October 2022

Original or the clone

/ Zines /

The Philly Zine Fest is accepting submissions for their Anthology zine. I made a collage with a bit of text I’ve been waiting to use somewhere.

Black and white collage that shows a woman's face, cut in half. One hand is above her head and the other hand is resting on the opposite cheek. An eye is in the top right corner. A different eye is in the bottom left corner. The text says, "Some of you have never figured out if you're the original or the clone, and it shows."

The background is photocopied aluminum foil (for real!). I simply cut a piece of aluminum foil and made a copy of it. Then I crinkled the aluminum foil a bit and made another copy. That became the background for this page.

The woman’s face and hands are stock photos taken by Ospan Ali, available on Unsplash.

The text is something I wrote a while ago and hadn’t found a place for…until now. 😉

This collage is a very different style for me, and I really like how it came out! The great thing about submitting to zines is that there’s room to experiment. It feels like low stakes, since it’s only one page.

Halloween collage

/ Zines /

I contributed a page to Webs Across the Campfire, vol. 2, a special Halloween zine from Vlasinda Productions. Copies are available in their shop.

For my page, I wanted to make a collage. I had paper from my ink color experiments to work with. I cut these into shapes for clouds, a moon, and pumpkins.

Paper cut-outs of purple clouds, an orange moon, spider webs, and pumpkins.

For the spider webs, I drew on black cardstock with a white gel pen. Then I photocopied the webbing, so I had sections to work with.

Here’s the finished page, with text I printed and glued on, a clip art house I modified, and black cardstock for the hill.

A collage of a haunted house with pumpkins and spider webbing. The background is a purple and blue sky, with clouds and an orange moon. The text says "A dark and scary night is not so scary. Sometimes fear is simply the absence of knowledge."

What comes after social media?

/ Thoughts /

I see lots of conversations about quitting social media and all the negative effects of using social media. I don’t disagree. Yes, the platforms were built to be addictive. Yes, they spread misinformation. Yes, they manipulate people’s emotions.

But social media also offers a way to connect with people and build communities that we didn’t have before.

What’s missing from those conversations about quitting social media is, what comes next?

How do you keep the positives of connecting and building community and leave behind the negative aspects of social media?

I haven’t seen many people talking about that. (If you have, please send me links.)

One solution might be, people take back their online identities. Build their own site and that’s their home on the internet, along the lines of IndieWeb principles.

But lots of people don’t want to (or don’t care to) build their own website. It’s a lot of effort, compared to posting on Instagram.

We need easy-to-use tools that help people create their home on the internet.

Tools that:

  • don’t require a lot of technical skills
  • are low-cost (or better yet, open-source and free)
  • break down barriers to having your own site

As long as social media platforms are the simplest way to post online, lots of people will keep using them. We need alternatives that are just as accessible as social media apps.

Is anyone building something like that?

Add to dictionary, but for audio

/ Thoughts

You know how this goes–

You’re typing in Microsoft Word or Google Docs or whatever you use.

You write a term the software doesn’t recognize, and little squiggly lines appear beneath the word to let you know it’s wrong. Maybe it’s an acronym or someone’s last name. You typed it correctly and you’ll be typing it again. So you right-click on the word and select “Add to dictionary” in the menu. Now the software recognizes that word and won’t flag it as incorrect.

That’s a super handy feature. I’d like to have the equivalent for audio transcription.

I record a lot of ideas using the Day One app. The premium version automatically transcribes the audio to text. I copy and paste that text to use as a starting point for writing. That’s how this blog post started, actually.

A lot of my Day One entries are about zines and guess what? The transcription rarely gets the word “zine” correct. “Zine” gets transcribed as “zen,” “scene,” or even just “Z.”

I want Add to dictionary but for audio.

How would that work?

Maybe I record myself saying the word a couple times? Then the software has audio samples to match to text outputs. I don’t have the technical knowledge to know how that would work. But it would be a useful feature to have.

Scroll to Top