Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's ready to get to the pottery now and see the results of the latest bisque firing, and no this is not some kind of metaphor

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Plenty of time remains for you to check your plans and mark your calendar for the 14th of November in this, the year 2024! It's going to be the last one of the year, which means it's going to be special. (To be perfectly honest, they're all special, but that's just because every band that takes the stage is newly created five minutes prior and wonderful surprises abound) Shine your partyin' shoes and put them carefully in the closet next to your rockin' outfit, 'cause they're gonna see some use in four months!!!

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: go check it out!

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.

We just got back from Monterey (see #dadthoughts) and boy are my arms [slide-whistle sound of a giant cartoon cane yanking me off the stage followed by the tinkling crash of something body-sized being thrown into a pile of fragile garbage]

#dadthoughts

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

Last year we made a one-night trip down to Monterey for the Aquarium a week or two before the onset of school, chronicled here for those who may not recall (or are new to this particular venture of mine).* This year's edition also went great! 2024 Notes:

• Bigger car and slightly older kids means less fuss with luggage
  

• Quentin is perfectly happy to listen to at least an hour's worth of Smologies and would probably do more if Felix's attention span/car naps permitted
  

• Exact same suite type at the vaunted Fish Hotel,** but on the 9th floor: much interest generated in the view, but less convenient for getting down to ground level at high-traffic times
  

• The INTO THE DEEP exhibit at the Aquarium really is something special, y'all (I touched a giant isopod)
  

• Food at the cafe is still surprisingly good, although given what it costs I suppose it better be
  

• Quentin chose as his gift shop purchase a blacktip reef shark stuffy exactly the same as last year's, so now I guess he has two
  

• Felix first chose a little hammerhead shark finger puppet, which we fully purchased, only to encounter a stingray stuffy on the way out the door and proceed to let us know he no longer wanted the little sharky in the most absolute terms possible; since I still had the receipt from a sale made literally 22sec prior, I was able to effect an exchange and now the stingray is guarding the floor next to Felix's bed from monster incursions with "stingray powers"

Folks, this trip is a good one and we're going to make it again next year. We might mix it up a little? Go down in the morning, see the Aquarium in the afternoon (their website implores visitors to consider this timeframe, insisting it's less crowded), stay at the Fish Hotel that night? We've got a year to consider it. 🤔🤔🤔

* (yes I know Substack is less than ideal, but remember that I needed to use their one-click import from TinyLetter before TinyLetter collapsed into a neutron star so I could then import the archive (with less success from a formatting standpoint, I should add) from Substack to Beehiiv in similar fashion; I will never use Substack as anything other than a static archive that will garner no subscriber information nor see me write a word upon it)

** The Embassy Suites in Seaside has a trio of giant screens in the lobby playing nothing but footage from the Aquarium on loop, so last year the kids dubbed the place the Fish Hotel and quite frankly I'm happy to return every year

Fascination Corner

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

• We like to make analogies to help explain how beliefs get transmitted ("ideas are like a virus"), but they all have their pitfalls; The Scientists are here to help. (Santa Fe Inst) (Paper)
  

• "A peek behind the curtains of a more diverse Children’s Fairyland puppet theater: Longtime puppeteer Randal Metz reveals how the magic happens." (Oaklandside)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a simple but extremely good way to mutate bacteria in huge batches to try to force-evolve a trait they're looking for — in this case cellulose production — and it should be applicable for other materials, too. (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• I know this will shock and dismay you, but it turns out Big Oil has been touting a climate solution that has limited potential at best while allowing them to continue operating as usual. (Vox)
  

• Svalbard's a great idea, but there are craters on the Moon that exist in permanent shadow and would be great for cryopreserving our planetary biodiversity without having to spend energy on refrigeration. (Smithsonian) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists successfully used The Machine to reengineer a formerly toxic antibiotic, and the result is giving promising animal trial results already. (UT Austin)
  

• As a person who contemplated all kinds of wild ideas to try meeting women before hitting the jackpot on okcupid, these DIY singles' apps are almost certainly something I would've tried. (Bustle)
  

• Fuck: air pollution makes it much, much harder to bees to find their pollination targets. (Knowable) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists who say they detected phosphine on Venus are back with more evidence; they also say they see ammonia over there(!!!). (CNN)
  

