Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's having trouble letting go of some classic t-shirts that really should be moved on to new homes

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 26: SPRING FLING

Instead of beating the drum for how goddamn fantastic Instant Band Night 25 was, I should instead focus on making sure you know Instant Band Night 26 is on May 9 and you should mark your calendar immediately. Come have some fun making or watching the most joyful and surprising act of musical improv in the entire SF Bay!!

May 9 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

If you have someone in your life who can tell you the names of the entire Enterprise-D bridge crew or just appreciates an almost rebelliously whimsical ceramic object, well buddy have I got a store for you. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

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.

Last year as part of a fundraiser for the PTA, we got a charming windchime made by one of the classes at Quentin's school (5th or 6th grade, presumably). It's great: ceramic stars and circles and rings were hand-cut, stamped, glazed, and fired in school colors, then tied with twine to dangle from a bamboo hoop to tinkle and clank against each other whenever the wind blows. The one downside is that the twine seems to be at least partially biodegradable: the strings holding two of the larger pieces have rotted through and dropped their cargo, which landed on a shelf outside and sustained no damage. In fact, now that I think about it, the twine at the top of the entire thing gave way some time ago (again, no damage resulted — these are extremely tough little ceramic guys, apparently) and I replaced the hook or whatever it was with a loop made of braided pipe cleaners. I think the only way to save this thing long-term is to swap out all of the twine with fishing line in a partial Windchime of Theseus situation (the hoop and the chimes themselves being the only remaining original parts). I've learned a new end-loop knot from the internet and we're just going to see if these initial few will hold before I go all in. This has been: your windchime update for 2024.

#dadthoughts

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

There were a lot of little projects the kids in Quentin's class did for MLK Day a while ago, but there's one in particular I need to describe for you: the kids cut out a paper cloud that says "I Have A Dream" on it and attach colored strips of construction paper, upon which are written their dreams. Here are Quentin's, which are very good:

• To work at an aquarium

• To learn to do more math*

• To learn to do karate

• I want to be an astronaut**

• I want a snapping turtle

• To live in Monterey

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which ones are related directly to each other, if at all (I detect at least one indelible geographic link). I just wanted to say what a great set it is, and that I suppose it constitutes evidence that Mavis and I are at least doing something right; thank you to her and everyone else who's been a force in Quentin's life thus far — you know who you are.

* Does every kid do this: Quentin is fascinated by numbers. He's always asking us for the sum of two numbers he pulls off the top of his head, or showing us how he can count by fives, or saying what ten plus ten is. Yesterday in the car, he told me he knows all the combinations of numbers that add up to eight, which to be fair is only about five total.

** When we read these out loud, Felix informed us that this was also his goal, just fyi.

Fascination Corner

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

• "Miranda's Last Gift: When our daughter died suddenly, she left us with grief, memories—and Ringo." (Atlantic gift link)
  

• Let's all learn about Girl Scout cookies together. (Atlas Obscura)
  

• Some Engineers have invented an origami-inspired system of flat-packed designs that can unfold to form surprisingly strong, highly versatile structures. (U Michigan) (Paper)
  

• Political commentariat consensus seems to be that Republican shitheads' incoherence around IVF is fucking them up, but when was the last time catching any of these assholes' self-contradiction actually hurt them? They don't care and neither do their voters. Still, it's at least fun to watch. (NPR) What's ....... less fun is reading anything about Project 2025, but we really have to, because these fuckers are serious and they are not going to be as inept as last time. (Democracy Americana)
  

• Isn't it a little weird that we don't have any memories of our earliest years? How do memories even form while our brains are busy growing like time-lapsed mushrooms? The Scientists are on the case. This one's good! (Science)
  

• MacKenzie Scott is still out there giving away wads of money, folks. I also like that she's got a website where you can really see where it's all going. (NBC News) (Yield Giving)
  

• The Scientists report some meaningful progress using The Machine to design antibodies from scratch. (Nature) (Paper)
  

