Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has indeed put up the Xmas lights outside and regrets nothing!!!!

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 34: NEW YEAR'S BALL III

Once again I must report that if you failed to make it to Instant Band Night 33, you missed the fuck out, but fear not: redemption is at hand!! Mark your calendar for the 8th of January and don't put away that fancy New Year's Even party outfit yet — take it out for one more spin in the company of the very best crowd in the San Francisco Bay area! Hit the stage and flex those creative muscles or just hang back and watch an explosion of musical inspiration roughly every 9 minutes; I guarantee you've never seen anything like it!

✨🪩✨
Jan 8 2026
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

🪓🐰 New little weirdos on sale NOW 🪓🐰

I made a bunch more! Due to circumstances previously described, the last batch of heavily armed bunnies sold out almost instantly. I've made these ones slightly more expensive in the hopes that they won't all be gone immediately — I did make another Tumblr post and the same thing happened when I Blazed it; as of the time of this writing the (truly ridiculously boosted) campaign is still underway and five or six have sold already, so if you had some holiday shopping in mind then you might wanna step on it. I am, you may rest assured, at work on yet more little weirdos, not all of them bunnies with weaponry. Shocker!!!!

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.

All right, look. Yes. That USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D Lego set is beautiful, but it's also expensive and (crucially) I absolutely do not have any room in the house for it. I just don't. Also, I already have a die-cast metal model of that Enterprise on a shelf above my desk and it's pretty nice, even though it's about 1/6 the size of the Lego one. Tell you what, though: Lego would make some money if they decided they just wanted to sell the minifigs. Right???? I don't have space for any ships, especially not at that size, but I could see a little row of the TNG minifigs on that shelf I mentioned. Surely they've thought of this? Surely??

One thing I do want to link to is something I'd never seen before that got brought up in one of my Slacks: the Lilium Brick Yards, where you can get instructions, part lists, and even the actual parts for DIY Lego sets of Starfleet vessels in number and variety beyond the very dreams of avarice. This person is a goddamn genius. So, you know, if you don't have four hundo to drop on a big-ass Lego version of the Enterprise-D, maybe the dream can still live in smaller form for you!

#dadthoughts

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

Quentin turned 8 last week; we're getting perilously close to double digits somehow???? The celebration was essentially threefold:

• On the actual day, a weekday

• Kid party on Saturday

• Grownup party on Sunday

The first day was when he got his presents, which of course he was most excited for. Mostly books — we're saving the toys for Xmas — but I did finally give him the Dunkleosteus stuffy I nabbed from the Paleontological Research Institution probably at least a year ago, and it was a hit! Quentin asked for pie this year, so there was apple pie for breakfast.

Usually the kid party takes the form of an unstructured "big invite list, let's meet at a park, have cake, run around" type thing, but this year Quentin asked to have it at our house, and gave us exactly five (5) specific people to invite. We were able to get ahold of four of them, and you know what, they had a muddy, self-directed blast. Another apple pie was served.

The grownup party was the "invite the grandparents and extended family and adult friends and really just provide an excuse for us all to catch up with each other while the kids play somewhere" function, and it went down exactly as planned. Our network has a truly astounding confluence of birthdays within about a week of each other, so we sang happy birthday to no less than five people and had another apple pie. That's three (3) pies total for those keeping track, and every single one of them was perfect; Mavis does not fuck around!!!!!!

Recipe Nook

All right, listen. Maybe this is the devil talking. But I want to know if you or someone you know has a good hot dish recipe that doesn't involve cream of mushroom soup. This has to exist. It's occurred to me recently that hot dish as a concept is something I really should investigate, as a person who really enjoys a one-pot cooking process. Whatcha got???

Fascination Corner

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

• Most of the time people on the internet who say they're doing a "social experiment" are to be avoided, but I think Nikalie Monroe deserves a genius grant of some kind?? (Newsweek) Predictably, there is now Discourse about her activities, but once again Anne Helen Petersen is here to distill and clarify the actual salience of it for us. (Culture Study)

• It turns out 3D printing prosthetics isn't quite the low-cost distributed miracle we all thought it was. (IEEE Spectrum)

• Everybody relax and watch some footage of remoras doing their equivalent of ghostriding the whip, where the whip in question is a breaching humpback whale. (AP)

• Speaking of whales, drones have made whale research a hell of a lot easier, which is good news for everyone, whales included. (Knowable)

• The Machine can't read an analog clock yet. (IEEE Spectrum)

• Whooping cough — fucking whooping cough!!! — has killed two babies in Louisiana whose deaths can absolutely be laid at the feet of RFK Jr [spit], who at this point should unquestionably be one of the three most hated men in America. (Undark)

• The Scientists have spotted a binary star system wherein each star has at least one rocky, Earth-size planet circling. What????? (U of Liège via Science Daily) (Paper)

• I guess if you're going to try harnessing the energy of the sun and for whatever reason it's too complicated to manufacture solar panels, you could go with special hot rocks instead? I guess??? (TechCrunch)

• CARI has come up before in this newsletter because it's great (I was unaware of the wiki; rabbithole warning (positive)!!), but here comes a good writeup including perspective from its cofounders. (It's Nice That)

• If the UK is anything to go by, this year's flu season in the US might be a motherfucker; get your flu shot now, people! The protection won't be perfect, but it'll still be something rather than nothing. (Ars Technica)

• The Scientists got a pretty good view of what a supernova looks like at the exact moment it erupts. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• Even inactive geothermal vents can still host life, apparently??? (bioGraphic)

• In a shocker that absolutely no one saw coming at all whatsoever, toys powered by The Machine (Generative Flavor) turn out to be ............ less than ideal from a child safety perspective. (The Register)

• They didn't get around to the "making pugs" level of crazy, but new evidence suggests people were creating different dog breeds literally thousands of years ago. (Nature)

• A ridiculously rare species of beaked whale only known from washed-up corpses was seen in the wild by The Scientists for the very first time last year; apparently all the beaked whales are just Like This, spending almost all their time in the unknowable depths. (Guardian) (Paper)

• The Scientists have announced a possible super-Earth candidate just 20ly away in the habitable zone of its host star. Okay!!!!! (Penn State) (Paper)

• While this quickly gets into the range of math I either never studied or simply forgot, just know that The Scientists have hit upon a method of making predictions from existing data that's way better than anything they were doing before. (Lehigh U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Aircraft designers haven't been too big on trying to make hypersonic planes because they've been assuming the turbulence at those speeds would be too wild to factor in, but new experiments suggest maybe they don't have to worry all that much about it after all. (Stevens Inst of Tech via Science Daily) (Paper)

• The Scientists have been looking at raccoon faces and it seems like the city-bred ones are starting to show signs of what they call "domestication syndrome" where their faces get shorter and cuter. (Scientific American) (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 is giving Gotye vibes based on me knowing just that one Gotye song.

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)!