#anyway this will all be emailed out tomorrow if the zines actually show up but just posting it here for the ppl following me here

[trans-axolotl]

zine update btw: zines r supposed to arrive tomorrow night if my tracking number is correct. will ship them out to zine participants asap and everything should launch publically on friday! really excited

[coolmarriagerecords]

On Chronophage

By Zachary Lipez

https://zacharylipez.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-mekons-chronophage-and

Chronophage are a band from Texas. They have been around for three years. Chronophage consists of Parker Allen (they/them) guitar and vox, Sarah Beames (she/her) bass and vox, and Cody Phifer (he/him) drums. For the new record, Parker’s brother, Casey Allen (he/him) plays synth. That’s all I know about Chronophage. The internet shows no interviews and, besides punk zines I don’t own (and presumably critics on Terminal-Boredom forums), the music press outside of Austin has ignored them. I first heard about the band from MaximumRnR, which listed their debut, Prolog for Tomorrow, released in December of 2018, as one of the best albums of 2019 (you can do stuff like that when you’re a revered punk zine). Because MRR is famously *cough* averse to cover any band that even flirts with problematicism, I don’t have to worry about my ignorance of Chronophage’s individual members potentially allowing me to big up fascists. Maybe it’ll turn out they’re Maoists (an ideology MRR is less worried about) but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when/if we come to it. Anyway, I had never even heard of Chronophage (a small miracle unto itself considering the underground’s ready access to publicists and music writers- such as myself- who love few things more than being the first to “discover” a band.). But, even while my sense of aural adventure is a bit rusty since the days of having to risk $8.99 on albums based solely on cover art and/or vibes in the air, I just knew Prolog for Tomorrow was going to scratch an itch. Maybe not an immediate itch but, when you keep as many itches on file as I do, you can afford to trust your instincts. Especially when those instincts have already been validated by some punk weirdo in Oakland who’s probably still mad at the Go-Go’s for firing Margot Olavarria fifteen years before they were born. My instincts served me well because that hypothetical punk weirdo was right! (About both things.)

I’m not sure how to describe Chronophage. I’m not a major fan of the comparisons, to Swell Maps or the Messthetics comps, that the punks made. I don’t dislike either point of reference but knowing Chronophage supposedly sounds like both doesn’t affect how I hear the band. Prolog for Tomorrow’s inner sleeve art has “Curse of Chronophage” scrawled, which may be a reference to The Curse of The Mekons. Or maybe not. I’m trying not to project my bullshit on the band. Matter of fact, Chronophage don’t sound anything like the honky-tonkin’-Mekons. Not because Chronophage aren’t honkys tonkin’ but because, historically speaking, American bands aren’t as hung up on sounding American as English bands are. The album art for Prolog is reminiscent of much of the (actually) cut and (actually) pasted Pavementisms of the ‘90s, which in turn was lifted directly from The Fall and all that band’s adherents. Like early Pavement and The Fall, Chronophage are full of hooks, some overt and many buried under transient skronk. But, unlike all the obscurist indie Chronophage shares a typewriter with, the basic template on the album, if there’s one at all, is “folk punk.” I suppose? At least the sense of that genre is present, if dependent on an expansive notion of both “folk” and “punk.” Minus any busking grotesqueries in the “Wagon Wheel” vein, there’s the strum and twang of barely distorted guitars, every string visible in the mind’s eye, maybe in need of tuning or maybe just playing those jazz chords I hear so much about at music critic parties. While only three musicians play on Prolog, horns and keys go in and out of the songs like a C Squat marching band showing up to support the potluck. Adding to the offhand spontaneity of the proceedings, there’s intermittent cowpoke yowlings, some very live sounding drums, and at least one poetry reading. There’s a real anarchist house party vibe but just when it feels like Chronophage are going to lose their train of thought or, worse, ask to borrow the touring band’s kick drum pedal, another fragile and plaintive power pop chorus arrives in time to keep me from retreating to the kitchen to bum beer off strangers.

