Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will never take advantage of the Gemini bullshit Google keeps trying to promote inside all of its tools everywhere

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 32: BEACH PARTY

I made custom guitar picks. In case you wanted to know how it's gonna be from here on out!!!

Also, this will be the last Instant Band Night until November, so make sure you come to what might be the highlight of summer in your best vacation outfit and get ready to either create or witness something amazing onstage every 5-10 minutes!! There is, of course, no pressure to perform — you can just be a part of the best live music crowd on the entire West Coast. Yeah I said it

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

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

(Eventbrite) (Partiful) (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

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.

This one's going to be about cleaning products. Just in case you want to skip down to the next section, I figured you should know up front.

One of those refill stores opened up a while ago over on Solano Ave. You probably (hopefully) have one of these near you too, and I recommend stopping by: it might sound hippy-dippy to ditch your perfectly serviceable mass market prepackaged products for generics you'll have to bring a container from home to buy, but listen: I get a surprisingly nonzero amount of satisfaction out of filling a plastic tub that formerly held maybe a month's worth of dishwasher pods with a three-month supply of powder that works just as well, if not better.

We also keep two gallon jugs down in the garage: one for hand soap, the other for dish soap. The thing about these soaps is that they're a smidge too thick, which is actually great news: when you pour the soap into a dispenser (be it a hand pump or former single-use dish soap bottle), you can cut it with water; it'll work better and you use less of it, so that gallon jug lasts a truly ridiculous timespan. I've been tinkering with the ratio of water to dish soap specifically, and I think it might actually be a 1:1 ratio by volume of soap:water that works best? Plus the refill joint sells its dish soap in grapefruit-scented form, which is objectively the best dish soap smell. We're never going back to store-bought!!

#dadthoughts

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

We're rapidly approaching the end of first grade for Quentin and it's wild. He's had a great year and for this we are truly grateful; I don't have anything more profound to say at the moment but maybe something will happen when summer break begins (at which point he'll go right to summer day camp). Felix's preschool only takes a two-week break during the July/August transition, so he's got plenty of days left.

One activity I can freely endorse for parents of kids who are 3 and 7 or thereabouts: going to a fruit orchard. We hit up Airaya U-Pick Farm out in Brentwood, about an hour away under ideal traffic conditions (which proved to be exactly so in both directions, blessedly), and it was great. It turns out there is a bit of technique to picking a peach in a way that doesn't ruin the top of it, but once you get the hang of it, you're set. The kids' attention spans didn't quite go the distance, but they were perfectly happy to tramp around and marvel at the trees while Mavis and I succumbed to a bit of stonefruit madness; we might go again sometime? Apricot season will be starting soon. I'm just sayin'.

Fascination Corner

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

• Ed Zitron's got a good one for us this week with "The Era Of The Business Idiot" — long, but (as always) worth it. (Where's Your Ed At)

• An interesting-sounding new book says there's a lot of untapped potential in the microbial world to deal with the problems we've created in the uhhh general ecosphere of the whole planet. (Nature)

• Some Engineers are working on helpful farm robots for perennial crops and they've hit upon a great model: what if giant centipede? (IEEE Spectrum)

• Testing seems to show that The Machine (Generative Flavor) is capable of understanding emotions and (at least on paper) outperforming humans at interpreting emotional situations, which is ........ something. (U of Geneva) (Paper)

• "When memories from fiction become part of who you are: Scenes from books, movies and games sometimes carry as much weight as events from people’s own lives. We’re finding out why" (Psyche)

• The Scientists have hit upon a promising way to attract helpful algae symbionts to growing coral, which would be great for restoring all those reefs that keep dying. (Anthropocene)

• Not even the Trump people liked Elon, apparently. (The New Republic)

• Uhhhhhh: "Can Plants Hear Their Pollinators?" (Acoustical Soc of America)

• The Scientists have created a whole new class of materials they call "intercrystals" with some highly promising properties. (Rutgers)

• Hummingbird feeders have exerted visible evolutionary pressure on California hummingbirds, whose beaks are now a different shape than they were just 10 generations ago. (Science)

• MIT Technology Review does that "3 free articles a month" thing that makes it hard to actually read their stuff, but here's a summary of the main takeaways from the big series they just published on the energy demands of The Machine. (~$MIT Technology Review)

• Speaking of The Machine: "Why Does Google’s New Veo 3 AI Video Generator Love This Dad Joke?" (404 Media) Also, what? "Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline" (TechCrunch)

• The Scientists have developed contact lenses that let people detect infrared light. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• Rating systems that use stars vs numbers are interpreted differently, according to a new study. (Cornell) (Paper)

• "Scientists have figured out how extinct giant ground sloths got so big and where it all went wrong" (Florida Museum)

• At least one Cooper's hawk out there has learned to use traffic signal sounds to mask its approach to prey. (Frontiers)

• Longtime readers are going to have to brace themselves for an existential shock: it seems Some Engineers have created a material that can pull water out of the air and collect it without any kind of external energy input. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 😮😱🤯 (UPenn) (Paper)

• The Scientists are pretty sure that at the start of the solar system, Jupiter was twice the size it is now. (Caltech)

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 Laura delivers perhaps the most compact yet accurate take possible: "Tiger Jacket is definitely a spawn of Wilco."

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)!