#24MAG
twitter.com/24magazine:
Better late than never.
I am so glad to say that we’ve made another magazine for you. We’re like a machine that runs on sleep-deprivation! Issue 5 of #24MAG is live and entirely readable right here! Right here:
http://issuu.com/24magazine/docs/24mag_issue05
This issue contains the following: fiction, fact, photographs, charts & tables, interviews and wine reviews (sort of), genders & non-genders & other-genders, a monster, theater, plaid, rather a lot of poetry, non-Newtonian stress, the breaking dawn, process, blue hair, stories of suffering and survival, sexology, women of color, face paint, more blue hair, concussions, science, stats, truth, lies, love, diagrams, tinsel, sleep, the polar opposite of sleep, probably another monster, the transmediest of transmedia chains, and data, data, DATA! Somehow, some way, we’ve made our largest issue ever.
But why take my word for it? Verify this data for yourself.
I’ve known Sara Eileen Hames for about five years—but only Internet Explorer knows when exactly I first became aware of her presence in the world, right around the time I was 18 and first becoming aware of a lot of things.
Even though I didn’t even meet her until a year ago, and didn’t even know her name at first, she has been nothing short of a tremendous inspiration to me. I can’t help but reflect on this when I see all the evidence on Twitter of her commitment to #24MAG, long after the deadline passed. Her work on #24MAG, from start to finish, every time, makes me so grateful for her presence in my life, so grateful that because I know her I get to be surrounded by so many talented, warm people, and make something beautiful with them. It makes me excited for the things I might accomplish in the future, just the way reading her writing for the first time made me excited for the person I was becoming.
When I moved to New York in 2011 and didn’t really know anyone, people told me to reach out to Sara. But I waited, because I knew that sometimes the people you admire from afar fail to live up to your expectations. I couldn’t have been more wrong about Sara.
Sara is a role model—a concept I’ve been rolling around in my head since Andy asked me, not-quite-24 hours ago, “who are your gender role models?” for a piece he was writing for the magazine (My answer was Carol Queen), in addition to being a fantastic creator and editor who deserves to be getting lots of sleep. Why are you reading this? Get some more rest!
Aida, Ian, Rose Fox, Steven, and Molly (am I forgetting anyone else who stayed very, very long after I left?) are much newer people to my life, but in all of our interactions and in the look in your eyes when you stare at the magazine drafts on your computers, I can tell that you are very special people. People I am so lucky to be getting to know now. You’ve been working for hours and hours more than one should reasonably be working, so that others can go home, so that I can spend the evening in New Haven with my partner (the person who gave me a reason to know Sara, and therefore all of you, in the first place).
What an honor to contribute to Issue 5. What an honor to know all of you lovely people. I can’t wait to see more.
Love,
Rachel
This picture of Johanna and Ben is IMPOSSIBLY ADORABLE.
Too cute, y’all. Staaaahp.
- The standard length of a banana is 8 inches.
- POTATO CHIP CHOCOLATE EXISTS AND IT IS GLORIOUS (as expected).
- Toads in cowboy boots. Just…toads in cowboy boots.
- Wolfram Alpha is a thing of awesomeness and computational magic.
For this issue, I had planned on doing a photo-shoot + mini profiles on a set of people, and then doing a bunch of original content and collaborations (as well as editing, because overachievement is fabulous). When most people for the mini-profiles had to cancel and only one came through, I decided to shift gears and turn that mini-profile into a longer interview.
But you know what? INTERVIEWS ARE TIME-CONSUMING, Y’ALL, especially if you’re not relying on a strict Q&A style with audio being transcribed by someone else. It’s also a very different type of project than trying to extract awesomeness from your own brain.
So, here’s what went into it (written as a how-to):
- Prep-time: Figure out what the heck you’re even trying to do. Run it by #24MAG folks. If things sound groovy, contact the person beforehand to see if they’re interested and available. If you get their yay, sort out logistics, like place to meet and all that jazz, before the actual day of #24MAG. Ideally, you also prepare questions/know what you’ll be discussing. Ideally.
- Actual meeting: The day of, set aside some time to go meet up with said person. Photographs will be taken, chit chat will be had, and eventually the interview will begin. Remember to budget in time for the to-and-fro from your meetup spot!
- Interview-a-go-go: If you’re me, you’ll whip out your computer and transcribe and/or write notes on the spot as you and the other person talk. If you’re someone else, you might bring a recording device (probably a smart decision).