If we’re going to (re)subscribe to my initial thesis that there are certain sounds made by certain bands that provide a messily alluring alternative to the pat and disingenuous cleanliness of overculture, therefore making a prickly honesty worth striving for (even if that striving lends itself to either self delusion or a romanticizing of failure), then Chronophage are what we’re talking about. Even if on their new album, The Pig Kiss’d (out on November 23), they kind of fuck a significant amount of my thesis over by showing that they do, in fact, know what they’re doing. Whatever. I deserve it. The whole mythology around The Mekons as a band finding dignity in the face of drunken ineptitude was a fib. While not having the chops of The Texas Playboys, and certainly often drunk, The Mekons, by the mid-’80s, were writing and performing songs as subtle and dynamic as any non-boring rock and roll, not to mention post-punk, band could aspire to. Because perfection is so oppressive, its absence will always be its own inherent virtue. But even better than not being able to play your instruments is being able to play them real pretty, but throwing some ugly in anyway. Just to show all the aesthetic bible thumpers that heaven isn’t always the hot shit it purports to be.  

The Pig Kiss’d is a sharper, more streamlined, proposition than Chronophages’s first record. The guitars, thankfully still mainly free of any distortion mush, ring out as cohesive riffs. Even while the lite-funk chunka-chunkas still occasionally approximate Desperate Bicycles covering Steely Dan (an under-appreciated subculture band influence… a lot of people don’t know that Big Black’s name was short for “Big Black Cow”), and the snare underpinning gives them a decidedly peace punk punchiness, the riffs now transform into razor-like, no wave leads instead of the decays into noise (or just silence) prevalent on Prolog. While the previous album positioned voices as hesitant souls in conversation, Chronophage’s dual singing is now consistently commanding. Not to say that either Allen or Beames are preoccupied with auditioning for American Idle anytime soon, but they both have cool, heavy-on-personality punk voices, ranging from conversating chill to accusatory growl, which the mix now accentuates. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t miss the feeling of a sinking ship, barely kept afloat by the bodies of oogles under the hull, but I’m also glad for a recording that doesn’t sound like the studio engineer is holding a personal grudge against the drummer. Of course, in no longer sounding a mess, Chronophage runs the risk of just sounding like, you know, a rock band. Of which there are plenty. Luckily this ain’t the case. The desperate, weird energy of Prolog for Tomorrow is still abundant. It’s just put in the service of songcraft more than ADD-infused mood. If there’s a newfound, almost psych, expansiveness in the songwriting, it’s a psych fueled by strychnine over any slouching towards bliss. And when the songwriting contracts, we get instant classics like the album closer, “Name Story,” which could be an undiscovered New Model Army a-side. So much does “Name Story” sound like a lost hit that I had to write the band and ask if it was a cover. (They responded that the aim was to sound like New Order… which is amazing.) Still, by contemporary indie standards, Chronophage sound like countrified First Wave of Black Metal-ers running through the American songbook. By contemporary post-punk standards, which can be applied now that New Order are on the table, Chronophage don’t sound contemporary at all. They sound out of the timeline; Richard Lloyd skipping post-punk entirely to jump headfirst into college rock, making that nerd rock hip, and vice versa. Lightning striking itself. In the face. Repeatedly. And by folk punk standards, if we’re bothering to still apply it, Chronophage continue to sound like the only true freaks in a field of future beer reps.Like I said, I don’t know much about Chronophage. While writing this, I exchanged emails with Parker but, preferring the mystery, I only asked about pronouns and whatnot. Maybe they’re apolitical. Maybe they are Maoists. Maybe they’re neither but still find my chronic naysaying abhorrent and dull. For all I know, they all campaigned hard for Pete Buttigieg and all the proceeds from The Pig Kiss’d are going towards having Chronophage Brand hostile architecture benches placed near the homeless encampments in Austin. Guess we won’t know for sure till the album comes out. But this feels like opposition music, and, more importantly (to me) it feels like music that speaks to a refusal to simply be grateful for the crumbs handed to us. Nit picking, as it were. If not exactly “dignity in the face of drunken ineptitude” then, in the face of endless war and empire and an oligarchal insistence to smile more, Chronophage make a sound that- equal parts sweet fury and sweaty sweetness and spilling over with a feisty, chaotic grace- approaches dignity. If the next few years are great, then great. We can play Chronophage at the cookout we’re all invited to. And if the next four years are instead a happy faced atrocity exhibition, at best a grinding exercise in defending cops, creeps, and landlords for the sole reason of the other side’s cops and creeps and landlords being so much worse? Then Chronophage’s sound will prove to be the kind of correct that’s too sloppy to be smug. Even under austerity, the anarcho-freak punx got bops. So even as COVID, the ice caps, or capital’s poptimist truncheon bear down on us, threatening to tickles our little chins, let us, at least, enjoy this thing.

