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Zine Review: Dead Templeton Issue 1

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Dead Templeton Issue 1
Ellen and Gideon
www.deadtempleton.bigcartel.com
www.deadtempletonzines.etsy.com

I don’t often review music/music-related zines because I feel like I’ll be out of my depth. (Unless someone has a Punk 101 zine out there.) Thankfully, zines are very good at shattering my assumptions about what they’ll be about, almost always a pleasant shattering.

Dead Templeton Issue 1 is the most ‘cut n’ paste’ zine I’ve seen in a while, filled with all sorts of goodness to look at as well as read.

The very beginning of this zine made me smile because it’s such a great reason the make a zine:

Zines are something that seem to be missing from our area, and we always thought they were super cool and important for whatever scene was going on. So we figured,

“Hey, punk rock is dead here, let’s have some fun. Let’s make a zine.”

Opening up with a piece about the music in the show Daria and the complications involving the music in the show vs what they were able to put on the DVD. Double win for Daria and for immediately bucking my expectations of what would be in the zine. That the next piece was a ‘non-piece’ that was and wasn’t about goats…

If you want variety, then this zine has it. Along with the aforementioned piece, there is an interview, an album review, show reviews… It’s a music zine with side salads of humour and human interest.

I’ve mentioned before how I love the little things that move the zine experience into more than experiencing what’s in your hand. Well this zine comes with a Spotify playlist. I don’t have Spotify, so I wasn’t able to check it out (yet), but I still think it’s a pretty cool add on in a world where including a cassette or CD could shoot postage out of budget. Not only that, they say they’re going to make a playlist for every issue.

I have one nitpick in that some of the type is tiny – I mean really tiny – and even my near-sightedness didn’t help me out. Making that small text white on black makes it a smiggle harder to read again. At least, by lamp light, like I was trying to. That being said, this is a first zine, and it can take a while for people to find their zine layout groove.

When I traded for this zine months back, Punkrawkdewd said that the second one was nearly done and looked even cooler than this one. I hope I can get my hands on a copy.

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ZineWriMo Update + Don’t Call Me Cupcake 6 Sneak Peek

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The rollercoaster that has been life since… gosh, probably back into August… made me realise that I haven’t really given a ZineWriMo update since I first posted about it. Oops!

zine-ideas-notebook

I’m one of those people who always has so many ideas rather than not any. I want to do all the things on top of all of the things I’m already doing. There’s always something to do. I started my ZineWriMo prep by gathering all the notecards, sticky notes, envelopes, napkins and the like, and putting them into a proper ideas notebook.

I have been working on pieces for Don’t Call Me Cupcake 6, but there has been a particularly insistant idea bouncing around in my mind for a few weeks. When I sat down to dig into zine making this weekend, I found myself naturally gravitating towards creating this zine…

It’s different in size, shape, subject, and pretty much everything else that I’m used to creating in my zines. So, of course I would mess up the pages, end up needing to cut everything and then washi tape it back together so it would copy/print properly.

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Oops.

I ended up scanning it into the computer because that was just the simplest way to clean up the pages and make copies. I have yet to make the covers, so this zine is still ‘in progress’. It’s also the first zine that I have yet to be sure if I’m even going to release, as it’s a bit… It makes me feel a bit vulnerable, to be honest. I’m still very glad I made it, either way.

Now, while all this has been going on, I’ve also been working on Don’t Call Me Cupcake 6. I was feeling quite stuck and unsure (no idea why). Whenever that happens in my writing, I go back to longhand. That usually does the trick of getting me out of whatever muck I’m in.

Seeing as I’m running late with it anyway, I thought I would share the very first page of Don’t Call Me Cupcake 6…

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Happy Mail – Zine Pack Goodness

Wind and rain, wind and rain, and some happy mail to make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

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This Brainscan Zine Pack came all the way from Portland Button Works. The pack came with Brainscan 21, 25, 26, 27 and 28, and it was like getting a basket of Easter eggs. They are all Brainscan, but they come in all different shapes, sizes and colours! It does my head in a little. 🙂

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Yes, I’m showing the happy mail after I reviewed one of the zines (It Will Be Okay). Missmuffcake just so happened to have the awesome timing to have sent a zine so I received it right when I needed to read it.

I’ve been eyeing up The Stay At Home Girlfriend series for ages now, so I’m excited to finally have one. 🙂

As always, thank you so much to everyone who sends me mail. Happy mail makes me feel, well, happy – especially in the past few months where we seem to have some pretty bad luck happening!

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Call for Submissions: Waste Management

Hi, my name is Fee, I’m 20, white, ablebodied, working class, bisexual, queer, mentally ill, fat and I dropped out of high school in feburary of 2015.

I know a lot of people but I know exactly one who shares this experience. And I have the suspicion that I know why… I’m part of this beautiful social justice community that’s also incredibly centered on university level education. And I don’t even have a levels. (Or the German equivalent.) The people that mean the most to me can’t sympathise with the very real existential fear that comes from not having a high school diploma.

