Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that feels a deep and intrinsic need to sculpt little mushrooms forever

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Plenty of time remains for you to check your plans and mark your calendar for the 14th of November in this, the year 2024! It's going to be the last one of the year, which means it's going to be special. (To be perfectly honest, they're all special, but that's just because every band that takes the stage is newly created five minutes prior and wonderful surprises abound) Shine your partyin' shoes and put them carefully in the closet next to your rockin' outfit, 'cause they're gonna see some use in four months!!!

Nov 14 2024
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

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: go check it out!

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ 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.

Imagine I'm somehow on an episode of Dropout's MAKE SOME NOISE but I'm the only contestant and we're doing the rant minigame, and the prompt that's just appeared is "How to promote friendship anniversaries as a more widely celebrated thing because they rule" (thanks to reader Christie).

Ahem. We should be celebrating friendship anniversaries all the time!! As Tumblr puts it, our friends are threads in the rich tapestries of our lives; they're the recurring leitmotifs in the soundtracks of our worlds. They deserve celebration, commemoration, acknowledgement at the very least! The only thing I want to know is whether we're going to celebrate the literal day we met — which in many cases is something I absolutely cannot pin down with any degree of certainty — or the day we became friends (which has the same problem). Just about my entire cadre of college pals could be sourced to whenever orientation day of my freshman year was. A vast swath of others came from my internet messageboard era: tracing it to the day I joined is nonsense — nobody knew me. The first interpersonal exchange, maybe? Then there's my in-person peeps: I couldn't begin to tell you when I met most of my local friends more accurately than "200X or so??"

What this tells us is that exact accurate dates don't matter: what we need to be doing is picking a date more or less at random and sticking to it. Name one for each friend. Go have lunch. Get dinner! Have dessert? Go for a walk or visit a museum! If you made pals with a group of people all together at once, maybe do a game night? I'm just spitballing here. The point is that this is a fantastic idea and we should start doing it immediately; I might make myself a spreadsheet. Let's all make ourselves spreadsheets!!

#dadthoughts

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

Quentin's first day of 1st grade was today and he had a ball; may it always be so. Felix is also still having a very nice time at preschool, so we're going to count ourselves extraordinarily lucky while we gear up for the year ahead. What with the new mix of kids happening on both fronts, I'm going to assume we're in for at least a month or two of new colds making the rounds until everybody's got the same set of pathogen cards in their deck. I say this mostly to gird myself psychologically for that first cold; it's coming. Just so we can all be prepared. You're ....... welcome??

Fascination Corner

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

• If you still mask in grocery stores and people give you the sideeye, or you end up in a conversation with one of them, here are some high quality responses to their most common talking points. (Olivia Belknap Therapy)
  

• Another banger from Hamilton Nolan: "Public Ownership of Public Goods" (How Things Work)
  

• This makes sense: drones are going to start flying garbage down from Everest. (Kathmandu Post)
  

• You know what, it's worth a shot: "I have written 10 books on happiness: The simple, 2-minute habit I do every day to feel happier" (CNBC)
  

• Sonos fucked up so badly that they're considering re-releasing the old version of their app. Jesus fucking Christ. (The Verge)
  

• Humans seem to hit two peaks of aging: one in their 40s and another in their 60s, which explains why my traitorous bloodstream turned prediabetic on me a couple years ago. (Science Alert)
  

• You can actually pay money to be a castaway on a deserted island for a set period of time. (Afar)
  

• I don't buy clothes a lot, so this was illuminating: "The care-label queen: how Andrea Cheong will stop you buying bad clothes" (Guardian)
  

• The Scientists are working on a Machine-powered system that could one day identify and catalog endangered animals down to the individual level just by looking at footprints. (Hakai)
  

• So: that Australian b-girl. It's more (or perhaps less) complicated than you think! (Vox)
  

• "The People Who Quit Dating: Being single can be hard—but the search for love may be harder." (Atlantic gift link)
  

• Some Engineers have successfully live-tested a surprisingly simple navigation technique for a small swarm of satellites. (Stanford) (Paper)
  

• Geochemical analysis of the Stonehenge altar stone reveals it came from Scotland nearly 400mi away. Do you know how much work that would've been back then? Why do it, guys? Why? (Nature)
  

• The Scientists have created a gene-edited version of the poplar tree that can make engineered wood without chemicals, which is great news for sustainable, emissions-reducing construction techniques. (U of Maryland) (Paper)
  

• Hey, that 3D-printed neighborhood is actually nearing completion. (IFLScience)
  

• They've only done it in simulation thus far, but Some Engineers are already getting surprising results programming industrial robots to account for human carelessness. (Washington State)
  

• "The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design: The publishing industry’s troubling reliance on visual stereotypes" (The Walrus)
  

• Black soldier flies are already used in some parts of the world to consume and process organic waste, but The Scientists think we could genetically modify them to convert the garbage they eat into even better animal feeds or raw industrial materials. (Macquarie U) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists might have found something that can at least slow down the impending bananapocalypse. (UMass Amherst)
  

• The human gut microbiome might turn out to be a promising place to look for new antibiotics, at least according to one recent attempt by The Scientists. (UPenn) (Paper)
  

• Speaking of which, it's not a cause for alarm — it might even be a source of interestingly helpful bioremediative bacteria! — but your microwave almost certainly has its own microbiome. (Nature)
  

• "Who Picks Up the Phone When ET Calls Earth? It's Complicated" (Supercluster)
  

• Sony and Microsoft and their attendant game studios burn through barrels of money and people trying to cram more millions of mipmaps into their visuals while Nintendo routinely eats their lunch making games and consoles that just don't give a shit about graphics. How? Their games are fun. (Sherwood)
  

• The Scientists are pretty sure the Chicxulub impactor was an asteroid from our solar system somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter. (U of Cologne)
  

• Some Engineers have created a smart fabric that can harvest body heat and turn it into electricity. (U of Waterloo)
  

• ManhattAnt! An unremarkable species of European ant appears to be attempting a takeover of NYC. (NPR)
  

• When the Roomba guy says he has three laws of robotics for the real world, we should probably at least give 'em a read. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• This little printing press looks like a lot of fun, doesn't it? (Colossal)
  

• Oh ....... oh no. A new study seems to show a quarter of patients with brain injuries who seem unresponsive might actually be conscious?? (Mass General Brigham) I wonder if this might be helpful for that someday: Some Engineers used some implanted electrodes and The Machine to help a man with ALS speak again. (UC Davis)
  

• The Scientists have reason to believe there's a shitload of water on Mars, it's just soaked deep down into the crust. (UC Berkeley) (Paper)
  

• Venting to your friends can make them like you better, but only if you're not a dick about it. (UCLA)
  

• The Scientists asked a bunch of people to sing whatever earworms were stuck in their head, and discovered that a surprising percentage of them seem to have perfect pitch. (UC Santa Cruz) (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:

Reader Lila says "Fort Fuckable are incels and sound like if Limp Biskit and Kid Rock joined forces at the Battle of the Bands."

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.