https://zacharylipez.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-mekons-chronophage-and

* The cassette version of Th’Pig’Kiss’d Album will be available soon on Cool Marriage. Check this blog for updates. 

[oldtumblhurgoyf]

A Pseudo-History of Hypereconomic Diplomacy

So I corresponded with someone way back in 2009 who ran a game of HED way back in the 70s. I don’t remember at all how I found this wonderful man, but he scanned a bunch of the stuff he still had and then I took those scans and typed them up into the rules and tables I posted earlier. Even better, he helped me figure out where the original scans were incorrect (as they were from a game in progress and some stuff had changed) as well as sent along the maps which allowed for someone else to make the maps I posted earlier.

Anyway, I went back through my email and still had all of them we had exchanged. Below I’m pasting them bulk of them, which contains a bit of history of the game and how he did things back then. This is actually a series of emails he sent, often prompted to some extent by questions I had asked. I present it here as one big essay on the history of Hypereconomic Diplomacy as he remembers it.

Also on the off chance that you know the following gentlemen who were in some way involved in this game back in the 70s (they’d mostly be around 60 now I think and were all from Britain by the sounds of it), I’d love to chat with them and get some scans or maybe even pay postage for some old hard copies of HED stuff:

Don Miller Pete Ansoff Steve Norris Martin Feather Stephen Agar Frank Kopel

A little history then.  Hypereconomic Diplomacy Mk I was designed by Don Miller (the man after whom Miller numbers were named) in about 1972.  The earliest Diplomacy variants (I think Youngstown was the first) date from around 1967.  Don created some of the basic economic systems and ran the first game in a zine called Aux Armes in 1968.  You can see a run of Aux Armes at http://www.whiningkentpigs.com/DW/oldzines/aux10.pdf which also shows the relative simplicity of the game at that stage.  It folded after about a year for unspecified reasons. I know that Don went blind at some stage in a life which is a bit of a drawback in running a zine.

The idea got taken up by one Pete Ansoff re-worked to create Hyperec Mk II and Pete launched it as a game, housing it in a zine of its own called The Siberian.  Pete ran The Siberian for 15 issues (1971-73).  But he was a law student and needed to actually pass some exams so he handed the reins on to Steve Norris who ran the zine for the next 5 years.  Doug Kent’s archive reckons the last known issue as number 51.

In Britain we had one player who’d started playing in the game and he introduced me to it in 1973/4.  At the time I was 17, running a sub-zine, studying for ‘A’ levels (the British equivalents of SATs) and planning a university life.  I joined in Steve’s game and inside a few months was busy redesigning the game.  Steve knew that there were flaws in his game that neither he nor Pete could by that stage correct and so they both contributed some changes whilst I did likewise and made the rules more coherent.

The zine I created for it was Hyperion.  As well as being a pun on the game, it’s an allusion to a poem by Keats, and turns up in an SF book by Richard Cowper.  What can I say?  I was 17 for God’s sake and 80% geek to 20% hippy.  The game started in 1974 and ran for 9 seasons in total.  I did 5 seasons and I then went to University and discovered life, alcohol, women, sound and lights for visiting rock bands, running discos and anything but studying.

