Hello again everyone, sorry for the delay! The formatting period for the zine is running behind schedule, I'm afraid, but we are currently in the contributor preview and approval period, so the zine formatting is very close to completion.
To explain why the formatting took so long: It seems like there wasn't enough oversight when contributors turned in final pieces, because there were lots of mistakes and important things missing for a significant number of the zine pieces. We had to reach out to many contributors to fix mistakes (typos, graphical errors, wrong dimensions, etc) and resubmit their pieces, but since the zine was delayed so long, there were quite a few contributors that were hard to reach. Some contributors had to be contacted on other social media platforms, some contributors had personal things going on (work, health issues, moving, etc) that delayed their responses, some contributors had lost the original files for their piece and had to do their best with only the final version of their file… the list goes on.
In addition to contributors who had to resubmit their pieces, the credits information was not collected for all contributors, and the delay meant that several contributors had changed names and/or social media handles, so that information had to be collected/recollected from almost every contributor as well. Because there were so many people who had to be contacted, there was a much higher chance that at least one person would have a delay in their response, and any delay from an individual person meant a delay for the entire project.
Contributors were also encouraged to include codes in their pieces, and the mods had decided to include a section at the end of the zine for solutions to all of the codes, as well as English translations for all text that isn't in (modern) English. However, only some of the code solutions provided by the contributors had been saved and organized by the mods, and because of the delays with the zine, most contributors with codes in their pieces could not remember what the solutions were. This meant that we had to go through every page of the zine, search each piece for codes, and manually decode them.
It was a grueling process to work through all the issues, and there were many, many times where it seemed like solving one problem unearthed even more problems that also needed to be solved. The good news is that we are very close to completion of the zine formatting, and are mostly just waiting on resubmissions/approvals from a few more contributors.
Unfortunately, I'm not able to post an updated shipping schedule at this time. All of the merch and shipping stuff is in Pudgy's possession, and they have been having a health emergency for a few months now and have been hospitalized several times. As of the time I'm writing this they've told me they hope to be out of the hospital soon as long as their health issues don't flare up again, but unfortunately there is no way to know for sure if that will happen, and I haven't received any other news about their health or about merch/shipping. Because of all the unknowns and things out of my control, I'm not comfortable making a new shipping schedule for the zine until Pudgy's health is more stable and they are out of the hospital.
As penance for the delays, and as proof of zine progress, I will attach a few zine pages below.
If anyone has questions, comments, refund requests, address changes, or anything else they want to reach out about, please send an email to [email protected]. Social media messages and mentions will still be responded to, but email is preferred!
I'm very very sorry for the delays - organizing and handling things on the backend of this zine has been... challenging. But with continued effort, things have been coming together, and we're getting close to finally finishing this thing and getting it out to the world. Thank you guys so much for your patience, and I will continue posting updates as I have them. 😭
A preview of two page art pieces from kingseagull (@usurp) and kronehaze (@kronehaze) (effects were added by the artists so as not to reveal the entire piece, the pieces will look normal and unobscured in the zine itself):
A preview of two writing pieces from Lore and Static (@frangenda):
As well as one page from the credits section and one page from the code solution section:
blakekathryn
2087
kianamaiart
amandla
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
