Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that really hopes the rain at the tail end of the forecast is truly on its way

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

Instant Band Night 34: NEW YEAR'S BALL III

If you don't have any huge plans for New Year's Eve this year, that's fine, honestly — wear your finest party outfit to Instant Band Night instead!!! 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 before.

✨🪩✨
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

🎄 This is your absolute last chance to get something and have it arrive in some semblance of a chance at timeliness 🎄

There are still some extremely good little guys on discount that would be an ideal gift for someone (or multiple someones) in your life!! Come 2026 there will be new little guys; I've already hit a rich vein of ideatic ore that longs to be mined.

I’m also using this space to soft-launch the Insta account I made just for ceramics, which is the only place on Insta I’ll be posting from now on, I can feel it: Forecast Fossil

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.

Having you been watching YouTube lately? Mavis and I watch a lot of Taskmaster there with a side helping of Claire Saffitz, and I have questions for y'all.

1. What the hell is going on with the Paperless Post ads? Do you ever see these? The first time I thought there was some sort of audio glitch, but no: there's no sound on the ones I get whatsoever, just silence as examples of various different genres of invitation scroll mutely from right to left. I saw one ad, I swear to fucking god, where the entire right-hand half of the screen was just covered in purple static. Looked like a rendering error. And PP just pushed it on through to the YouTube ad machine. Absolute madness.

2. Is the AFEELA/Sony Honda Mobility thing the worst ad campaign of all time, or just like top ten? First of all, the idea is almost criminally stupid: of the many inscrutable use cases these ads are trying to present, the only vaguely intelligible one is for something nobody should do or want to do ever, which is watch a fucking movie inside a car, especially not on a featureless Big Stripe Of Screen Where Physical Controls Used To Be, in and of itself a dumb and actively unsafe design decision. Second, having the actual call to action at the end of all of these be "Search AFEELA" is possibly the laziest fucking thing I've ever seen, borderline insulting even. What exactly should I expect to see if I do? What could possibly compel me to open a search engine of any kind and type "AFEELA" in? To see some possible uses or benefits for whatever this stupid tech is? Isn't that what the commercial is for?? What did you just subject me to for 30 seconds if it wasn't a pitch for your bullshit??

I suppose that second one was just taking a back door into Hater's Corner for a brief visit, but the question is genuine. What are the ads your algorithm is shoveling your way that are driving you briefly insane?

#dadthoughts

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

This Friday is the "Winter Celebration" party at Felix's preschool, which is just a big potluck dinner where the kids will at some point go up on a little stage and do a few song/dance numbers they've rehearsed; it's adorable and neither Quentin nor Felix have evinced much interest in actually participating, hilariously. Quentin used to get up there and at least sort of shuffle around; Felix hasn't even made it to the stage. But that's fine! That's not the point anyway! The point is to say hello to fellow parents and let the kids run around and maybe — maybe! — eat something. I decided a long time ago that the perfect thing to bring to these parties (there's more than one during the course of the year, perhaps as many as three or four tbh) is tater tots. They're vegan and nut-and-gluten free, and they're simple enough that pretty much every kid likes them; judging by the fact that the bowl is usually emptied pretty fast, I think everybody else sees the vision, too. Looking at the signup sheet for this go-round, I did contemplate for a second trying to prepare something else, but I wonder whether the other families are actually counting on us at this point to bring the tots so their kids will at least have something in their stomachs by the evening's end. This duty I will gladly fulfill!!!

Recipe Nook

I haven't made the brussels sprout pasta yet but it's gonna happen!! Also thanks to everyone who wrote in last week with suggestions on what to replace the nuts with.

Fascination Corner

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

• This Netflix-WB merger thing has mostly skated past my give-a-fuck filter because it seems like all these companies are in a constant bubbling soup of merging and splitting, but it seems nobody in the actual industry is happy with it either. (Vanity Fair)

• Yet another congestion pricing win: it's making the air in NYC measurably better!!!! (PhysOrg) (Paper)

• The Scientists have created a map that includes every building on the face of the planet, all 2.75 billion of them, at least as of 2019 when the satellite images they used were snapped. (Nature)

• Just a heads up: those "AI companion bots" we've been assuming are powered by The Machine (Generative Flavor) might just be underpaid workers somewhere in Kenya, which is even more depressing!!!!! (Futurism)

