Tagged studio

▶ today's drink: Pepsi from my travel coffee mug
▶ listening to: The Wolf by The Brat

I swear, did I like neglect to do a zine trade with a mischievous spirit who has now cursed me with a monkey's paw for zine fests? It must be, because what other possible reason could there be for a sudden snowstorm closing roads in my county only on the single day I was to drive two hours for the first zine fest I'd have done in over a year and a half? I'm a little miffed with the weather departments too for claiming it would be max 1-2" snow literally while we'd already had 4" and no sign of slowing. Anyway, all this was yesterday, and when I got up this morning it was snowy but clear and bright, perfectly fine to drive. Ugh.

Anyway, as soon as I saw I would not be able to leave the house, I of course emailed the organizers. I didn't want to miss out on meeting other zinesters and sharing zines and all the fun, so I made a flyer I asked the organizers (who were librarians with easy access to color printing btw) to print out and have at my table/area, put up on maybe a book stand or something else upright for people to see, so I could still connect with people. They were super nice and said of course, so as far as I know this flyer did indeed represent me. I'm actually pretty proud of the flyer because I think it's cute so I want to show it off somewhere for, I dunno, posterity or whatever.

The text said:

Hi everyone, my name is Wesley! I run Twenty Two Zines, a zine distro and resource hub focused on radical creativity and a philosophy of sharing over selling. I live in Salem, and unfortunately I don't trust the roads to be able to make it today.

I'm really bummed so please say hello to me online! I have lots of resources on my website and I would love to trade zines or send you a free/pay-what-you-want bundle through the mail.

Check my site or email me at twentytwozines@posteo.net! please drop by Twenty Two Zines dot com!

Unfortunately, at least so far, I haven't had any communications from visitors or tablers at the zine fest, so looks like the flyer was a bust. Neocities has like a view counter thing and it looks like there were a few more views on my site, which is great and all and I hope people found some free zines or encouragement out of it, but damn it, I wanted to talk to people! I wanted the tactile experience of shoving a zine into someone's hand and watching them flip through it and reading theirs and making a friend!

And it's never About the Money or anything (I always offer everything for free/donation at zine fests), but to be honest I was also looking forward to getting a little bit of cash for the distro, I was hoping for ~$40, so I could take and pay for a few submissions people have sent me. It's one of those things where I could probably make it happen anyway, but since I'm still unemployed (that's a long story but you can see the first parts on these YouTube videos o' mine), and so I'm very hesitant about spending money on non-essentials, and unfortunately zines are essential to my heart but don't put food on my table. And I already spent $125 I'd slowly gathered over the last year to print more copies of zines for the zine fest that I just missed, UGH!

Anyway, the reason I wanted to make this blog wasn't just to complain about the weather and money, it was also to complain about the fact that this is actually the second time I've had to miss a zine fest, made a flyer begging people to connect anyway, and had absolutely zero personal interactions come as a result. I suppose it's only been a day, so I could give it a bit longer, but given the last time this happened I don't have super high hopes. That time was in I wanna say 2022, and while lots of people were thinking of COVID as over there were still new variants abound and the zine fest was trying to be very health-conscious, masks and vaxxes were required for tablers (except in extenuating medical circumstances), etc. Well of course the day before I started getting a few minor flu-like symptoms, and although I felt fine it could have been COVID and the drugstore tests weren't reading new variants, so I'd have to go into a doctor's office to get tested properly but they were closed because it was a long weekend and I didn't want to go to the hospital and possibly spread it. So I did the same thing, emailed the organizers and said I need to stay home out of an abundance of caution and asked if they could put up a flyer, etc. Honestly I remember their response being a little rude but I'm 100% sure I just felt it that way because I was already grumpy and disappointed and feeling sensitive and I didn't want them to think I hadn't been being cautious in my life so far or have them be angry I'd ended up taking a table from someone else who could have been there.

That flyer did not net me any interactions either. And of course when I got tested it turned out I didn't have COVID and also probably didn't even have the flu, but of course there's no way I could have known that. Doing the right thing is so frustrating sometimes.

