Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that got some sad news today and is working it out right here and now

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

You missed the September one!!!! JUST KIDDING we skipped September — but see you in November?? November 14, specifically! Mark your calendar for 11/14 and prepare to either rock or be rocked at a minimum; as always, there'll be a mix of genres and performances guaranteed to surprise and delight!! Ticket link (including handy FAQ) is right here (as well as below) for convenient forwarding to your top-tier friends.

Nov 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

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: there has never been a better time than now.

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.

Around 20ish years ago I invented a game called Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle, which certainly deserves its own lengthy ramble but isn't the point of this one. If you were around in those days, you might recall a brash, cunning, hard-partying friend of mine and devotee of the game named Erica, who was loud and vulgar and a complete goddamn delight to be around. I just received the news today that she departed this Earth at some point last night in her sleep, leaving the planet a poorer place in many key aspects. She and I hadn't talked in some time, having done that thing so many of us do where we gradually drifted out of touch, but her bestie Laura knew how to find me and I'm glad she did. Erica! Damn. Damn it.

This next part requires some context; I won't bore you with the entire ruleset of Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle (UTCFB for short, obviously), but briefly:

• It involves two teams who each build a fortress of cardboard boxes and hide a flag somewhere therein

• The goal is to destroy the other team's fort and capture their flag

• Battle goes in rounds of 5m at a time, with breaks in between to make repairs and restrategize

• Each team is led by a General

• Traditionally, combat takes the form of extremely brief wrestling, whereupon the loser has to go sit in a penalty box until they count to 100 or so

• If either team's General is taken out in this fashion, the round of battle ends immediately and the break begins straightaway

A brief dive into my old correspondence reminded me Erica was the one to realize that the rules don't prohibit a team from tackling their own General and thereby ending a round of battle prematurely, a strategem no doubt to be deployed if things were going badly for them (momentary decimation of team, location of flag discovered, etc). I had planned at the time to enshrine this nuance in the official rules as Meltzer's Gambit in her honor, but for whatever reason I never got around to it.

I think I will now, or in the very near future. As I sit here thinking about it, I would like to bring Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle back for at least one game to celebrate one of its most diehard players, a woman who relished life and all it had to offer in a way that brings a smile to my face to recall, who I regret having lost touch with, whose memory will now and forever be a blessing. For a while now as my friends and I age and our bodies become less able to tolerate the sporadic but unadulterated violence (not to mention the sheer cardio) of traditional UTCFB, I've been trying to work out a less physical version of it, and I think the solution my brain has had bubbling on the backburner is ready to bring out and field-test. I'll talk about it here in this section next week, and probably ruminate publicly on where and when to hold the game in weeks to come. Thank you for reading this section this far; hug your friends and tell them why they're great.

#dadthoughts

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

Felix caught some sort of weak half-cold from another kid at his preschool that gave him snot and a cough and that's about it: no fever, no loss of appetite or energy, etc (covid test negative). This was enough to prompt the preschool staff to ask us to keep him home for a couple days, which I simultaneously resent and understand, given that I'm nearly positive he caught it from a coughing kid I saw at pickup a few days prior. So yes: he's been home even though he's more or less fine; I'm typing this right now on Friday and the cough is pretty much gone but the snot's still running. We've been watching a lot of cartoons. I have to tell you I'm enjoying this age immensely (he turned 3 in July): right now he's in a big ADA TWIST, SCIENTIST phase on Netflix, which incorporates a lot of songs, and he's seen enough to be able to sing along quietly to a lot of them. It's adorable.

I'm typing this paragraph to you now on Monday, and the weekend was: fine. He was fine! If we were going to get hit by a cold, I'm glad it was this one, but now I worry that there's some karmic balance coming due in the fall or winter. I'm doing my best to be spiritually prepared for it, but I would settle for some broad-spectrum vaccines instead.

Fascination Corner

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

• "The FTC says social media companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves: A new report reveals just how much Facebook, YouTube, X, and other platforms gobble up user data." (The Verge)
  

• Rich people make way more of a negative carbon impact than anyone (rich or poor) thinks, while at the same time everyone overestimates the carbon footprints of poor people. HUH HOW ABOUT THAT (U of Cambridge) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have built a drifting research station intended for Arctic waters that kinda looks like a big UFO; it's a very cool idea (no pun intended hrrhrrhahaha). (Science)
  

• Why don't people don't volunteer as much? Is it maybe because the fucking economy is garbage and we're all busy just trying to keep our heads above water???? (U of Georgia) (Paper)
  