The game stopped.  I eventually got it together enough to hand it on to a guy called Martin Feather who ran the game for 2 seasons (Martin now works at the Jet Propulsion Labs in CA and is a very high-end computer person).  At the end of my first year in Uni, I got chucked out as they seemed to resent offering a college course to someone who didn’t actually go to lectures or study.  How unfair - and in hindsight there are other things I should have done about it, but didn’t. 

I move back home and as Martin was struggling with it, retook the reins, GMing the next couple of seasons, but then I moved back to live on people’s floors at my Uni and had a sort of surrogate 2nd year.  It was never going to work to run a zine from that kind of existence and the thing died in a messy fold in 1977.

I got back into publishing a zine in 1981 once my life had sorted itself out and ran Home of the Brave for around the next 14 years and 130 issues.  But that was just a calm dip zine with nothing special.

GMing Hyperec was hard.  It took around 50 hours to GM a season’s play.  There were around 55 players, 1 for each country in the world in 1900.  The game revolves around 4 aspects of a country’s existence – Manpower, Agriculture, Industry and Money.  So in 1900 China has lots of Manpower, reasonable Agricul ture and no real Industry.  Holland has Industry and little Manpower etc etc.  You have to trade these factors around and buy Stuff with them.  Stuff includes the military units that are then able to fight the wars that inevitably result.

Money is a different thing because the game has a system that says that money is never spent out of existence.  If you buy something from someone else, the money transfers to them.  If you (as the US player say) spend money, it goes into the US economy and a proportion of it returns to your stockpile each turn.  The total amount remains the same.

The game has a whole set of banking systems that support this system and which can be used to ‘grow’ money if the money is put to one side and not spent.  And there are a whole load of other transport, research, fishing and other systems that form part of the game.

In 1975 I had a pocket calculator that I’d built myself, which was so slow that if you asked it to calculate a mathematical function it would think about it for 20 seconds.  And there was lot of calculating in Hyperec as you’ll see.  In a way I was running a PBM country management game.

The game developed quite a life of its own.  As well as the actual zine itself, people published their own newspapers for propaganda purposes.  One player sold his country (Peru) to the Bolivian player and used the money to actually play as a bank rather than a country.  The combined Perivia was the dominant country in South America by the time the game folded.  Maybe it’s no surprise that the guy playing Bolivia ended up in real-life politics and is now an MP and a possible member of Gordon Brown’s government in the next reshuffle.

I thought at the time that what I was doing was indulging in some damn stupid hobby.  In hindsight if I’d have had a sense of application it could have been a living in itself.  PBM games for computer adjudication got quite popular in the 80s as computers became a more established part of life.   What I have found is that the skills I used to develop the game and to run a zine actually turned out to be useful life-skills.  These days I have a small accountancy firm (www.emtacs.com) and the communications techniques and basic abilities to use language as a tool are enormously useful.  The abilities to organise large systems, hold stuff in your head and to recognise patterns are all just good business skills.

The game in a modern context would need a serious revamp but it would be a relatively simple thing to use Excel to present reports, do the maths and control the mechanisms of the game.  I’ll be quite happy to lend a hand if you ever threaten to get another game off the ground and I could even round up 2-3 players from the old game to join in!

Right - time to go hunt stuff in the garage and the attic. I'll get back to you.

OK – some progress to report, but I’m afraid they come with a bit of a story and a mumbling apology.  The good news is that I have a set of rules for Hyperec which will be coming your way.  The bad news is that I think I have less in the way of material of the passage of the game than I’d like and the better news is that I know where to get hold of copies.

I have been delving into my garage where old zines, unused toys and books etc are living and unearthed a ring binder and a folder with Hyperec written on them.  I dragged them back in the house and sat down to read. And went “oh yes, now I remember.”…..

To carry the story on from where I left it, Hyperion folded and I dropped out of the hobby in 1977.  The game died with no-one remotely able or willing to take it on.  I kept in distant touch with a few people and then returned properly to running a zine in 1981.  My finds in the garage prodded my memory that there was in fact another attempt at running a game of Hyperec. 

