stir-fried random: navel-gazing on zines and me making zines and

[taichara]

We interrupt the usual nonsense for a different kind of nonsense --

I like making zines.

I like making zines even when actually putting them together gives me the internal screams layout and font choices are the devil, and I really like the idea of just letting them circulate; this is why whatever ones I could squinch into their wee upload limits are on a small nexus to be freely downloaded, and my uploads on itch.io are free or pwyw which is basically "free but I was avoiding The Discourse please humour me and just take the things".

I also discovered two things (three things?) as I've gone:

- I have a really really hard time reading or even grasping a lot of fancy/arty layout used in ttrpg zines; I have a similar but not usually quite~ as strong response to really heavily collage'd non-rpg zines

- making colour covers let alone colour anything else for something meant to be print-at-home gives me The Bad Feels because ink is a pain in the arse a lot of the time and I would like people to be able to print stuff

- I find I actually really like sticking with a black and white, basic layout with black and white or greyscale cover image in the middle of the cover. Nice, simple, neat, hopefully easy to print or at least easier.
(yes I know some of my things have colour spots, like the amulet pics in the beast beads zine or the colour text highlights in Wandering Jewel Moons/Lost Emblem Saga, etc)

Buuut because I'm me, I also sometimes get fifty pounds of brainweasels in a five pound bag that I'm simultaneously not making "real" zines by using a word processor and inserting images rather than pasting together master flats, and not doing ttrpg stuff "properly" by some weirder incoherent metric.

(this is the brainweasels at work.)

(they also like to chew through my brainstem about my love for minizines/pocketmods/quarter-size zines, because they are persistent and obnoxious weasels)

(... I should make a zine about brainweasels some time)

But! I want to make more zines! I especially want to add more non-ttrpg zines to the slate -- zines of some of my mini-fiction or a short story, zines about just Stuff (like Raspberry Ruminations) -- but there will be game things. Like a minizine of a mini-setting, maybe two, if I can just survive the tail end of summer and the world stops exploding and ...

Someday I'd love to mail out a few, but not sure about logistics there goddamn.

I'd like to say there was a point or a punchline to all this, but not really? Just needed to get the words into words, I guess?

But that's what this place is for, so --