Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that refuses to believe Xmas is only about two weeks + change away

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 29: NEW YEAR'S BALL AGAIN

We hereby resolve to kick 2025 off with an explosion of musical creativity and extremely good outfits because we all deserve to have at least one source of unalloyed joy in our lives that cannot be touched. Also, for real, it's going to be a fucking blast if the last 28 of these are any indication, and you've gotta get in on it!! Come play onstage or just be in the crowd for a new debut of a brand new act every five minutes or so; there's nothing else like it in the entire Bay and possibly the world??? Send everybody you know the link, put on that fancy party outfit, and let's do this

✨🪩✨
Jan 9 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

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: there has never been a better time than now.

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.

So that UnitedHealthcare CEO who got shot, huh. I'd make a joke here, but honestly the best one about it has already been done on Nurse Reddit (r/nursing). Anyone reaching for some pearls to clutch would be advised to remember this is the company being sued for insisting on using an idiot robot with an error rate of 90% to deny claims on care for elderly patients (Ars Technica), and that's just one of the dogshit things they were up to.

Are the other insurance CEOs getting nervous? Should they be? Isn't this interesting timing for Anthem to backtrack on an unpopular policy (CNN)? I suppose the real questions we should be asking fall along the lines of:

• Is it even possible to run an insurance company humanely?

• If so, what actions would you need to take (and in what order) to make your company humane?

• If you're next in line to be CEO and the current one eats a bullet for not taking those actions, do you make a different choice when it's your turn in the chair?

• How many more dead CEOs (or board members) until one arrives who starts making humane choices?

Do we wonder whether these same thoughts might inhere for, say, an oil company? I'm just asking questions. You should read this interview with a corporate security contractor, particularly his final two answers (~$Intelligencer). (btw, if it gives you the "subscribe to read" overlay, this is one of those sites where you can bypass it by putting a period into the URL — literally a . — after the .com, as in ".com./" and hitting enter)

David Roth has a meditation right now on the unavoidable fact that living here the way we're forced to is gross as hell, we're getting tired of it, and maybe there's some hope in that (Defector). Someone else — certainly not me hahaha — might say that if we're going to live in a country that values guns more than women and children, we might as well get some good use out of the fucking things: it's not a coincidence that the shooter's expended brass had the words DENY, DELAY, and DEPOSE written on them (NBC News) — as Luke O'Neil puts it, "Those are the practices companies like these use as a matter of standard procedure or through lawsuits to make sure they extract as much money as possible from people like you and me" (Welcome to Hell World). That NBC News story, btw, is Very Interesting on account of how it points out that the entire true crime internet — which normally salivates at the chance to play armchair detective — agreed en masse very pointedly to not do shit to try to find the guy. Taylor Lorenz has a good distillation of "Why 'we' want insurance executives dead" (User Mag), and that should be the last word any of us need right now.

Except FUCK, I guess they caught him?? (ABC News) Or more accurately, some dumbshit working at an Altoona McDonald's ratted him out?? (Latin Times) I suppose by the time I send this we'll know what his milkshake duck quotient is, but I don't think a friend of mine is wrong when he summarized what he could see of the guy's footprint as "basically just a tech bro who somewhat justifiably thinks he's smarter than everyone else but isn't quite as brilliant as all that, either." If this is even the right guy; what if it turns out to be someone who just wants to be him? If — if!!!! — this is him, his Goodreads review of the Unabomber's manifesto is ........ instructive (Goodreads). His profile has now been made private, but if my Bluesky feed is to be believed, the last book he'd marked as having read was The Lorax. Honestly, good for him.

#dadthoughts

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

Short one here today just on account of [waves arms around]: I do want to note that my childhood Legos have arrived* and they're pretty dusty, but at least there's no cat business involved, so cleaning has been a relatively straightforward process. There are a number of components that are no longer good — battery-operated items that have corroded, corresponding motors that are now useless, etc — but overall it's an incredible array of vintage parts. Amazingly, I'd forgotten that we also saved the instruction booklets for just about everything we bought??? The old Galaxy Explorer instructions are in there, so hopefully that'll be something exciting!!

The boys are getting incrementally better at playing together every day, which is exciting to see, and Quentin is starting to get a little more confidence with his reading. These are also very exciting developments!!

* Along with all of our Construx, which I think we're going to have to hold for another time due to the sheer volume of incoming Legos. Remember Construx??