Martin Hammon was a good friend who’d played in my game and vanished at a similar time to me and was returning when he had the idea that he’d like to run a game of Hyperec because he had had so much fun playing mine.  He set up a zine called Stuart and asked me for help.  And so I bundled a lot of stuff, copies of Hyperion, the rules and much more and sent them to Martin.  His game lasted for a shorter period than mine.

It’s 25 years back now and so I’m afraid I can’t remember why the game ran aground.  Martin was a bit of a chaotic and it may have been his (a) separation and divorce, (b) his kitchen-fitting business folding or (c) ill-health or (d) he just couldn’t hack it.  When I handed on the stuff I probably said something about having it back and I may have more stuff to find in my garage. 

Regardless – Martin died about 5 years ago (dodgy heart, about 48-50) and I’m pretty sure that’s a dead end (no pun intended).

What I do have are some relics of my running the thing – a couple of the set-up issues, a couple of the zine I used to publish between main deadlines (Japetus) and a whole lot of stuff pertaining to the game Martin ran and a set of the rules which Martin rewrote to incorporate some of the changes.

I’ll mail you over a whole lot of this stuff in the next day or so, but what I can do tomorrow is try scanning a whole chunk (including the rules) and emailing it over to you.  I would scan it here but my home scanner doesn’t seem to want to play right now, but I’ve another scanner in the office and I’ll be in there tomorrow. I’m a little worried about the quality of the printing and whether it will stand up to scanning and reprinting, but we can try.  I’m worried most about the maps but I can probably recreate these if necessary.

And I should thank you for taking me on a trip into the past.  My younger daughter, Steph (19) was fascinated by the whole thing and the idea that I did this kind of thing when I was 2 years younger than she was.  The whole idea of being able to write a zine of probably 10-15,000 words in the course of a long weekend, without a word-processor is quite scary.  He most accurate comment when confronted with it all was “God you were such a geek, Dad”.  You’re not wrong there girl, but it didn’t harm me in the long-term.

The other source of material is the UK Zine Archive run by an old friend of mine, Stephen Agar who has issues 1-8 of Hyperion and which he can either lend me or scan for me.  If you are ever to run this thing as a reality then you’d probably find it fairly invaluable as a template to create a game report for the thing.  I’ll talk to Stephen about that.

So – browse the rules and I’ll send you the rest of the stuff on Monday.  I’m not sure if you gave me an address so give me it again.  Have a think about it and then if you decide you’re serious I’ll give you a hand with setting up.  I think the rules may need a bit of tweaking since issues 1-6 of Hyperion were full of rule changes. 

There’s no doubt that Hyperec would make a fascinating test case in a new millennium.  I ran it in a world where the only practical way to communicate internationally was to send an air letter and wait 10 days for a reply.  I can quite see it being a big success.  I was saddled with having to create the game reports every issue and spend hours working with fiddly numbers that would be a piece of cake done in Excel.  It cost me a lot of money to produce something, print 65 copies of it and deal with a bulk mailout.  You’d have none of these problems.

In terms of the number of people playing you ideally need around 60!  The catch is that you need people who can be encouraged to be sufficiently in love with the concept that they are happy to play Nicaragua (not relly that much of a superpower in 1914.  The trick is to have a kind of hierarchy of standby players.  If Turkey misses a turn, then the following turn you invite the player of Nicaragua to send orders in for their country and for Turkey.  Then you'll be able to offer someone else the chance to take over Nicaragua if Turkey dsrops out altogether.

As you'll see - a little inactivity in the minor countries doesn't matter too much but having an NMR from the UK or France is a bigger problem.

Some of the printing on the tables is a little bit faint and these are the ones I worry most about in a scanning sense.  Let me know how they turn out your end.  If there are a few missing ones I can fill in the blanks but if they're just illegible I can retype.

