Editing The Pen Addict 434/transcript (section)

== Survey Success ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Awesome. I look forward to next year's version. I'm glad they got this off the ground and we'll make this an annual thing, hopefully.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. Definitely. All right. Let's take our first break and thank Squarespace for the support of this show. Make your next move with Squarespace. They will let you easily create a website for your next idea or project and give you all of the tools that you need to make it shine. With your unique domain name, they can do it for you. If you want to customize an award-winning, beautiful template to make your content look exactly the way that you want, they have all of that. If you want an all-in-one platform with nothing to install, patch, or upgrade, that's what Squarespace is all about. They have got you covered. And who doesn't want that? When you have a project, an idea, a thing you want to put online, you don't want to jump through a million hoops to get it done. You just want to get the thing out there. And that is what Squarespace is best at. And if you run into any issues along the way, they have 24-7 customer support. If you need any help, they have got you covered. This is why I have used Squarespace for so many projects over the years. I think I have like three or four active Squarespace websites right now. And that's just a thing for me. Like if I want to put something online, I go to squarespace.com. That's where I go because that's how it starts for me because I can get everything set up exactly the way that I want, looking, feeling, performing perfectly. And they have fantastic apps for iOS as well. Like now you can actually build your entire website in the Squarespace iPad app, which is fantastic. And I've done that. I've gone in and edited stuff. I've edited layout stuff, text stuff. It's so good. So go try it out for yourself today. No credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash penaddict. And their plans start at just $12 a month. When you decide to sign up, make sure that you use the offer code penaddict to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and show your support for this show. That is squarespace.com slash penaddict and the code penaddict for 10% off your first purchase. So thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. You know, mentioning Kat was part of creating the survey, I am using today the Retro 51 bump in the night. Yeah. Which Kat was responsible with in collaboration with Matthew Morse. And it is probably one of the best Retro 51s ever made. I think without a doubt. In my book, anyway. It is super good looking. Like the texture of the pen is nice even. Which I don't know if I've really noticed before on other Retro 51s. Like it's got like a matte texture to it. Super good. I have number 007, by the way. That was the number that I ended up getting, which I greatly appreciate.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' There's a long story behind that. We'll save that for another day. But yeah. The, yeah, the way, number one, I love Matthew's artwork. So like give me all of that. But the way the colors came out. Yeah. And the, the, the glow in the dark and stuff. It's, yeah. And, and all the color differentials and everything. It's just super, super sharp. So yeah. Very cool. So you kind of, you know, went off topic here, but continued on the topic I wanted to do, which is continuing a few community shout outs. Some of my friends in the stationary world, specifically Les at Comfortable Shoes Studio and Johnny at Pencil Revolution have started to make zines. I have always been a zine person. Being such a fan of music in the 80s and 90s in my entire life, you know, that's how I felt cool is going to the indie record store and they'd have a shelf full of zines that somehow they found, you know, in these, you know, nascent days of the internet. And me picking up my zines, figuring out which ones I would like, and then mailing off to subscribe for, you know, a few different ones. And I still probably have, I don't know, I got a pretty good stack of zines from 20 plus years ago.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Can we go back a minute? Sure. What is a zine?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I see, you could probably get a lot of different definitions and there's probably a technical definition, but I see it as just a self-published, low-budget piece of art, essentially.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So Wikipedia defines zine as a small circulation, self-published work of original or appropriate texts and images.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So I think my personal definition was pretty close to that. Right? So that's the way I see it is if someone has an idea and they want to publish those ideas, whether it's words or pictures or poetry or lyrics or art or whatever, and they build something themselves, they publish it on an extremely tight budget, usually stolen copier budget is the OG zine world. But now you can go to Kinko's and get your files printed or, you know, things like that. So, um, very low to no budget, very raw, um, you know, put together, you know, very, you know, kind of randomly just stapled together with the, the, you know, staples that you can find and just basically collecting whatever you can to put your words or whatever art you're creating out into the world, into other people's hands, whether it's, you know, something you make five copies of that you've handwritten written and drawn yourself, or you make a hundred copies that you run off a photocopier. And then you send them out to people who are interested in those types of things.