Breaking Bad Stan Account

I've been fond of Gen Urobuchi's writing since first discovering him through Psycho Pass in middle school. In late 2025 I decided to finally get into Fate by way of watching Fate Zero, which (though I enjoyed) is a pretty poor anime adaptation of his light novel. It was never officially translated to English, and mostly exists as a crowdsourced and completely un-proofread fantranslation hosted as plaintext on a forum wiki, or a very poorly formatted epub of of the same text. So when a friend mentioned wanting to read the originals, I was excited to whip out a skill I happened to pick up a little earlier in the year: bookbinding!

This was my second bookbinding project ever, so for ease of working I decided to combine volumes 1-2 into an omnibus. Having a bigger book means less agonizing over measuring and cutting things to exact millimeters, but it also meant I had about 3 weeks total to copyedit and typeset 500-600 pages, and then turn them into a finished book. I ended up having to rewrite almost full pages at a time, and just tunnel visioned on proofreading and typesetting it until about 4 days before my deadline.

My printer is cooperative, so after getting everything formatted, the actual bookbinding part was fairly straightforward. It's a letter folio, so two pages are printed side by side on letter paper and folded in half shortways to get 4 pages, which is nice because it means my 550 page pdf was only around 150 sheets of paper to print. The folded pages get stacked into pamphlets called signatures and then sewn together, which I remembered to take wip photos of!

Here you can see all the stacked signatures, and the cord it was sewn around. A lot of modern books pretend to be sewn on cords to have a kind of fancy or vintage feel, but in this style of binding theyre structural elements and give support to the spine, and then are used to attach the covers (which I did not remember to take a picture of). The combination of folds and sewing thread makes the spine thicker than the opposite edge, which is called swell. The second photo there shows how the spine is rounded to offset the folds/seams and minimize that swell. The cloth on top is cheesecloth glued down to strengthen the spine.

I was honestly expecting these to be unwieldy or delicate decoration pieces, but the level of construction makes them handle pretty well.

+ Photos my friend sent of both volumes together after I got to the second omnibus.

THE BOSS

Desire (2025)

22.5 x 31.5 in

hi! sorry, real quick:

grab a piece of paper and fold it in half like a book

write "im indifferent to zines" on the cover

write "i've never been able to buy one" on the first page

write "and i'll never be in one" on the second page

write "just want to be a hater today" on the back

the first zine idea i found was in a book i checked out from the library (id never remember what it was. it was about cartooning i think and had a section about chibi style lol) that had a little section on taking one sheet of paper, marking it into eighths, cutting a line in the center of the page and folding it over for a quick eight pages. like this

And then I thought, hey I have a piece of paper by my desk I should at least follow that diagram and fold it, that way I’m halfway there even if it’s blank and sits on my desk for months, and then 5 minutes later I had this:

Now I’m just holding this little thing I’ve made in my hands and I love it so much

I aready said this isn't a semantic thing, but you if you really want to go there: 'zine' is a shortening of fanzine or magazine and the concept of a 'fanzine' itself is directly derived from a style of independently published magazine that has roots at least as far back as the Harlem Renaissance and arguably the political pamphleteering of the french and american revolutions. but the actual point I was making is that the entire ethos of zine making originates in an effort to broaden access to publication, and we are losing that.

am I saying nobody ever slapped a $20 cover price on a zine before the 2020s? no! am I saying no influential underground publication has ever made the crossing into fully fledged magazine? no! am I saying I will come to your house and punch your teeth in personally if you use the word zine in a way I find objectionable? no! I'm saying the trajectory of commercialisation, professionalisation and lost knowledge is not only stripping foundational meaning from the form but directly harms the viability of low-overhead zine production. just look through the notes of this post for dozens of people saying they'd never heard of the homemade zine before this post, that they'd been burned by high production 'zine' projects and soured on the whole concept as a result. no equivocation: this shit is killing the medium.

but hey, maybe the $15 zine is the norm and I'm just pearl clutching because I don't like genshin impact or whatever. let's look at the cover prices of some historically important zines at launch:

oh sorry, my bad, these aren't 'fanzines' let's try again

mm but of course the very first fanzines ever published would be cheap and amateur, the form was still being figured out. what about the one everyone on tumblr loves to call the birth of fandom:

well fine, but what about zines that deal with serious social issues? that involve research, outreach, even risk on the part of the creators?

believe it or not (or refuse to believe it) but the history of zines is not the history of bag-getters. accessibility has always been the lifeblood of the form, and that includes financial accessibility.