For those of you who can’t get down to the Armadillocon art auction this weekend, there’s two of our clay tablets up for sale on eBay.com. There’s #6 and #14, two of the most readable of the tablets I printed.
The auctions are only up for five days, so start your crazy bidding now.
If you would rather handle the product in person, and maybe bite a corner to see if it’s genuine clay, then this weekend at Armadillocon would be the ticket.
It’s only two days until Armadillocon and Space Squid issue nine is nearly ready for its debut. The PDF of our electronic version is about 90% completed. The photocopier (Sanjay2) is partially working, so I will likely run off a very limited run of the PDF for distribution at the party on Saturday. Yes, there’s a Space Squid room party! Could anything be more exciting?
You know what’s more exciting! It’s the fifth anniversary of Space Squid party! Yay!
Anyways, the clay tablet run of Space Squid has got a bit of a buzz, so I thought I would show you what it looks like.
That represents an afternoon of grueling clay working.
Here’s one fresh off the template and just beginning to dry in the 100 degree Texas heat.
There was a lot of clay left over, so I made a little token of the fifth anniversary of Space Squid.
The clay block to the left is a miniature tablet with a piece of J.M. McDermott’s story on it, because we had to push it to the next issue and it’s too bad that he couldn’t be a part of this.
And then I decided, hey, with all this extra clay, why don’t I make my own panelist nameplate for the con?
You have to figure someone is a programming pro if they show up to the con with their own nameplate.
And this is what the clay tablet looks like when it’s dried:
For Public Release: 8/25/10
Contact: Matthew Bey, Publisher and Communications Director, Space Squid
email: squishy-at-spacesquid-dot-com
Literary Magazine to Print on Dead Media — Clay Tablets
As digital media threatens traditional print periodicals with economic and cultural obsolescence, some magazines are returning to their ancient roots. Austin-based science fiction and humor magazine Space Squid will print its ninth issue on clay tablets.
“Print is dead,” says Space Squid design editor Steve Wilson. “So there’s no reason not to print on the deadest media available. There isn’t much difference between dead media and really, really dead media.”
Faced with steep printing costs and the bulk of their readership downloading the online PDF of the magazine, the editors of Space Squid made the decision to return to clay tablets. Space Squid communications editor Matthew Bey says, “Given the choice between printing 2000 paper copies that won’t last ten years, or thirty copies that can last six thousand years, it’s an easy choice to make.”
“Sometimes archaic media just works better,” says Space Squid art editor David Chang. “In some respects, clay is a superior recording medium. It has more warmth and depth of tone than paper.”
The clay tablets are unfired as was common practice in Sumeria. Like their historical antecedents they are dried in the sun, giving them a startling durability. “Practically speaking, these tablets could last until the end of the world itself,” says Chang. “Unless someone drops them.”
The Space Squid clay tablet is the first major cultural application of clay tablets since the collapse of Egyptian colonialism in the first century A.D. The tablets are printed using a unique technology that allows multiple impressions of the same text, despite recording on a medium that pre-dates Gutenberg by thousands of years.
Says Bey, “If the Sumerians had been as clever as Space Squid and developed a similar clay-printing technology, they would have sparked the enlightenment era a thousand years before the birth of Christ.”
The clay tablet issue contains most of the content familiar to readers of the paper version of Space Squid. Side one has a seal-imprint with the image of a squid and the name “Space Squid” in phonetic cuneiform. The rest of the front-face features a short story by Kevin Brown titled “Hunting Bigfoot,” hand-lettered in the English alphabet using a wedged stylus in the same manner as the Sumerian scribes. The back side contains an off-color joke and advertisements for the Drabblecast podcast, the movie Bikini Bloodbath, illustrator David Johnston, Krakatoa Shirts, and a live performance of the graphic novel Intergalactic Nemesis.
Space Squid will print less than 15 clay tablets. Only five tablets will go up for auction at the Armadillocon art show, open to members of the Armadillocon science fiction convention. One tablet will go up for sale on eBay. The remaining tablets are reserved for private collections.
