Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wonders if maybe there might be too many fantasy/scifi trilogies in the book world these days
You'll Like This
Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.
Instant Band Night Returns In May
I've had to come to the conclusion lately that there's just too much on my plate to continue managing Instant Band Night, but the good news for you the reader is that a new team of bright and capable people (led by an Instant Band Night volunteer who should be familiar to anyone who's been to one the last few years) is already working on putting the May installment together! I'm hoping for updates soon!!
Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU
I'm cooking up some new weird little guys for the shop already, but did you know there are now enough purchases for the reviews down at the bottom to constitute some lovely little reads? It's nice beyond description to know that these things I'm making have found homes with the right people. Go have a look; eagle-eyed viewers may notice a new bunny has snuck in there.
Idea Factory Giveaway
I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after four+ 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.
What's going on with our great nation's Chex Mix supply? I ask this unironically: I can't be the only one who's noticed it's hard to find it consistently in any great quantity, right? It's not always on the shelves at Safeway or Target. There was a short while where I was able to sneak into Costco under the auspices of my father-in-law, and the first time I was there I encountered a Lorge bag of Chex Mix that I passed up, reasoning that I did not need it at the moment and I'd be able to get it next time if I did. Foolishness; I've never seen it since. Yes I'm aware not everything at Costco is there at all times, but I went at least five or six times subsequently and it never popped up again. Mocking me. And as previously stated, even the normal-sized bags aren't guaranteed to be found at the usual grocery-type locations. What gives? Is there some component of Chex Mix whose supply chain has gotten all fucked up in This Economy? Are the corporate masters of General Mills quietly preparing a phase-out? Are we prepared to riot should this come to pass? I'm just asking questions here.
#dadthoughts
Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.
One of the things Felix wants to do a lot is build Lego sets: we have, as I've noted previously, a truly ridiculous amount of them, and a wealth of instruction booklets from days of yore (the original instructions to the Galaxy Explorer from the 80s, for instance, along with what I think must be all the instructions from all the other sets we got as kids), which I put into a couple different document holders for the kids to peruse, loosely grouped into "space" and "everything else." Felix often pages through them and asks to build one, which I'm happy to do if there's enough time: the real bottleneck to building a Lego set is finding the pieces, and that can take A While if there are especially fiddly bits to look for.
But so we've built several of them, the latest of which is a racecar whose little instruction pamphlet depicts variations on the theme that could be built with the same set of parts. Yesterday Felix wanted to make one of those, and since the pamphlet doesn't actually give instructions beyond showing you the finished variation, I had to freestyle it a little, which he liked just fine.
What he likes even better (along with Quentin, and honestly me) is embellishing a finished vehicle afterward, which he set to doing immediately after we got done. "You can go now, Daddy," he said imperturbably as he started looking for parts, and I left to go read in the other room (Quentin was off visiting a buddy). And for the next I-shit-you-not 45 minutes, he would leave his room to show me every time he made a new modification: rocket engines, stabilizers, a "wind system", smooth tiles for the stabilizers, etc. Every time I would ooh and ahh over them, but honestly I didn't need to fake enthusiasm: it was fucking magical. The joy! The quiet joy of building something cool!! Although it was a lot of in-and-out for him, lots of trips to and from the room.
"Maybe you don't need to leave the room every time," I suggested, "you could just show me when you're done, you know?"
"I like showing you every upgrade" was his answer. Of course!!
Anyway, this is something I think I'm going to hold close to my heart for, oh, the next 30 years or whatever. No big deal!!!!
Fascination Corner
I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.
Hoo boy, that stupid Palantir manifesto, huh? (How Things Work)
New Stanford report says nobody outside Silicon Valley seems super jazzed about any flavors of The Machine. Can't imagine why!!! (TechCrunch)
That said, mathematicians are figuring out how The Machine can be useful to them, and the answer is: an amount both surprising and increasing. (Quanta)
According to a simple experiment with almost 2000 people participating, we tend to underestimate how interesting conversations are going to be, even the ones we think will be boring. (APA via EurekAlert) (Paper)
"The algorithm erodes the travel recommendation: what comes after? On TikTok tourism, the slow striking out of local culture, and what trusted curation looks like now." (It's Nice That)
The Kyoto Aquarium's penguin exhibit has the most complicated set of relationships you or I or anyone else on this entire Earth has ever seen. (Kyoto Aquarium)
What if we looked for interstellar alien civilizations by trying to identify patterns of similar planets near each other? What about that? (Inst of Science Tokyo via Science Daily) (Paper)
The Scientists are starting to see evidence for a universal rhythm in nature. (Northwestern U) (Paper)
After the DOJ abandoned the Live Nation monopoly case, a lawsuit filed by 33 states working together came through! (NPR)
The DNA floating around in a bucket's worth of river water can be shockingly informative. (Anthropocene)
Caity Weaver has found the best free restaurant bread in America. (Atlantic Gift Link)
The Scientists have hit upon a fantastic way to use discarded car battery acid to turn hard-to-recycle plastic waste into hydrogen and valuable industrial precursors, effectively solving two waste streams for the price of one. Hell yeah. (U of Cambridge) (Paper)
You're not imagining it: backpacks got worse on purpose. (Worse on Purpose)
Is everything we like a psyop or is this just how marketing works? (TechCrunch)
A very long-term nuclear waste storage facility is coming online in Finland, but there's precious little detail in this article about what sort of messaging they've put together for the people a hundred millennia from now who might stumble upon it. (AP)
Something killed off a whole bunch of people in Europe 5000 years ago, and The Scientists have the DNA evidence for it. What was it, though? Nobody knows. Plague, maybe? (U of Gothenburg) (Paper)
The Colorado River's seeming inability to refill properly after winter has been puzzling The Scientists for years, but they just figured it out: thirsty springtime plants have been guzzling the meltwater before it can even get to the river. (U of Washington via Science Daily) (Paper)
I just think it would be funny if people started sending cardboard cutouts of the letter L to JD Vance's office in vast numbers. (Independent)
"How Do You Parent in Ecodistress?" Gonna have to come back to this one more than once, I think. (Culture Study)
It sounds bonkers, but at a certain level so does all of cosmology: what if dark matter is made out of black holes from a previous universe? ??/ ??? (The Conversation)
Making hybrid cars is good and all, but making hybrid factories is also kind of a big deal. (TechCrunch)
Of course Hamilton Nolan was going to have a great time at a big union rally, but that's because unions are a goddamn great idea. (How Things Work)
Caffeine seems to make Argentine ants better foragers, which is giving The Scientists ideas about caffeinated bait for more effective pest control. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)
As the sea rises, The Scientists weigh the options for Venice, none of which seem great if I'm being honest here. (Science Alert) (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 Jon Tyson 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 Circling Sea on Unsplash
No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is a duo consisting of a singer/songwriter on a guitar and a drummer, and they go surprisingly hard.
I still could use some more submissions to build out a notional 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 this page right here (which also has the archive)!
