maëlys chay

the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. if you're being asked to apply to participate in a print project, it is not a zine. if the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. if you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put of ten if the final product costs more than $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this.

this isn't snobby gatekeeping or imaginary semantic problems or whatever, this is an issue that has come up irl at cons and zine fairs local to me and which keeps coming up online. people who show up to trade fairs selling professionally printed $15 anthologies as 'zines' have a direct impact on the people trying to sell their $3 chapbooks at the next table over. submission based kickstarter projects that bill themselves as 'zines' exploit the connotations of amateur, punk production values to induce creators to work for less and eschew formal guarantees and protections they are entitled to.

my favorite zines have all been $1 or free and printed on highlighter paper. i used to pick em up from a book store in chelsea that sold predominantly self published work, and had sections for zines. Some were about how to eat cheap in the city when most of your paycheck went to rent, others were talking about the best drag performances in town, and plenty of DIY stuff. all of them had the same unique quality: nobody but the author and their collaborators could've made this, and they wanted to make it easily accessible to the community

i kinda hate that the word that was used for extremely personal and cheap works is applied to essentially art books of your favorite anime OTP

hi! sorry, real quick:

congrats you're in a zine! if you like you can photocopy it and sell it to art students, fellow haters, or anyone with a sense of humour. I'll buy one.

ive been saying this since 2015! all my illustrator friends kept submitting to them (and gettin in which i was proud of) but they... werent zines. they were like massive books with grandiose color schemes and gilded bossing. i couldnt afford them even. zines are oft free or traded and they arent about how pretty a picture you can make.

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

this makes printing soooo easy too. id love to see these floating around places

So I scrolled past this post and was thinking the same thought I always do when I see people talking about zines, which is basically ‘zines are so cool, I’ve never made one because I don’t think I have anything interesting to say in one, but I should make a zine someday if I ever have creative energy again’ and then it gets added to my ever growing mental list of things I want to do but don’t end up doing (I have spent the last several years struggling so hard with my depression that I can’t seam to create anything at all)

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

So thank you to this post for inspiring me to make something today! Even if it’s just a simple silly little thing I’m going to treasure it

I began quilting in the 1990s. I have handquilted about 60 sci-fi quilts. It has been many years of trial and error. I was never very good at following quilting patterns. My favorite pattern is the disappearing nine patch. I use it a lot in my quilts. My blocks were never perfect. In fact , I’m most certain every quilt I have made has a mistake or two. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, I look at the mistake as adding character and artistic deviations to my quilts. :) A quilt doesn’t have to be a complicated design . My first quilt was an appliqué Star Trek baby quilt. It was simple by quilting standards. I worked so hard on it. It took months to finish but I was incredibly proud. As I was learning to quilt, I secretly hoped to make something fancy and worthy of an art show one day. FYI, A little more than 30 years later, I have never entered any of my quilts into an art show. I quilt for me. I quilt to give one of a kind quilts to friends and family…and the occasional acquaintance on the internet. Maybe one day, one of my quilts will make it to outer space. How glorious would that be? Peace to you and yours.

I got an ask from someone who felt timid about drawing curlier hair and wanted some advice! This is by NO means exhaustive and is mostly just my thought process for my own stylization. There are tons of resources for drawing more textured hair, so for this I just wanted to focus on curls. hope it helps!

does anyone else have a deep underlying sadness that never truly goes away and probably never will or is that just me haha

so i study decolonization, as in i studied it as part of my degree, and i thought I'd make a list of some readings/films that might offer additional insight about decolonization (it also helps if you're tired of the christian moralistic thinking)

Occupation 101

The Wretched of the Earth

The Battle of Algiers

Find Unthinking Eurocentrism at a library near you

this is what girls do right after they log off

if you start reading books again. you will feel at least a little better. I promise

girl typing a very specific question into google search bar, scrunching her face as she takes time to make sure she hasn't made any spelling errors, hitting enter, shaking her head as google only presents her with unhelpful websites that don't answer her query at all, moving her cursor back to the search bar and clicking on it so she can carefully write 'reddit' at the end, hitting enter again, sighing with relief as she finds a link to a reddit post asking the exact question she needed answered posted in a subreddit for a very niche topic, finally moving her cursor to click on the link, wondering why she didn't go straight to the subreddit earlier, only to be met with a deleted comment with a reply from the OP stating 'that was very helpful, thanks', sighing with frustration as she moves her cursor back to the search bar so she can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine,

Replace "reddit" with "reveddit" in any reddit url to reveal deleted or removed comments. If the comment/post was deleted too quickly after it was posted, it may not pull it up, but it works most of the time

girl after reading a post on tumblr dot com with a reblog by user impossiblepackage, moving her cursor over to the url of the aforementioned reddit post, using her mouse to highlight the word “reddit”, typing out the word “reveddit” in its place, hitting enter, waiting with bated breath as reveddit loads, finally content as the deleted comment is displayed in front of her eyes containing the information she sought for so long.

I cannot believe there's absolutely no way to watch free shows and movies anymore, there are too many paid streaming platforms and pirating websites have viruses and ads preventing you from watching it uninterrupted((.)) id rather follow the rules and purchase media moving forward because it is too inconvenient. Seriously, free and no ads or viruses with 1080p streaming is DEAD.

I miss the days where I could watch anime on illegal websites, now it's totally impossible. Does anyone remember watching Zoro in One Piece? Or xxxHOLiC? I don't think they play that on tv anymore because it's pretty old but I highly recommend purchasing it((.)) Too bad I don't watch anime anymore I bet there are some great new ones out.

#remember to never use sites like zlibrary to get books for free that is piracy which is WRONG and IMMORAL