Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that needs to warn everyone the third Baru Cormorant book is in fact not the final one and we're all in for it now

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 33: BANDSGIVING

If you miss Instant Band Night already, and it's understandable if you do, don't worry: it will return in November, and you can secure your ticket and put it on your calendar right now; feel the warm glow of security fill the space in your heart where music and creativity and surprise live. And if you've never been before, this will be the perfect opportunity to see what all the fuss is about!! Come play or just watch; as always, it'll be like nothing else you've experienced.

✨🪩✨
Nov 13 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

🎃🌴SUMMER SALE/NEW LITTLE WEIRDOS🌴🎃

That’s right, there’s new little guys in there!!! I've been experimenting with new glazing techniques and I have to say I think I've hit upon a winner! Also I have too many things on my "finished work" shelves and it's time to move some inventory, so I've put everything on incredibly deep discount. Decorate your garden or anyplace else that needs a splash of color or whimsy; they also make thoughtful and unique gifts for that special discerning someone in your life.

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.

Now that we're two eps into Alien: Earth, I want to talk about the Alien universe's specific take on the way space is inimical to human life in a very specific, quasi-Lovecraftian way.* Mild spoilers for the show, sort of?

To start: why does Weyland-Yutani have such a hard-on for terraforming as we see in Aliens and Romulus? Because it's literally the only way to establish colonies. I think that's what the show is telling us. You have to start with bare rock and poison, because if there's anything remotely capable of hosting an existing ecology, then it's an absolute fucking guarantee that ecology is going to be full of nightmares from top to bottom.

Where'd they come from? Well, either

• Nature's just out there doing what Nature does 😬😬😬

• Somebody else already got to all the planets and seeded them with the worst shit imaginable 😬😬😬

Whether it's the laws of biology themselves or some sort of malevolent, unknowable elder intelligence (did the xenomorph evolve somewhere utterly hellish or was it engineered on purpose?**) it pretty much doesn't matter: space is bad. Does it cast the Weyland-Yutani tagline in a slightly different light? "Building Better Worlds" — you damn well better, buddy!!

I'm not reinventing the wheel here, we all knew from jump that the Alien movies think space is very scary. But the way it's scary is something the new show seems interested in illuminating for us, at least a little, and I'm here for whatever they want to do (this is code language for I would like to see what the crew of the Maginot got up to before episode 1 started. right??? not so much because the show clearly started 2/3 of the way into a whole-ass other Alien movie, which we all know how those go, but I really want to know where they went and whether it was a whole bunch of other planets or just One Horrible One or what. disprove my thesis (such as it is) or don't, you cowards!!!!!!! by no means am I reinventing the wheel here; I am aware. I just find something compelling about what I imagine the Maginot's tour of exoplanetary horrors to have been like and it gives me the jibblies).

* Standard disclaimer applies re: Lovecraft himself being a Big Racist Bastard who also unfortunately had a genuinely good idea about horror stories; the stories we'll take, the man we'll toss in the garbage

** I'm aware Prometheus has an answer to this question, but in this house we do not recognize Prometheus as canon, nor did we even bother to see Covenant

#dadthoughts

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

I'm writing this the literal night before Quentin's first day at second grade. Felix has already made his return to preschool for his final year there; the end of an era approaches. I don't want to jinx it, but I think it's going to be a good year with a good group of kids. El Cerrito's got good schools, folks, or at least this one most certainly is!!

In order to get Felix ready to enter kindergarten next year, the main thing we really need to do is get him to put his poop in the toilet more regularly; right now he's die-hard potty-only. He is peeing into the toilet basically all the time, though, even when we're out and about. We're starting to ditch the portable potty: I carry a small collapsible stool instead, so Felix can just pee into the shortest urinal available (which oftentimes still aren't low enough to the ground for a 4-year-old); should the hour arrive where he needs an actual toilet to do his business, we've discovered he's confident enough to sit on one if he takes his pants/undies all the way off and one of us holds him up. I'm all for it; this is going to be the Year of the Toilet for him, I can feel it!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• This is an important one. (How Things Work)

• Here's One Weird Trick to instantly be better at something that oddly works more than you think it oughta, at least according to one person. (Big Think)

• Some Engineers have built a proof-of-concept flying device with no moving parts that's powered by sunlight alone; it's super tiny, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be useful. (Nature)

• An oceanic carbon removal idea is being tested soon. (Undark)

• Not only have The Scientists built a pretty good brain-computer interface that can detect intended speech, they thought to put a password on it so it doesn't accidentally read its users' private internal monologue. Honestly good for them! (Nature) (Paper)

• We've all seen videos of cockatoos dancing, and new research suggests a) more of them do it than we thought, b) they're doing it on purpose because they like it, and c) maybe we should play them more tunes in captivity. The paper has a really good illustration, btw. (Charles Sturt U) (Paper)

• DOGE was complete fucking bullshit from the start, but how much bullshit exactly is a figure that will almost certainly enrage you more than you were already, which for me is saying something. (Politico)

• "What our shelves of unread books teach us about ourselves" (Big Think)

• The Scientists have figured out where rogue waves come from. (The Conversation)

• Some Biomedical Engineers have made excellent progress on a concept they're evocatively calling "skin in a syringe," which would be a fantastic way to heal wounds without scarring. (Linköping U) (Paper 1) (Paper 2)

• The guy who thought 'Oumuamua might be an alien spacecraft says NASA could divert the Juno probe to get an up-close look at 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar comet that just showed up in our neighborhood. (Universe Today)

• A new study suggests that one key element to not being consumed by shame and guilt over something you did is to stop thinking about it so much. (Flinders U via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Nobody wants more plastic, so The Scientists have figured out a way to turn grapevine waste into a strong, transparent film that can be used for food packaging before biodegrading within a couple weeks in soil. (South Dakota State) (Paper)

• Regardless of cultural background, most of us faced with big complex decisions tend to ponder it ourselves rather than seek advice from others, which is fascinating when you think about all the different ways we've tried to structure societies as a species. (U of Waterloo via Science Daily) (Paper)

• Now that the lawmakers [cough] of our great nation [cough cough] are starting to embrace crypto, how should we be feeling about it? Guess: "Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy: It's bad and you should be alarmed." (How Things Work)

• The Scientists have been looking at two decades of satellite data and they're worried as hell about how dry the continents are getting (and how it relates to sea level rise). (Science Alert) (Paper)

• FBI Agent Fox Mulder's I WANT TO BELIEVE poster has a more complex backstory than you think. (Supercluster)

• The Scientists have established that elephants can use nonverbal gestures to communicate, making them the first confirmed non-primate species known to do it. (~$Discover) (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 an unfortunately forgettable album of knockoff Chemical Brothers beats 'n' riffs.

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)!