Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that literally just saw SINNERS and holy hot shit you should go if you haven't already

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 31: FLAVOR

THIS THURSDAY

Holy fuck do we ever need something to do that isn't worrying about everything around us for at least a couple hours of surprise and joy and music

See you a few days from now. If you can't make it, at least tell some friends: whether you choose to play in one of the bands or just watch it all unfold, it's an almost unbelievably ecstatic celebration of spontaneous creativity that we all need at the cellular level.

✨🪩✨
May 8 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

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

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.

I've discussed the Emoji Kitchen feature before and I must report that it's still paying conceptual dividends. However. A new wrinkle seems to have emerged, in that I seem to be unable to invoke the Sparkle Pumpkin unless I go into the Emoji Kitchen's browsing function and scroll until I find it.

I will explain.

Typing ✨🎃 used to bring up a jack o'lantern covered in sparkles, which is a surprisingly versatile signifier for any number of useful and ideogrammatically proximate nonverbal rhetorical flourishes. This combination of emoji no longer works as intended; the Sparkle Pumpkin doesn't even appear in the first 4 choices, which is madness to me. What happened? Who's in there tinkering with the Emoji Kitchen on the backend, first of all, and second: who would want to mess with the Sparkle Pumpkin?? If you're an Emoji Kitchen user (and frankly why wouldn't you be), what happens when you type ✨🎃? What the hell is going on? We have only one recourse: we must follow the money. Join me on my deep dive into the wo[crackling static noise] [picture fluctuates wildly] [blackness]

#dadthoughts

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

We took the kids up to the Children's Museum of Sonoma County for their second visit on Saturday, and it was just as good — possibly better? I will reiterate that if it's at all in your power to do so, you should consider going, because it's really truly fantastic. Also, somehow traffic was miraculously ideal in both directions, so it took less than an hour to go and return. I think we're starting to encroach on the outskirts of a new era with the kids — one being 7 and the other 3 — where they need slightly less handholding and we can watch them appreciate and soak up a vibrant new setting, although frequent check-ins for bathroom breaks are still warranted. Is this new territory real or a mirage; only time will tell!!

Fascination Corner

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

• We can at least take some comfort in the fact that our neighbors can see what we're up to and say "None of that" (AP)

• "Talking Our Way Forward: How to have a conversation with a political enemy." (How Things Work)

• The Scientists are seeing some kinds of industrial waste being converted into rock within decades, which is a ridiculously short span in Geology Time. (PhysOrg) (Paper)

• Extremely minor spoiler for Andor s02 within: Disney themselves have blessed us with an hour-long version of this year's uncontested scifi dancefloor banger from DJ Floating Golden Party Orb featuring Mon Mothma really going through it. I would actually contemplate playing this if I had a party to throw anytime soon. (YouTube)

• Oh really, dipshit? Marc Andreessen thinks The Machine will replace everybody's jobs, but there's just something Special and Ineffable about being a venture capitalist that no AI will ever be able to replicate. This fucking guy. (Gizmodo)

• The Scientists have run some mouse tests and say that microbiome transplants don't really last unless you can also guarantee a reasonably healthy diet to maintain the little guys you just stuffed in there. (Nature)

• Why beat around the bush? "The American Government Sides with the Party of German Neo-Nazis: The MAGA-AfD alliance of extremists is not surprising, but it remains outrageous. If democracy is to prevail, America needs to establish a robust anti-fascist consensus" (Democracy Americana)

• Some Engineers in China have built a kickass thorium-based molten salt nuclear reactor based on literal abandoned and declassified American research. (Live Science)

• Get all your vaccine shots in the same arm. (Garvan Inst of Medical Research) (Paper)

• Some Biomedical Engineers have invented a heart-attack-detector-on-a-chip that could easily be integrated with existing wearables. (U of Mississippi)

• The Scientists wonder whether it's possible to make wood stronger by essentially infusing it with iron, and the answer is: yeah??? (Florida Atlantic U)

• Spraying pesticides on crops means a whole bunch of it doesn't actually get onto the plants; injecting them would be way less wasteful, but how do you make the needles for it, much less in a scalable way? The Scientists think they're onto something. (MIT)

• It wouldn't work quite as well and it'd probably make acid rain a problem again, but we could pull off solar geoengineering with the planes we have instead of building a whole bunch of new ones, if it came to that. (University College London) (Paper)

• Straight-up democracy has some, uh, weaknesses; what if you could make political decisions the way the human body regulates itself? The Scientists have run some interesting-sounding simulations. (Columbia) (Paper)

• Believers in karma tend to think of it as a force that mostly rewards them and punishes others, according to a new survey. (APA)

• "How to Not Get Poisoned in America" (The Sword and the Sandwich)

• The Scientists think they've spotted the zone in the brain that tells us whether a social interaction was good or bad, at least in mice. (Mount Sinai) (Paper) They've also got evidence (in people this time) for a brain spot that seems to control how impulsive you are. (U of Birmingham) (Paper)

• Why did some animals fossilize while others didn't? Body size and protein content seem to be a factor according to The Scientists. (U of Lausanne) (Paper)

• "The Failure of Warren Buffett: The best version of capitalism wasn't good enough." (How Things Work)

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 must unfortunately conclude is some kind of truly unlistenable free jazz nonsense, the kind of thing that would make Ornette Coleman make a face like he smelled something bad.

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)!