I'm realizing all this sounds like some sort of pity-based engagement bait, but I promise it's not about that. I just wanted to meet some local zinesters and have some in-person interaction and I'm just annoyed that mother nature sent me to my room. I'll be honest that I still have some difficulty with online engagement--I have a hard time really feeling like myself or feeling motivated to keep up with conversations through text, email, any messengers or socials. It's not just you guys, I've just always been a talk-on-the-phone person over a text person, despite how it may seem from this long blog, haha! If you're the same way, I'll say right now that it sucks trying to find and talk to other zinesters sometimes, doesn't it?!

I spent the whole rest of the day installing a new blog engine and moving all my old pages over to it so I could feel like I was doing something to further the distro that didn't cost money and I did have fun. Maybe today I'll try to install a comment box for the blog so I can continue to be cagey about responding over text. If I have indeed done so you'll see it below ;)

Update 2/7/2026: Moved to a new blog platform! Original text preserved below.

▶ today's drink: tea, earl gray, hot

Pardon the CSS dust; I'm reusing the divs/template I made for my Free Zine Friday blog (which will also be getting a bit of a reno). But I just spent a bunch of time on an in-progress zine and I'm dying to talk about it!

The main zine I'm working on right now is the next issue of my perzine series Unfair Maiden. This one is #7, what I've finally titled the "Material Grrrl" issue. I've had the idea for this subject for a long time--I want to explore my relationship to my enjoyment of material goods as an anticapitalist. It's something I feel I haven't examined thoroughly enough, so this zine is an attempt to do so.

I actually have quite a few bits and pieces that are done (in fact, one part has been done for about a year before I took a break). But the part I just finished was definitely the most involved, writing-wise. The section is titled "The Little Treat: Exploring justifications for consumption under capitalism". I even spent a hilariously long time (probably an hour) making a Seinfeld-inspired logo for the header, since all the titles of Seinfeld episodes are formatted "The [blank]". Anything to lighten up the subject, right? (Plus the Season 8 pattern totally matches my aesthetic).

The idea of this part was to explore the argument of "the little treat" in anticapitalist spaces and how it relates to morality. Like, what makes choices about consumption moral or immoral, and are there things we're (I'm) obligated to do, relative to my consumption, to behave "morally"? It was originally just going to be about how I felt about that argument (which I explain in the zine too of course), but to sort that out required so much more work than I thought! It ended up feeling like reading and writing philosophy essays from when I was in undergrad! (I mean, not just feeling like it, that's basically what it turned into!)

I ended up writing at least 5000 words (probably far more given the amount of stuff I cut/moved around), and the "final" essay at the moment is 2988 words, at least 8 zine pages but it'll probably jump to 10 once I format it. It might change a little. This is WAY more than I've ever written for a single section of a zine, and frankly I feel like it'll probably scare people off (it's scaring me off right now), but it's important to me so it's going in. I have no idea how I'll remotely be able to make it flow with the rest of the parts.

Anyway, since I was typing all this, I'm not sure if I can adequately express the amount that I "spread out" on my laptop, but I tried to capture the feeling in this screenshot:

Allow me to point out:

• my incredibly helpful file titles, "ZINE IN PROGRESS", "zineinprogress_222", and "Untitled" (which was also unsaved until this moment). All saved on my desktop instead of a folder, naturally.
• the text in a different font on the left, which is part of my first draft, approaching it from a slightly different point which I found to be too boring after spending hours writing it
• you can't tell, but I don't even mention the concept of "the little treat" until 1587 words in, when that is ostensibly the theme of the essay
• so many tabs across multiple windows, all vaguely related resources and Wikipedia articles I thought might be useful. I finally tried to close some and then realized hours later that I wanted to reference them later in the essay, so I had to go through my history and pull them up again
• my text notes that go anywhere from full drafts of paragraphs to lines like "that economics game!", which is a reminder for something unrelated I might want to make an entirely separate section about. Unlabeled, of course.
• 2050 extra words I like but now don't know what to do with. They will probably stay in these poorly titled files until years after publication of the zine itself.

Next on my to-do list: selecting font, images, and anything to make the portion more interesting than a wall of text without making it 10+ pages long. Then onto deciding what I'll do for my next sections!