Tag: events

International Zine Month 2023!

Poster for International Zine Month 2023. Text of the poster is in the post.Happy International Zine Month! Every year our friend Alex Wrekk, who started IZM, puts out a list of daily activities for the month of July that are zine related. This year’s poster was designed in collaboration with their pal Zineville and their mascot Mr Chompy.

Below is the text of the poster, which can be downloaded from here. Have a very happy and safe IZM! Make cool zines and share them! Send us LGBTQ+ zines to include in the archive!

  1. What is a zine? Make a definition in your own words and share it.
  2. Zine Rewind! Re-read your favorite zines, and share why you love them so!
  3. Cook 1 recipe or complete 1 DIY project found in a zine!
  4. AmeriZine Day! Explore marginalized voices in the Americas. Buy, share, and read zines that celebrate racial justice and zines written by BIPOC (Black Indigenous and People of Color) from the Americas.
  5. Try a new way if folding a 1 page zine or, create your own.
  6. Zine Pride Day! Explore LGBTOIA+ zines! Вuy, share, & read zines by people of marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities. Check out the Queer Zine Archive Project (HEY, That’s US 😀 )
  7. What’s a zine distro? Educate ourself of what zine distros are, how they operate, and how they pick zines to carry. Support a distro near you!
  8. Look into upcoming zines in events in real life or virtual events that you can attend! When else are you going to be able to attend a zine event in a different city or even country for free?
  9. Buy direct! Do you sell zines online? Update your shop and post a link to it online. Or Buy directly from someone who posts a link to their shop.
  10. RPG zines are a blast!! Find or make your own role play adventure zine!

    Image of an Ouiji Board, but the traditional text has been replaced to say "Sending unbound zines to zine librarians results in seven years of bad metadata" Underneath that there's a silhouette of a stapler and the words "Good Bye"
    Lucky #13: This was the zine superstition that WE made up in 2021!
  11. International Zine Day! Read a zine from a country different from your own.
  12. ZineWiki Day! It’s a wiki just for zines! Add to or update listings to the new and improved zinewiki.com
  13. Make up a zine superstition and share it (skip the 13th issue? Spin 3 times to prevent copier jams? Your best friend reads your zine first?)
  14. ValenZines Day! Give yourself some zine love! • read zines in a bubble bath? Buy some new scissors? Let your zine friends know you care about them.
  15. Free Zine Day! Offer your zine for free online or –if it’s safe to do so where you are – leave zines in public places for strangers to find and enjoy.
  16. Make a list of reasons you love zines and share your list with others!
  17. Make a flyer for yourzine to trade, send out with zine orders & trades.
  18. Zine Trade Day! Ask someone to trade or swap zines with you.
  19. Zine Distro Appreciation Day! Tell people about/order from a zine distro.
  20. Talk about a thing you learned in a zine.”I once read in a zine that…”
  21. Check out YouTube channels & TikTok creators about zines.
  22. Zine Library Day! Search for a zine library in your area and make plans to go someday or contact them about how to include your zine in their collection.
  23. Tell 5 people about zines… The more the merrier!
  24. Teach yourself a new zine skill. Extra points for using a tool you never have before!
  25. Make a zine for a non-profit cause!
  26. Organize your zine collection. Post a SHELFIE online.
  27. Ask a zine friend if they would like to do a split zine or collaboration.
  28. Read or create a mini-comic zine
  29. Write out a list of zine ideas and use a random way of selecting one to make! (D20 dice work great, but get creative!)
  30. Write a letter or online post about your #IZM2023 experience!
  31. HallowZine! Remember zines and zinesters that are no longer with us.

Throughout the month bonuses:
– Read a zine a day
– Do the 24 Hour Zine Thing (make a zine to your skill level in 24 hours)

Queer Space Communism 2019

qsc

As we enter into “Pride Month” here’s our annual reminder that corporate rainbow capitalism won’t save us, but queer space communism just might.  To that end, here are 10 things that you can do to help foster rad queer communities into the future:

  1. Skip the rainbow tat from big box stores and chains and support indy queer artists and producers.
  2. Have lesbian potlucks on the regular, and invite non-lesbian queers too.  But tell the TERFs and SWERFs to fuck right the fuck off, and give them no space at the table.
  3. Start edible garden collectives.  Growing veggies and fruits can be intimidating, but, like visiting a bath house for the first time, if you do it with buddies it’s more fun.
  4. Create spaces and events without “allies” and straight folks.  We don’t have to always invite or accommodate them, and we NEVER need their approval or to be “respectable.”
  5. Talk and write about queer sex.  Be explicit.  Discuss pleasure, and desire, and health.  Especially with younger folks and older folks.  Don’t make assumptions about who or how.
  6. Throw queer dance parties!  Also throw queer dance parties with a variety of muisical genres and themes and at different times of day and night.  Make space for the metalheads and disco divas and hip-hop homos and everyone else.
  7. Preserve our hestories through story telling, oral hestory recording, artifact collecting, and letter writing.  Help commit our lives to physical objects so that there is a fossil record.
  8. Teach and learn both hard and soft skills.  Host or attend workshops on bike repair, cooking, community first aid, budgeting and personal finance, sewing, arts/music/writing and so on.
  9. Make queer digital media and host or platform it yourselves.  Become unchained from YouTube, Facebook, Blogger and iTunes.  Work together to skillshare technical knowledge, including recording, editing, sound and visual production skills, but also how to build webservers and host different types of content on your own.
  10. Make and read queer zines.

Get QZAP Swag!!