• Wonkette has a good breakdown on why calling the MAGA chuds weird works so well: because they fucking are, and they hate that we know it. The writeup is longer than that and worth checking out. (Wonkette)
  

• It makes sense that it would be the Aussies who discover this: The Scientists have shown that DNA collected from the wound dressings on a shark bite can accurately identify the species that did it. (Flinders U) (Paper)
  

• The Dept of Energy would like to put a solar facility on the Hanford nuclear waste site — it's not like anybody can use it for anything anyway — which would make it the largest solar installation in the country. (Canary Media)
  

• How much does your age and culture affect your appreciation for your own body if you're a woman? About what you'd expect, honestly. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• A robot dentist that can do the job faster and more accurately than a human sounds like a good idea, actually. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The US Army Corps of Engineers seems doomed to keep rebuilding beaches forever. (E&E News)
  

• Urchins are a goddamn ecological menace off the California coast, but in the Caribbean The Scientists are desperately trying to breed thousands of them to gobble algae that's choking off coral growth. (Hakai)
  

• HahahaHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA putting the words "artificial intelligence" in your product description makes people want to buy it LESS (Washington State)
  

• A bunch of weird new fossils unearthed near Gabon suggests complex multicellular life first got started 1.5 billion years before we thought, but only in a landlocked shallow sea that prevented it from spreading over the whole planet. (Cardiff U) (Paper)
  

• "American Versus European Out-of-Office Replies" (McSweeney's)
  

• Can we learn anything from surveying the world's money and seeing which animals pop up in which countries? Who knows; here are some interesting findings anyway. (Griffith U) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers accidentally created super-black wood that absorbs almost all the light that hits it (even if you coat it in gold atoms), named it Nxylon, and are working on commercializing it. I unironically love this. (UBC) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have launched a multi-year study on friendship in America and have released some findings. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• Would a glass bottle of OJ be more sustainable than a plastic one? Does the fact that I'm even asking this question perhaps hint at the surprising answer? (UMass Amherst) (Paper)
  

• Huh: a new study that I can't wait to read seems to show that your name affects how your face looks. Ever meet a guy and think "He just doesn't look like an Eric" — turns out you might actually be right?? (PhysOrg) (Paper)

• The Scientists have identified some trees that turn out not to be softwood or hardwood but an entirely different kind altogether that might be really good for carbon storage. (U of Cambridge Sainsbury Lab) (Paper)
  

• We're putting over 4600 animal species at risk with all our mining and digging. (U of Cambridge) (Paper)
  

• You know what, why not: The Scientists have done some wild math to simulate what sort of gravitational waves would result if a real-world Alcubierre warp drive broke down. We don't have grav wave detectors sensitive enough to spot them now, but we could theoretically build one! Really I just want to commend These Actual Scientists for still putting Star Trek references in their paper: you giant nerds {affectionate}. (U of Potsdam) (Paper)

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:

Power Robot are a four piece (guitar, bass, drums, synths and loops), and this album has a similar theme to Aesop Rock's Spirit World Field Guide. Loosely connected songs about another world a fraction of an inch away from this one, but with a thread of melancholy because the gate is closing. (Also there's an absolute banger of a song about a dog they adopted together, doesn't really fit with the rest thematically but they don't care)

Reader Neal Moeller came through with a whole album review for this one:

With a sound that is best described by fellow musician and fan, Henry Rollins, “[The Gate is Closing] is like if the 1980’s movie Tron, used its sound effects department to dissect a wisened old screaming yak from the Himalayas.”

This is the 15th album from the aging Oklahoma born artist, Evelyn Ebenthorp, frontman for the post-meta-pre-metal electro band, Power Robot.

More raw and vigorously rotund than the previous album, (“seeds of the dumpling farmer”) “The Gate is Closing” selects rabid electronic disharmony and mixes them with the round mouth feel of some ancient vines of pre-war burgundy.

Ebenthorp’s raspy vocals obliterates any preconceived notions of sacred sounds and instills a desire for hot sandpaper in your tighty whiteys.

The first track, Tolls of the Blood Highway, lasts for 35 mins and 16 secs (approximately 80% of the album). Its haunting lyrics are the seismic hammer that nails in the heavy metal-electro into your thirsty earballs.

It is worth a listen for any fan who longs for some deep lingering trauma, but grew up in a loving household.

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.