---
title: TRAP Zine
date: 250326
category: phlog
---
It's nothing new, my propensity to ping-pong between hobbies and
passions. I've referred to it as a seasonality: I might be in my
writing season or my music season or my gaming season, but time
inevitably marches onward. The shift is often abrupt, often jar-
ring, and often occurring before I'm ready for it. This phlog is
a long time coming, but I am sitting at my desk and forcing the
words into the terminal because I want to document and remember
last season. Not a post-mortem, because I know it will come back
around again, but perhaps more of a cloud-seeding attempt. Don't
wait so long until you come back again, please.
In February of this year, I worked on and released a zine called
TRAP. Ostensibly, it is a TTRP-related work of short fictions,
which could potentially be used in a gaming scenario. I'm using
a lot of vague words here because it's not _exactly_ gameable,
intentionally so. I don't have much interest in writing systems,
and my inspiration here was to have a venue for some of the short
and evocative scenes that have always littered my notebooks. The
zine came about after some discussions (and argument) about the
format itself, especially at a time when the word is used to de-
scribe a wide variety of self-published books and commercial pro-
ducts that happen to be in a minimal and maybe rough format. To
me, this is not necessarily the spirit or culture of a zine, al-
though I hate to be a gatekeeper.
A zine, to me, is an analog artifact of personal expression de-
signed to break boundaries and restrictions of capital and act as
a community-building object by virtue of its reproducability and
distribution. It's not a $20 glossy small magazine that is dis-
interested in its recipients. It's a library-photocopied blood-
on-the-page expression of oneself that inherently encourages re-
sponse recirculation.
So, putting my money where my mouth is, I made TRAP. It's 16pp,
black-and-white, constructed in a literal cut-and-paste method
using printed public domain graphics and typewritten text, photo-
copied at my local library and mailed to anyone who wants a copy
on a stamp. I loved making it, but once it was out in the world,
my season changed. I don't want this to be the only time I make
an issue of TRAP, and I don't necessarily want to wait for what-
ever mercurial shift has to happen internally before I'm ready to
do that work again. Hence: this post.
Soon (read: tonight? Let's say tonight) I'm planning on uploading
the individual spreads from issue one here on the Zaibatsu. I'm
not quite ready for it to be a PDF on itch.io, downloaded and im-
mediately forgotten, and there is a certain similarity of integ-
rity in gopher and gemini spaces that aligns with zine culture.
Heck, one of my first introductions to this space was the Circum-
lunar Transmissions zine!
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~trunnion/trap
If you read this and are of a zine-trading nature, please reach
out! One of the best surprises from this venture has been the
return label serving as an invitation for folks to send me their
zines. The culture and community builds and builds, and we all
become stronger against the inevitability of the trap.
-30-