- Time to edit: When you get back to your home base, it’s time to start sorting your notes and quotations. Will you write the interview in a straight-up Q&A format? Do you want an introduction? How long will that be? How will you close the interview? You cannot possibly fit ALL that you talked about onto the pages, so what do you cut? What do you keep? What feels important, and what fits in with the theme? SO MANY DECISIONS! You may decide to flesh ALL your notes out before deciding what to cut…but that may be a time-consuming process that you won’t undertake again for later interviews. NOTE: This part will take a fair bit of time.
- Whip it into shape further: Edit, edit, snip snip, write, write, let others read it, check it out, kill all typos and repetitive ish. Also, connect with the person you interviewed and let them see it to check if they’re comfortable with your portrayal of your interaction. (That’s a nice touch! Bonus points!)
- Design-time: Send it to designers and let them make some magic!
- C’EST FINI
Still on the #24MAG train, everyone. Ian is asleep, Steven’s in another room on his computer, and I’m just providing moral support & documentation at this point. Sara & Molly are behind me working on the last bits of design work and copyediting. Hopefully we’ll have a finished product in a few hours? But we shall see. It promises to be worth the wait, either way.
Now that we’ve relocated to Sara & Steven’s apartment, some of us have had the glorious opportunity to shower. Personally, it made me feel human again. The only reason I conked out for a large part of the afternoon (after the deadline was past) was because I didn’t want to deal with my sweaty body and layers of clothing. As Kate put it, “I felt like I was made of human with slathered on human soup for skin.”
Close your eyes. Fish plastic forks out of the garbage disposal. Eat bagels with slices of cheese. Stare at the design team. Write a blog post.
These are the things you might do at #24MAG between the hours of 11am and closing time.
It’s my first time at #24MAG, the morning after, because I had to leave issue 4 early for work. I’m trying to be helpful, but mostly that means picking scraps of trash off the floor (they are gorgeous hardwood floors with the comfiest rugs you’ll ever nap on) and scooting out of the way of our editors and designers.
I’m too tired and distracted to do anything else, and it looks like Rose G is performing a puppet show with a couple of plastic dinosaurs over there, which I don’t want to miss.
“I think this is ADORBS,” Sara says from the design pod, looking over a page headlined “Data-Driven Drawing.”
We’re getting closer.
-Rachel C
Good morning, Lower East Side! Good morning, white shag rug that looks like it was made out of several Shiba Inu dogs! Good morning, tiny shreds of aforementioned rug all over my pants!
We are in the last hour of my first 24MAG experience, and I’m feeling fine! There’s stuff taped all over the walls, creative folks sleeping on every available surface, and more resultant tweets than I could have predicted, including one containing a video of a surprisingly jazzy lounge version of the Llama Song.
I spent the bulk of my time in this apartment asking people to talk about their gender, most of whom had never been asked to talk about their gender before. After a few false starts and protests - “My gender is boring!” – I recorded stories of gender-affirming experiences, hypotheses about how other contributors to the magazine would notice if their gender changed, and some sincere introspection about why questions like the ones I was asking felt so profoundly weird and uncomfortable to many of them! I think making people uncomfortable might be part of my creative process for the same reason that I usually make a weird face when someone is taking a picture of me – I’m pretty sure it’ll happen anyway, so I figure I might as well do it on purpose.
I also wrote two stupendously depressing poems. The first was my participation in the transmedia chain – something I’ve wanted to do since I saw the first one in Issue 1 - and the second was my riff on data gathering, which contained a companion piece on how I write poetry. I write poems that deal with raw, personal subjects and thoughts all the time – I’ve written maybe two cheerful poems in recent memory – but speaking frankly in prose about exactly what I’m talking about in the poems feels really different. I think it feels like when I’m talking about really personal things or things that are a giant downer in the context of poetry, it’s art, and repurposing feelings into something beautiful is sort of the point, but when you take away the imagery it’s just me, expounding on my insecurities and weird fantasies with no pretense that I’m creating something. Eek!
The important thing is that there’s a special sort of glee that comes with meeting someone whose brain clicks with your brain and you immediately know that you have to Do a Thing together – when before you’ve known each other ten minutes you’re having the kind of conversation that’s all, “yes, and!” “yes, and!” “yes, and!” and you’re building off each other’s ideas and falling over your own words in your hurry to say everything you can. Really, people that you wish you had an excuse to interview so you could just sit and listen to them talk. I’m absurdly lucky to have spent the past 24 hours surrounded by an apartment full of people like that, and about seven of those hours doing nothing but listening to them talk!
