Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that swears it hears an owl outside right now (1021p on a Monday night)

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

ONE MONTH UNTIL INSTANT BAND NIGHT

Just about!!! 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) (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

💸🐰 This sale lasts exactly two more days 🐰💸

I made a bunch of new weird little guys and now they're all gone, but there are still some really good ones left, anywhere from 50-70% off! Get these out of my house and into your house!! Or garden!! Or the houses or gardens of friends of yours with excellent taste. Go see what's what!

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.

Dream I had:

• I've started a new job

• Something in show business

• I'm with a group of people in a sort of lobby space

• Amy Poehler is there

• She's been doing a bit where she walks past us wheeling a big wagon laden with boxes and pretends to take our lunch order, and everybody's getting in on it

• It is at this point that I put my nose in the air and affect a highfalutin' tone as I say "Yes, very good, I would like a large quantity of yellow sweet corn, please, heavily genetically modified. I don't want it to taste any different, I just want it to be ......... better."

I woke up before I could see anybody's reaction.

#dadthoughts

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

First off I want to thank the kind and generous people who donated to Quentin's Tigerthon PTA fundraiser last week: know that you have made a difference and let that knowledge warm you!!

We purged the kids' bookshelves a few days ago; all of the weeded books now live in bags in the garage, there to stay for at least a month or so just in case they're missed, at which point I think they'll find new homes out in the world. Interestingly, the shelves don't look all that much different despite the three heavy grocery bags' worth of books that were removed; that probably just shows how crowded they were in the first place 😬😬😬

Recipe Nook

The time is fast coming to propose another trio of recipes for the kids to vet; check this space next week to see if I manage to pull it off, because suddenly it seems like there's a lot to do!!! Sorry I don't have anything else to put here!

Fascination Corner

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

• The world's first fossil resulting from an animal dragging its butt on the ground has been found. (The Conversation)

• You only need about 250 malicious documents to effectively poison The Machine (Generative Flavor) no matter how big the size of its dataset, according to some research from inside the house. (Engadget)

• According to rat tests, DMT can help the brain heal after a stroke. Yes, that DMT. (HUN-REN BRC Inst of Biophysics via Science Daily) (Paper)

• The Scientists have built a search engine for DNA sequences that works pretty well. (Nature)

• Some Engineers have worked out a great way to essentially "grow" wildly complex 3D-printed metal, ceramic, or composite shapes cheaply and easily, though there's still a speed and shrinkage problem to crack. (EPF Lausanne) (Paper)

• Talk about a great idea that took us so long to figure out it's kind of embarrassing: just put EV chargers on the fucking streetlights. (Penn State)

• Delia Cai has choice words not just for the marks who fell for this Claude marketing popup in New York but the people behind it. Poetry. Read! (Deez Links)

• In other news: how much do we really need to worry at this point about The Machine's scheming? (Nature)

• Spanish bearded vulture nests are turning out to be surprisingly fascinating treasure troves of history going back over half a millennium. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• A genuinely good idea: ex-con "violence interrupters" in schools. (Oaklandside)

• Of the 246 drivers killed in car crashes in a single county in Ohio over five years, half of them had a bunch of THC in their blood, confirming that driving while stoned probably isn't a great idea, all things considered. (American College of Surgeons via Science Daily)

• Working from a mathematical model, The Scientists have concluded that our memory system is built to optimize for seven senses rather than five. What??? (Skoltech) (Paper)

• At least one animal out there doesn't seem to give a shit how many forever chemicals it's bathing in every day. (Oxford U Press via Science Daily)

• You have to read this story about what happened at game 5 of the MLB playoffs on Friday. (Sports Illustrated)

• Some Engineers are closing in on the problem of fixing GPS in cities, where the satellite signals bounce around between the urban canyons of skyscrapers like crazy. (Norwegian SciTech News) (Paper)

• More college grads are moving back home than ever, and it's because the price of housing has gone fucking insane. (The Conversation)

• If you listened to that episode of The Daily about Russell Vought or had friends who did, please send them this writeup immediately. (Democracy Americana)

• These are at least worth a chuckle: "If Pop Songs Had Classical Music Titles" (McSweeney's)

• Yikes on bikes: Jeep pushed a software update to the 4xe hybrid that bricked it while driving. (Ars Technica)

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 knows where this one comes from.

The Digestive Enzymes are what happens when a joke goes too far, in this case one promulgated by members of a biochemistry faculty that had too much free time.

Utilizing only notes that correspond to the nucleotide bases of DNA (adenine, cytosine, and guanine are represented by middle C and the A and G in the same octave; thymine is F of the second higher octave, treating the ABCDEFG scale as a modulo divide), they build chords out of notes that equate to codons corresponding to amino acids incorporated into proteins. Finally, the songs are sequences of these chords corresponding to the protein chain that constructs (at last!) a digestive enzyme, one enzyme per song.

To compound the joke, the album is only available on vinyl which instead of the normal single groove on the vinyl surface has two, interleaved, representing the double spiral structure of DNA. When you drop the needle, it is random chance whether you land on the "A side" or "B side" groove. The flip side of the album is the "RNA remix" version of the songs, with all of the thymine-F notes replaced by uracil-G notes. It's about as successful as you'd imagine.

Both sides are almost completely unlistenable without the aid of altered states of consciousness or extensive psychological training, but track 2 on the DNA B-side groove ("Lactase") has found a measure of popularity on the EDM festival scene after a certain popular DJ claimed that listening to it while tripping hard on molly counteracts his lactose intolerance.

The album title came from a particularly brave post-doc who told the keytar player that if he made his children listen to the album he would be the World's Worst Dad.

DON'T FORGET: I'm thinking of doing a 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)!