🌌🧠Action Potential #3
Hello! This is the email newsletter for Galaxy Brain, a creative studio, small press, and Risograph printer in North Beach, San Francisco. Action Potential tends to contain a lot of “here’s what it’s like to run a tiny artistic business” along with a touch of “here’s what we’ve done lately”. It’s published on roughly a biweekly cadence, depending on when we have something to say. If that sounds good, then wonderful, because you’re already subscribed.
In these uncertain times, our first instinct was to batten down the hatches. In early March, we locked the door to our shared studio space with some awareness that we might not be back for some time. Weeks have passed since we last printed something. Animal, our trusty Risograph, lies fallow. In the absence of certainty about when we’d be back, we waited. We have been quiet, listening for a sign.
We listened for about a week, and then we said “fuck this”. We may not be able to put ink on paper, but we will not be stopped from making a mark. There are things to be done! We are doing them. What remains is for us to tell you about them.
What’s New
- Weeks ago, Friend of Galaxy Brain™ Oliver Blank came to us with an idea for a live-streamed version of his podcast, The One Who Got Away. We exist to make art happen, so we built a custom web app we call Hello Caller to help him take phone calls live on stream. It was a rousing success. We’ll be helping out with more of these performances, and we’re also polishing Hello Caller so that we can release it for other podcasters and streamers to use.
- Galaxy Brain partner Philip braved the wilds of North Beach—overgrown and crawling with coyotes as it is—to bring home some of our printed goods so he could resume making shipments for people who order from our online store. We are offering bundles of our available zines and prints at a steep discount.
- Our podcast, Thought and a Chaser. We describe its interests as “language, libations, and logistics”, which is a broad enough category to nearly satisfy us. The latest episode includes a deliriously-researched history of Anchor Brewing and a crash course on the chemistry of tropical fruit flavors in alcohol.
- In mid-March we released Victory Pic, a Slack app that makes it dangerously easy for you and your Slack teams to take selfies at the slightest provocation. We use it to celebrate and commiserate in equal measure. It’s helped us quite a bit as we adjust to remote work, which is distinctly lacking in spontaneous comradely goofing-off.
A Vision of The Future
In the continued interest of flipping the double-bird at the abyss we’re all staring into, we completed a visioning exercise recently. We realize that “visioning exercise” somehow sounds wishy-washy and corporate and intolerably Goop-y all at once. That’s not us. We are as scrappy as a neighborhood coyote, and we thrive on concrete detail.
We got the exercise from Zingerman’s, an unusual Ann Arbor business group we admire. Zingerman’s started as a deli, but has since branched out to multiple restaurants, a bakery, a mail-order service, a management training firm(!) and more. They swear by visioning as a tool for defining what a project’s success will look like at a given point in time, from the persective of the people working on that project.
Zingerman’s has a vision that stretches many years into the future. We decided to look forward to 2021. What are we doing then? What do we want to have already done? What does it feel like to do our work? We may eventually publish our answers to those questions somewhere. For now, I want to tell you a few things I can see in our future, as hazy as it is:
We’re printing zines. We’re making art and tools for other people to make art with. We’re holding events. We’re taking long lunches at the diner, in between getting things done. It’s fun, and it’s hard work.
The point of making a vision is to pick a spot on the distant horizon, and in doing so, to make up your mind that you’re going to get there. As strange a time as it is, we’re looking into the future, and we’re taking steps to get there. This is the only way to escape the present, I believe. We hope you’ll walk with us; we’d love to tell you what we can see.
Thank you for opening this email and reading our newsletter, long as it’s been since the last one. We’re adjusting our output to fit the new shape of our lives, but we are as dedicated as ever to making interesting things and, crucially, telling you about them.
If during the course of this email you realized that we might be the right people to help you with your next project or idea, drop us a line. We welcome collaborators, accomplices, and co-conspirators.
— Liam and Philip