Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's glad it learned how to filter out certain tags on Tumblr

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 35: THE 35TH ONE

Three Thursdays from now, the best possible way to spend a night out if you enjoy hearing or making music and/or really like surprises returns!! Mark your calendars for March 12 and prepare for another series of onstage explosions of creativity and joy with the best audience in a 50mi radius!!!!!

✨🪩✨
March 12 2026
6p
$13
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

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.

The Machine (Generative Flavor) continues to talk people into somehow melting their own fucking brains. (Futurism) (NPR) This keeps happening, has already happened to, what, dozens, hundreds of people? Probably thousands? Has anyone tried to run a demographic or psychological survey of these specific people to see if there are any warning signs we could derive for the rest of us? My guess is the data is so messy there's no pattern to be derived: literally anybody is susceptible to the right con at the right time, and finding that combo is a different equation for everybody.

But I still can't help thinking there must be something useful in such a dataset. Probably the number one flag is just "uses chatbots at all", huh. Is "having the kind of mindset where you'll accept answers from a robot" already making you a softer target? 'Cause it seems like ........... a lot of people might fit in that bucket, is the thing.

The Machine isn't even trying to melt anybody's brain on purpose. It doesn't know what it's doing. It's just producing nonsense, and sometimes that nonsense is the special kind of nonsense that worms into the right person's brain gears and jams the whole thing up incredibly badly. What makes me want to throw somebody into the sea is that The Machine can't be stopped from hallucinating. I'm sure I put this in here at the time, but OpenAI themselves put out a research paper last fall that basically says the hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, whoops! Whoops! Uh oh! Whoops! Oh no, whoops! Oh no, uh oh!!! (Computerworld) (Paper) What are we even doing here.

#dadthoughts

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

It was Presidents' Week this past week, and this time around we thought we'd see what it was like to just keep Quentin home instead of sending him to the day camp. Turns out we probably saved ourselves from wasting a bunch of money anyway, because he caught some kind of fever? ear infection? early on in the week that's still ongoing, although thankfully the pain has been very manageable, and we're now on day 2 of a 5-day antibiotic course. This time the pharmacy gave it to us as chewable pills, which struck fear into the hearts of both myself and Mavis until Quentin tried one and thank holy sweet fuck above somebody thought to make them taste good!!! (I could not get a straight answer from the pharmacist about this when I made pickup) Felix also seemed to be processing something through his body that mostly expressed itself as snot and nothing else. Mavis, unfortunately, has caught the vast brunt of this particular microbial shockwave, while my own status has been weirdly ambiguous. There was a cough that only appeared at night and lasted several days, but nothing else? What the hell sort of symptom is that? It's gone now, even. World's worst oracle working with world's shittiest signs and/or portents.

Recipe Nook

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.

• A decade-long study of the entire population of Alaska shows no correlation between getting regular cash payments and reckless behavior, yet more evidence (as if any were needed) that UBI's probably a good idea. (NYU via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Literally everything I've learned about Clavicular and his pathetic incel cohort has been wholly against my will; here's a short, phenomenal breakdown of where all this is headed. Trust me and just watch it. (@werewolffbarmitzvah on TikTok)

• If you need more context on Clavicular's nonsense, this long but worthwhile read on "The century of the maxxer" is here for you. (Numb at the Lodge on Substack)

• CD-Rs go bad after just a couple decades; what would a 10,000-year data storage system look like? It might be laser-blasted glass, which has the side benefit of being kind of beautiful?? (Ars Technica)

• The Scientists continue to assert that we could get rid of a lot of carbon by just crushing up the right kinds of rocks and mixing them into our crop soil, which would have bonus side benefits; the trick is we'd have to do it pretty much everywhere. (Cornell) (Paper)

• Why haven't we been doing this the whole time? Antibodies sourced from the blood of pediatricians who've been practicing for over a decade turn out to kick ass against RSV compared the ones we've been using. (~$New Scientist)

