who's the god of earbuds anyway

Can I put in a good word or not

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's just rotating the last season of ANDOR endlessly in its mind

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 32: BEACH PARTY

This will be the last one until November, so if you want some Instant Band Night energy in your summer, then mark your calendar for July 10 and get your best vacation outfit ready!! As always, there's no pressure to perform, so if you want to just come watch something amazing happen onstage every 5-10 minutes, then enter and be welcome.

Tell your friends! Pass the invite around! Mark your calendars!

✨🪩✨

July 10 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

+ + 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

If you've been looking for a weird little guy to put in your garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then I have the perfect place to start your search. If you know someone else who needs a weird little guy for their garden, potted plant, or kitchen, then you're also in luck!!!!

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 wish my earbuds would make up their mind about how to goddamn function. For a long time they just worked: I paired them once with my phone together, and then I would just use one at a time in sequence so I'd always have a functional one with a full battery waiting for me. Except now it's a crapshoot as to whether the one I pick up will decide to connect, and if it doesn't, there's an entire dance I have to go through in order to re-pair it that's both stupid and enraging because

  • It doesn't always work

  • But sometimes it does

  • And there's no way to tell what I did differently because I did THE SAME THING JUST A SECOND AGO

It feels like a ritual I'm undertaking to propitiate the most capricious and inattentive god possible. But I do it because I goddamn need the fucking thing to work, it's not like there are backup options! I don't have any larger points to make here; I just needed to unburden myself of this seemingly trivial but incredibly irritating aggravation. Thank you for reading this one.

#dadthoughts

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

First of all, an update from last week: the First Cat In Space books are actually pretty good. Maybe a little advanced for a first-grader? I think these are meant for 8+ so that's understandable, but Quentin gets a big kick out of a fair percentage of the jokes (the LOTR references fly over his head, of course, but I think that's also sort of the point). If you've got a kid who likes a frenetic adventure comic, you should find the first book and see what's what.

I'm mostly just here to note that our bizarre streak of good epidemiological luck came to an end on Friday: Quentin came down with a brief but very real fever (no other symptoms, thank fuck)* that put the kibosh on plans to go to the zoo and have a playdate with a friend. By the time Sunday rolled around, he'd mostly recovered, and he's at school even as I type this. Did he pass whatever it was on to us? Only time will tell. Also where the hell did it even come from?? Mysteries abounding.

* He did go through almost two boxes of tissues, come to think of it. We're really glad we taught him to blow his nose (my friend Krischelle has come to loathe the sound she christened "the loaded sniffle" of a kid trying to snurf the snot back up into their own head), but wow

Fascination Corner

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

  • Empirical evidence says living things emit an incredibly faint glow that fades when we die. I know how it sounds, too! (Science Alert)

  • A new study shows us the best ways to motivate climate action. (UPenn) (Paper)

  • The first baby in the world to receive personalized gene-editing treatment to fix a life-threatening genetic disorder is doing well. (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia)

  • What, uhhh, what's going on with this star over in the Big Dipper? (Universe Today) (Paper)

  • The Scientists think they've figured out where orange cats come from. (PhysOrg) (Paper)

  • Peanuts Tamagotchi. PEANUTS TAMAGOTCHI THIS IS NOT A DRILL (The Verge)

  • Well that's no fuckin' good: Flock, who make a license plate reader nobody likes, is building a surveillance tool that's even shadier. (404 Media)

  • Chat, is it good for people to watch livestreams of animals in nature doing their thing? (yes) (Guardian)

  • The math says we've probably been overestimating the salutary effect of physical fitness on mortality. (Uppsala U) (Paper)

  • It might not be entirely Nicole Kidman's doing, but the numbers previously were so dismal that maybe it is: her pledge to work with a woman director every 18mo back in 2017 has been fulfilled and then some. (Variety)

  • Epic put an interactive AI Darth Vader into Fortnite and players immediately tried to make him say cusses, with at least one notable success. (Polygon)

  • The Scientists think there might be a fundamental algorithm underlying the behavior of (possibly) all mammals everywhere. (Max Planck Inst of Animal Behavior) (Paper)

  • Adherence to a bad philosophy take might be hobbling the entire field of physics. (Nature)

  • Some Engineers have ensured that Voyager 1 will still be able to communicate with Earth for a while after a nail-biting remote fix to its thrusters, which as a reminder are 15.5 billion miles away moving at 35,000mph (CNN)

  • We're one step closer to an HIV vaccine. (Scripps Research)

  • Research into making useful materials out of fungus seems to be getting somewhere interesting. (Empa)

  • One of The Scientists thinks the way gravity behaves could be evidence that we're all living in a simulation, which he codifies as "the second law of infodynamics." Okay!! (The Conversation) (Paper)

  • If you're trying to grow new rainforest, you should consider bringing some termites along so they can help it along. (Anthropocene)

  • The Corporations are killing their DEI initiatives because it's politically expedient and they never wanted to do them in the first place; Hamilton Nolan outlines what we should do differently in the future. (How Things Work)

  • Harvard bought what they thought was a cheap replica of the Magna Carta for about the price of a PS5 back in the 40s, but it turns out to be a genuine original worth millions. (BBC)

  • A new mathematical model suggests The Machine (Generative Flavor) works a lot like the brain of a person with aphasia, which probably shouldn't come as a gigantic surprise. (U of Tokyo) (Paper)

  • The National Restaurant Association reports that 75% of restaurant traffic these days is takeout. What! (Food & Wine)

  • Okay, so we know why your fingers wrinkle when you've been in the bath for a while, but: do they always wrinkle the same way? The Scientists looked into it. (SUNY Binghamton)

  • The Burgess Shale is still giving us new weird little guys! This one is especially magnificent even if it's not very big; they named it after Mothra anyway. (Royal Ontario Museum) (Paper)

  • Kinda want to try some feijoa someday. (AP)

  • Robots are making the food at some Korean highway rest stops and it's, uh. Reviews are ...... mixed, but also the whole situation is more complicated than you think. (Rest of World)

  • Some Engineers have demonstrated a method for 3D printing soft structures inside a living organism using focused ultrasound. (Caltech)

  • I've never thought for a second about fungal viruses; now I've fixed that, and you can too! (Knowable)

  • "What Do We Do With All This Consumer Rage? When a Complaint Isn't Really A Complaint" (Culture Study)

  • Just sayin'. (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

  • The Scientists have a new theory for where dark matter came from. (Dartmouth) (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 Pavel Czerwinski 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 Danny Greenberg on Unsplash

Reader Jade says "This week's album sounds like it comes from disillusioned Christian pop artists. They keep the religious titles and imagery but focus on the nitty gritty bits of life. They've probably got some songs about those oddly specific but common things most people encounter, like doing a dramatic turn when you have to go back and get something even if no one's with you, or accidentally leaving your earbuds unplugged while listening to music in public."

Interestingly, reader Neal opines "The Holy Joystick is a band of polyamorous, male-identifying swinger millennials who have created sultry music to 'smash' to. Their latest album Great God Who is Above Us is the result of adding mirrored ceilings to their boudoir/sound studio. One Spotify listener described the album 'as if Narcissus sang about how great he is in the sack.' The band is a forerunner in a new subgenre of rock aptly named 'Crotch-Gazing.'"

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)!