Remember last year how @HOBO arranged a whole zine trade thing? That was fun right? Let’s do it again!!
There are lots of ways to make zines. The traditional way to do this is to draw on a piece of paper, then photocopy it a bunch and fold it into a little magazine. Here’s a template that should give you an idea of how you can make one:
The other way is to make it digitally. The easiest and most fun way to do this is to use Electric Zine Maker - a tool I’ve used a bit and found to be quite awesome:
Either way, if you end up printing/photocopying your zine, then you’ll want to fold it too. I really like this image showing the process of folding it:
And that’s just the simple template! You can get real wild with these, as you might see in Electric Zine Maker. I prefer the little baby ones though myself.
If you’ve never made a zine before, here are some tips:
You don’t have to have a good idea
You don’t have to have any ideas at all, in fact
Everyone can make a zine
The fact that they exist at all makes them cool by default
Just copy and paste some images from Online and put weird text over them!! that’s a zine!!!
If you would like some inspiration, here is one that I made:
Anyway, let’s make some cool zines again!! Folks going to the meetup: let’s do an exchange in person! we can have a folding party there too. Then everyone can upload their sick-ass zines after the meetup and we can do a virtual exchange too.
@daphaknee remembered that last year there was a co-working session, so let’s do that again!! Basically we’ll just join a voice chat and/or share what we’re doing, be that digital or physical. Or not share! Just coworking is nice and incredibly productive in my experience
I’m figuring Friday evenings are probably the best for most people, here’s a quick poll to see which Friday
Friday the 13th (oooo scary)
Friday the 20th (oooo normal)
0voters
Feel free to pick both if you don’t have a preference. I’ll drop a discord link here once I figure out what discord to do it in, also!
I’ve got an idea but it remains to be seen if I can pull anything out of it (i think it will be good though)
VOICE CHAT WITH BUTTS I’ll let free company people know what’s up so people don’t pop in the chat being like WHAT CONTENT WE RUNNING IS IT TIME FOR MAPS
Looks like it’s gonna be Friday the 13th!! I’m just gonna say we’ll start at 2023-10-14T01:30:00Z and I’d expect it to go for several hours as people come and go.
holy shit i actually finished my zine, then shrug said ‘im writing some cringe ah ah prose’ (actual true and honest quote they completely said this are you kidding… hoohoohoho)and i was like now i wanna write a poem maybe ill make two zines MAYBE no promises WE’LL SEE i just made this one so fast and actually stuck with my idea? this is a major improvement over last year. by the time im dead ill be able to keep an appointment!
I tried using scribus to make a zine, but the zine templates I downloaded did not work. It’s totally like old open source software is where nothing really works and there’s a current version compatible for OS/2 Warp
I use Affinity Publisher for my recent zines* and I can’t recommend it enough. Don’t recommend like buying a license unless you’re gonna get a ton of use out of it but there’s a trial and maybe there are other ways of using it out there somewhere, I dunno, great app though
*aside from the New Loo Review which was Electric Zine Maker (also good and cool but I’m what you might call a “power user” at this point in my “career”)
