Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has by this time well and truly succumbed to stonefruit madness

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 32: BEACH PARTY

Three(!!!!) Thursdays from now, the last Instant Band Night until November will kick off another explosion of spontaneous musical creativity and you know you need some of that in your life, whether it's witnessing it as part of a fantastic crowd or making it as part of a spectacular band of like-minded and shockingly talented soon-to-be-friends!! This just might be the highlight of summer, so get your best beach vacation outfit on and bring your coolest friends, let's DO THIS

✨🪩✨
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 + +
+ + S E E + Y O U + T H E R E + +

Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

🎃🌴SUMMER SALE/NEW LITTLE WEIRDOS🌴🎃

That’s right, there’s new little guys in there!!! I've been experimenting with new glazing techniques and I have to say I think I've hit upon a winner! Also I have too many things on my "finished work" shelves and it's time to move some inventory, so I've put everything on incredibly deep discount. Decorate your garden or anyplace else that needs a splash of color or whimsy; they also make thoughtful and unique gifts for that special discerning someone in your life.

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.

Hi, welcome to Hater's Corner again; please take any open seat and make sure your phone's set to Vibrate. Is everyone comfortable? Then let's begin:

What the fuck is the point of business advice books other than taking credulous people's money? Is there anything more useless than business advice from successful executives? The entire corner of the store/section of the Dewey Decimal system should just be renamed "SURVIVORSHIP BIAS." That's all the fuck it is!

"Do what I did because it worked." Okay, Doug, if that advice worked all the time, then how come every single business doesn't just do the same thing you did and rake in piles and piles of cash? Could it ...... could it be that every success in business is down to a combination of different factors that inheres at the right time for the right person, and that this combination will always be different for different people and different situations and therefore cannot be identified, much less replicated???

Thousands of companies have tried things that worked, and many thousands more have tried those same things and failed. No lessons can be learned because it's different every time!! Should you stick to your guns and continue to offer the same product unchanged in the hopes that it will find its customer base and validate your original brilliant vision? Should you pivot and move with the times, embracing agility and constant innovation? How the fuck should I know?? Don't ask me, and sure as fuck don't ask some book by a guy who got incredibly lucky exactly once and decided that made him an anointed god-king of business!!

This one brought to you by nothing in particular; might've been an ad or something I saw.

#dadthoughts

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

Week two of summer day camp for Quentin has begun and [knocks wood] I think he's gonna have fun! It helps that it's at a different place this time, and also the kids are old enough now that there's a field trip every week. Some future week they're hitting the Exploratorium, another week it'll be the Academy of Sciences, but the very first trip they took was to: Chuck E. Cheese. I haven't set foot in one of those in a geological eon, so I'm positive my experience is highly out of date; Quentin had a blast, though, and wonders periodically if one of us will bring him back sometime. I think it's going to have to be with at least one friend, so I need to ask around and see if anyone is willing to brave the maw with me before coming to him with an answer. Or is it possible "I went to Chuck E. Cheese with my dad and we blasted so many aliens" would be a nice memory for him to have (apparently there's an arcade game version of Halo)?? Much to consider.

Fascination Corner

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

• Every time a judge does this I feel some hit points being restored, but also I don't know that it's necessarily going to work, either. Right? Doesn't it seem like an entire branch of government just doesn't give a shit what judges say anymore? (Nature)

• Sand battery?? Sand battery. (TechCrunch)

• The Scientists have observed nematodes forming little towers out of their own bodies to get high enough to potentially reach something they could hitchhike on, but never in the wild — UNTIL NOW. (Max Planck Inst of Animal Behavior) (Paper)

• Cheers to The Nerd Reich for putting up transcripts of their podcasts, because this is a fascinating conversation. (The Nerd Reich)

• The Machine (Generative Flavor) appears to visibly panic when its Pokemon playthroughs are going badly. What? (TechCrunch)

• He's right and he should say it: "The Subway Is Not Scary: Fear of the subway is a mark of low moral character." (How Things Work)

• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is online and its 3.2 gigapixel camera — the largest digital camera ever built — is already doing some work. (Science Alert)

• During the Cryogenian period you might've heard about as "Snowball Earth" 635-720 million years ago, the average temperature was -50C; how the hell did life survive? The Scientists think they've figured it out. (MIT) (Paper)

• Listen: Honda can make cars that will run for decades, I'm willing to trust them to figure out a rocket. If anything they should've gotten into this game sooner (although if they can do this, they can sure as fuck make a Fit EV and sell it in the US) (I'm just sayin'). (The Verge)

• The Machine (Analytical Flavor) can detect biomarkers for Parkinson's in the odors of ear wax with shocking accuracy. (ACS)

• How good is your brain's internal orchestral conductor? Something called "theta connectivity" might be an indicator of cognitive ability, at least according to an interesting new study. (Johannes Gutenberg U)

• I feel like the risk of having your soul sandblasted is high, but the UK's Ofcom did in-depth interviews of about 40 people who'd been interacting with the manosphere to find out how they got there and what they took away. (Ofcom)

• The FDA approved what's essentially an HIV vaccine, but shit it's expensive for no reason. (Science Alert) Good thing The Scientists have had super promising results with a different approach. (MIT)

• San Franciscans who've been seeing the Zoox robotoasters tooling around, your intuition is confirmed: those backward-facing seats are a bad idea. Or maybe that's just my intuition? (SF Standard)

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:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which looks to me like the last hurrah for the stomp-clap-hey genre, only this time the band knows full well they're riding the downslope of the trend and the mood is accordingly bleak.

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)!