Fascination Corner

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

• Stop kissing Trump's ass, you fucking cowards!!!!!!!!!! (How Things Work)

• Meanwhile, the South Korean repudiation of their president's attempt to declare martial law is so good it's like they're doing it at us or something. You can read the 101 take here (Yahoo News) but there's also Sarah Jeong's amazing drunk first-person account of it on Bluesky — I'm linking you to the last post, but if you scroll up you should find the entire thread in coherent form; it's weird that this is the best way to do it but oh well!!! (Sarah Jeong on Bluesky)

• Ed's on fire with this one: "Godot Isn't Making It" (Where's Your Ed At)

• Why would you publish this: The Scientists have identified a single mutation that would make H5N1 human-transmissible. Idk, maybe it helps someone jumpstart making a vaccine?? (Scripps) (Paper)

• Comb jellies can fuse with each other if they get injured, fully functioning as a single integrated organism with unified nervous and digestive systems. Suddenly I'm seeing the short story "Spar" by Kij Johnson in a whole other light. (Live Science)

• Smarties don't care if you don't personally like them, because Smarties stay making money, and they're not going anywhere. (Food Dive)

• The ecology of cities may be helping spotted lanternflies spread, which means we need to smash these fuckers more. (NYU)

• Even when you take human fuckery into account, global warming last year still went 0.2°C over all our models, and The Scientists think a simple change to our overall planetary albedo might be to blame, due to low clouds simply not forming as much, which is ......... concerning. (Alfred Wegener Inst)

• How come nobody in power seems to ever listen to The Scientists? (Nature)

• The Scientists have worked out a seemingly foolproof way (in mice) to make immune cells target cancerous brain tumors, which is incredible. (UCSF)

• Perplexity AI seems to be accurately named if the performance of its shopping agent is anything to go by. (TechCrunch)

• The microplastics in beauty products are put there for cleansing purposes, which is still A Problem; fortunately, The Scientists have come up with a biodegradable alternative! (MIT) (Paper)

• Some Engineers built a fixed-wing drone with bird legs that enable it to hop around and jump to take off, which means it can land, move around, and take off from rough terrain and hard-to-reach spots without needing human intervention. (EPFL)

• That thing where fashion trends come around every 30 years or so seems not to be limited to human cultures, apparently: the orcas are at it again with the dead salmon hats. (Science Alert)

• "A Brief Theory of the Modern Gift Guide" (Culture Study)

• The Scientists have invented a 3D-printed bone graft substitute inspired by coral that heals bone injuries fast, dissolves naturally, and is easy to mass-produce. Dang!! (Swansea U) (Paper)

• Mealworms can eat plastic in laboratory conditions, sure, but what about when there's other food around? Turns out they'll still go for it if the mix is right! (UBC)

• The "sophomore slump" turns out to be the critics' fault, not audiences'. (PhysOrg) (Paper)

• Stem cells can be made to divide and grow into a whole animal; that's their entire deal. Regular cells can be induced to become stem cells with the right genetic tool; that also is known. The Scientists tried something utterly bonkers: prodding regular mouse cells to become mouse stem cells using genes from a whole other organism, one that literally predates the concept of "animals," and it fucking worked. What!! (Queen Mary U of London) (Paper)

• In theory, disinfecting public surfaces in airports (including restaurants) every two hours would cut the risk of norovirus infection by up to 83%, while handwashing is only about 2% effective. Who's going to do that work, though. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper)

• The Scientists warn that we're not thinking hard enough about how climate change is going to fuck up our food supply (BTI). Good thing Some Other Scientists are already making great progress on our dear friend the potato! (RIPE) (Paper)

• Some Chemical Engineers have figured out a way to make diesel-equivalent biofuels from used cooking oil and such that's 1000x more efficient than what we're doing now. Okay!! (King's College London) (Paper)

• We've known for a while that giving feedlot cattle seaweed cuts their methane emissions significantly, but what about the guys who are out there grazing? You can still feed them enough seaweed to cut 40% off their methane output, says a new study. (UC Davis) (Paper)

• Just in case you wanted to feel more rage than a single human body can contain, Texas and Georgia have stopped recording maternal mortality data since their abortion bans, and you can probably guess why. (Salon)

• A group of middle school kids in an applied science program for underrepresented students found a new compound with promising medical applications in goose poop. (ACS) (Paper)

• Cohousing. I'm just sayin'. (NPR)

• "Game on! A look into the rise of design-led board games" (It's Nice That)

• What happens when you ask a bunch of people to draw a corporate logo entirely from memory? Something surprisingly fun. (Branded in Memory)

• The Scientists have worked out a way to crack PFAS forever chemicals in the lab; now to see if it works in less-controlled conditions at scale! (KUNC)

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 Kyle says "Rusty Iron Disco is technically Rusty 'Iron' Disco, a 34 year-old from Iowa City. (Yes, Rusty is normally a nickname for a redhead but his parents didn't know that. He's very tired of filling out forms and being told "no, we need your full legal name."). He rebelled hard against his last name and went full singer-songwriter. This is his third album, each folkier than the last."

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)!