Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that really doesn't want to feel the heat with somebody (or anybody, bring on the crisp fall weather already)

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

In a little over a month we'll open the doors for the last Instant Band Night of 2024 and I think it's going to be a good one. You should be there for it!! As always, there's no requirement to get onstage — just show up and bear witness to the most concentrated explosion of joyful musical creativity you can cram into your eyes and ears! Ticket link (including handy FAQ) is right here (as well as below) for convenient forwarding to your top-tier friends.

Nov 14 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

Update! Excellent new 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.

Friends, I request your opinions on a matter of gameplay modification!

Namely: is it possible that even the Less-Intense Combat Rules for Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle as proposed last week might still be potentially injurious? How enthusiastically will people want to tag others — is it possible someone might still get unnecessarily knocked around?

Would it make sense to go with flag football rules instead?

• Everyone tucks a hankie of some sort into their belt

• No contact of any kind is allowed

• If you yank someone's hankie, paper-rock-scissors commences immediately

• Best 2 out of 3

• Loser has to go to the penalty box

I imagine it would probably be easy to get a few yards of very cheap cloth from someplace and cut it into hankies suitable for this purpose that wouldn't be confused for the fort flags that are the objective of the game. They don't even need to be particularly durable! Right?

Anyway, what do we think? Should this be the final form of Somewhat Gentler Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle? Hit that REPLY and let me know your thoughts!!

#dadthoughts

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

Friday night is still Movie Night here at House Sung Gruver, which often means just watching 3 episodes of something in a row, but occasionally there are actual (very gentle) movies. Usually somewhere around 2/3 of the way through, the kids say they're hungry and we deploy some bowls with snacks — graham crackers, a little dried mango, etc.

Hilariously, the kids are fucking terrible at eating and watching something simultaneously: they just stop and the bowls sit untouched. On the one hand it's adorable that they can be so utterly transfixed by a story, but on the other it's slightly irritating to have to remind them to eat their snacks literally every 90 seconds.

"But Jon, surely you could just leave them alone" Yes sure I could do that, except when I do leave them alone, their snacks go absolutely untouched and then when the movie is done they complain that they're hungry. This is ........ suboptimal. So in the meantime I have to remind them to eat frequently. Seeing as how it's one of my favorite pastimes, I (selfishly but also with great curiosity) wonder when the ability to snack while watching will kick in for them. I guess it's truly the first multitasking they'll ever have to figure out!?

Fascination Corner

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

• Actual IPCC Scientists both are and uhhh aren't optimistic about hitting our climate targets. (Concordia U) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have successfully mapped the fruit fly brain connectome, an absolutely mathematically staggering task. (Princeton) (Paper)
  

• "Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers: The technology, which marries Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes and some other tools, lets someone automatically go from face, to name, to phone number, and home address." The fact that two Harvard kids could do this on their own is a sign that the cat has left the bag and will not be returning. (404 Media)
  

• There's so much plastic trash out there that it essentially constitutes its own biome for tiny little guys — the plastisphere — and we don't know shit about it. The Scientists would like to change that!! (Nature)
  

• Jen would've loved this: Angel Cakes is going strong as a worker-owned cooperative now. (Oaklandside)
  

• The Scientists dug up a 2-billion-year-old rock sample and found living microbes inside it what the FUCK (U of Tokyo) (Paper)
  

• Getting rid of PFAS forever chemicals is a huge pain in the ass, but The Scientists have hit upon a good, cheap way to make the materials we need to get it done, so that's nice! (Rice U)
  

• Emails between government officials in Springfield after the Trump/Vance attempt to incite a racist pogrom against its Haitian population show that it's fucking wild out there in the Fox News Brainworm infosphere, and not in a good way. (404 Media)
  

• The Scientists have identified a wastewater bacterium that can break plastic down to the point of using it as a food source(!!!!!!). (Northwestern) (Paper)
  

• Once sea turtles hatch, how do they get from their eggs to the surface of the sand? The Scientists figured this out by digging some up, putting tiny accelerometer backpacks on them, and carefully reburying them. Yes there are pictures in the paper. (UNSW Sydney) (Paper)
  

• "10 unsolved, creepy, or just weird Boston archaeological discoveries" (Boston Globe)
  

• Some Engineers have developed an impressive-sounding cognitive framework for robots that lets them ignore irrelevant information while they're trying to do something. (MIT)
  

• Ethics! How do we make sure to incorporate them! Instead of ending a meeting by saying "Does anyone have any questions?" it might be a better idea to say "Can anyone think of anything that could go wrong with this plan?" (UT Arlington) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists are building a smartphone app that can tell when you're depressed by how your pupils move. No, really. (Stevens Inst of Tech) (Paper)
  

• October's just going to be hot from now on. Thanks, oil executives. Should we just start putting names and addresses on billboards in the hardest-hit cities when the temperature tops 100°? I'm just saying ideas here. (Vox)
  

• Ten Spirit Halloween stores in an extremely focused corner of the continental US will become Spirit Christmas stores once Halloween is over. (Attractions)
  

• It still needs more extensive testing, but Some Biomedical Engineers built a truly kickass scanner that can image your capillaries down to a half inch under your skin in a matter of seconds. (U College London Hospitals) (Paper)
  

• The people who rank the value of all those collectible cards aren't even being paid enough to live in Syracuse (no offense to Syracuse, my actual hometown); come the fuck on, eBay. (Polygon)
  

• Nobody thinks about F-type stars when it comes to possible alien life, but The Scientists think that's a mistake, and they've found at least one interesting-looking system that could potentially be a candidate. (UT Arlington) (Paper)
  

• RSV: we hates it. We haaaaates it, preciousssss!! But it's a slippery little bastard that's hard to image — until now: The Scientists have figured out how to take its picture, which will hopefully lead to insights on how to disable or kill it better. (U Wisconsin-Madison) (Paper)
  

• NASA's trying to figure out what comes next after the ISS and is having a little trouble nailing down an answer. (Ars Technica)
  

• The extent of Sonos's Big App Fuckup is still staggering to me, even as a person who doesn't now and probably never will own a Sonos product. (TechCrunch)
  

• Geico will no longer insure Cybertrucks, apparently hahahahahahahahaha (Torque News)

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 looks to me like a quiet folk record from the members of a much louder band who wanted to take a break from seething, cacophonous noise rock without drawing the ire of their fanbase.

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)!