Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that admits a certain amount of curiosity about zero sugar Werther's Originals
You'll Like This
Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.
Instant Band Night Returns In May
I've had to come to the conclusion lately that there's just too much on my plate to continue managing Instant Band Night, but the good news for you the reader is that a new team of bright and capable people (led by an Instant Band Night volunteer who should be familiar to anyone who's been to one the last few years) is already working on putting the May installment together! Watch this space for more concrete news as it gets closer!!
Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU
I'm cooking up some new weird little guys for the shop already, but did you know there are now enough purchases for the reviews down at the bottom to constitute some lovely little reads? It's nice beyond description to know that these things I'm making have found homes with the right people. Go have a look; eagle-eyed viewers may notice a new bunny has snuck in there.
Idea Factory Giveaway
I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after four+ 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.
When he was littler, Quentin was completely fascinated by garbage and construction trucks, and I could get a decent amount of pandemic lockdown mileage out of putting him in a stroller and walking someplace I knew an excavator would be working. Driving past a big construction site literally just today, I saw a dad hoist his toddler up on his shoulders so he could watch the concrete pumper truck extend its improbably long boom arm out to do its thing. Wouldn't it be nice to have a map you could use to either:
Find construction near you that you could watch
Say "hey there's a construction site here and you can watch it!"
I bring you my latest experiment with The Machine (Code Flavor): Construction Near Me (if this takes off I might actually spring for a real URL).
Report construction you've seen!
Filter by types of machinery or whether there's a good view!
Site reports are visually color-coded for recency, so you know you're seeing current ones!
Yes I know there's only one site in there right now, because that's the one I reported, but there was originally more test data in here that I deleted. I got rid of it because (a) as far as I could tell it proved the site works fine (b) I want the real shit now. Tell us where the construction is, friends! Also, let me know what you think?
#dadthoughts
Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.
Remember back when there was a teachers' strike and our side won? In a classic case of "sure, that might as well happen," the district delivered an enormous cut to the site budget of Quentin's school and presumably every other school they oversee, I'm guessing because they're scrambling to figure out how to pay for all the stuff we won without digging into their own pockets too hard. I don't know. Who's to say?! The upshot is that now the PTA has to pay for things like uhhhh band (🎷🎺🥁) and a whole bunch of other stuff. It is with this context that I humbly pass around another fundraising hat in the form of the Read-a-Thon, to which you can pledge directly and know in your heart of hearts that you're making a real difference in the day-to-day lives of kids I know and love!!
Fascination Corner
I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.
Worth a read: "They Killed Normal and Called It Progress: Julia Roberts, Applebee's, Bandcamp, your manager, and the death of everything in between. (Also, Sweetgreen is the A24 of dining and I will die on this hill.)" (Found Object on Substack)
Elon's class action fraud lawsuit no go so good, to the point where his lawyers are trying to get a mistrial declared, in part because everybody clearly fucking hates his guts. (Gizmodo)
Actually, speaking of Elon and lawsuits, a Cybertruck owner who survived a crash has fired up a lawsuit with an interesting liability angle for ol' Elon. (Electrek)
The appendix has independently evolved at least 32 times across 361 species of mammal. Why? Why, though? (The Conversation)
You should read this interview with an author who wrote about how fucked modern parenting has become because of (you guessed it) capitalism, but also I'm not sure we're gonna actually be able to do anything about it without a massive and well-organized national movement. (Culture Study)
That sure didn't take long: Grammarly is taking that stupid "Expert Review" feature offline; you know, the one that was either stealing from or zombifying writers living and dead? As if we wouldn't notice? (Engadget)
Raccoons appear to solve puzzles for the fun of it even after whatever food rewards are on offer have been claimed. (UBC via EurekAlert) (Paper)
Have a very good short (fiction) story by Tal Lavin about "The Submarine of Czechia: Or, The Life of a Spy at Mar-a-Lago" (The Sword and the Sandwich)
"Do All Jobs Suck Right Now?" (Culture Study) Pair this with a new study from Tufts that finds younger people for the first time have worse life expectancy than the previous generation, and it might be because everybody's stressed the fuck out. And cancer is going nuts. Maybe because everybody's stressed the fuck out? (Tufts U) (Paper)
We always assumed it was because they were following the wolves around, but it's much cooler than that: years of observational data shows that ravens in Yellowstone remember the places where wolves succeed in their hunts and visit them frequently. (Max Planck Inst of Animal Behavior)
The British Wildlife Photography Awards have declared winners for 2026 already; there's some good ones in there. (BWPA)
It's not ......... great out there for behind-the-camera diversity in Hollywood, but it's at least interesting that audiences seem to actively prefer a more diverse cast?? (Variety) (UCLA report)
EV skeptics like to honk about the way battery performance supposedly degrades when the climate warms, but a new study shows they have nothing to worry about. (Anthropocene)
I'm trying very hard not to contribute to my own rage spiraling here; I'm including this piece about the wartime civilian harm reduction program Trump killed for whatever historical record will exist decades from now. We saw it too, folks. (ProPublica)
The Scientists theorize that the moons of rogue planets could still support subsurface habitability through tidal heating for long enough for life to form. (Max Planck Inst for Extraterrestrial Physics)
New paint tray design just dropped. (Core77)
The landscape left behind after a wildfire is surprisingly inhospitable to life, but there are fungi that love it, and they deserve some scientific attention. (bioGraphic)
"What is wisdom, and can it be taught? Scientists are trying to name the qualities that make someone wise and figure out how to cultivate them" (Knowable)
Deployment of The Machine at Amazon isn't going as well as they'd like it to. (Guardian)
The Scientists are making what I hope are pretty reasonable guesses about what our ancient ancestors might have sounded like. (BBC Future)
It turns out the question of "how do cats always land on their feet?" wasn't fully answered, but The Scientists are now pretty sure it has to do with the way their spines work. (Science Alert)
A Fictional Thing
Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.
A band and their album
Photo by Evie S on Unsplash
(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:
Photo by Margaret Kester on Unsplash
No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is a stripped-down but speedy and abrasive rock trio where the bassist is the singer and only one out of every five words is even audible, let alone intelligible.
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 this page right here (which also has the archive)!
