Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's beginning to see strawberries out and about in the world and ohhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiiit

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 26: SPRING FLING

I am sorry to report that you missed the fuck out if you didn't make it to Instant Band Night 25 last week. Lots of great bands! Fantastic music! Fun, cool people! Delicious pie! Come get in on this next time!!!

May 9 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

I'm just going to quote the shop's "About" section for you:

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.

A happy vernal equinox to you: Mavis is making preparations to start the garden again this year. Last year's garden, which included cherry tomatoes and string beans in wild abundance along with beets and carrots and several perfectly-formed little pumpkins, was a riotous success. I'm not looking for advice here — she absolutely knows what she's doing and has a cadre of experts to consult on her own — just celebrating the return of something that brings joy and vegetables into the house in unexpected abundance. I hope I haven't just jinxed it. Consider this my statement of culpability if something weird happens to the garden this year!!

#dadthoughts

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

Every year the school does a PTA fundraiser called the Read-a-Thon where kids collect pledges for reading a certain amount and whichever class does the best gets a pizza party. I'm not gonna lie: we already read to Quentin a lot. So if you feel like donating to his pledge page here, I can guarantee that (a) we will hit those amounts and (b) you'll get to feel good about keeping vital school services alive! You wouldn't believe what the PTA has to fund, although I guess if you've been living in the American capitalist hellscape for any amount of time you probably do. Read-a-Thon goes until the end of this week; thank you for your consideration!

The promised Felix Bed Update follows:

Felix got upgraded from a crib to a bed a little over a week ago. It's the exact same bed Quentin has. He loves it? Which is a huge relief. Also, I've been cleared to return to my own place in my bed, and this experiment has thus far worked ......... reasonably well, actually.

BEFORE: Felix would demand to sleep in my bed next to Mama, thus relegating me to the couch where I slept for a nonzero number of months

NOW: Felix is starting to figure out that his spot in my bed is taken, but also he has his own bed

Crucially, Mama can fit in Felix's bed if she needs to deliver some nighttime comfort snugs and then sneak away back to her own bed, which was not possible in the Era of the Crib. Sometimes this even works!

The thing we're having to get used to (and which we predicted would become a concern of as-yet unknown magnitude) is that Felix has figured out that he can get out of bed and open the door to the room whenever he wants. His bedtime emergences have thus far been mercifully limited to just one or two immediately post-bedtime to demand more goodnight kisses. Another emergence somewhere in the 11p-1a timeframe is also possible, but if he's had enough outdoor time to wear him out for the day, he skips it: this is a lesson to us, I think, to go to the park more. Wisdom received, I guess?

Fascination Corner

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

• Praise be to all the gods above and below, for Trump can't pay his nearly-half-a-billion civil fraud judgement and it sounds like the good state of New York could theoretically start to seize his shit as soon as next week. Praise be!!!! (CNBC)
  

• "End the Phone-Based Childhood Now: The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development." This sounds alarmist, but the author is literally a social psychologist with a background in social development, so uhhhhh. Sit with that, I guess. (Atlantic gift link)
  

• Playing the sounds of a thriving coral reef on a speaker plopped into the middle of a damaged one can trick coral larvae into settling down there, according to an experiment run by The Scientists recently. (Woods Hole OI) (Paper) Which is good news, because the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing another bleaching event. (BBC)
  

• How does stress turn into fear? Can we prevent that from happening at the neuronal level? The Scientists think they've worked it out in mice. (UCSD)
  

• Walter Isaacson and his whole "flawed genius" schtick must be stopped. (~$The Drift)
  

• Here, have a surprisingly delightful read on the "is a hot dog a sandwich" debate. (The Sword and the Sandwich)
  

• New observations from the Jimmy Dubs lend weight to the notion that complex organic molecules can form in clouds of icy space dust. (NASA) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have created a proof-of-concept transgenic cow that can produce insulin in her milk, which would revolutionize the insulin industry if they can really get it going. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper)
  

• "The end of the MrBeast era: Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back". I freely admit to never having watched any of these, but they don't sound ...... good. Do they? (Polygon)
  

• Holy shit: The Scientists have done detailed CT scans of 13,000 different specimens and uploaded them to a database anyone can access. (U Texas Arlington) (Paper) (Morphosource)
  

• Toyota built a real-life cat bus!! (CarThrottle)
  

• According to the numbers, an absolutely pitiful percentage of state legislators come from working-class backgrounds, but that might change if they could get paid more. (Stateline)
  

• The Scientists think too much information can be a form of pollution as valid as any of the other kinds. (RPI)
  

• A very good study involving some very good sheepdogs seems to show that they scare foxes just enough to leave the sheep alone without hightailing it out of the neighborhood altogether, which would actually be bad for the ecology. (Anthropocene)
  

• The Jimmy Dubs has confirmed the Hubble's observations about the rate of expansion of the universe, which is a huge problem for cosmologists. (NASA) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers propose a fourth traffic light to be added when enough autonomous vehicles are on the road: a white one that just means "follow the car in front of you." They swear it would make traffic better, even with pedestrians in the mix. (NC State) (Paper)
  

• Wait, what ...... what if dark matter isn't a thing after all? It sounds crazy, but then again so does dark matter. (uOttawa) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists are really working on making fungal food more appealing and nutritious. (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) (Paper)
  

• "A utopian strand of economic thought is making a surprising comeback: It was once normal for economists to imagine a world with less work. What happened?" (Vox)
  

• The eastern US is slightly cooler than climate change would otherwise have it, and it's at least partly due to reforestation efforts over the last century. (Scientific American)
  

• Some Engineers have invented a stick-on patch that can read the signals going to your voicebox and use The Machine to interpret them to produce speech. It's still in preliminary testing, but it would be incredibly helpful for anyone with a voice disorder. (UCLA) (Paper)
  

• Happiness can be learned, but you actually have to do your fucking homework if you want it to last. (U of Bristol) (Paper)
  

• The assumption that the male of any given species is always bigger is almost certainly horseshit, according to a new meta-analysis. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have built a truly impressive underwater mapping drone. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The Scientists think nematode mating behaviors offer a glimpse into the evolutionary origins of attraction. (Rockefeller U) (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 Madara 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 Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Reader Avery points out that this band has extremely strong Dune vibes but was unable to determine whether that meant it's North African yodeling or MRI-inspired machine noises; I see parallel universes where either one is possible, tbh

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.