The Fateful Mat

Nick Coleman and I were eating pie and drinking coffee at the truckstop outside of Madison. This was pretty typical behavior for us. For some reason, the topic of starting a Web publication came up.

It might have been because the Web was all the rage. Or it might have been because we were nostalgic for our high school publication, the Liberator.

But it was here, on the back of a truckstop placemat, that we scooped out the vague, messy pile of stuff that eventually cooled and became Flak Magazine. Since its inception, Flak has been touched and shaped by many hands. But there's something comforting about looking at the source document — clumsy and random as it may be — that got the voyage started.

Both sides of the placemat rest below, transmitted around the world and rendered crude and unreadable by the wonders of modern technology.

— James Norton