Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that once again is dealing with a tiny but fortunately well-behaved heatwave

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

ONE MONTH UNTIL INSTANT BAND NIGHT

Just about!!! Get your ticket and spread the word!! Now more than ever we need something to do that brings genuine joy and delight, and there's a good chance there'll be cake!!! Come play or just watch; as always, it'll be like nothing else you've experienced.

✨🪩✨
Nov 13 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

💸🐰 This sale lasts exactly nine more days 🐰💸

I made a bunch of new weird little guys and now they're all gone, but there are still some really good ones left, anywhere from 50-70% off! Get these out of my house and into your house!! Or garden!! Or the houses or gardens of friends of yours with excellent taste. Go see what's what!

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.

A while ago Tumblr pushed a new monetization feature called Blaze that I still find endearing and somewhat useful: in essence, Blazing a post means you pay them a little money, some sort of moderation queue has a look at your post to make sure it's not something terrible, and then they show that post to a set number of random users within a language you can specify. That's it. There's no segment targeting or other demographic bells and whistles. Since users can reblog any post they see to their own followers, theoretically any post can go mildly (or wildly) viral throughout the entire site if the post's vibes are right and the right mix of users sees it. I've used this feature several times to advertise Instant Band Night, and it always seems to pay for itself: at least one or two people will walk in the door and (when asked) reveal that they saw a post about it on Tumblr, which always causes me to hi-five them and gesticulate triumphantly. Blazing posts is fun and good actually. I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

Did you know medieval manuscripts occasionally featured heavily-armed bunnies in their marginalia?

I started sculpting these guys and quickly discovered they were an endless source of amusement.

Due to various reasons,* it took a while before I built up what I deemed to be sufficient inventory to list them on the Etsy shop. And then I thought: why not mark the whole store down for sale and make a Tumblr post about it I could Blaze? So I did, at which point I made a discovery: just as the Blaze moderation team has the power to nix an attempted Blaze, they can also boost the Blaze on a post if they like it a lot, raising the number of random users to whom they'll show the post by a staggering factor for no additional charge. This is what happened to my post about the bunnies, which had the effect of selling through the entire bunny stock in about a day. As I'd initially hoped, some other store items also got nabbed; I think a side benefit of this whole thing is that I've discovered a useful calibration point for my pricing. Anyway, all this is to say you should watch the shop in the next week or two, because I suspect there'll be a new batch of bunnies ready to go soon.

* The ears turned out to be shockingly frangible, and the weapons would sometimes sag or list at unpredictable angles in the glaze fire; I think I've got all those quirks ironed out with more deliberate construction methods and the use of braided nichrome wire as a kind of miniature rebar reinforcement, but the kiln gods can still be capricious.

#dadthoughts

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

Forgive the indulgence, but on the other hand I only do this once a year: Quentin goes to public school and they do a pretty damn good job; the PTA also works incredibly hard to round out the experience. Through the fault of no one except The System (which we all agree is the true enemy), it's up to the PTA to fund things like field trips, supplies for the less fortunate, recess help, and a whole-ass gym teacher, among other things (many other things) (I know this because I'm in the PTA). The beginning of the year, understandably, is when a lot of the fundraising happens, which includes the Tigerthon, an event that used to be called the Walk-and-Roll-a-Thon whose nature you can probably divine from the name; the kids have a lot of fun with it and try to collect a lot of pledges from friends and family and such.

Thusly: I know there's a lot going on out there right now, but if you have a couple spare dollars rolling around in your pocket, please consider tossing them at us! Based on past experience with the way beehiiv's outgoing link instrumentation works, your best bet is to simply copy this line into your browser's address bar and delete the two instances of "XXXX" to create a functional URL:

hXXXXttps://pledgestar.XXXXcom/t/5vU8/

I thank you, the kids thank you, and perhaps more importantly, you can justifiably feel like you've Done Something concrete to help make the world a slightly better place. For real!!!

Recipe Nook

I haven't tried anything else out yet, so I have nothing concrete to report to you on new discoveries; thank you again if you sent something my way! I will note that this farfalle with cauliflower and sausage is intriguingly similar to something I already do that also involves either a big can of diced tomatoes or just a straight-up jar of sauce, an adjustment I recommend. I might do a deep dive on Smitten Kitchen and just swim around in there for a while; that lady does not miss.

