Seattle used to have a top notch zine scene - entire sections of stores (music, magazine, comic, game) would have hundreds of local and national zines.
Recently, Seattle's been trying to make a comeback downtown. We lost gobs of tenants and the riff raff tookover. One element of the comeback strategy is this Seattle Restored project. Basically, rent free storefronts to small businesses.
For father's day my ladies brought me to one of them:
I'm also not trying to get into an argument, but totally disagree, and honestly believe that your attitude leads to an untenable breakdown of the social contract.
I don't agree with use of the tongue-in-cheek term "riff raff" for unhoused people living in tents and shanties on the sideway. And I think such people deserve help.
But yes, they have less of a right to live on the sidewalk than the right of people and businesses that pay rent and expect public spaces that are usable, safe, and free of people so intoxicated that they have lost contact with reality and are not safe to be around.
And I can't disagree with either, especially the riff raff usage, but the term "takeover" was the one intended to play the important role in the sentence. And it wasn't for the unhoused - but the dealers and traffickers.
The zine enthusiasts in this thread might enjoy this little tool I made to print out and zine-fold Project Gutenberg books: https://github.com/sieste/pocketbook
I keep hearing about zines and how they're cool and awesome, but I've never really seen one, so I can't really get a sense in my head for what they are. Does anyone have like an online gallery of zines or something? Are they literally just a small, independently made magazine?
These days they tend to be single sheets of paper folded to look like a small 8 page book. That's the modern cute version. "Back in the day" - meaning the 70's and 80's a 'zine was a mimeographed or photocopied hand made full sized magazine, typically on what we'd call cheap printer paper today.
They were punk rock expressions, with large amounts of collage art, mix media art + poetry, and amateur fiction, and sometimes fan fiction. It was creative expression for people with no outlet: the punks, angry about economics. If you think punk was about music, that's the lie, it was about dead end careers.
Yes, it's literally that. Some are made with just one sheet of paper smartly folded into 8 pages.
you can find them in random art stands in small alternative markets. Sometimes music shop, art shops and small independent book publishers.
At your nearest city library if you're lucky. Christchurch's Tūranga public library has a stand of them although the stand isn't in an obvious place. Apart from that I've only seen them in local arty/hipster shops. I'm guessing avoiding publication on the internet is part of the appeal.
There was a TV show, Our Hero[0], that aired in the 2000s that was about Zines. I can't say I've ever seen a "zine" irl so I can't say how accurate of the "scene" it was, but it's definitely a blast-from-the-past.
Was doing a similar thing for plain HTML zines: https://github.com/zserge/zine - write each page as html, render as page previews in browser and as a folded zine when printed
Is there one of these for making a 12-page chick tract style one, so I can print a two sided single page with six segments on each side? I arranged something myself in photo editing software, but it's off just a little bit in a way that drives me nuts.
I didn't know about zines before and they seem interesting but aren't we wasting half of the paper surface (from what I understood looking at some images) A printer spread achieves a similar result without wasting one side of the sheet. (A bit more folding and cutting involved)
* Or does one put additional content pages inside which are supposed to be read by unfolding the zine and folding it the other way?
I believe Affinity Publisher 2 should support it. It's much easier than the 8 pager on a single sheet. They have a booklet printing that handles page ordering
I've gotten super into Zine making this year and love this mini-8-pager format. I typically carry them around to share information with others, and get back to a world of print in our digital divide. People really like the bite size knowledge they can fit in a pocket.
I picked up a slightly different format which is double sided and two per piece of paper.
The hardest parts of formatting these are (a) not making the font too small (b) getting the folds to land in the middle of pages (if you are OCD about that like me)
Recently, Seattle's been trying to make a comeback downtown. We lost gobs of tenants and the riff raff tookover. One element of the comeback strategy is this Seattle Restored project. Basically, rent free storefronts to small businesses.
For father's day my ladies brought me to one of them:
https://seattlerestored.org/locations/paper-pushers-print-sh...
They had about a thousand zines and variants. I was told my minimum spend and nailed it. So much fun. In the area, go!
Not trying to get into an argument but you are no more entitled to the city than your fellow citizens aka the "riff raff"
I don't agree with use of the tongue-in-cheek term "riff raff" for unhoused people living in tents and shanties on the sideway. And I think such people deserve help.
But yes, they have less of a right to live on the sidewalk than the right of people and businesses that pay rent and expect public spaces that are usable, safe, and free of people so intoxicated that they have lost contact with reality and are not safe to be around.
Is someone living with their friends, relatives, family, entitled to less in a society?
Zine meetup every other Friday downtown: https://seattleprintersguild.org/
https://pocketmod.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition
I use the psbook command-line utility for this kind of thing.
pdfjam in.pdf '1,8,7,6' --angle 180 --outfile /dev/stdout | pdfjam /dev/stdin '1-4' test.pdf '2,3,4,5' --nup 4x2 --landscape --frame false --outfile out.pdf
They were punk rock expressions, with large amounts of collage art, mix media art + poetry, and amateur fiction, and sometimes fan fiction. It was creative expression for people with no outlet: the punks, angry about economics. If you think punk was about music, that's the lie, it was about dead end careers.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYzXlo7zHY4
* Or does one put additional content pages inside which are supposed to be read by unfolding the zine and folding it the other way?
[1] https://bumpbooks.com/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/190221-bas...
I use it for making books but it may be a better option than some of the other projects linked here depending on what exactly you are trying to do.
I picked up a slightly different format which is double sided and two per piece of paper.
PDF example and Affinity Publisher 2 files: https://limewire.com/d/Vi7Td#q7xsY0HXLY
The hardest parts of formatting these are (a) not making the font too small (b) getting the folds to land in the middle of pages (if you are OCD about that like me)
(edit, added both file types for a few examples)
This is another online zine maker I came across as well which supports markdown / json: https://zeenster.com/ | https://github.com/virgilvox/zine-maker
If you want to mass produce them
- Brother Inkjet Printer
- HFS guillotine paper cutter
- Martin Yale P7200 RapidFold
Here's a Google Drive link with the same files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jjp8fOn1fsQ0vvix84dm...
I’ll see myself out