Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has officially gotten the wool sweaters out of the drawer, and yes, the Xmas tree is already up

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 34: NEW YEAR'S BALL III

Mark your calendar for the 8th of January and don't put away that fancy New Year's Even party outfit yet — take it out for one more spin in the company of the very best crowd in the San Francisco Bay area! Hit the stage and flex those creative muscles or just hang back and watch an explosion of musical inspiration roughly every 9 minutes; I guarantee you've never seen anything like it!

✨🪩✨
Jan 8 2026
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

🪓🐰 A bunch of brand new little weirdos on sale NOW 🪓🐰

This will likely be the final drop for the year, and the savings are 🔥HOT🔥

If you haven't looked in a while, I urge you to take a gander now and see if there's anything in there that might make a quirky and unique gift for that friend who's otherwise impossible to shop for. Come 2026 there will be new little guys; I've already hit a rich vein of ideatic ore that longs to be mined.

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 put together a small collection of Star Trek Hallmark Xmas ornaments — no, not the one that inexplicably commemorates the most heartwrenching moment in the history of the original series — these are just starships that light up. Well, they're supposed to light up. Specifically, they're supposed to plug into string lights. Incandescent ones. They don't work with the LED ones.

You can see how this might be a problem.

Except that at the end of the Xmas season last year, I apparently picked up a string of incandescent lights, probably because they were cheap as hell, with the intention of using them this year so I could finally light up my little ships. Great idea, Past Me!!

Exceeeeeeeept that the socket design on these fucking things seems to have changed just slightly. On two of the ships, the plug could still be wrangled far enough in that a connection could be made, and so those ones light up. There's a third that I just can't make work. Hilariously, the ones that work are both Starfleet vessels (USS Voyager and the Enterprise-E) and the one that remains dark is a Romulan warbird, which has been pointed out to me as making some sense if you think about it.

Still: just a bit disappointing.

The tree looks great overall, though. And I have one more ship that lights up no matter what, because it's battery powered: my precious Enterprise-C. That one seems to be the kids' favorite, probably because the lights are quite bright and they can trigger them themselves. The end! No moral!

#dadthoughts

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

Nothing for this section other than to note there's about to be a lot going on; the teachers are going on strike starting Thursday (Richmondside) and they have legitimate grievances. Let's see what happens!!

Recipe Nook

I have fallen down on this project for November, seeing as how it's now December, but as I said there's a lot happening and I haven't had time to research new recipes to present to the kids. Hopefully I'll have something for next week!!

Fascination Corner

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

• A Finance Guy recalculates the American poverty line and comes to a stark conclusion in a writeup whose title probably tells you everything you need to know: "Part 1: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America" (Yes, I give a fig)

• The fact that Twitter is overrun with MAGA content farms that turn out to have been run from the global south that MAGA chuds despise shouldn't be surprising (Guardian). Renee DiResta lays it all out quickly, cleanly, and mercilessly. (Agents of Influence)

• Did you know we averaged about one crypto "wrench attack" per week this year? (Decrypt)

• A surprising percentage of Americans still believe in Bigfoot despite the universality of handheld devices containing high-quality cameras and a paucity of corresponding video footage. That said, the percentage who believe in the possibility of alien life seems low. (YouGov)

• Corporate insurers would like to excuse themselves from covering mistakes made by The Machine, which probably tells you something about the reliability of The Machine. (TechCrunch)

• The Scientists have invented an artificial tongue specifically for evaluating spiciness. (Nature)

• An entirely new branch on the tree of eukaryotic life has just been discovered by random chance. (Charles U)

• Orange juice appears to have some health-boosting benefits, but I'm not looking forward to the inevitable fitness influencer trend of "citrusmaxxing" this discovery's going to trigger in a few months. Actually I lied, I want orange in every baked good under the sun, so this is going to be just fine!!!! (The Conversation)

• Here, have a fascinating longread on something with the deceptively simple name of "group relations" and what it can maybe do for us. (n+1)

• There's a reason all the mugs in diners look the same; it's probably not surprising, ultimately, but it is interesting. (Mental Floss)

• Around the turn of the millennium, pediatric surgeons were having a problem where sometimes babies who'd survived surgery didn't make it through the incredibly complicated and time-sensitive transfer process from operating room to ICU. Solution: get advice from Formula One pit crews. And it worked!! (MedBound Times)

• Hamilton Nolan has a beautiful dream that we should all take a look at. (How Things Work)

• The Scientists have discovered an amoeba that thrives at temperatures previously thought to be literally impossible for nucleated animal cells. (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

(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 real rough-around-the-edges, snarling blues album by an eight-piece band you'd be real happy to share a small dive bar with for an evening, even if they're not up onstage.

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 the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!