Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that hails the coming of stonefruit season and must be restrained from overindulging
You'll Like This
Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.
Instant Band Night Returns Sometime Soonish?
I'm not going to lie: the team working on bringing Instant Band Night back has had some stuff going on. But it may yet return, so we should keep the hope alive and watch this space in the meantime!!
Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU
Spare time has still been difficult to come by as of late; we know this. But we all need releases, and believe me when I say ceramics are high on the list for me even if I haven't been able to get my hands on the clay in a bit. Thus: the store still remains, and know that I haven't stopped thinking about new weirdos and perhaps even some dishware?? Watch this space, is all I'm gonna say, but take a peek at the shop in the meantime — maybe that garden you've been planting (or thinking about planting) needs a little buddy in there to surprise passersby?
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.
Who's got a good YouTube rec for me? I'm poised at the rim of the Last Meals well, which I sense is deep and potentially brimming with treasures, but I dunno — did I spoil myself by watching the Brennan Lee Mulligan one? Are they all this good or is that the best one they ever did? This would not surprise me. I've also been working my way through episodes of Ask Hank Anything, so you don't need to recommend that one!
#dadthoughts
Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.
We're getting to the point now where it would probably be a good idea for the kids to be able to make their own breakfasts, and to be fair, there's at least one breakfast they certainly can handle themselves! We call it "sprinkle yogurt," and it's exactly what it sounds like: a bowl of plain yogurt with a couple spoonfuls of cupcake sprinkles mixed in there. But lately they've been coming back around to the appeal of oatmeal, which takes a grownup to make on account of the boiling water. Why do they simply not pour themselves a bowl of cereal, you may ask? Because we never really acclimated them to breakfast cereal, and I wonder if perhaps the time has come. Cheerios have been a reasonable snack option for years now, but crucially, they've always been dry Cheerios eaten from a plate or a bowl. I tried one time to see how Honey Nut Cheerios would go down, and the verdict was: too sticky. (Honestly, fair) At dinner today Quentin ranked his favorite liquids, and chocolate milk came in basically at the top ("melted chocolate" was his favorite liquid, so I suppose it appeared at least twice in the top three), which makes me think that perhaps Cocoa Puffs would be a valid way in? Who doesn't love a cereal that ends up with chocolate milk at the end?? The only tricky part of this will be explaining that we can't have Cocoa Puffs all the time — in fact, maybe once they're used to the involvement of milk and spoons, Honey Nut Cheerios can make a reappearance? It's worth thinking about. If you have opinions, anecdotes, or warnings, you know how to reach me!!
Fascination Corner
I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.
No real way to sugarcoat this one: The Scientists have run the numbers and the numbers say we've exceeded the planet's ability to sustain us by, like, a fucking lot, and we need to rethink how we do things around here or there's going to be Problems. (Flinders U via Science Daily) (Paper)
A teeny experiment with human brain organoids suggests that regenerating damaged nerves in adult tissue should theoretically be possible. (U of Cambridge via Science Daily) (Paper)
We've talked before about rogue planets harboring subsurface oceans, but The Scientists are now pointing out that rogue planets might come with their own moons that have subsurface oceans of their own that could be kept warm for billions of years through tidal heating. Hmm. Hmmmmmmmm!! (LMU) (Paper)
The Bluesky post I saw that commented "I love the American strategy on all fronts of civic life that this admin has taken, of putting a loaded gun in the economy’s mouth and fingering the trigger" was about something more serious(?), but I think it applies more accurately to the shuttering of this vitally important bee laboratory. You heard me. (The Conversation)
A carved-off chunk of sea cucumber stayed alive and thriving for three years in natural seawater, baffling and intriguing The Scientists at the same time. (Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences) (Paper)
Here's a nice architectural rabbithole for you. (WikiArquitectura)