Space Squid, which is known for printing edgy and often humorous fiction, has a history of pushing boundaries. In 2009 Space Squid staff experimented with zombie-killing techniques, using actual weapons and actual heads, posting their scientific results on Youtube.
A digital PDF of Space Squid issue 9, with far more content, will be available at spacesquid.com.
For more information:
Space Squid:
http://www.spacesquid.com/
Video of clay tablet printing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gg6oNMB6Fg
Photos of clay tablet printing:
http://www.revolutionsf.com/bb/weblog_entry.php?e=2539
Armadillocon:
http://www.armadillocon.org/
Zombie head bashing experiment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSd7SbO9I8U
A couple entries ago I showed you how to make a clay tablet magazine using stupid words and pictures. Wouldn’t you rather watch how to do it without having to do any stupid reading? Editor D Chang put together a great video that walks you through the process. Also you get to see my awesome new mustache.
Let’s give you a little peek behind the scenes for how things are coming together for Space Squid issue 9.
Newcomer (or at least new to Space Squid) Morgan Wilson just completed an illustration for Brian Beise’s story "The Truth About Amnesia."
I mentioned a little earlier that Space Squid will publish this issue in clay tablet format. This afternoon I made the first prototype in this series. So why don’t I walk you through the process?
Of course I have no intention of hand-copying an entire print run of clay tablets, impressing each stroke of each letter one by one. Instead, I plan on cheating, by imprinting the issue only once onto modeling clay, making a master template, and pressing the master into multiple copies of clay tablet.
I start by pressing modeling clay into a mold and rolling it flat with the only cylinder I had on hand, a AA battery.
Yes, I am just that ghetto.
Then I carved a stylus from a stick I found in the backyard. The wedge at the tip is functionally not dissimilar to the styluses used by Sumerian scribes to press little cuneiform wedges in clay tablets.
Using a cuneiform-esque font, I wrote out the first half of Kevin Brown’s short story "Hunting Bigfoot." This will become the template for the front face of the issue.
With the text completed, the next step is to make a polyester-resin mold. Pictured is the casting resin, catalyst, and measuring cup.
Sixty-four drops of catalyst are mixed vigorously into the resin. The catalyst produces heat which helps the thermo-setting plastic to turn solid.
The resin pools over the mold and seeps into every crevice.
The next morning, with the help of the catalyst and the hot Texas nights, the resin is perfectly clear and hard.
The resin shrinks just a little as it hardens, so it is pops out of the metal tray relatively easily.
Getting the modeling putty off the plastic is a little harder.
Luckily the impressions of the characters are not particularly delicate.
First, I discover that a little bit of rubbing alcohol and a toothbrush don’t quite do the trick of removing the modeling clay.
Neither does a lot of rubbing alcohol.
Or dish soap.
But boiling hot water does the trick marvelously.
Because this is thermo-setting plastic and not thermoplastic, the master template retains most of its rigidity despite the high temperatures.
Each character impression is captured with a high degree of accuracy.
Because I’m lazy, I bought clay from the store instead of spending hours digging it out of the backyard and processing it and cleaning it of rocks. The store bought clay simply fits straight into the mold.
The template presses into the clay.
Revealing the story, in a form about as legible as the original Sumerian clay tablets.
The Space Squid seal which I mentioned earlier goes in the blank square in the corner.
It says "Space Squid 9" in phonetic-numerical Ugaritic cuneiform.
The whole tablet goes into the Texas sun which is scarcely cooler than the sun-baking process of Mesopotamia.
Next step is to finish the template for the other side, which includes the finale to the "Hunting Bigfoot" story, advertisements, and jokes if there’s room. Essentially what you usually get with a Space Squid issue.
Why haven’t I fired up the grill more often? I made a special trip to a carneceria and bought a strip of bright-red marinated fajita meat.
Meat should always cook over an open flame. It brings together the two great elements of the human condition: flesh and fire.
At a friend’s backyard barbecue, I had some of the super-fancy Wholefoods sausage. The top sausage has dried cherries mixed in. That’s what the dark spots are.
