makes a reasonably useful antibiotic, The Scientists realized one of the precursor steps on the way to the finished product is actually a wildly powerful antibiotic all on its own, but now they need to see if it wrecks mammal cells too. (Nature)

• Fungal computers??? (Ohio State) (Paper)

• I don't know what's with AI companies publishing their research as discrete little websites (probably makes them easier for The Machine to digest), but it does make for better and/or funnier reading, as in this case where they tried to give The Machine regular work tasks to do and it uhhhhhh not go so good. I hope they re-run this exact trial year over year to give us a reasonable idea of what kind of progress they're actually making! (Remote Labor Index)

• Pair that with this test where they tried stuffing various flavors of The Machine into a vacuum robot to see how it did performing tasks in the physical world; at least the failure mode for one of them is genuinely hilarious. (TechCrunch)

• Last year The Scientists worked for six frantic months to concoct and deploy a lifesaving single-gene edit tailored for one specific baby; this year they're hoping to do it five more times, and faster. Fuckin' badass!! (Nature)

• Everybody "knows" we're in the middle of a mass extinction event, but The Scientists took a look at the numbers and where they came from and it turns out we might not be — in fact, extinctions might've peaked a century ago — although that doesn't mean we should be slacking off either, conservation-wise. (U of Arizona)

• I've never even heard of quantum batteries as a concept, but I'm glad The Scientists are out there trying to wrangle theoretical models for how they might someday actually work. (RIKEN via Science Daily)

• OpenAI's own numbers suggest a sobering number of people out there are at risk of Machine psychosis. (Gizmodo)

• Nobody panic: the blue dogs in the Chernobyl exclusion zone probably just rolled in something. (Science Alert)

• The Scientists have derived what they're calling a "universal thermal performance curve" that underlies every form of life on Earth. (Trinity College Dublin via Science Daily)

• Green sea turtles are back from the brink of extinction, at least on paper, but there are caveats. (Vox)

• The Scientists have demonstrated a cheap and effective way to do direct-air CO2 capture in air filters that we could all just put in our houses and office buildings. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• You know those flatworms you can chop up and the pieces all regenerate into whole-new flatworms? The Scientists are finding out how they pull that off, and it looks like it's because their stem cells don't have to listen to their neighbors. (Stowers Inst for Medical Research via Science Daily) (Paper)

• The Scientists think fungi may have been messing around on land close to a billion years ago, which is ......... different from what we've believed for a while now! (UOC) (Paper)

• It's not just for South Africa anymore: orcas have been seen in the Gulf of California killing great white sharks and scooping out their livers. Interestingly, this particular pod seems to have worked out a strategy specific to younger sharks that don't know about orcas. (Frontiers) (Paper)

• One of The Scientists has run the math and concludes the likelihood of life arising on Earth randomly is incredibly small. However (and this is key) since you and I and everyone else are here, now, reading this, clearly either his math is wrong, based on faulty assumptions, or there's some whole other shit going on that we still need to puzzle out. (Universe Today) (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 I think sounds like: CAKE, but worse, which is too bad because CAKE rules.

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 the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!