Month: March 2019

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Zine Review: Adventures in Predictive Text

Adventures in Predictive Text
Saff Miro
https://www.instagram.com/saffmiro/

Adventures in Predictive Text is an A6 black and white zine predictive text written by Saff Miro’s phone and tablet. Hehe.

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve very likely seen the ‘type this on your phone and let predictive text finish the sentence’ type of posts. Tapping on that suggested next word again and again can create sentences that are strange, funny, and occasionally deep.

It was only a matter of time before someone made a zine of it, and I’m glad they did.

Adventures opens with Saff explaining how they went about making this zine. At the top of each page you find the few prompt words that started each predictive response below. With prompts like ‘In 2018’ and ‘My New Year’s Resolution Is’ there are some pretty funny responses. There’s even one response that got trapped in a loop of ‘again and again and again and again’ so Saff ended up using an infinity symbol when they ran out of room for text. Haha.

I thought I would pick a favourite response for this review, but it was a lot harder than I’d thought it would be to pick! So many of the responses made me smile. I mean, there are Bananagrams and mentions of hashtags taking over the world.

Maybe Saff’s phone is trying to warn us all.

Adventures in Predictive Text is a fun zine that made me smile a lot and also made me want to go on some predictive text adventures of my own. A win on all counts.

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Technical Difficulties

I’m beginning to think 2019 really doesn’t like me.

At about 4pm last night, I started having trouble with this site. By 8pm, I gave up on it coming back up in any sort of decent time

The good news(?) is that it wasn’t the SGZ site itself. There was nothing here that broke nor anything I specifically had to fix. The hosting site itself went down. While that’s not great to have your site host go down, I’m just happy to not have to wade my way through code this morning.

Anyway, knock on wood, I will be back this afternoon with a lovely new zine review. <3

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Guest Mini-Zine Reviews: Nightwalking, an incomplete guide to the cats of kingsville, Fault & Fracture #1-4, How to Properly Read Peoples Minds

Apples of The Chicken Collective is guest posting here today with my utmost thanks for even having a single thought to give to me while dealing with the chaos of a brand new baby.

Some of my favourite small zines.

I live in a hospital this week cause my wife just had a baby and the baby just had an operation. Everything is going well! It’s just that they both need a lot of medical attention so we all hang out at the hospital all the time. Last time I went home I grabbed my small box of good zines that I like to re-read, and also some new ones that just arrived! So here are a few zines that you might like to know about.

nightwalking
David Witteveen
@davidwitteveen
library3000.com

nightwalking is a story about a walk taken at night. It is mostly illustrations, clear and simple with colour pencils. I really like this zine because (most of it) is so recognisable. I have many times missed the last tram home and walked through melbourne just like this. Surely I too have walked past that exact pub with sore feet and half-asleep.

I also am a sucker for A6 landscape zines with nice heavy paper covers just like this!

an incomplete guide to the cats of kingsville
Liz
@_lizbarr
no-award.net

Exactly what it says on the front, this is a one-sheet folded A4 zine with drawings of cats Liz met in Kingsville. The drawings are all really cute, and it comes complete with DVD extras on the other side of the sheet, inside the zine. As I’m a map nerd, I thought the background was a neat touch. And it was Liz’s first zine! But not the last.

Fault & Fracture #1-4
Bettie
bettieriot@gmail.com

It’s a bit silly in the context of a review, but I don’t know if i actually can tell you why I like Fault & Fracture so much! Here are a few of the things I enjoy about it:

—sometimes Bettie writes about how writing zines is hard, and throwing away work you’re not happy with

—there’s a lot in these zines about organising zine fairs, something I’ve never done but I am super glad other people do

—other topics include excellent people the author knows, ice hockey, excellent zines and music, terrible past housemates and low-key wedding plans; all of these are favourite topics of my own

—i really like the mixture of handwriting, typewriting, and printing, and the different backgrounds and illustrations

—Bettie just seems really happy to write these zines?

Also Bettie’s handwriting is almost identical to my former housemate’s, and that just makes the zine feel extra friend-shaped to me.

I bought these all from Penfight Distro (https://penfightdistro.com/) a while ago. I keep meaning to go check if there are any more, as all four are really enjoyable.

And a new to me and super fun zine:

How To Properly Read Other Peoples Minds
Crash Reynolds
@IndelibleCrash
https://linktr.ee/indeliblecrash)

I picked up a bunch of zines from Crash Reynolds on my way to work the day I did not actually do any work and instead drove to the hospital to surprise! meet my son. So as you imagine it took me a few days to read any of them. I loved the look of Crash’s art when I first saw it, and I was really taken by “How To Properly Read Other Peoples Minds”: a very short zine with cute illustrations and Exact Instructions. I look forward to reading the rest of the parcel soon!

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Guest Mini Zine Review: Oh Shit. I Accidentally Lived to be 24. What Now??

I’m Amber and I make zines under the name Amber is Blue. I’m writing a couple of mini zine reviews for Nyx while they’re unwell.

I’m a chronically ill artist and zine maker, most of my work focuses on my mental illnesses to show people in a relatable and accessible way what living with mental illness is really like and how specific symptoms impact everyday behaviours. Through my art I want to encourage people to look at mental illness without stigma. I’m also non-binary and so gender identity and expression also feature heavily in my work.

https://linktr.ee/amberisblue

Oh Shit. I Accidentally Lived to be 24. What Now??
https://www.instagram.com/smallbabyslug/

This was my favourite zine that I got at Festival of the Photocopier last month – and I got a lot of zines at Festival of the Photocopier last month.

Oh Shit. I Accidentally Lived to be 24. What Now?? consists of a personal essay about Small Baby Slug’s move to Melbourne and them coming to terms with how amazing and talented they are. It is so hard to put your art out there and expose your vulnerabilities so I really appreciate Small Baby Slug’s work.