Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has a truly incredible amount of Xmas cookies in the house right now

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 29: NEW YEAR'S BALL AGAIN

We hereby resolve to kick 2025 off with an explosion of musical creativity and extremely good outfits because we all deserve to have at least one source of unalloyed joy in our lives that cannot be touched. Also, for real, it's going to be a fucking blast if the last 28 of these are any indication, and you've gotta get in on it!! Come play onstage or just be in the crowd for a new debut of a brand new act every five minutes or so; there's nothing else like it in the entire Bay and possibly the world??? Send everybody you know the link, put on that fancy party outfit, and let's do this

✨🪩✨
Jan 9 2025
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

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.

I've been splitting a Dropout.tv subscription with friends for well over a year now and I strongly suggest you do the same because it's fucking chockablock with shows that will put a smile on your face, but that's not what I'm here to talk about: the point is if you watch enough Dropout you will become a fan of Erika Ishii if you weren't already.

I also subscribe to the Berkeleyside newsletter because why not, and for what felt like a couple weeks after the election it seemed the mayoral election was hotly contested, in the sense that they really truly had to count All The Votes until they could really call it. I saw Adena Ishii's name in the headlines a lot and for a second — for a fleeting second!! — I thought "???" but immediately followed up with "Not all Asian people with the same last name are related!!!!" (I am Asian btw)

BUT THEN (Erika Ishii on Bluesky)

TURNS OUT IT'S TRUE (Wikipedia)

Hahahahahaha the end; no moral — but how delightful!

#dadthoughts

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

Bit by bit, the kids are starting to play together better, which on the one hand is literally all we've ever dreamed of, but on the other hand means they reinforce and amplify each others' rowdiness when we would really rather they just sit and eat their dinner or pre-bedtime snack. I guess you can't have one without the other, huh.

As I type this, it's been about 25m since we put the kids to bed and maybe 15m since the end of Booklight Time, which is a 10m period during which the kids can clip a booklight to a book and flip through it. Felix is really the only one who does Booklight Time these days, though, and apparently he still needs some wind-down because I can hear him roaming the boys' bedroom babbling to himself. Quentin goes out like a light maybe 3m after bedtime and sleeps like a stone! I wonder what they're going to be like as teens.

Fascination Corner

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

• Ken Klippenstein has what I guess you'd have to call Luigi Mangione's manifesto in full, although that'd be a stretch since it doesn't even top 300 words. It's a quick, no-nonsense read! (Ken Klippenstein) Pair that with this: "It truly does not have to be this way: We've lost sight of how absurd living like this actually is" (Welcome to Hell World)

• As the Damoclean sword of Kids Bringing Colds Home For The Winter looms over us all, what will actually help? (Vox)

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a right to science. (The Conversation)

• I missed this incredible deep dive into fanfic shipping data in October, but we're fixing that now!! (The Pudding)

• The new Indiana Jones videogame sounds good: "Objects To Hit Fascists With In Indiana Jones, Ranked: I've been playing Indiana Jones and The Great Circle and have constructed a ranking internally." There's no explanations but you can just take some time to imagine each one, or (I suppose) go buy the game. (Aftermath)

• It's December and we may be tired of How The Democrats Fucked Up: A Thinkpiece, but this one is worth looking at: "Democrats Lost the Propaganda War: The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way." (The American Prospect)

• The Scientists have found what sounds like a molecular mechanism in the body that could allow them to target drug delivery to places that are usually super hard to reach. (Ottawa Hospital) (Paper)

• Open this one and just read the last paragraph if you don't have the time for the rest of it, although you should. (How Things Work)

• SpinLaunch is ......... making progress???? (Gizmodo)

• The Scientists are pondering whether life can exist in the void of space (albeit still within the habitable zone of a given star), and the answer seems to be a tentative ".......yes?" with what seem to me to be a lot of wild caveats. (Universe Today)

• I'm being serious when I say Defector only hires incredible writers at the top of their game. Even if you don't understand any of the words in the headline, you will by the end of this excellent piece (unless of course you have the same brainrot I do and parsed it instantly, in which case hello): "The Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis Of Bag Culture" (Defector)

• Everyone look at the beautiful vintage Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. (Sanborn Fire Maps)

• What in the fuck is happening with quantum computers right now. No, read this one. It's short! (TechCrunch)

• The trouble with machine learning is that lots of times The Machine will learn to spot the wrong things — making correct but dubiously useful correlations, like whether an x-ray patient has eaten refried beans lately — and it's really hard to get it to stop. (Dartmouth) (Paper)

• I wasn't expecting "chirality" to go on the list of Potential Black Balls to pull out of the notional world-destroying urn but there we go. Great. The authors' summary in the journal Science is mildly terrifying, just so you know!! (Guardian) (Science writeup) (Full report)

• Conducting a long-term survey on twins who live in different places let The Scientists confirm that living in a walkable neighborhood really truly does increase your odds of walking around more. Hint hint, urban planners. (Washington State)

• Wouldn't you like to have a vaccine that comes in the form of a skin cream instead of an injection? This writeup is pretty good! (Stanford)

• [pounds fist on table] Ed. Zitron. Doesn't. Miss!!!!! This week's is long but VERY GOOD. (Where's Your Ed At)

• Soda taxes do actually seem to be affecting peoples' attitudes toward sugary drinks. (UC Berkeley) (Paper)

• The Scientists have run the numbers and it turns out we should really think about turning all our sewage into fertilizer if we're going to meet crop demand in the future. (Cornell)

• You know what, let's go: spraying clay particles onto the ocean after an algae bloom can help plankton make heavier poops that send the carbon down to the seafloor instead of into the air. Like a lot of carbon. (Dartmouth) (Paper)

• I guess it's time for a skeleton to give us feelings. (Crow Time)

• Uhhhhh: The Scientists have officially observed quasiparticles that are massless when moving in a particular direction(??????) but do have it when moving the other way. What is going on down there [points to the quantum level]?? (Penn State) (Paper)

• Tourism is fucking our emissions targets, especially long flights. Who wants to go in on me with a wind-powered passenger liner business? (U of Queensland) (Paper)

• A big meta-study suggests that evidence for animals getting outraged at inequities is actually pretty damn thin on the ground, and what's probably really going on is that they're mad at expectations not being met. Which honestly is still pretty relatable! (UC Berkeley) (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:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is an album from a improv sketch comedy group called Too Many Notes, which I think makes the title self-explanatory.

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)!