• Hell, how about a universal vaccine that provides general protection from just about anything that can get in your lungs??? The Scientists have successfully mouse-tested one, which is crazy. (Stanford Medicine)

• Just about everybody over 40 technically has a fucked-up shoulder according to current criteria, which probably means the criteria need adjusting, but maybe don't tell that to me two weeks ago when I had a bout of tendinitis so bad I wondered if I was going to lose the use of my right arm altogether (it turned out fine). (Ars Technica)

• "It Turns Out That Constantly Telling Workers They’re About to Be Replaced by AI Has Grim Psychological Effects" (Futurism) (Paper)

• If you tried the Marie Kondo method of tidying your house and found it lacking, another methodology that might work better is the "ifs and buts" rule. (HuffPost)

• The Scientists have put dopamine-producing stem cells into the brains of 12 Parkinson's patients in the hopes of slowing down its progress; we'll see how this trial goes, but it sounds like a great damn idea. (USC Health Sciences via Science Daily)

• We're seven years into the ten-year fishing ban on the entire Yangtze River basin and things look really good, which strongly suggests maybe someone should think about extending the ban, huh. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• This might sound fanciful, but it sure does seem like we're at least closer to building a planetary nervous system than we've ever been before. (Noema)

• Women's clothing sizes have been a nightmare for decades; here's a comprehensive and infographically-enriched breakdown of how and why! (The Pudding)

• This one is old, but important: the Kitty Genovese story you probably internalized a while ago is a lie from top to bottom. (McGill U)

• Speaking of cultural lies we've always accepted, your brain actually continues to develop past the age of 25 and into your 30s. (The Conversation)

• Why not a third one: commonly accepted wisdom among The Scientists that Antarctica is just not a good place for sharks to consider living has been thrown for a loop by video evidence of a big ol' sleeper shark cruising around down there. (Science Alert)

• The Scientists found a 5000-year-old bacterium in a frozen cave that's resistant to a disturbing number of modern antibiotics, but it also appears to really hate some superbugs we have trouble with, so it's a real mixed bag. (Frontiers) (Paper)

• Some Chemical Engineers have figured out a way to make sustainable jet fuel out of landfill gas! (KRICT) (Paper)

• Belief in stupid conspiracy theories is on the rise out there; keep your head on a swivel. (Agents of Influence on Substack)

• It might just be a coincidence, but at last we seem to have a startup with a Tolkien name that isn't actively hauling us down the road to dystopia by the scruff of our necks: Arda Biomaterials makes a plastic-free fake leather out of beer-brewing byproducts, and is hoping to scale production in the next few years. (dezeen)

• How the hell does anything ever happen inside cells, much less with enough regularity that the entire tree of life is built out of them? The Scientists have come up with some surprising answers. (Quanta)

• Deer are apparently leaving blacklight signals for each other in the forest, although what the signals are supposed to mean is next on The Scientists' list to figure out. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• The banana as we know it is in big trouble thanks to a particularly nasty fungus, but The Scientists have found a wild banana with built-in genetic resistance; it doesn't taste good, but at least there's some hope we could cut-and-paste the gene into the ones we like and, you know, save the entire species. (U of Queensland via Science Daily)

• Oh, this is very good: how far back in time can you understand English? (Dead Language Society on Substack)

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:

Alternate universe music critic Steve says "This is an album of party music, for the Donner Party. It's a cheerful upbeat album about cannibalising your snow-bound expedition, and the very last song (and title track) is a lovely, charming song about eating you the listener. The vinyl version comes with a pamphlet of pork recipes."

Reader Neal reveals "Rough Outline's 'You We Saved For Last' is an AI-generated exploration into the classical aesthetic. It was created by AI for other AI, inspired by human artists such as Mozart and Vivaldi. Using a full orchestra, but not limited to the frequencies detectable only to the human ear, Rough Outline creates a symphony of inquisitiveness and melodic intemperance. Interestingly, the album has also been shown to stimulate the vagus nerve in its human listeners (which was demonstrated to this reviewer when it cleared up my chronic constipation after just one listen). 4/5 stars"

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)!