We shouldn't be taking floppy disks for granted as, like, a permanent data storage mechanism; thank fuck there's at least one person (with kind of a wild swing of a name) thinking about this stuff. (IEEE Spectrum)
"I asked a billionaire about his environmental philanthropy. It didn’t go well. The contradiction at the core of big-money environmental giving." (Vox)
The Scientists' current theory of evolution is that most genetic changes are basically neutral, but a new study says the truth might be more complicated (and weirdly poetic) than we realized. (U of Michigan via Science Daily)
A sweeping new study suggests beta blockers don't do shit for you if you have normal heart functioning after a heart attack, and might [heavy sigh] even be harmful to women, and We Just Didn't Know. (Mt Sinai Hospital via Science Daily) (Paper)
What might be the earliest wooden tools ever made have been uncovered at a site in Greece, dating back almost half a million years. (U of Reading)
"They Want to Get Rid of Your Property Taxes Because They Think You Are Morons: The Republican plan to defund everything." (How Things Work)
Plastic surgeons are starting to report people coming in requesting procedures The Machine (Generative Flavor) has told them are possible that just plain aren't. (Guardian)
Warning! Due to an evolutionary mechanism known as island gigantism, the wrens of St. Kilda are becoming GIANT. Which still means they're only about 15ish grams, but that's still twice as big as their counterparts on the mainland!!!!! (U of Birmingham via Science Daily) (Paper)
A longstanding argument over the way pianos work and whether the touch of a player can influence their sound has been settled by a consortium of The Scientists and Some Engineers, and it's genuinely surprising (to me at least). (NeuroPiano Inst via Science Daily) (Paper)
Shouldn't the workers who make all the chips and servers and whatnot benefit from the insane profits the AI industry has made possible for a select few? (Rest Of World)
Speaking of The Machine, a tech CEO opines that his peers are all suffering from AI psychosis of a very particular sort. (TechCrunch)
Here's a longread that identifies an intriguing pattern around petty tyrants who refuse to acknowledge reality; I don't know if it holds up in the age of information collapse we've entered, but it's at least sort of hopeful? (Noema)
The Scientists have invented a process that can turn wastewater from a beer brewing process into fertilizer by forcing millions of tiny bubbles through it, and the tests have been highly promising. (Anthropocene) (Paper)
Everybody relax, 2026's International Mollusc of the Year has been decided: the Mediterranean vampire snail. It's amazing that I can be in my mid 40s and still be learning about new animals. (Senckenberg Nature Research)
Speaking of molluscs, though: new tiny blue octopus species dropped. (Field Museum)
"The Vibecession Is Entirely Rational: Even if all-time lows in economic sentiment are just inequality-based vibes, inequality still had a big hand in the Great Depression." (Jezebel)
Behold an interview with the production designer for BACKROOMS, which I'm very curious about, so nobody spoil me. (dezeen)
The numbers do say that longer waits between seasons seem to increase audience engagement, but on the other hand we're already waiting way too long between seasons of Severance and I don't really want to wait longer. (Media Play News)
Website that shows you the Rothko painting that most closely goes with your weather. I see my good friend Claude helped build this one, but it's the idea that counts! (Current Rothko)
The steroid Olympics you may or may not have heard about didn't go very well if you happen to be a fan of steroids or whatever other bullshit people are trying to supercharge their bodies with these days. (Guardian)
An interesting idea with an admitted built-in bias still produced interesting results: analyzing almost half a million Reddit posts about GLP-1s yielded what look like some side effects the studies didn't catch. (UPenn)
Who wants to see a dress made from the wood fibers of a shipwreck from the 17th century!!! (Colossal)
The Scientists see evidence for what they're calling a "fungal spike" after the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit, which I suppose shouldn't be much of a surprise given the uhhh function of fungus in the ecosystem. (Science Alert)
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 Luke Jones 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 Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think sounds like the early New Pornographers but with an extra guitarist in the mix who likes to do a lot of heavily-reverbed, chiming arpeggiation.
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)!
