🌌🧠 Action Potential (from Galaxy Brain) #4
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.
It is easy for us, as writers, to justify silence with the excuse that we don’t have anything original to say about what’s happening. Just as easily, we can deflect by saying that current events are not our usual subject matter. We can even fool ourselves into feeling noble by claiming that we’re leaving room for more important voices to be heard.
All of these excuses are abdications. We’re a couple of white people; even if we speak from behind an organization, our voice is a white voice. To say nothing would be an act of complicity. To try and submit our own “unique perspective” would be trite and self-serving. So let’s briefly be clear about where we stand:
Black lives matter. All cops are bastards. Police violence is the cause of this unrest, and no amount of blame shifting should let us lose sight of that fact.
All speech is political speech, even if most of our speech is deeply frivolous. It’s tempting to believe that because we’re a zany creative organization we can sidestep our politics, but that’s just not the case. Instead, we’re endeavoring to turn our frivolity towards good whenever we can.
What’s New
- Our flagship zine, Adult Juice Box, has a new t-shirt out with all profits going to the Anti Police-Terror Project. We hope you’ll help us support a vital organization. https://teespring.com/all-cabernets-age-beautifully?pid=2&cid=2397
- We’ve released Hello Caller, an app that helps streamers and podcasters take live phone calls with minimal setup and a professional-quality workflow. You may remember that we’d been testing this with Oliver Blank’s The One Who Got Away, as well as a radio show called Favorite Flowers, run by Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin. Both shows are running call-in segments regularly, and we encourage you to tune in if you want to hear a sample of what’s possible with Hello Caller—or if you just want something neat to watch or listen to.
- We’re publishing new episodes of Thought and a Chaser fortnightly. Our latest episode is a history of the infamous Gallo family in American wine, and a look at the intertwined stories of beer and baseball. It’s almost educational, if you squint and tilt your head slightly.
What does a zineshop do when they can’t print?
It’s now been nearly three months since the Bay Area Shelter-In-Place advisory went into effect. While some of those restrictions are starting to change, we haven’t yet worked out a process for printing that makes us and our families feel safe. Are we being overly cautious? Maybe, but we’re in this for the long haul. We want to build Galaxy Brain into not just a lifestyle business but a lifetime business, and that means sticking around for as much of that lifetime as possible.
The point here is that we haven’t printed in three months, and there isn’t a clear path towards us doing so anytime soon. In the grand scheme of current events, this is such small potatoes that you can’t even make a fry out of them, but it still presents us with a challenge:
If you came into existence to make zines, what do you do when your primary zine-making tool is inaccessible?
One thing we do is make software and podcasts, like the projects we mentioned above. Those are great, we’re going to do more of them, but they don’t really fill the same void in our souls that printing creative, informative work does. We call ourselves not just a print shop but also a publisher, and when the word “publisher” is used in relation to software, that often means a special type of software: Games.
In the same way that “printed material” can span from massive, high-quality art books to glossy first-print novels to newspapers to zines, “video games” as a category spans from AAA multi-million dollar multiplayer first person shooters all the way to text-based dungeon crawlers made by one person.
So what’s the video game equivalent of a zine? There’s a number of contenders, but if we were to look at the culture around all the various types of video game, and create a Venn Diagram for each compared to the culture around zines, the nearly-perfect circle would be Interactive Fiction.
Interactive Fiction (often called IF) is, in its barest form, the digital equivalent of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. Interactive Fiction has a history all the way back to the early days of computing, and is only barely beat by “Space Simulator” as the oldest genre of video game. IF is what it says on the tin: A genre of game driven by the narrative story, and by the player making choices that guide the story.
So, given what Galaxy Brain wants to put into the world and what Adult Juice Box exists to do in the world of wine, and given that printing and shipping zines isn’t strictly available to us right now, we’ve decided that the next issue of Adult Juice Box is going to be an Interactive Fiction game.
AJB Issue 6 will be a guided interactive narrative where you as the player navigate the world of growing and making wine. Along the way, you’ll learn what goes into vineyard management, what goes into wine production, and how the decisions made all year round affect what goes into the glass in front of you. You’ll hopefully come away with a newfound sense of wonder that good wine happens at all, and some slight encouragement to explore what interests you across the world of wine.
Our Patreon patrons will get early access to the game, and we’ll be dropping regular missives here about how the game is being made behind the scenes. The first thing we get to share with you is our chosen toolset for AJB6: Ink. Ink is an open-source IF toolkit released by Inkle, a game studio producing incredible, award-winning interactive fiction games. Ink’s flexibility and community is a large portion of why we chose it, but we would be lying by omission if we didn’t also mention Robin Sloan’s video game development newsletter as a point of inspiration. We highly encourage adding his weekly development log to your stable of newsletters.
We don’t have a target release date for AJB6, other than a desire to be working on something different by the end of the Summer. We really think this is going to be something special in the world of wine, and we hope you’ll follow along at our Patreon. In any case, we will definitely be announcing the final release here.
That’ll do it for this week. Be well, stay safe, be excellent to one another.
Galaxy Brain