Fascination Corner

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

• The Scientists think they've found the neural basis for long COVID brain fog, which hopefully means a treatment for it can be worked out!! (SciTechDaily) (Paper)

• Garbage Day has a must-read warning for us all on "The pressure cooker of political violence" and where it's coming from. (Garbage Day) Then maybe I'm going to just put this NPR poll on the table here and walk away whistling. (NPR)

• Here's a nice profile (with some good tactics) of an anti-ICE activist in Chicago. (WBEZ) And while we're here, this short Bluesky video post is good and has great jumping-off points surrounding it. (Kevin Foster on Bluesky)

• The Jimmy Dubs has spotted a rogue planet with some truly wild-sounding shit going on. (Universe Today) (Paper)

• Culture Study this week is very good!! (Culture Study)

• We're fucking up the planet's plants and animals; this is known. But now that we have the technology to edit their genomes and maybe help fix what we're breaking .......... should we?? (Aeon)

• The High Seas Treaty is set to become international law, thank fuck. (Inside Climate News)

• Lots of retrospectives on the great Jane Goodall from people whose lives she touched. (Nautilus)

• At least one Chinese company is going ahead with underwater datacenters; I'd be more worried about environmental impacts if I felt like this was going to be The Way Forward for datacenters from now on, which ............ seems unlikely. Right?? Good luck to them. (Science Alert)

• Innovation in science seems to be correlated with having rookies on your team. (Nature)

• "The Life and Death of the American Foodie: When food culture became pop culture, a new national persona was born. We regret to inform you, it’s probably you." (Eater)

• China is absolutely kicking the entire world's ass at commercial electric truck adoption. (Rest of World)

• Did .......... did we need more ways to eat chicken on the go???? (Food Dive)

• Early data from the Jimmy Dubs says exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e miiiiiiiiight have an atmosphere, and potentially liquid water. (U of Bristol) (Paper)

• Climate activists are getting murked left and right out there, and the pattern is depressingly easy to suss out. (HEATED)

• The Scientists have managed to make a viable human egg cell out of a skin cell, which needless to say has some Implications. (BBC)

• It's good to know this is what we're doing with OpenAI's new version of the Machine (Generative Flavor) that makes incredibly copyrighted material right out the gate. (TechCrunch)

• "We Keep Us Safe: On Antifa" is comparatively ancient (2020???) but still quite relevant. (The Sword and the Sandwich)

• This comes from Kelsey McKinney's newsletter so apologies if you're seeing it twice, but this girl on a quest to gaslight her boyfriend into thinking she paid Anthropologie $150 for a rock from the ground outside is doing incredible work. (TikTok)

• You know what, as long as we're doing this, here's StoryTerra, an interactive map that lets you explore locations from stories, but that sentence doesn't really do the concept justice; go see it. (StoryTerra)

• Only about 20% of the world's one billion dogs can be classified as pets; what are the rest of them up to? (bioGraphic)

• "The libidinal appeal of fascism is a perversely powerful motivator," begins this essay by Sean T. Collins, and well, you can and should read the rest of it. (Welcome to Hell World)

• Creative hobbies might make your brain age slower?? (Nature) (Paper)

• Some Engineers have come up with a wild-sounding plan to send a swarm of laser-propelled robots to the nearest star system and see what's up. (IEEE Spectrum)

• Here's an interesting longread about the challenges of actually scaling EV battery manufacture. I know how that sounds but it's true!! (Knowable)

• The Scientists ran the numbers and found the One True Drinking Straw that has the least environmental impact, and it's not the one you're thinking of. (Anthropocene) (Paper)

• "Bari Weiss Takes Her Grift Mainstream: Journalism's biggest fraud takes the reins at CBS" (String in a Maze)

• What in the hell is going on in there: a tiny butterfly has 229 pairs of chromosomes in its cells. (Wellcome Trust Sanger Inst via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Ed Zitron is really doing his best to bang the gong as hard as he can (with copious receipts) that the entire tech industry's obsession with AI is stupid, economically ruinous bullshit. (Where's Your Ed At)

• This engineering school sounds like it might rule, actually?? (Nature)

• Pasteurization kills H5N1, so you should feel free to knock the raw milk out of the hands of any idiot within visual range. (Science News)

• Taking care of just 50 specific objects in orbit could cut the risk of space junk catastrophe in half. (Ars Technica)

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 sounds like someone doing a Peter Gabriel impression who only half-remembers what Peter Gabriel's music is like.

DON'T FORGET: I'm thinking of doing a Reader Submission Month for band/album/artwork combos! Feel free to send something in; just tell me how you want to be credited!

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)!