Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wants to know if anyone else thinks the Spotify ads for TaxAct were (a) read by somebody else for a little bit before they got Adam Scott to come in or (b) always read by Adam Scott from jump and I just wasn't paying attention somehow????

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 25: PI DAY 2 (PIE HARDER)

You don't have to take my word for it anymore! The Oaklandside did a writeup on Instant Band Night and you can read it right here!!

Whether you choose to play in one of the bands or just watch it all unfold, it's a joyful celebration of spontaneous creativity that we could all probably use more of in our lives; also, there'll be pie. Come have pie.

March 14 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

New year, new space! Why settle for a boring garden, potted plant, or domicile when you could have a little statue of a crazy-colored tardigrade, a delightful friend to hold your last fruit, a Star Trek buddy in a party hat, or an Ediacaran life form right now. Take a look and consider some clever ceramics for yourself, for family, or for a dear friend far away.

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.

With TinyLetter about to wink out of existence, I needed someplace else to host the archive, which turned out to be 318 issues deep. Having decided to move to Beehiiv, I was presented with a problem, which was that Beehiiv doesn't actually have an import tool for TinyLetter. But it does have a turnkey import for Substack. Which in turn does have a very good turnkey import for TinyLetter.

You can maybe see where I'm going with this.

I already have a Substack account because I somehow got tricked into making one forever ago; at least I'm not paying them for it. And currently being a writer on Substack is free, which is also good because I'm never going to actually write anything there; it's just where the archive lives now. Hats off to whoever wrote their TinyLetter import tool, because it worked fantastically and I didn't have to do anything. Images, everything, it all worked. 318 issues! Holy hell.

Whoever wrote the tool that pulls content from Substack into Beehiiv was maybe not paying as close attention, so the archive on the actual tool I'm using doesn't look as good; don't go there. Presumably things I write subsequently that are native to Beehiiv will look better!

I'm aware probably nobody actually cares about this, but I wanted to lay it out here in case somebody wonders in the future why any mentions of previous content point to Substack of all places. That's just where the archive lives; don't worry about it!

#dadthoughts

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

January still isn't over, folks: Mavis came down with a whole new cold this week! This new one is kicking her ass slightly less, but over the last 36h it deployed a new feature where she just lost her voice entirely and can't talk above a whisper. Sounds a lot like a week I had not too long ago, but she's already trying out the regimen that restored my voice within about 48h after a solid week of producing nothing but rusty gate squeaks; I reproduce it here for the benefit of anyone else who's had their voice stolen by microbes:

Just take two ibuprofen with food 3x a day for 2 days. Could be naproxen if you like that better. I did it for 3 days just to be sure, but by the end of day 2 I'd already experienced like an 80% return.

Turns out inflammation is one of the main causes of having no voice, so you know, anti-inflammatories can do wonders. Before you ask, this advice came from a fellow parent from Quentin's class who also happens to be a doctor, so take it up with the Western medical establishment if you have questions!

That's not even what I wanted to talk about; I'm really here to give a shout out to everyone who's helped us get through the Endless January in some way. I understand — truly I do — that there are going to be times where the kids bring home a cold, but the sheer volume and severity of this infinite parade of microbial aggression has been ridiculous. If you've come over to our house, if you've met us for hangouts elsewhere, if you were just there with a text or a wry comment at a clutch moment, know that you have in a very real way saved some particle of our sanity. Thank you.

Fascination Corner

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

• I'm going to admit that although I haven't done it in forever, I always liked playing Mafia (or Werewolf or whatever you want to call it), and while I'm intrigued and happy that a TV show version of it turns out to be extraordinarily compelling, I'm also retroactively annoyed nobody thought of it until so recently. (Defector)
  

• "Welcome to the New ‘Good’ Economy, Where Millions Get Left Behind: Prices aren't coming down, wages for many aren't catching up and rent is deeply unaffordable. But policymakers say everything is going great." (Motherboard)
  

• Time to buy a genetically modified glow-in-the-dark petunia!!!!!! (Nature)
  

• The Atlantic conveyor belt current is in serious, real danger of shutting down, which would be a fucking global calamity in slow motion. (The Conversation) (Paper)
  

• Okay, maybe there's exactly one good social network. (Hakai)
  

• At least some of these are sort of convincing reasons why getting obscenely rich may not make you happy. (Collab Fund)
  

• Our great ape cousins really enjoy teasing each other, which suggests that (in the words of The Scientsts) "the cognitive prerequisites for joking evolved in the hominoid lineage at least 13 million years ago." (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• Anecdotal evidence is one thing, but market data does seem to suggest that dating apps are cooling off. (TechCrunch)
  

• The Red State Brain Drain is real, and it's real bad. (The New Republic)
  

• "Wherever a Dead Body Lies, The Exact Same Organisms Always Appear" (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists conducted a massive study to figure out which climate messaging strategies really do work the best. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
  

• I don't know how right he is, but this guy thinks The Machine might actually help people in the middle class get better jobs. (Noema)
  

• Looking for the best mode of locomotion, Some Engineers tried modeling a soft robot after an animal that lived half a billion years ago. (Biophysical Society)
  

• Your brain's propensity for scent memory might help with depression, according to a new study. (U Pitt) (Paper)
  

• BEEF RICE: The Scientists tried growing beef cells inside rice grains, and not only did it work, it made the rice more nutritious (as well as pink). As the name "brice" might be too confusing for people who know a Bryce, I hereby suggest "breef" as a name for this new food going forward; thank you for your time. (Science Alert)
  

• <Lawrence Fishburne> Have you ever seen fire in space? </Lawrence Fishburne> NASA has, in a series of experiments designed to figure out how fire behaves in space so it can be controlled. (PhysOrg)
  

• We have about 25 years to unfuck the Amazon rainforest before it's literally too late. (Reuters)
  

• A pest that attacks onions can be driven off more effectively with red nets than any other color, even if the holes are big enough to let 'em through. (U of Tokyo) (Paper)
  

• "The 10 horniest episodes of Star Trek, ranked by cultural impact: This list is fully functional and programmed in multiple techniques". Quite honestly inarguable; props to Susana Polo for providing separate rankings for horniness and cultural impact. (Polygon)
  

• High-rez satellite data seems to indicate there's more coral out there than we thought. (U of Queensland) (Paper)
  

• A new study tells us older adults rely more on trust in decisionmaking, which makes them more tempting scam targets, but I want to know whether this is just a generational thing or an intrinsic effect of aging. Does that distinction make sense? Maybe it's in the paper. (U of Florida) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists found a Stone Age megastructure built for hunting deer at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. (Ars Technica) (Paper)

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 Eberhard Grossgasteiger 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 Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Reader Kyle M is pretty sure Ass Patrol is "a protege of Ray Smuckles who appeared on several of his tracks as a feat. artist. Don't Say You Weren't Warned is their solo debut."

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.