The more I look at this the more I realise that this is such an online accessible game.  The tables and the maps were things I had to redo and redraw from scratch every turn or two.  These days you'd just have an Excel sheet or 6 that hung on to this data and you could amend it as appropriate and then permit online access for all players.  It would actually need an active website and the ability to update that website on a very regular basis.  How are your HTML skills then?

The rules and everything are a little bit dry and I'll try and drop you a line that explains how the game plays in a more coherent way.  My friend Stephen Agar has said he'll dig the copies of Hyperion out of the UK Zine Archive and stick them into pdf's that you and I can read and which will not require them to cross the pond.  That's a big help although I will send over a whole bunch of stuff anyway.  I don't think the postage cost will be hideous so don;t worry about that.

I think some of the maps and provinces may be 'in play' items.  The rules permit subdivision and recombination of provinces so some people's actions will have produced different provinces.  They all started as pretty straight.  But then Bolivia and Peru agreed to merge into Perivia and some people started to label the newly-formed provinces with fun names - hence Midgard (which was the name of a free-form RPG of the 70's, or a book, or something), Doc's Pleasure Garden and Rivendell.  Some peope went to an atlas and come up with the Cianares, Hejaz etc.  This game taught me a hell of a lot about the geography of the world.

There's a number of changes to the first spreadsheet brought about because this version of the tables must have been compiled from the game-in-progress.  A distant bell of memory is ringing to tell me that I put these tables together to simplify things.  I think they once were a part of the rules at the relevant point but I separated them into a 4-page document which contained everything because that was what people referred to once the game was in progress.  The game had one or two strange turnings.  Different countries swapped bits of one another - hence anomalies like Greek Sumatra, Aden being a province of India, Brazil having renamed itself Rivendell etc etc.  Plus a stab at humour here and there.

So - Doc's Pleasure Island was a renamed half of Haiti (named after Papa Doc Duvalier who ran the country for a long time with voodoo and a secret police).  Perivia was the renamed combination of Peru & Bolivia, Rivendell I hope you'd know, Cyrenia was a half of Cyprus and Leazes End is named after one end of Newcastle United Football Club's ground.  Hejaz was floated into a new nation, and divided between Benson & Hejaz etc etc.  The investment performance table of countries in the various regions has been badly affected by this and is seemingly cocked-up anyway.  I have tried to correct this and re-labelled a couple of the regions but in essence, it doesn't matter.  Some countries are blessed with being in more than one investment return area for bank purposes.

What else?  The Public Works thing is a strange iterm that just seems daft.  It's really a means of transferring money into the escrow (economy) of a particular country.  That can have a logic but I've forgotten what it was!

Having a bit of a browse trying to track down people who played in the first game led me to the NA Variant Bank that tells me there is a Hyperec 4 and a Hyperec 5, but I can't find any details of these nor do I have any idea if the NA Variant Bank is still intact.  It didn't help me track down Pete Ansoff, Steve Norris or Frank Kopel who were leading lights of my game.

[cliveboney]

hhhhhh

im tryin to get over this & move on w/ my life so maybe making a post abt it will help

so i applied for a zine a while ago (well like. 2 weeks ago) bc i’ve never been part of one & i thought it might be cool (also free copy + $$ right yell heah yeehaw). from the beginning i wasn’t really expecting too much like im just basically like “it won’t hurt to just apply & see what happens”

so i spent a bit of time gathering up some recent pieces to put in my “”portfolio”” so i could send it over because like. applications were open but there was like a week until the deadline to send yours so i took advantage of that to finish up some drawings i’d been working on etc (that’s why i was suddenly super active on my art blog for like a week lmaoo)

