/praxis/ - Projects

>General interest:
I'm definitely interested! I am happy to help with technical work like compiling a PDF from pages. I also have basic graphic design skills so if no-one puts their hand up I can manage text layout and other editing.

>Editorial direction: What is the mission of the zine, and what, if anything, should be the primary focus of the zine?
I think we should solve this point before the name or distribution.
The easy option is to simply treat the zine as a curated, polished sampler of the topics we already talk about here. Essentially, this just amplifies whatever discussions we chose to have, our own voices and this site, rather than having any elevated purpose. Many of the threads here have enough content to turn into a diverse series of topics, I can see articles being made from the Open Information thread, the Three-Sided Football thread, the /eses/ project and /farcism/, and media review from the Groucho thread and maybe even the socialism-in-mainstream thread.
While this may sound a bit directionless, in the sense that there's no explicit political aim like 'educating and agitating the online left', I think simply being a nukechan zine is valuable for giving us a wider audience for whichever things we decided are worth discussing, sharing our original content with other communities (a stated purpose of nukechan) and perhaps even providing an incentive for our community - making content worthy of being added to the zine.

>>126
that's the obvious direction to go in, and i see the value of it. maybe it would make since to think about this in terms of regular sections we could plan to have for each issue. you could have a section called "from the boards" or something for showcasing OC and high quality effort posts, another section for purpose written editorials maybe, etc.
another thing to consider as far as editorial concerns is how we go about deciding what goes in and doesn't. this won't be much of a problem in the short term while there are only a few contributors who will likely be directly involved in the production of the first few issues, so most of it will just be done with a simple conversation, but its worth planning for the future. once the ball starts rolling ti will be worth having a matrix room in the nukechan space.

>>127
>this won't be much of a problem in the short term while there are only a few contributors [] but it's worth planning for the future
This site lost a lot of its initial momentum last year by prefiguratively focusing on its ideal designed structure, so I hesitate to even discuss this yet. But there are interesting ways it could go: we could create a project room for the zine and forming either a direct-democracy voting method for curation by editors and sufficiently-interested readers, like a page election once enough content exists, with other proposals followed up later to adjust based on the zine as a whole (e.g. if two redundant yet individually-popular pages are elected, an editor could propose to remove one for variety). Or, one could more simply have an editor elected for each run of the zine.
As for what content to allow and disallow, or which to prioritize, that would depend on the mission and target audiences. And if the audience is the general socialist circles and mission is to raise our own voices, then it can be pretty broad. On the other hand, allowing the edgiest things this site permits might interfere with the mission by building a bad reputation. It's hard to decide which way to fall on that line, especially without a real example.

i'm so fucking zine pilled

https://erikhoudini.com/zine_rack/

will help out, need to update this, zines are kinda a dead medium atm, well aside from a TON of trans stuff on itch.io, which is totally fine but we can branch out beyond that absolutely

I'm working with people in various competitive gaming communities to help create zines, think retro yugioh, this will help bolster the cultural spread of zines

down to help, host, whatever

https://erikhoudini.itch.io/sacrifice-zone-art-musings-and-poetry-by-erik-houdini

>>130
Sounds great, thanks a bunch.

I'd say the worst thing we could do is be boring, just trying to be a regular whiny mag like the ones my org sells.

http://newescapologist.co.uk/blog/

>>132
Whoops pressed post early
https://www.idler.co.uk/sample-issue/
I stumbled across these 2 anti-work, pro-slacking magazines the other day and I think having a section like that would be pretty neat.

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>>133
The Idler sample issue is nice. An early section is about the Tang Ping movement ("lying flat"). One of the quotes makes a good point about being content without racing on the luxury treadmill. There's a real sense of security and zen which comes with avoiding riches. Unfortunately money is useful to the revolution so I choose to toil.

I know people who just can't live like that, and these people tell me I "need to spend more money". Part of it is frugal or miserly instinct, another is fear of an expensive accident, but it's also from a sense of comfort and content in simple daily living, and a revulsion towards the arrogant waste of decadence.

