Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will never stop advocating for the Envy as the superior eating apple across almost all axes of appreciation

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 35: THE 35TH ONE

Folks, I'm not gonna lie to you: due to some complicating factors, there might not be an Instant Band Night next week, but for now I'm going to cross my fingers and still hope it's happening!! (any tickets purchased will of course be refunded if it doesn't happen)

✨🪩✨
March 12 2026
6p
$13
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Facebook)

+ + W E + H O P E + W E + S E E + Y O U + T H E R E + +

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.

Nothing here this time, folks, but we can always hope!! For the future!!

#dadthoughts

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

I don't remember if I've talked about this here yet: it turns out that if your kid enjoys the Kirby games, there's like seven volumes of collected Kirby comedy manga called Kirby Manga Mania and they're hilarious (at least to an 8-year-old); hats off to Hirokazu Hikawa honestly (and also the West Contra Costa County Library system). There's also a lot, and I mean a surprising amount, of action/comedy manga based on Splatoon, and I gotta tell you: maybe avoid these for a while unless you want your kids to run wild. We've had to put a moratorium on further borrowing of Splatoon books from the library because the kids just fuckin' run amok after a sufficient amount of reading. This is, I suppose, a testament to either the skill of the creative team or the power of my childrens' imaginations. So we've got that going for us!!

Recipe Nook

Still no time this week either! 🤷 But if you have a recipe you like, I'm always open to hearing about them; some real bangers have come our way since I started this section and I love it. Thank you!!

Fascination Corner

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

• The creator of Stand With Minnesota offers a model for us all to follow since ICE isn't going anywhere anytime soon. (Guardian)

• Meta's attempt to "comply" with the law means it's using The Machine to send reports of potential child abuse to the appropriate agencies, but the reports are mostly useless bullshit and it's wasting the time of people who really need to be investigating legit claims. (Guardian again)

• How fast you perceive time is in some sense dependent on how fast you live your life: starfish and dragonflies don't seem to observe the passage of time at the same rate, according to The Scientists. But why? And how'd The Scientists find out in the first place? (The Conversation)

• "They Haven't Even Started Spending Yet: The terrifying math of money in politics." (How Things Work)

• An analysis of a staggering number of cancer patients over almost 30 years shows a correlation between cancer diagnoses and criminal behavior (the Breaking Bad effect, naturally), even in a country that has universal healthcare. What?? (Science Alert)

• Some Engineers have successfully tested a tiny working engine that can generate power at night thanks to the infinite cold of space. (UC Davis) (Paper)

• Computational analysis of the symbols on artifacts from 40,000 years ago suggests humans back then were definitely recording information with markings, meaning they were just on the cusp of inventing actual writing. (Saarland U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Nobody likes those fucking Flock cameras. (Blood in the Machine on Substack)

• Do you really need pro-quality audio cables or can you just run a signal through wet mud and get the same result? Some audiophiles ran an experiment on each other to see if they could tell the difference and uhhhhh, well, read the article. (Tom's Hardware)

• You can't even trust The Machine (Code Flavor) to not delete your entire fucking inbox, huh. (TechCrunch)

• The Scientists have really looked into it and it turns out horse whinnies are a combination of two simultaneous sounds. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• I cannot rule out the possibility that every issue is going to have a long must-read by Sam Kriss; this one is about the absolutely melted brains of some prominent San Franciscan startup people that you would be profoundly disappointed to meet in person. (Harper's)

• "Pokémon turns 30! Explore the archives of original artworks that defined our childhoods" (It's Nice That)

• Well, shit: a professor of strategy put three versions of The Machine (Generative Flavor) into a wargame against each other to see what they would do, and the overwhelming go-to option turned out to be nuclear annihilation. (King's College London) (Paper)

• A piece of backyard decor in New Orleans turned out to be a nearly two-millennia-old Roman artifact that's been missing for decades. (AP)

• The Scientists think there might be as many as 26,000+ species of bees out there in the world and we're only discovering about 117 per year, so unless more bee scientists appear out of nowhere, we're looking at what they call a "taxonomic bottleneck" that could last for the next four decades. (PhysOrg) (Paper)

• An initial study points to promising results for condensing helpful brain zaps into a 5-day period as opposed to 6 weeks. (UCLA Health Sciences via Science Daily)

• The Scientists ran a surprising test that shows organic life on Mars might last a lot longer in pure ice than we thought. (Penn State) (Paper)

• If you read all the way to the bottom of this section I have a nice little moment of rest for you. (AP)

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 submissions came in for this one, which I think is a surprisingly delicate collection of round beeps and boops over gentle beats, like an even mellower Boards of Canada.

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)!