Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that guesses it's probably time to wash and store the winter sweaters that have been draped over the easy chair for literal months now

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 32: BEACH PARTY

I made custom guitar picks. In case you wanted to know how it's gonna be from here on out!!!

Also, this will be the last Instant Band Night until November, so make sure you come to what might be the highlight of summer in your best vacation outfit and get ready to either create or witness something amazing onstage every 5-10 minutes!! There is, of course, no pressure to perform — you can just be a part of the best live music crowd on the entire West Coast. Yeah I said it

Tell your friends! Pass the invite around! Mark your calendars!

✨🪩✨
July 10 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Partiful) (Facebook)

+ + T E L L + Y O U R + F R I E N D S + +
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Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

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.

Mavis inherited a walking treadmill from a coworker some time ago, and I realized I could also just as easily make use of it. It's been great to bust out while I watch an episode of something; I've gone through all available episodes of The Boys and The Pitt this way and I endorse it. I've also very recently realized that this means I can finally do something about which I've long been curious and have never remotely been able to fit into my days, which is I can finally watch Dimension 20 shows. Have you seen how long these episodes are? They're like 2 hours each, which is just not a chunk I can readily sit down and absorb easily, what with all the stuff I have to do around the house and having two kids and whatnot. But — but!! — I can get on this treadmill and watch half an episode a day, and in this manner finally achieve nerd totality. I think my first stop will be s01 of Dungeons & Drag Queens, because it's only 4 episodes long and thus should be achievable in like a (business) week and a half. After that the field goes wide open and I'm ready to receive suggestions. I'm thinking Tiny Heist will probably be next, but is Fantasy High good? Opinions seem to vary. What's yours? Let's do this.

#dadthoughts

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

Father's Day was good:

• Felix's preschool had everyone work on a little frame with a picture of them + their dad in it, and Felix walked me through all the stickers he'd put on there in the manner of a justifiably proud craftsman

• Quentin had gone with Mavis to a store not too long ago to get me a carefully-guarded surprise that turned out to be a pair of socks chosen with extreme care that were great

• Also Mavis made waffles, and a passionfruit-orange pound cake that I'd long theorized might be possible and turned out amazing

In this section of the newsletter I hope I manage not to sound like I'm crowing too much about what an amazing dad I am, because truly I am not: I'm certainly above average, but nobody's going to kick my door down to hand me a trophy and a medal. I shout more than I'd like to. My "getting the kids ready for bed" manner has been critiqued as brusque. When the kids want emotional comfort for some misfortune that's befallen them, they call for mama and not me.

But also: when something has happened in the night that needs fixing (a bloody nose that's leaked onto a pillow, for instance), they shout for me. When there's out-loud reading to be done in the house, they want to know if I'm free. Quentin feels no compunction telling me about his list of crushes, which currently stands at one (1) person whose name I will not disclose here. Are we having takeout or did I make something for dinner? Often the latter answer is greeted with more enthusiasm. These things are also true, and I like to think they count too.

Fascination Corner

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

• If you're going to send somebody something about the LA protests, it might as well be this: "The Los Angeles Protests Are an Act of Self-Defense". (The New Republic) 

• Simultaneously, we should be letting everybody working on the ICE side of things know that we all think "You're a Bunch of Cowards!" (How Things Work)

• Finally, especially after this weekend, it's good to remember "There are more of us than there are of them" (Welcome to Hell World)

• The Scientists have come up with a new reforestation map for carbon removal that considers other ecosystems and people, and it's a lot smaller while still removing 1.5 billion tons of CO2 from the air. (Guardian)

• Stem cell therapy for Parkinson's is getting somewhere! (Nature)

• That thing where we sometimes think people look like their dogs is actually true. (The Conversation)

• I can't imagine there was a lot of audience crossover, but still: Andor beat Bluey for total streaming minutes in May. If you haven't watched season 2 yet, get on it, especially in These Troubled Times. (Media Play News)

• The Vera C. Rubin observatory is about to go online, at which point it'll take a picture of the entire Southern hemisphere's sky every 3 days, generating 20 terabytes of data a night (more than the Jimmy Dubs generates in about a year), for a whole decade. (Scientific American)

• He's not wrong: "The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse: Why the most dangerous political crisis in modern American history is met with emotional denial, moral distortion, and cultural distraction." (Notes From the Circus)

• A merchant shipwreck from the 1500s has been found over a mile down off the coast of southern France, and it was full of stuff. (Science Alert)

• Which country cusses the most? (The Conversation)

• The Scientists have worked out what seems to be the universal algorithm for how species spread out over the surface of the planet. (U of Reading) (Paper)

• Finally, a house — no, a home — for those terracotta warrior statues. (Colossal)

• A really good brain implant has successfully translated a man's thoughts to speech in just about real time. (Nature)

• Some Engineers used The Machine (Analytical Flavor) to scour a vast body of literature and samples to find sustainable cement alternatives for carbon emissions reduction and it seems to have done the job, though now they actually need to physically test its findings. (MIT) (Paper)

• Because of course they are: "Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement: An investigation shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED finds that 80% of anti-trans organizations receive fossil fuel funding." (HEATED)

• The Jimmy Dubs has captured direct images of exoplanets 306ly away that are good enough to figure out the composition of their atmospheres, as well as a weird disk of olivine particles surrounding one like a Pogo Ball. (Science Alert)

• Oh good, now The Machine (Generative Flavor) will be making influencer videos from scratch. (The Verge)

• Sun Metalon is a company working to turn steel and aluminum waste into usable metal for recycling, which is great because otherwise that all goes into landfills. (Canary Media)

• Appendix cancer is surging in younger generations and nobody knows why; now I'm really glad mine was removed 20 years ago. (The Conversation)

• Megan Greenwell's new book on private equity sounds like a banger. (Vanity Fair)

• Humpback whales seem to like blowing bubble rings (different from bubble nets) when they hang out with humans, and The Scientists wonder if the rings might be their way of saying hi. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• A neutrino detector down in Antarctica has picked up a couple of signals that defy The Scientists' current understanding of particle physics. (Penn State) (Paper)

• Your breathing pattern is just as unique to you as your fingerprints, according to a new study that also suggests it might correlate to your mental/emotional state. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)

• What the hell is going on inside llamas? The Scientists have isolated a new llama antibody that attacks a whole different part of the covid virus's spike protein that doesn't really mutate, making it essentially variant-proof. (VIB) (Paper)

• You have to admire the work ethic: an AI spam farm set up bullshit websites on unmonitored niche corners of prominent domains like Nvidia and Stanford to game the Google robots. (404 Media)

• Minimalist luxury houseboats? Minimalist luxury houseboats. (Robb Report)

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 Lauren says "Ragebaby's Prior Engagements album is giving me a Smashing-Pumpkins-esque alternative vibe, likely from a Cincinnati local quartet of young dads who met in college.

"If I flip the band and album name around, I get Prior Engagements's album Ragebaby, which is much more folk-rock and includes cello. Still from Cincinnati though."

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)!