🌌🧠Action Potential #1
Howdy. This is Liam and Philip, the people behind Galaxy Brain.
You’re reading this because you supported Galaxy Brain in some way over the past few months. You bought a zine. You subscribed to Adult Juice Box. Maybe you’re one of the true believers that attended an event and drank wine with us. “Thank you,” is what I want to say here, though it seems like too small a phrase given the sentiment for which it stands.
Six months ago we were xeroxing the second issue of Adult Juice Box at our day jobs, in a blatant misuse of company time and materials. Now we have a physical location, a large and fussy Risograph, and most surprising to us, a publishing business. We’re having a blast, and it's only possible because of your support. Thank you for that.
What's New
- We've released a new zine! 13032 Sky Valley Road by Margo Stern is a story about a Southern California house and the stories that made it a home. It's on sale now.
- In case the previous link did not reveal this: we finally launched an online store!
We’re excited to do even more in 2020. One of the reasons we can do more seems simple at first glance: we can now print in yellow.
Printing In Yellow
In September, before we’d even bought our Risograph (whose name is “Animal”, by the way), Philip and I commissioned three designs by three artists to celebrate Adult Juice Box becoming a Riso publication. We gave the artists free reign to do whatever they wanted within the Riso ink colors we planned on keeping stocked, and the pieces they sent us are absolutely beautiful. We told our patrons they would be seeing the pieces as soon as we had all the colors.
It’s now December, and you haven’t seen them yet. Nobody has. Animal has been up and running for almost three months, but we only gained the capacity to print these pieces this last week. To understand why, we need to talk about Riso color drums, the amateur Riso tech community, and the color yellow.
Each color you print on a Risograph needs a discrete part called a color drum. Each drum contains a tube of a particular color of ink, a screen that mounts stencils, and a pump mechanism that sprays ink out evenly through those stencils. This sounds messy, and it is—a Risograph a mechanical abstraction that obscures the ink-splattered work of cutting stencils and pressing pigment through them. The drum is the heart of that abstraction, and its self-contained swappable nature is what makes it feasible to create multi-color prints on a Risograph. To switch colors, you unmount and remount drums on a rail system in the middle of the machine. Each drum comes in a bulky carrying case, and loading one looks like putting a torpedo into a tube.
We buy color drums used, which often means those drums used to contain one color but were converted to another. Converting a drum means attempting to flush enough of the new ink color into the drum that the old color (left in the pump, saturating the screen, globbed onto the scrapers) no longer remains. This might involve cracking the whole mechanism open, running entire reams of paper through the machine, or both. The Riso community helpfully documents their hedge magic in a wonderful wiki, and you can take a look at some articles to see what a pain in the ass converting a color drum can be.
Anybody who’s mixed paint can tell you that a little bit of a dark pigment easily taints a much larger amount of light pigment when mixed. Some conversions are harder than others, and yellow is among the hardest. This is why, as we discovered, many drum dealers will say “we don’t do yellow”. We shopped around a long while for a yellow drum and finally lucked out on a drum that somebody had already started converting from green. It looked like a streaky tie-dye disaster. It was kind of cool, actually, but not practical. Here’s an example:
This past week we ran about 1000 sheets of legal paper through Animal to flush out old green ink and saturate the drum’s screen with yellow ink. We’re finally getting usable results, and we’re excited to finish the prints we commissioned this Autumn.
We’ll be sending these prints to the backers we owe soon, and the remainder will be available for sale in our store.
Thanks, Again
By being subscribed to Action Potential, you’ll get a weekly-to-monthly stream of articles like the above, as we pull the curtain way back to show the messy details behind running Galaxy Brain. You’ll also get to hear about new projects before anyone else, and for those two reasons we hope you’ll stay subscribed. If this newsletter isn’t your cup of ink, no worries, and you still have our eternal thanks for supporting us this far.
— Liam and Philip