I was feeling concerned that this blog post was super rambly, but to be fair, none of us have slept much. There’s breakfast laid out, and people are groggily poking at their computers. The designers are plugging away like champions.
To conclude, please enjoy this photographic evidence of my earlier point re: stupid faces in photographs.
For anyone who’s followed us through this grand adventure in previous issues, you may have a sense of where we are right now. We are 45 minutes from our deadline. And we are so close. We have never been closer.
Our rules for 24 have maintain that it is more important to make the best magazine we can, and as the deadline approaches we always consider the question: do we choose to blow our deadline, or do we choose to release a less-than-finished magazine?
Every issue, we’ve had to ask this question. And every issue, we’ve chosen to blow deadline. With just over half an hour to go, we already know our answer.
But we are so close. We are seriously so close.
The room is slow and quiet now, everyone dozing and yawning as they work.
With some panicked rounds of plastic fork purchasing, some rounds of hot potato with baking sheets covered in biscuits, and a rather dramatic battle with foamy quinoa, breakfast has been served to our intrepid magazine staff. For the dairy & porcine-inclined, cream biscuits with sausages & gravy (red eye, of course, even without coffee in the sauce — it counts if the chef is caffeinated, right?). For the dairy-, meat-, or gluten-avoidant, spiced quinoa with almonds and apple compote. Ben valiantly made pot after pot of coffee, and people are slowly staggering around in the final stages of magazine-making. Steven assembled our masthead, Ian is working on our Table of Contents (written, as it might have been, by malcontents), and Sara, Molly, Abby, and Matt are carefully adjusting the layout of each page and color and font.
Emily L woke up briefly from her floor-slumber to name her comics, while Matt provided silly options for everything that sometimes won. We debated how to credit our interviewees in the Table of Contents, and we parsed how to name the small clusters of poems and reviews that have their own titles and should be presented as a whole.
After everyone has eaten, I’ll do the last rounds of kitchen work: cleaning up Leslie’s kitchen, packing up our leftovers, hauling out the last bits of trash that Kadish didn’t already purge.
Mermaid-hair-in-Chief: Sara Eileen Hames
Fancy-Hats-at-Large: Rose Jasper Fox
Grand Duchesses: Molly Macdonald, Lucia Reed
No Longer Made of Balloons: Johanna Bobrow
Not a Leopard: Casey Middaugh
Elastic Face: Ian Danskin
Leopards: Ben Cordes, Rose Ginsberg, Emily Kadish, Steven Padnick
Fire Engine: “Other Rose” Ginsberg
Magicians: Matt Obert, Abby Ringiewicz
Monsters: Emily Lubanko, Max Hames
Goblins: Johanna Bobrow, Kate Donahue, David Dyte
Ducks and Drakes: Kevin Clark, Alain Chan, Ben Cordes, Rachel Cromidas, Ian Danskin, Kate Donahue, David Dyte, Rose Jasper Fox, Meg Grady-Troia, Rose Ginsberg, Max Hames, Andy Izenson, Emily Kadish, Leslie Kwan, Emily Lubanko, Aida Manduley, Casey Middaugh, Steven Padnick, Jenny Williamson
Bork Bork Bork: Meg Grady-Troia
Special thanks to Save Water, Drink Panic, Don’t Your Files
This magazine is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
For supporting documentation, sources, and additional content, please visit http://24mag.org/issue-5
6 AM and it’s intricacy all the way down
Turns out illustrating for pretty much 24 hours straight is kind of the best?
More 24 mag progress shots!
As Ben put it, with two poets on staff we don’t need haiku this time around. But I wrote some anyway:
We’ve been having a thunderstorm this evening, the kind of lazy, summer thunderstorm I usually don’t expect to see until August. It is meandering past our windows with long, drawn-out thunderclaps. The rain is falling in sheet and drips rather than the usual drops. It’s the kind of storm that begs you to stand under it and threaten to drown. It’s the kind of storm that begs you to wiggles your toes in a puddle or splash a friend.
I did actually run out into the rain until I realized that, unlike those August thunderstorms, the temperature dropped precipitously until I was too cold to stay outside. I came in to tea and the heat of 20-off laptops. I also came back into the kitchen and started breakfast, chopping apples and pears to make a compote, roasting cauliflower and scribbling down my biscuit recipe so that I can share the burden of mixing a million batches in a few hours.