• Couches really truly have gotten shittier over the last decade or so. (Dwell)
  

• After reading about the kind of numbers she's doing, I'm surprised "hot bartender who charges $30 for a shot and a slap to the face" isn't a much more widespread business model. (Axios Miami)
  

• Climate change means infectious diseases will start to spread beyond their usual zones of influence. (UC Davis) Oh, and honeybee colony collapse will happen a lot more, unless we want to start sticking hives in the fridge. (Washington State) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have created a self-heating concrete that gets warm when the weather is cold, melting any snow that falls on it and obviating the need for shovels. (Drexel)
  

• If you're not already watching Taskmaster, this will be meaningless to you, but if you are, then this (slightly old) interview is a gift. (Polygon)
  

• A study of over half a billion comments spanning 34 years shows that no matter where we congregate online, be it Reddit, Facebook, or the ancient halls of Usenet, we can't escape our own shittiness. (City U London) (Paper)
  

• "Anti-Immigration Democrats Fuck Off: Offer the public a different vision, cowards." (How Things Work)
  

• It needs some testing and tweaks, but The Scientists have come up with a way to process food waste into material suitable (in theory) for plastic-free, biodegradable sanitary pads and diapers. (ACS)
  

• Neural evidence strongly suggests dogs can understand nouns as general referents and not just as specific objects in their lives. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• Honestly, life in a Bronze Age fen-folk stilt house sounds kind of nice. (U of Cambridge)
  

• Sweet creeping Christ in the cornfield: why in the fuck would Glassdoor ever even think about attaching users' real names to their profiles, much less actually go and do it? (Ars Technica)
  

• Nobody actually knows what makes electroconvulsive therapy work. That it works is unquestionable, but how?? (Quanta)
  

• Some Engineers have developed a universal controller system for robotic exoskeletons that used The Machine to simply learn what people are up to when they're trying to move around. (Georgia Tech)
  

• The Scientists think it should be possible to detect signs of life in a single grain of ice ejected from someplace like Europa. (U of Washington) (Paper)
  

• Venting about something that makes you mad may not help, and jogging about it can actually make it worse — the things that actually let you manage your rage are stress-relief techniques like deep breathing, yoga, or just plain counting to ten. (Ohio State) (Paper)
  

• I'm at least cautiously optimistic that Gamergate: The Sequel doesn't seem to be working nearly as well as its members hope. (The Verge)
  

• The Scientists have figured out that tailoring climate messaging to different groups of people depending on how self-interested they are works a lot better. It really does make sense! (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• Pythons grow quickly without eating a lot, which means they might be good to farm instead of cows and pigs and whatnot. But there are a lot of unanswered questions, so The Scientists are starting to look into 'em. (Scientific American)
  

• The first big offshore wind farm in the US just came online. (Canary Media)
  

• Wholly unsurprisingly, it's fucking rough out there for gig workers, who are — surprise!! — people who need things like rest and food and the ability to use the goddamn bathroom. (Rest of World)
  

• Why would you do this: The Scientists are trying to teach The Machine how to tell when people are lying when they've got an economic incentive to do so. (NC State)
  

• Some Engineers have worked out a way to encode information holographically onto simple plastic surfaces with an ordinary 3D printer. (Technical U of Vienna) (Paper)
  

• Instead of making climate pledges they can't live up to, The Corporations are simply shutting the fuck up and going about business as usual, a practice I hope doesn't catch on that's already been labeled "greenhushing." (Inside Climate News)
  

• Passing electricity through a soft material can bond it to a metal more or less permanently unless you reverse the polarity, a discovery we could've made at any point since inventing the battery but which The Scientists have only now stumbled across. (IEEE Spectrum) (Paper)
  

• That's one big-ass blueberry. (BBC)

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 CJ Botha 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 Madara on Unsplash

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think might actually be an all-instrumental album suitable for playing in the background of just about any retail environment.

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.