Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that just had an idea for a new glaze treatment that will unfortunately preoccupy a startling percentage of brainpower from here until whenever

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.

Shortchanging this section because I've run out of gas to put anything in it has become an unfortunately regular feature, but I'm gonna have to do it again because Felix had his first day of preschool and there was a lot happening around here after everyone got home. But! Is there anything you want me to talk (or rant) about in the next one? Smash that Reply and let's hear it???

#dadthoughts

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

Felix went to his first day of preschool today and he had a pretty good time; he seemed wobbly when we got there and we're told there was a little crying after naptime, but he also did fine making new friends and having snacks and exploring the place with his second little lilac bunny. We got this one as his Daycare Little Bunny, but when we brought it home with him Friday from his last day at daycare,* he promptly folded it into the pack, which resulted in a miscalculation this afternoon when we picked him up: we advised that he leave it at preschool so he could see it again tomorrow. Mistake! The other Little Bunny needs to come home too, we've since learned.

Felix has, perhaps unsurprisingly, recreated our family with his bunnies, albeit with a bit of a twist. The roles of each bunny are as follows, as told to me by Felix:

• Little Bunny (small lilac): The baby

• Other Little Bunny (small lilac): His brother

• Big Bunny (medium lilac): The daddy

• Giant Bunny (large Blossom Blush): The mama

It's interesting to me that he's decided the biggest bunny is the mama despite the largest person in our family being me, but I'm trying to make it clear to my children that the "males are always larger" truism is in fact not, so it's fine.

Also: whatever they paid the person who designed the Bashful Bunny line at Jellycat, I hope it was a goddamn fortune, because this bunny design is A+++, no notes. I would, however, like to suggest to the good folks at Jellycat that they make the bunnies browseable or filterable by available size, so we can easily see what's in stock at what size right away. Trust me: it's important. This has been your Usability Moment for today.

* If you know anybody in El Cerrito CA who needs a fucking fantastic home daycare, have I got a sterling silver recommendation for you

Fascination Corner

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

• The Scientists have created some incredible nasal sprays: one that boosts immune power (and helps vaccines work), and one that seems to be a vaccine against all coronaviruses. (U of Houston) (Paper 1) (Paper 2)
  

• Here's where all that AI slop all over Facebook comes from: Facebook essentially pays people to make it. (404 Media)
  

• The Scientists keep finding interesting stuff at Göbekli Tepe, in this case a carving that might be the world's oldest calendar, but if they uncover anything that looks like the reliefs from Prometheus then we gotta shut it down. You agree with me on this. (U of Edinburgh) (Paper)
  

• Maybe try not to think too much about how happy you are, because it'll almost certainly backfire on you. (APA)
  

• Jesus creeping Christ in the cornfield: the book by the Project 2025 guy — the one JD Vance wrote the foreword for — is fucking bonkers. (New Republic)
  

• Would you buy cheese derived from the correct proteins that just happened to be manufactured by bacteria instead of a cow? Honestly, I probably would. (U of Göttingen) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a much faster way to start terraforming Mars. (U of Chicago) (Paper)
  

• Highly promising celiac breakthrough: The Scientists think they've nailed down where exactly in the body the gluten reaction starts. (McMaster U)
  

• The Moon has an extreeeeeemely thin atmosphere, and The Scientists think it might be the result of micrometeoroid impacts over billions and billions of years. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• Let's all learn about Gladys West, the Black woman whose incredible mathematical mind made GPS possible. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The Scientists have worked out how to determine where PFAS forever chemicals were originally manufactured, which would be a handy way to go after the people making them. (UT Austin)
  

• CAR T-cell therapy is a good treatment for leukemia since it's bloodborne, but doesn't work so great against solid tumors; The Scientists have made a breakthrough in getting CAR T-cells to at least recognize that the tumors are there and target them. (St Jude) (Paper)
  

• All of the above is probably good because the risk for fully half of the most common cancers is going up for younger generations instead of down. (ACS) (Paper)
  

• Some Biomedical Engineers have demonstrated a prototype for an electric bandage that can heal wounds 30% faster. (NC State) (Paper)
  

• The Great Barrier Reef is in real trouble and yes, it's our fault. (The Verge)
  

• I saw a Tumblr post with the tweet (and the followup) but the headline is nevertheless correct: "The Gay Supermarket Sweep “Business Partners” From the ’90s Have a Wilder Story Than You Know" (Slate)
  

• Some Engineers think it might be possible to achieve fusion by microwaving the plasma instead of trying to toast it. (Princeton Plasma Physics Lab) (Paper)
  

• As long as we're talking about fusion, nobody has to send this to me: Some Engineers have been using mayonnaise (🤢) to understand plasma flow phase changes. (Lehigh U)
  

• The Scientists initially thought red dwarf stars might be a good place to find habitable exoplanets since there's a shitload of them, but new data suggests they might also throw out a lot of UV flares that would scour a planet clean of life or uh, atmosphere. (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) (Paper)
  

• If the AI bubble is indeed bursting, Ed Zitron should feel vindicated in that he's been ringing this bell for literal months. The whole piece is good, but the real takeaway is "The people propping this bubble up no longer experience human problems, and thus can no longer be trusted to solve them." (Where's Your Ed At)
  

• Analytical AI is a slightly different beast in that it has actual applications: for one, see this instance of The Machine that got trained on the human genome and seems to be spitting out useful results. (Technical U Dresden) (Paper)
  

• Here, have a convincing argument against the creation of a third labor-focused political party and just taking over the Dems instead. (How Things Work)
  

• More knowledge isn't always necessarily better. (Cornell) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists ran a study that indicates lonely people have more nightmares. Makes sense, oddly? (Oregon State)
  

• Some Engineers have built a way to transfer waste heat without electricity that could be put to great use in a bunch of different fields, from solar energy to EVs. (Nagoya U) (Paper)
  

• A decade's worth of survey data seems to show that people's moral values have seasonal fluctuations. (U of British Columbia)

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 a startling album-length evolution of wherever trip-hop would've gone next if it hadn't just sort of vanished around the turn of the millennium.

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.