• Kinda wish I'd been there to see John Mulaney cook the entire audience at Dreamforce live. (SF Standard)
  

• The math says all technological societies will reach a point where they inevitably roast themselves, but like: really? Really?? This theoretically means it should be easier to detect alien civilizations, but also: c'mon, really?? (Science Alert) (PDF of paper)
  

• Daaaaaaaamn, who else wants to be artist-in-residence on an ocean science expedition??? (Colossal)
  

• OK, this is a use case: with all the data they have onhand, The Scientists think they can train The Machine to learn fundamental rules of biology that it can use to solve problems or design useful new molecules, and early results are actually promising. (Nature)
  

• The Scientists are warning us that climate change + agriculture could produce a doom loop where food producers have to adopt increasingly climate-unfriendly practices to keep up with demand, worsening climate change, so then they have to yadda yadda. There is, however, a way out. (Columbia)
  

• Observations indicate that dung beetles can cooperate to roll their poop balls higher and further, but only if they're mixed couples; same-sex pairs invariably end in battle. (PhysOrg)
  

• It turns out food waste bans haven't done shit for diverting food waste away from landfills anywhere except for Massachusetts. (UC San Diego)
  

• Hhhhhhhuh: because online dating allows you to be more selective, people have been increasingly marrying someone more like themselves, which means income inequality has also been going up. I'm going to have to read this paper. (~$Bloomberg) (PDF of paper)
  

• Sand tiger sharks are returning to Boston Harbor. (Boston Herald)
  

• NASA wants to build a pressurized Moon rover, essentially a science RV for astronauts, and the conceptual animation is pretty good. Let's hope they land that Toyota partnership?? (NASA)
  

• "I Stayed at This Coast Guard Station in the Middle of the Ocean. So Can You. The Frying Pan Tower is 32 miles offshore, way the heck up in the air, and the coolest vacation rental on earth" (~$Outside)
  

• The Scientists have figured out on a molecular level why lithium ion batteries lose capacity over time, which means they might be able to work out a way to make it stop. (U of Colorado Boulder)
  

• Some Engineers have demonstrated a way to make tougher, more damage-resistant concrete structures by designing hollow tubes into them that mimic the layout of bone. (Princeton) (Paper)
  

• At-home nasal spray flu vaccines! Next year! Hot damn! (The Verge)
  

• Early experiments indicate it may be possible to reduce the biased responses The Machine puts out by simply telling it to behave like someone from another part of the world. (Cornell) (Paper)
  

• Nathan J. Robinson wrote an excoriation of The Atlantic that we should probably read. (Current Affairs)
  

• How did Snowball Earth end, though? Like: how?? The Scientists think they might've figured it out. (U of Washington) (Paper)
  

• Cards Against Humanity is taking Elon to court. [let_them_fight.gif] (Ars Technica)
  

• Data from the Jimmy Dubs has led The Scientists to propose a whole new flavor of dark energy exclusive to the creation of the universe that solves one of their most annoying cosmological puzzles. I didn't know you could do that. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• It sure sounds like someone over in Atlanta has figured out third spaces in a big way (literally). (Expedite)
  

• Thickness alone is no longer a reliable method for determining safety: climate change is even making lake ice worse. (York U)
  

• Some Engineers have created a design for 3D-printed glass bricks that can interlock and withstand stresses comparable to concrete ones. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists are getting increasingly worried about fungal infections developing resistance to our current arsenal and they really want us to pay attention. (U of Amsterdam)
  

• How do different species of herbivores who all live in the same place get enough to eat? It's an obvious question but the answer has been elusive up til right about now.* (Brown) (Paper)
  

• Music festivals typically run on diesel generators, which I don't need to tell you is a problem; fortunately, the transition to battery power seems to be going surprisingly smoothly! (Billboard)
  

• Did uhhhhhh. Did our planet have a fucking ring system during the Ordovician period???? (Monash U) (Paper)
  

• "LA’s streaming gold rush is over. Film and TV workers have been left in the dust. Media and tech companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Hollywood as they built shiny new streaming services. Now they're aiming their firehose of money elsewhere, and actors, writers and behind-the-scenes workers are suffering." (Sherwood)

* The funk soul brother.**

** Sorry.

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 Kyle says "Tiny Electronic Friend formed when 2 friends listened to The Boy Least Likely To, fell in love, and formed their own band to mimic the sound. Now on their 5th album, they have a rotating cast in the rhythm section as they grew and turned into their own sound but the BLLT inspiration is still definitely noticeable."

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.