Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's mentally cataloguing every fan in the house right now

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

If you miss Instant Band Night already, and it's understandable if you do, don't worry: it will return in November, and you can secure your ticket and put it on your calendar right now; feel the warm glow of security fill the space in your heart where music and creativity and surprise live. And if you've never been before, this will be the perfect opportunity to see what all the fuss is about!! Come play or just watch; as always, it'll be like nothing else you've experienced.

✨🪩✨
Nov 13 2025
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

🎃🌴SUMMER SALE/NEW LITTLE WEIRDOS🌴🎃

That’s right, there’s new little guys in there!!! I've been experimenting with new glazing techniques and I have to say I think I've hit upon a winner! Also I have too many things on my "finished work" shelves and it's time to move some inventory, so I've put everything on incredibly deep discount. Decorate your garden or anyplace else that needs a splash of color or whimsy; they also make thoughtful and unique gifts for that special discerning someone in your life.

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.

It's fucking humid outside right now, which is such a rarity in the immediate San Francisco Bay area that I have to call it out here instead of letting it pass by uncommented. On the whole, the weather around here is uncommonly blessed:

• It's generally just ....... nice out all the time

• Mild summer

• Rain instead of snow come winter

• No humidity to speak of most of the time

• No mosquitoes (which I know aren't technically weather but this is my list and I make the rules)

Weather-related drawbacks of this corner of California are as follows:

• August/Sept/part of Oct are the actual hottest months of the year, which is generally unfortunate but also clashes with the "fall! sweaters! pumpkin spice!" vibe the rest of the country starts to project around Sept

• Rain is more or less constrained entirely to winter

• Almost no thunderstorms

• No fireflies

The pros make the cons worth it, but I suppose one thing about living in a place where I generally don't have to ever consider humidity is the sheer hideousness of it when it does strike. This is just me recognizing my humidity privilege; thank you for coming on this journey with me.

#dadthoughts

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

We've signed up for the next tranche of swim classes here in the good city of El Cerrito. Quentin has progressed quite handily to Level 2, while Felix has been encouraged to retake Preschool 1, mostly due to the fact that he wouldn't even get in the pool most of the time, contenting himself with splashing his feet in the first step down. As always, a social engagement proves to be where the most progress is made, or perhaps simply the Presence of Mama: a pool-based playdate with a friend of Quentin's on Sunday meant the whole family ended up going. Since Mavis was able to actually enter the water, she was able to encourage Felix to give it a shot, and he happily stood in the toddler end and sat contentedly splashing in her lap. We'll see if he remembers this adventure come Saturday, but it was at the very least a highly encouraging sign of possible future progress!!

Fascination Corner

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

• Well, fuck: The Scientists ran the simulations past the year 2100 and now they're very worried indeed that the big Atlantic conveyor belt current actually will stop running if we don't curb emissions immediately. (Potsdam Inst for Climate Impact Research via Science Daily) (Paper)

• At least Some Chemical Engineers have worked out a way to turn plastic waste into a carbon-absorbing material that's effective, cheap, and scalable. Let's fucking go!!!!!!!! (U of Copenhagen) (Paper)

• Machine-generated "boring history to fall asleep to" slop videos are threatening to crowd out actual educational content real humans worked hard to make. (404 Media)

• Imagine ending a remote meeting by yeeting yourself out of a crashing fighter jet?? (CNN)

• "The search for Earth’s most mysterious creatures is turning up extraordinary results: Scientists are looking for the “dark matter” of the animal kingdom — and it’s revealing how little we know about life on our planet." (Vox)

• Kelsey McKinney, who I've just learned has a newsletter, wrote what I think should probably be the definitive piece about that brief glorious moment when we all thought Trump might actually be dead. (Defector)

• It hasn't been a good box office summer out there, but I have an idea: maybe if you stopped showing us the entire fucking story of the whole movie in the trailer, we would go see them?? (Hollywood Reporter)

• Here, have some extremely cool ceramics. (It's Nice That)

• Guardrails like these for conversations with The Machine should've been something somebody thought of before launching the fucking chatbots. Just a thought!!!! (TechCrunch)

• Also: maybe if you're bringing humans in to fix something The Machine keeps getting wrong, you should just hire humans to do it in the first place. (NBC News)

• The Scientists have come up with a plausible way cell-like structures could form in the environment of Titan, which has hydrocarbon oceans instead of, you know, water. (NASA) (Paper)

• When we say "billionaires shouldn't exist" this is what we mean, at least partially. (How Things Work)

• Data suggests despair is peaking among people age 18-24 for SoMe CoMpLeTeLy UnKnOwAbLe ReAsOn! 🌍🔥🥵 (The Conversation)

• This isn't the first one of these I've heard about, but it's certainly the most promising: Some Engineers have hit upon a way to turn regular windows into waveguides for solar cells at the edges without compromising the view, meaning we could turn entire skyscrapers into solar farms relatively easily. (!!!!!!) (Chinese Soc for Optical Engineering via Science Daily) (Paper)

• I for one would love to know how The Scientists are even getting viable DNA from mammoth samples 4000 years old, much less a goddamn million, and then sequencing it to figure out their microbiomes. How the hell long does DNA last?? (Nature) (Paper)

• The staggering number of feral cats in New Zealand makes The Scientists worry about native animal populations, so they've worked out a way to scare cats away from sensitive zones, but what happens when the cats acclimate?? What then??? (bioGraphic)

• A massive new study says beta blockers are useless, and in fact are riskier for women than not taking them. (Mount Sinai Hospital via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Building bigger and better space telescopes always comes down to a bigger mirror, which historically we've always assumed should be Big Circle. But what Some Engineers presuppose is, what if: Long Ribbon?? Long Ribbon would actually be much easier and faster to build and would work pretty well! (RPI)

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:

Reader Neal brings us an excerpt from an alternate universe Pitchfork:

Ever wonder if Trent Reznor of NIN was replaced by a studio Exec's 13 year old child from Hamden, Connecticut? No? Well good! because you don’t have to imagine it. It’s already here: Punishment Church!

Stab You Open has a mix of heavy electronic beats, underlaid by existential dyspeptic lyrics, shouted from the vocal nodes of a puberty stricken high school student. It’s haunting and accidentally high concept — It feels like if David Lynch made a 2 hour commercial for Diet Coke. I don’t really understand my feelings — but I’m stockpiling Diet Coke in my new doomsday bunker, just in case.

Stab You Open succeeds in a world that doesn’t matter; it’s like getting a B- in AP English Lit, or getting divorced when you don’t have kids, or… like drinking a cold Diet Coke at the end of the world.

Reader Chris says "I thought you'd like to know that Punishment Church's blistering 'Stab You Open' was the band's only release, a violent, primal scream of a record that combined elements of speedcore and horrorcore with unmistakable traces of Celtic folk music. There was one single released, a five-minute tour de force called 'Gimme the Big Knife (So I Can Cut a Hole in You for Sex Purposes)', accompanied by a music video that was just sped up dashcam footage of a vehicle plowing through herds of cows. While the identities of Punishment Church's lineup remain unknown, persistent rumors suggest it was a side project of the the beloved New Age musician Enya, recorded during her mysterious 'lost winter', of which a little is known, other than it appears to have been triggered after her collection of artisanal pan flutes collapsed on her. The Irish treasure has refused to comment on said rumors, or on the alarming number of knives she appears to carry on her person at all times."

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)!