Who’s gonna have time to write after the apocalypse?
If Mad Max has taught me anything it’s that we will spend all our time building crazy tricked-out muscle cars and foraging for petrol.
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There’s a walnut tree in the neighborhood that’s the basis for the squirrel economy for a least a kilometer radius. Almost all their activity involves moving walnuts away from the tree, burying the nuts, digging up the nuts and burying them somewhere else, repeat, sitting on our fence eating the nuts and dropping hulls on our patio bricks.
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Oak galls, contain tannin. Take a vessel, cut oak galls, a few rusty nails, a bit vinegar (or other sour), and a bit water. Leave to stay for a 4/5/6 of day’s.
This ink darkens after time.
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That was Australia though. We don’t know if things were better elsewhere, or if, shades of On the Beach, that was the only place where people survived.
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And clogs your pen.
Only coconuts to make a radio.
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Coconuts, the universal ingredient to salvage civilization. Not only for radios but for transportation too.
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Did you forget the part where having the knowing and the doing of many things gives you an absolute monopoly over Barter Town’s energy supply?
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What happens when the future changes so much that Max has an electric car with solar panels on the roof?
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It would be pretty tricky to build a postapocalyptic-scrounging story around an energy source that requires materials that are mostly common and cheap; but some very fiddly manufacturing techniques and infrastructure.
First five minutes: Blood crazed psychos in S&M-themed improvised armor sack, pillage, and burn the land in their quest for silicate minerals; which takes only about that long because the real challenge is finding locations without silicate minerals.
5 minutes to infinity: Lord Humongous discovers that even brutal beatings and intimidation cannot compensate for his slaves’ and minion’s primitive tools and complete ignorance of vapor phase epitaxy and the Czochralski process.
Critics say that the movie really fails to navigate this thematic transition and bogs down badly toward the end.
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So is the next project paper? Or possibly parchment? Because that’s not very easy either.
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Papyrus. Or maybe Comic Sans
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AHEM. Attend the Whackyweedia: The family Sepiidae, which contains all cuttlefish, inhabit tropical/temperate ocean waters. They are mostly shallow-water animals
Lamp black is already nanoparticulate, requires no grinding. The Chinese scholarly tradition relied on lamp-black ink. Also good for tattooing, or so I hear from friends.
And burns the parchment if the sour is too sour.[quote=“jhbadger, post:33, topic:98105, full:true”]
Papyrus. Or maybe Comic Sans
[/quote]
You MONSTER. Triggered now.
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The only issue with lampblack ink is that Meg wants to write with fountain pens and lampblack based inks will clog the nib, most east asian inks are optimized for writing with brushes or moveable type, rather than quills and eventually pens.
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Binders are an issue. Carbon black is hard to argue with as a pigment; and fairly easy to make even with crude apparatus; but it only sticks to paper in the rudimentary ‘fine dust on uneven surface’ sense, which gets very smudgy, very fast, unless you are absurdly careful with the result(just ask any laser printer whose fuser isn’t working properly…)
Assorted animal glues, plant gums, etc. all do the job; but if you don’t have a convenient supply of EOL horses; or nearby trees more typical of Sudan than California, that might not help you too much.
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So all you need to do after the apocalypse is hop on the internet and…
…hrm. Maybe you need to be able to create the internet first. But after that, it’s all right there!
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build your own Telecine, copy all of these to super 8. Easy!
What’s the clearance between the barrel of a 0.13-mm technical nib and the internal wire? If China black ink doesn’t clog that, a standard nib should be good to go.
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east asian inks aren’t just lampblack though, there’s animal glue or other binders in it.
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Now you tell me, after I burned all my animal glue and tree sap to make lamp-black.
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