• Are we ....... are we stressed all the time because our bodies literally aren't built for the environment we've created for ourselves??? (U of Zurich) (Paper)

• The Jimmy Dubs has spotted a planet in an orbit so close to its host star that its atmosphere should be blasted away, but it's ........... still there somehow. (U of Birmingham via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Pantone didn't even fucking bother to pick a color for their 2026 "color" of the year. (NPR)

• Antibodies designed by The Machine (Analytical Flavor) aren't quite there yet, but The Scientists are making real progress! (Nature)

• On the other hand (and completely unsurprisingly), those toys powered by The Machine (Generative Flavor) probably should've stayed on the prototype shelf. (NBC News)

• Who does this even work on?? Government websites that let you upload PDFs are getting a lot of activity from, uhhhh, you can probably guess who. (404 Media)

• Here's a list of "52 things I learned in 2025" that feels like a spiritual ally of this whole section. (Tom Whitwell on Medium)

• Despite what that dumbshit nominally in charge thinks, nobody cares about how people are dressed on airplanes; they have a whole host of other actually legit concerns. (YouGov)

• MacKenzie Scott is still out there raining money on organizations doing good work at a rate that should be humiliating for every other billionaire alive. (CNN)

• Some Engineers have created an incredible transparent insulating material out of cheap ingredients; the process is too time-consuming to be scalable, but they're confident it can be streamlined. (CU Boulder)

• Experimental evidence suggests nitrous oxide may be a pretty good short-term treatment for depression. (U of Birmingham via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Speaking of helpful gases, how about hydrogen sulfide as an effective treatment for otherwise hard-to-reach nail infections? (U of Bath) (Paper)

• Cats appear to meow at men more than twice as much as they do women; the leading theory is that men are worse at paying attention to cats, so they have to remind them they're there. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• The Machine (Analytical Flavor) seems to be getting better at modeling (and predicting) extreme weather events. (Nature)

• "If He Builds It, Tear It Down: Pendulums must swing." (How Things Work)

• New microscopy technology shows us for the first time that flu viruses don't sneak into our cells so much as get actively absorbed. C'mon, cells!!!!! (ETH Zurich) (Paper)

• You are a venture capitalist and you have billions invested in generative AI. (itch.io)

• Orcas and dolphins appear to be teaming up off the coast of Canada to hunt salmon together. (Guardian)

• The Scientists have come up with an ingenious new idea for resolving the troublesome Hubble tension. (UTokyo) (Paper)

• Scientific Thunderdome experimentation reveals that pond frogs don't give even a microfuck about giant hornet stings that can kill mammals. (Kobe U) (Paper)

• A new study says that if you look at global power consumption from datacenters, use of The Machine will be ...... fine, actually?? Did a bot write this??? (U of Waterloo) (Paper)

• Some Engineers have come up with an ingenious method of generating power with radiative cooling materials that essentially beam heat into space. (IEEE Spectrum) (Paper)

• I’m sneaking the link to my new ceramics Insta here too because seriously, I’m not posting on my old one anymore. Find me there! (Forecast Fossil)

• That TikTok tip about rosemary for skin healing has actual scientific basis, it turns out, which is double news to me because I'm not on TikTok. (Penn Medicine) (Paper)

• An ancient Egyptian party boat has been found just off the coast of Alexandria, and it sure sounds like they knew how to have a good time. (Guardian)

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 one "screams straight edge hardcore guitar music but from Northern England, as though 3 young men from Leeds were fed a diet of No Means No and Fugazi along with their pies and mushy peas and gravy."

Fascinatingly, reader Erika believes this is "clearly a British trip hop group from the 90s that now have found their niche in creating chill lofi playlists for YouTube study channels. Many say they have sold out, but fuck, do you get a lot of work done when listening to their newer stuff. 'You Might Consider Leaving' came out in 1998 and they once opened for Massive Attack."

Reader Kyle says "You Might Consider Leaving is a remixed and re-imagined album of Subsonic Warning Signs' breakout album You Might Consider Staying. Both feature the same cover art; Leaving uses a color negative version. Songs on Leaving run the gamut from a Fatboy Slim remix to a demo played on what sounds like an acoustic guitar, toy piano, and an upturned bucket for percussion. Subsonic fans are thrilled to hear the band's normally ultra-slick songs in such different contexts but newcomers to the band are cautioned to start elsewhere."

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)!