Anyway i did all that & put it in my portfolio & then submitted it the day before the deadline & it was all taken care of, time to wait. the next step was for the organizers to post the list of accepted artists, so they did that & i checked & unfortunately i didnt make the cut which is like. cool, fine, i wasn’t expecting much anyway, right? they had a ton of applicants so chances were slim, etc etc

not gonna fuckin lie to myself tho ok i rly did want to be a part of the project & i was pretty proud of the things i had worked on in preparation for the application & yea i did think i had a p decent chance li ke i obvs didn’t know who i was up against & it could’ve totally been a bunch of amazing artists who blew me out of the water but i felt like my stuff was at least. u know. nice to look at 

anyway i didnt get in & i was like rip & the organizers were like “we’re gonna send out emails to everyone including those who weren’t accepted” & i was like ok cool at least this way i’ll know for sure they got my entry

except. i never got an email?? they were like “we’ll send them out today/tomorrow” & it’s been almost a week now & i haven’t gotten anything so now instead of moving on like i’m supposed to be doing i keep thinking about what if my entry didn’t go through, does this mean i actually did have a chance but some random error prevented it from happening? they had so many entries & there was so little time between the deadline for submissions & the announcement of the artist list, did they really look at all the entries, or did they stop before they got to mine? did i fuck this up by waiting too close to the deadline, ensuring that my work never even got considered? but if i had submitted early i wouldn’t have had any examples of my current work to show, and my art has definitely changed since the last time i posted smth i was actually proud of so it wouldn’t have been good to submit at that point anyway

im just fucking overthinking everything & it’s so. ugh. and im literally /literally/ the worst person for doing this, but i did look at some of the accepted artists & i did compare my work to theirs & i absolutely did feel like mine could have easily been accepted over theirs but then again i have the creator’s point of view i dont know what my art actually looks like, maybe it looks like shit maybe it looks dumb as hell with weird proportions & unintentional warping that just makes it so goddamn ugly no one wants to look at it & that’s why all the things im proud of never get reblogged, who knows!! 

i don’t know what the organizers’ criteria for judgement was & i dont know what precisely they were looking for all i know is i didn’t get into the thing i rly wanted to get into & im upset abt it despite my best efforts not to be & i wish i could just move on and try again next time but that was literally the only time i’ve ever seen a call for applications to a zine, i have no idea how tf people actually find these things because the only way i ever find out about them is when they’re done and being advertised to sell so even though i know it’s not the case this felt like a special one-time opportunity which is making the rejection feel even worse & im just overall rly mad abt this bc i went into this so casually & somehow came out so unhappy

i just wish i could forget about it & get on with more important things in my life like hmm maybe the one month i have left to catch up in my classes & not fail them both like uhhh this shitty 90 second animation for this shitty piece of shit class that someone somehow tricked whoever’s in charge into labeling an “animation class” for which neither of those words apply as there is teaching of neither animation nor any other fucking thing in the entire universe going on during what i like to call the Three Hell Hours, each referred to respectively as “i woke up this early and walked this far and climbed this many stairs for This”, “holy shit it’s only 9 am how”, and “just 55 more minutes until i can get the fuck out of this time trap and spend the rest of the day trying to figure out if this moment right now even happened or if it was all a terrible fever dream that i had while really spending the morning actually asleep”

this got away from me, it’s well past midnight, im tired and not happy ok, today was a bad day for no reason, just generally a shit day, i gave a presentation on my half-assed painting project today which was about aromanticism & ended up telling my class im aro which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time & probably isn’t in the long run but for some reason i’m regretting it big time now like i feel like i shouldn’t have been so casual like that with a bunch of strangers & i was trying to explain the project but people were confused bc i forgot that most people don’t even distinguish between romantic/sexual orientation & people know basically nothing abt aromanticism bc nobody ever talks about it except sometimes on the internet and hhhhhh it went fine and all but i feel retroactively uncomfortable at having been so open about myself in front of a bunch of people who Don’t Get It man what a wakeup call after having been online w/ people who do get it for so long

my only consolation is that i have a friend in that class who Gets It & she’s like. my one support in that class, she said i handled it well so that was reassuring at least. but god. i can’t wait for the semester to be over so i never have to go back & face those people again lolllool godddddddd

anyway that’s all the venting i want to do for now lmfao sorry about this i just. hohjhj