Pump up the zining. Old-skool.
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011As I have detailed in the past, I want a paper fanzine again, filled from cover to shining cover with good writing about music that doesn’t suck. But not only are paper fanzines basically obsolete, the process of producing one involves dealing with ripoff cowboy advertisers, dealing with ripoff cowboy printers, dealing with ripoff cowboy record shops, dealing with bloody arsehole ripoff cowboy indie record distributors who pay only on threat of lawsuit KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL and I got just a little burnt out on it.
That said, I remember sitting around my then-girlfriend’s back yard in 1998, idly leafing through the Trading Post and looking at stuff going cheap I would have killed for in 1990. Linotypes! Halftone camera setups! Entire clunky publishing systems, Mac IIx still in the middle! That stuff was sorta fun. Except that even 1991-level desktop publishing knocked it into a cocked hat for convenience and ability to get the damned information out, of course.
So I feel some slight old man’s schadenfreude at these meddling kids set to the task of producing a magazine with the technology of the 1980s. Poor dears had to do arithmetic to work out their layout. HA! HA!