A lot of people drop out of uni. That’s bad. I feel for you guys, I do, but you have so many more options in how to continue. It might not feel like that but it’s true… but being a high school dropout? in this economy? It scares the shit out of you – especially because there is a reason you didn’t stay in school and that reasons stays with you. Bullying (because you are trans or queer or fat or disabled or a person of colour or poor or any other thing people can use to wear you down with every day microagressions), mental illness (like depression, an eating disorder, bpd, etc), money (because you and your family literally can’t afford for you to not work), teachers or social workers not caring about you and not giving you the support, equipment, form of schooling, medication or love you needed because of all the things the other students used to destroy you. Or any other number of other reasons.

And now you are a fucking high school drop out. (Or the pre-university level education equivalent where you are from. This is not supposed to be us centric.)

And I want to hear about it so badly! Whether you dropped out yesterday or 20 years ago, whether you regret it or not, wether you’re back in school or never looked back, whether you want to draw about it or write or make a collage or just paint an entire page black because that’s how it feels, I want to hear from you. And by you I mean literally everyone. (If you want to for example write in a language other than english we can also totally do that.) AND I WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THE INTERSECTION OF OPPRESSION AND DROPPING OUT! Because I’m 97% sure I would still be in school if I wasn’t, you know, me.

I’m not sure how this is going to work. I’ve never made a zine before but I need to fucking heal from this trauma that was school, so… hit me up, you beautiful failures and disappointments.

Who Can Submit?

Anyone who has ever dropped out of high school. It doesn’t matter if you went back and are now working on your doctorate or if you never looked back. You can submit regardless of your academic status now as long as you left schooling before reaching university level education at some point.

If you have questions wether you are enough of an academic failure to be able to submit, you can talk to me on tumblr, twitter or via email.

Note: Dropping out of university does not count.

What Can You Submit?

Short answer: everything.

Long answer: poetry, diary entries, comics, song lyrics, collages, paintings, drawings, doodles, in-depth analysis of things, top ten lists, hate mail to your teachers, manifestos and because there will be a digital version you can also submit songs, videos and any other digital art.

Go all out. Or go deep inside yourself.

It is really important to me that you get support and love throughout this process. If you need help working on your submission or just want to vent about the emotional build up that creating things can cause, don’t be shy to reach out to me on tumblr, twitter or via mail.

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Call for Submissions: Thoughts Of You – A Dennis Wilson Fanzine

dennis-wilson-zine-call-for-subs

Theme: Anything inspired by the life, death and songs/music of Dennis Wilson, and/or his inspiration / contributions / role in The Beach Boys.

*Ongoing/no deadline.*

Looking for poems, fiction, humour, photos, art (illustration / collage /comics / memes, photoshops/edits /whatever) essays / articles / reviews, diary comics / graphic essays, memories / tributes &/or personal fan/fandom stories and tributes or anything else you can create.

Zine format will be colour & b/w pdf / A4 b/w print edition (+ pos a colour edition).
Planning to sell the finished zine grassroots homeless / anti-poverty charities.
Published contributers will recieve a free copy.
Long formal post w/ more info, (needs tweaking) http://denniswilsonzine.tumblr.com/post/152496063727/thoughts-of-you-zine-call-for

About the zine/blog / Basic idea

Interested in submitting or have any questions?
http://denniswilsonzine.tumblr.com/ask
www.facebook.com/dwfanzine/
or dwzine (at) gmail (dot)com

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Zine Review: It Will Be Okay

it-will-be-okay-mini-zine

It Will Be Okay
MissMuffcake

www.missmuffcake.etsy.com

It Will Be Okay is a mini-zine featuring quotes and drawings to give you a positive boost to your moment, your day… It’s definitely adorable, as you can imagine, but with a quote from Ice Cube tucked in there along with one piece of “adult language”, it’s not quite for the very young. (Unless you’re cool with that.)

I like that things are facing different directions (nothing is upside down, though), so you don’t just flip through this. That might not be another person’s thing, but something that gets me to interact more with a zine that I might otherwise quickly go through is a good thing.

Stickers and drawings definitely add to the fun vibe, but I think this added extra, something to physically ‘take away’ from the zine wraps it up perfectly:

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That, my friends, is an itty bitty button/badge that you can take out of the zine and put anywhere you please. I absolutely adore it.

I hate to list any nitpick with a zine that is created with such positivity, but I do have to mention… While Missmuffcake does put a name down on the back, there aren’t any other sorts of contact details or a shop URL… But, a name like Missmuffcake makes the Google search a much easier one than searching by zine title, so it’s practically not a search at all. 

Even so, now you have the link above, and I have this lovely mini-zine (with button/badge!) to put in my forever collection.

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Little side note: I’ve hit a point where people have started sending me zines specifically for review. Because of that, I’m creating and trying to maintain a queue so it’s all fair as far as timing goes. That being said, today’s zine, yes, skipped the queue. It’s been a hard week for so many reasons both personal and on larger scales, so I wanted to review a zine that had a message I really needed to hear today. I promise to keep deviations from the queue to a minimum.