🌌🧠 Action Potential #5
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 the words of the inimitable Daniel Johnston: “Hi, how are you?”
Oh, us? We’re good, thanks. I will slip out of the “corporate we” for a moment here (ah, so much more comfortable) to remark upon how being part of an organization (this one) whose mandate is “make and facilitate the making of art” can be an incredible motivator to do new things, look forward, and keep going; even as the cycle of days becomes ever more familiar.
To that end, this morning we attended a virtual Risograph Basics workshop given by Kate Bingaman-Burt and Leland Vaughan at Outlet PDX. We’re pretty savvy about the basics of Risography (which is good, since we… run a Risograph), but Kate and Leland are, crucially, much more experienced than us at teaching the basics. One day we’ll get back to giving workshops, and we’ll be more equipped now that we’ve watched these masters in action.
In the meantime, we highly recommend their next virtual workshop if you’re at all interested in Risography. It’s a tremendous bang for the buck, and the folks at Outlet know what they’re doing.
We’ll also take this moment to recommend the Quarantine Book Club series of events. You’ve just missed seeing Dr. Chuck Tingle, but we can assure you that spending an hour with him was delightful, and… intimate.
What’s New
- We’re running a Very Official Study on how drinking habits have changed during shelter-in-place. The preliminary results are remarkable, and will surely be fodder for one banger of a zine. We’d love you to take the survey, and we promise we won’t judge you, no matter what you’re drinking.
- We’ve begun another study on email newsletters, RSS readers, “read later” services, and other ways that people accomplish the pervasive task of reading on the Internet. This is related to a possible software project we’re pretty excited about. It might be the nerdiest thing we’ve ever done. Take the survey if that piques your interest, and we may follow up with more information. 😘
- Our own Phildini wrote a lovely piece about our software development philosophy, heavily influenced by what we’ve learned making artisanal (that’s right, I said it) web software over the past half year. Spoilers: the way we want to design for the web is almost nothing like how we’ve been doing it professionally for the past ten years.
- Every two weeks we produce The One Who Got Away with Oliver Blank live on Twitch, a livestreamed compilation of voicemails and calls responding to the question, “what would you say to the one who got away?” Here’s a behind-the-scenes tidbit: Ollie doesn’t always know what we’re about to hear, in terms of the stories or the swelling ambient background music, and sometimes (eerily often!) a music cue will perfectly coincide with an emotional shift in somebody’s voice, giving us all chills that absolutely nobody planned for. We’ll be live once again on Saturday, July 25th at 7PM.
- Thought and a Chaser, our semi-educational podcast, continues apace, and is getting steadily better, if we may toot our own horns. Our latest episode is about how a particular Japanese manga has had a tremendous influence on the modern wine world, and about some of the many branches of the natural wine movement—which is weirder and older than you think.
Thank you for reading this humble newsletter, and continuing to bless our ridiculous venture with your notice. We’re at a size where it’s no longer really feasible (or useful, since we’re not data hoarders and or hardcore marketing nerds) for us to know everybody who reads our newsletter, interacts with us on social media, or reads our zines. There’s a good chance, however, that if we had the inclination, we could draw a map of our audience and understand everybody’s friends-of-friends relationship to us.
This is a magical place to be—we don’t know all of you, but we certainly know someone who knows you, and can vouch for you being amazing and completely our kind of weirdo. We often feel disconnected, as does everybody right now, but at the same time we’re in the middle of a beautiful web of likeminded people. We can sense its vibrations if we close our eyes and reach out our fingers, and we can feel a little less alone.
Let me once again briefly drop the plural, and say what I mean: I bet you’re cool, and I’d love to get an email telling me what you’re feeling and what you’re excited about right now. It may not be obvious that if you reply to one of these emails, we’ll get it, and read it, and maybe respond. Your inbox is not a cold dead place!
We hope this newsletter has brought you a little joy, and we hope to hear from you. Be well, stay safe, and keep going, fellow pilgrims.
Galaxy Brain