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THE MOUTH OF XIBALBA digital
As I mentioned in the welcome, I decided to turn THE MOUTH OF XIBALBA into
a "digital" zine rather than continue as a paper one. One of the chief
reasons for this was my frustration at getting the paper zine out the door to
any interested parties, hell, just FINDING any interested parties was proving
to be damned near impossible. I suppose that I just don't have the patience
to set a thing into motion and let it gather its own momentum, I want instant
gratification, it's the American way! Now I no longer need to send out free
copies to various zine authors, hoping for a plug in their respective mags,
when I am happy with a work-in-progress, I can simply upload portions of the
zine into the digital ether via modem.
My disatisfaction with Xerox results is another reason for switching
formats (is that the correct term?), the inability to get a truly decent
photocopy job done, I don't have the funds or the distribution to warrant an
offset printing job. Of course, I have to impose a limit of 640 x 480
resolution because I don't want to automatically exclude someone who doesn't
have SVGA resolution, this makes for images that don't carry the same amount
of detail as a clean photocopy, particularly with tiny type. This is a small
sacrifice that has to weighed against the ability to reuse collage portions
and art repeatedly without loss of detail (and no messy glue!).
I received a grey-scale hand scanner for my birthday and that's what I've
been using to get graphics into the computer for manipulation. The hand
scanner works well but it's hard to get perfectly straight lines into the
computer due to my human limitations, perhaps I need one of those scanner
trays.. yeah, probably, but I don't have the money for that right now. At any
rate, I am using the scanner at lowest resolution and saving images in 16
color format so that I can keep the byte size of these images as low as
possible, if I am going to distribute any of this stuff via disk, I need to
pack as much as possible onto a single disk.
Another restriction that I am burdened with as a result of using this new
format is that I no longer have the ability to mix text and background
graphics with the same sort of reckless abandon as I had with issue 1 and 2.
Scanned text just doesn't look sharp enough to me, it can't be avoided when
you need to scan in a cartoon or weird article but disk space requirements
also preclude the scanning of a page of text when a simple ASCII file will
do. So it's not as colorful or visually stimulating to have the ASCII
seperated from cryptic graphic backgrounds, oh well, another one of the
trade offs that I have been forced to make due to format limitations.
Something that I was interested in doing was creating an engine that would
provide a graphic menu system that would allow the use of a mouse to choose
articles or images but my proficiency at C is not extensive enough to get
such a project off the ground, for now, a simple batch menu will have to
suffice. However, if anyone out there is interested in helping me design
such a menu in C or C+, please contact me at the usual address:
Neil Sorenson, THE MOUTH OF XIBALBA, 59a Onway Lake Rd, Raymond, NH 03077
Lastly, on a more subjective/less technical note, I have decided to lean
towards another form of zine, rather than pack it full of my own ravings and
weird art, I have decided to use this format to desseminate the work of other
zine writers and artists. Perhaps some will see this as a cop-out, thinking
that I am using the work of others as a vehicle for my own meager talents
and in most ways, I suppose that this is a correct assumption. You may call
THE MOUTH OF XIBALBA the K-TEL of the zine world, I plan to pick delicious
nuggets from various zines (and etc.) that make it to my door and reproduce
them here (with full credit of course). If you have an article or piece of
art that you would like to submit for consideration, by all means, please
feel free to send me mail at the above address or if your submission is
digital in nature, you can send me E-mail with file attachments to me at
COMPUTER CASTLE in Newton, NH at (603)642-5914 or (603)895-2393.
Feel free to write to either sources with your bitches, complaints,
praises, questions, offers of free energy, secrets of the unknown, and
recipes. S'long.
- Neil