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's super interesting to continue to make these things today. Like I understand, obviously I understand the value of the tactile thing, but the amount of effort required today to do this, I actually think is more in the sense of how easy it is to do this stuff digitally.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Counterbalances the amount of effort it is to put a project like this together, where before the internet you would make a zine because how else were you going to do it? Right. But now it's like to go ahead and make the zine, you are, it's kind of like you, you start from a negative position, which is like less than zero position of how easy it would be to get it online when probably most of the content was produced on a computer anyway, like if it was written and probably emailed to the person putting it together. So it would be so much easier for them to just copy and paste it. Also as well, I imagine these days as well, people are setting these things on a computer and have digital files to go and print, right? So considering you're doing all of that, you could just put it onto any like website creation platform and it would be out there, right? And would have a larger audience to it. So, and especially because all of these zines have websites where you get them from, the three that we're talking about today. So I'm just saying that it's interesting to me and I appreciate that desire to do it when it is easier these days to just share it online.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, then it's not a surprise that people who are into analog tools would be into zine making, right? Those things go hand in hand because by default, you're choosing not to do the easiest things to put words into existence by picking up a pen and grabbing a piece of paper. By default, you could open up your computer or your phone and do it the easy way. And to have that bit of creative outlet that a pen or a pencil brings us as, you know, stationary fans gives the zine makers the same kind of thrill to put this thing together and get their words published in a physical format that goes against everything, right? In the modern times, like a zine shouldn't exist. And they're starting to have, and it's been going on for a while. I follow it just kind of adjacently. You know, there's zine conventions, you know? It's no different than a comic convention or a pen show, right? People get joy out of making these things with their hands and with their minds. And that just doesn't always translate on a screen, even though they make our lives easier, you know, producing them that way. So, yeah. We'll put some links in the show notes. I've bought all of their zines so far, Johnny's and Les's. And then it was Les who turned me on to a zine maker called The Word Distribution, who is very prolific. They have an Etsy store. I bought a handful of their zines that I've been reading. They're really good, like pencil reviews. It's like a pencil review zine is one of them. And they do a whole, whole slew of different style of zines. And they do zine shows and things like that. So, I just wanted to point that out as another way to, you know, support our community. Get, you know, inspired by the creativity and see, you know, if that's something you might be interested in doing yourself. Like, I don't think I could ever pull off making a zine. Like, I don't know that I'd be, that's in my wheelhouse. But I do enough other things, you know. If I would have wanted to make a zine, like that's refill. The idea for refill was to be a zine or even a smaller, you know, more official publication. And then I decided that it would just work better digitally for me. But that was the original idea for refill, to be honest.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It does. Because I think that now that I think about it, refill is basically an email zine. With what you do, which is like you, it's like you, you have a, like an introduction essay. That's the word I'm looking for, right? Like you have a kind of an essay that you write every time, which I always love. And then like a selection of related works from other people, which you add your own commentary to. So it actually does have that kind of vibe to it, which is really interesting. I'd never thought of it that way before. But now that you say it, like, I guess that actually makes a lot of sense.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And if I can also add that one of the selling points to a zine for me is that it's never strives to be the perfect example of what it's trying to be, right? There's flaws and there's emotion. And, you know, there's things that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily see from an advertising or marketing firm in there because it's coming either from a singular person or a collective. And I try to put that through in refill, right? It's not too glossy, right? It's not, it's not too perfect. It's not too, you know, white glove and white tablecloth, right? It's, it's, it's a little bit more personal than that. And I think that's why people enjoy either refill or reading zines, right? Because it's, it's imperfect at times. And a lot of times the people writing them are imperfect human beings and they're trying to share those things about how, how, why that's okay. And why, you know, they like this weird stuff and want to share it with you. So I think that's an important part of, you know, the, the, the zine idea, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. Yeah. That's really nice. So, yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So there you go. That's why, that's why I think I've enjoyed it so much because, you know, I, I've tried to do things with that ethos. Yeah. Um, as well. And, um, it's, you know, it's a, it's a platform for all in publishing. So, all right. Ooh, I didn't, I didn't mean to get too meta on you there.