https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/shopkeeper/ Home About Moonbound Shop From: Robin Sloan To: main newsletter Sent: March 2025 Shopkeeper What a dude What a dude Trespassers: The best time to establish alternative, non-algorithmic networks of communication & affinity was five years ago. The second best time is today! Over the years, I've distributed many zines through the mail. Those have been one-off productions, which is to say, pageants of minor chaos, always with the sense, as the last zine went out the door, of skidding into home plate. For a while, I have wondered if I could rectify this, making distribu tion via mail both (1) easy for me, & (2) reliable for you. I know it's possible -- we've been doing it for years with the olive oil company! So, that's all to say, I've opened a little shop, which is today stocked with two items: * A limited-edition poster print from the launch of Moonbound * The inaugural zine of a new era, combining a poster print with a mini-manifesto I'm Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in March 2025. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page. My goals here are manifold: 1. Make printing & distribution a regular, ongoing activity, i.e. not something I totally forget how to do between mailings. 2. Develop & refine this particular format, the 11'' x 17'' Risograph print, tri-folded -- unprecious, but not unspectacular. 3. Establish a real physical network. It's fun to mail things, & fun to receive mail. And this isn't only for fun. A premonition is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the creatures of the digital night: ghostly bots, cackling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punctuated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, beacons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network. So, I am planning ahead, contemplating new (old) systems that might be better suited to the media ecology & economy of the 2020s & beyond. No grand launch here -- just the quiet ignition, vroom, of a hopeful machine: https://www.robinsloan.com/shop/ I swear to you it looks even pinker in person I swear to you it looks even pinker in person A note on the printing method, for those unfamiliar. The Risograph is a duplicating machine designed & manufactured by the Riso Kagaku Corporation of Japan. It is spiritual heir to the mimeograph, designed for organizations that need to crank out a ton of printed material, every day, under their own steam -- think of schools & churches. Observing a Riso, big & beige in the corner of the office, you'd assume it was a copier, but in fact it works like an automatic silkscreen. For each new design, the machine cuts a physical stencil. Prints are produced not by blending microscopic CMYK droplets, a la inkjet, but rather by pressing thick ink (made from rice bran oil!) through that stencil. Because the Riso lays down real sheets of spot color, that color can have special physical properties, e.g. the ocular assault (impossible to capture with a camera) of Riso Fluorescent Pink. The Risograph has, over the past decade or so, developed a cult fol lowing among artists & zine-makers, thanks to the machine's balance of quality & economy. It's also because the printing process imposes all sorts of appealing limitations & imperfections -- little analog bulwarks against the march of digital perfection. No two Riso prints are quite the same. I really love this machine, & I'm proud to use it both for practical, business-y purposes (all the collateral for Fat Gold is Riso-printed) & also in this zine-y context. --------------------------------------------------------------------- My project is also, of course, an exercise in USPS fandom -- a way to revel in the capacity of this democratic infrastructure, its profound invitation. Now, I think it's important that admirers of the USPS (of which I am an extreme example) avoid the trap of Post Office Eternalism. It is very, VERY tempting to appeal to the institution's flashy constitu tional cameo, & to remind readers that it was founded before the United States itself ... but the truth is that the postal service has been, from 1775 onward, restless & contested. Form & function, scope & mandate: all in flux. So, rather than gesture meaningfully in the direction of the past, I think it's better -- more honest -- to simply state what we want from this institution here & now in the 21st century. Turns out, what I want is pretty close to what we have, because the USPS is the only distribution network in the United States that con nects everyone to everyone. If the mail is frustrating sometimes, it's because this is a huge, weird country, with a lot of long lonely roads in it. UPS doesn't deliver to those places. Amazon doesn't, either. The USPS does it all, everywhere. And its rates are still sort of shockingly low when you consider the scope &, yes, the speed of that service. There's more on this subject in my inaugural zine, but/&, I'll confess here that a central cata lyst for my excitement has been the Global Forever stamp: $1.65, & it carries an ounce of mail anywhere in the world. Anywhere in the WORLD! --------------------------------------------------------------------- The best time to establish alternative, non-algorithmic networks of communication -- to forge durable links in physical space -- to insist upon the democratic necessity of a muscular, universal postal ser vice -- was five years ago. The second best time is today. From the lab, Robin P.S. You'll receive my next newsletter in early April. March 2025 I'm Robin Sloan, a fiction writer. The main thing to do here is sign up for my newsletter: [ ] [Subscribe] This website doesn't collect any information about you or your reading. It aspires to the speed & privacy of the printed page. Don't miss the colophon. Hony soyt qui mal pence