WHWC March 2025: E-Zines!
Following the March UofT WHWC Writing Event theme of “Smallweb”, I’m deciding to dedicate a small part of my site to an interesting smallweb subculture: e-zines!
What’s a Zine?
A cautionary perusal of the relevant Wikipedia page reveals the it is a typically small-scale and indie distribution of something resembling a magazine, with strong emphasis on typesetting and graphical elements. For the case of e-zines, there is also the fact that distribution is though the internet, allowing for a more interesting collaboration dynamic. In some cases, this collaboration is pseudonymous, so artists might not even know each other by name!
I’ve decided to archive a few of these because of the ethereal nature of these projects, with websites going down and file uploads getting removed, and the occasional nuke-everything-and-run by the admins. Many of these zines are uploaded in the most bizarre places, such as itch.io and Mega, which makes it impossible for the Wayback Machine to properly archive.
Archival
The archive is currently around 2GB on my hard drive which might cause issues with Github if I upload it all directly to my website. I’ll try to reduce the size somehow and make a page available later containing all the issues for each of these zines.
Lainzine
This was my first exposure to e-zines. Topics include cyberpunk/hacker culture, but there a lot of variety even within this specific space. There’s a lot of intro-level articles on a variety of computer science and math topics, some creative/political writing, and a suspicious amount of drug procurement guides. I also think these stylistically hit out of the park: I especially love the covers and full-page intermediary pieces.
Black Fog
This one is more focused on art (with a vague internet/glitch theme), with issues consisting of concatenated comics and visual art collections, from photography to glitch art to drawings. I particularly love the style here too.
cyberbully
This e-zine has a focus on internet users, but of course gravitates to the smallweb since that’s where all the all the fun happens obviously. Lots of fun pages, and I especially love the ASCII art full pages and cover.
Paged Out
This one is a more technical-oriented zine a la Phrack, but not just raw ASCII which makes the whole thing a lot more readable (though more expensive archive). I particularly like the “ICO/PDF polyglot guide” from Issue 1 since this knowledge has somehow come up in a job interview. Theres tons of fun esoteric things like quines and code golfing, even if you aren’t into cybersecurity, though its a bit inaccessible if you aren’t familiar with low level programming.
PoC or GTFO
This zine is typeset in LaTeX which tells a lot about the style of articles inside. Similar to Paged Out, there’s a lot of writeup-style explorations in very deep technical domains. As the name suggests, expanded as “Proof of Concept or Get the Fuck Out”, the articles aren’t abstract in the least: they are things you are able to do now on existing computers and setups (which is different from the more abstract kinds of info you learn from textbooks and courses).