You would think the sweetness would be revolting, but it meshed with the pork and the grease with intriguing effects.
Julia my food-frakking deputy left some fillets of freezer-burned salmon at my house, so I decided to make them into grav lax, which is Swedish for "fish from the grave." Traditionally it’s made by packing the salmon in salt and spices (dill in this case), and burying it in the ground for a week. In my case I just used the refrigerator.
I was shocked to find that the salt and the dill flavor penetrated all the way to the center of the cut after just three days. I would have thought that flesh would be less permeable.
They sold this gelatin cup at Baguette House, the Vietnamese sandwich shop. It could very well have been pistachio jello made with coconut milk.
I have never seen the tamarind version of the ice cream sacks.
If only it were filled with chili and salt. I prefer the eggnog flavor.
A buddy has a large canister of mineral water. So I fetched some chocolate syrup and milk and made some egg creams.
Like all egg creams is was that fascinating combination of delicious and vile.
Speaking of vile, I had thought that these "Huevitos," subtitled as "candy-coated chocolate flavor eggs," were your standard malted milk balls.
They tasted more like stale malted milk balls that used rancid rum instead of milk.
The "Cielo" bottled water is made right here in Austin! Or at least bottled here, I don’t think they burned hydrogen molecules to make this.
The label says that it has "fours times the dissolved oxygen of other waters." What does that mean? It’s H2O4??? Are we expected to breath it or keep goldfish in it? It tasted pretty much exactly like tapwater, so its claim to being local is pretty credible.
This week I went to La Mexicana bakery on South First. They have a new menu which includes torta ahogada, which means "drowned sandwich." It’s supposed to be a signature of the Jalisco culinary style, but I’ve never seen it offered anywhere else. As you can see, it’s a fairly normal torta, except it’s drowned beneath salsa.
Yes, it was very difficult to pick up and eat, but it may have been the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in a long time. Partially this is due to the superb barbacoa they serve at La Mexicana which is easily one of the three best barbacoas in town. My serving had a tiny, splintered shard of tooth enamel in it, so you know it’s authentic.
And of course there were the obligatory pastry purchases. The flat one here is a fried cookie of some sort. On top of it is a puff-pastry with lemon goop inside.
This other pastry appears to be a spherical cake with goopy and sticky frosting smeared along the outside.
It was like a tragically inverted twinkie.
Before too long I can tell you why this is significant:
Helmut Finch is an American horror writer who published short fiction in pulp magazines in the first few decades of the twentieth century. He is most known for the "Biter" series of thematically linked psychological horror tales. In 1996 he was posthumously awarded the "Son of Wisconsin" medallion by the Lion’s Club of Chippewa Falls.
I just got back from Highland Mall where I did a time-lapse video of the purple martins that roost there.
And incidentally, the sunset. It’s part of a larger work I’m doing that involves sunset time lapse videos. It’s the ten minutes every day that Texas is beautiful, so I can’t let that go to waste.
There were plenty of people there watching the purple martins, probably a couple dozen. There were dudes with dates, families with children, and senior citizens with lawn chairs.
It probably has to do with the TV news story about the purple martins at Highland Mall. It probably wasn’t because of the Austinpost article I wrote on the subject.
I thought I would show you how I spent my last 30 minutes. I had to get this Donnelly rearview mirror separated from its mounting bracket. In theory, the spring-latched bracket should have been a snap to disengage, but I spent a long time googling the issue and poking at it before I discovered the trick. I even looked up the original patent sketches, patent number 4936533, and that proved even more confusing.
So to keep you from spending the same amount of time trying to disassemble a rear view mirror, I’m going to show you the trick right now.
The secret is to ignore the spring latch at the front, that’s just a decoy. You’re actually aiming for the spring at the back. Slip a small screwdriver or stiff rod through the access hole, and press it against the back spring while putting pressure on the mount to slide forward.
The arrow points at the access hole.
Here’s what it looks like inside. The arrow is the path your screwdriver will have to travel to unlatch the spring.
And one more photo so you can get an idea what’s in there.