(As a side note, if the more anarchic school of ideas interest you, I recommend having a look at the 3-Sided Football thread. I am considering writing an article about it for the zine)

>>134
Stalin above, the Chinese can work 4 or 5 hours a day and afford food and accommodation?

Socialism is good
Socialism is good
In socialism people have high social status.

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>>135
Oh great, now I'm going down a [Western article] rabbit hole on China's wages and cost of living:
>Each province, municipality, or region sets its own minimum wage in accordance with its own local conditions. According to the country's Employment Promotion Plan, minimum wages are supposed to increase in accordance with local living standards by at least 13 percent through 2015 and be no less than 40 percent of the average local wages. Minimum wages under such policies increased by an average 12.6 percent rate between 2008-2012. However, the growth rate of minimum wage levels decreased in 2016, reflecting the Chinese government’s effort to reduce pressure on enterprises resulting from the uneven growth between labor costs and production rates.
I know China has different conditions, developing status, etc., but comparing to their economic rival, around 20 US states didn't make a 13% jump over a full 10 years (most not even increasing beyond the federal rate at all, last changed in 2009).

I'm interested in contributing, mainly in filling in stuff that needs filling in. I'm probably stronger with the visual stuff and layout than like writing the articles. I think one of the questions to ask is what content do we want and how much of each? Do we want more polemics or more political analysis? Do we want to include snippets like poetry or visual art on some pages to break up the content?

>>127
>another thing to consider as far as editorial concerns is how we go about deciding what goes in and doesn't.
Part of it is also how you put it together, you know editor type decisions. How do you fit the pieces together in the PDF or equivalent? Layout is a big part of putting together any kind of book/zine type of thing. Both in terms of order and where stuff goes on the page. Playing with the layout is kind of a trope associated with zines.

>>128
>As for what content to allow and disallow, or which to prioritize, that would depend on the mission and target audiences. And if the audience is the general socialist circles and mission is to raise our own voices, then it can be pretty broad. On the other hand, allowing the edgiest things this site permits might interfere with the mission by building a bad reputation.
Makes the most sense to put our best foot forward. As for audience, you bait your hook according to what you want to catch, but you also change the bait depending on what you do catch. That is to say, an audience develops at least partly organically. A project should adapt to the audience it gets as well as the audience it wants.

>>130
>I'm working with people in various competitive gaming communities to help create zines, think retro yugioh, this will help bolster the cultural spread of zines
Based and zinepilled.
I think zines are kind of popular in the tabletop community at large, as a way of sharing rules and other content. It's pretty common in the more indie side of the TTRPG space (along with blogs). In the age of the internet where people regularly share multiple megabyte videos as reaction images it should be really easy and normal to share lightweight texts.

>>140 (NTC)
>I think zines are kind of popular in the tabletop community at large, as a way of sharing rules and other content.
Cool, I didn't know that. I've mostly just really seen them in anarchist/punk adjacent scenes (including cyber culture I'm intentionally worming around the word 'cyberpunk')
>In the age of the internet where people regularly share multiple megabyte videos as reaction images it should be really easy and normal to share lightweight texts.
I helped a site out with a casual zine and it ended up being about 10MB, because it was somewhat image-heavy for aesthetic purposes, and with a bit of luck we can now reduce that using newer image formats (reminder that PNG and JPG were made in 1996 and 1992). Worst case, if a site didn't handle PDFs, we just shared with the cover image and a link.

>>143
Hey if you're really limited on data you can always resort to ASCII art. They got automatic generators for that nowadays.

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>>144
Oh it's not like that, I just mean it's good to avoid having to compress images until noticeable quality loss AND not having to make readers wait for a 30MB download.
For an interesting example of lightweight images, you can look at LOW←TECH MAGAZINE's solar-powered version:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
There's also a lot of interesting articles about efficiency.