The Whole Point Of A Zine Is That It's Cheap To Produce, Amateur And Homemade. If You're Being Asked

sign up for a contract with the saint electric now and you'll get a no-sacrifice guarantee for three months!

Having never considered the concept of a highschool retelling of the Odyssey until that one post mentioned them in passing, I'd like to give my own pitch: the Odyssey meets Back to the Future meets whodunnit.

Odysseus is the central figure of the story, of course. He is also one of those high school protagonists who is inexplicably surrounded by half a dozen girls, because emphasizing that aspect of the Odyssey is funny to me. There's Penelope, his actual girlfriend; popular girl Circe; poor little rich girl Calypso; freshman Nausicaa; and Athena, who is older and solidly in bro territory with Odysseus, but still adds to the overall effect of him being surrounded by girls. (Is she a goddess? Idk. Probably she has some other kind of power, like riches or genius or both.)

The cast is rounded out by some of his Odyssey crewmen, maybe a few Iliad Greeks, and Telemachus, a new kid at their school who quickly becomes friends with Odysseus. For about half the story, things focus on slice of life, Odysseus's schemes, and the students' various personal problems. Incidents from the Odyssey are nodded toward, but not directly retold.

Then you get the Back to the Future part with the reveal that Telemachus has traveled back in time twenty years, with the help of future Athena, to solve the extremely cold case of his dad's disappearance by investigating his high school life.

Future Athena was only able to discover that someone from his high school circle was involved; in their time, there were just too many roadblocks set up between her and the truth. And she can't get inside access to those events as her adult self. So it's up to Telemachus to get to know his past parents, investigate their friends, and chase down the clues to discovering where his father's been all his life.

...While hopefully not raising the suspicions of his teenaged, but still infamously clever, parents in the process of this totally straightforward and not at all emotionally taxing mission.

How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

Some I Was a Teenage Exocolonist thoughts now that I've had time to process my first run:

I love that not only are you not expected to achieve a perfect run on your first playthru, it's not even possible. There are consequences for things like not going to school (mostly in the form of missed opportunities) but no one is going to grab you by the scruff and force you to do it. You're truly allowed to just be a kid living your life which of course will include making mistakes. But this message that you can come back from anything, that there's no such thing as a life ruining choice, that it's ok to not be perfect or perfectly good, that's so fucking refreshing to see in a video game. And the replacement of a good vs bad morality system with a "respect for authority" meter is just *chefs kiss* that combined with the empathy stat should be the standard for any kind of game like this, it's so genius.

Like I started my second run last night and there are a couple things I'm intentionally going to do better this time (being more efficient with gifts and paying better attention to the fetch quests) but this is the first time playing a game where I've ever felt truly comfortable with not getting everything right, or even most things. Like I've just been randomly picking an activity every month (literally rolling a d6) and bc of that my character basically never goes to class. I've already decided next run I'm going to dedicate at least one month every season to school but I don't feel pressured to restart this one like it truly feels ok and part of the intended experience to fuck up and do better next time and that's so fucking cool

sorry if this has been asked before, but are there any pieces of media that have shaped your conception of angels?

a formative one for me was his dark materials, when it described angels as only appearing in the form of winged humanoids because it was what was expected of them, and claimed that their true forms actually resembled architecture/"huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling" - i could never hope to draw the mental images that gave me, but it influenced my comparisons of pylon towers to angels, which are the closest reference i can give to the towering skeletal chain-like structures of light and matter that i imagined angels to be. it was also what first made me question the nature of angels, and begin to see them as something other than simply people with wings and halos who sang and/or fought for god - though i do have a weakness for angels imitating humanity, desiring and envying their free will and the unscripted lives it grants them, and in doing so becoming a little more human and a little less divine themselves, and falling in a metaphorical rather than literal, physical sense (which, to an angel, being an entity made of pure symbolism, is essentially the same thing, and can kill them just as surely as a sword).

kill six billion demons' angels are very inspirational to me; their naming system based on which reincarnation of itself the angel is makes me clap my hands with delight - particularly 6 juggernaut star, whose name belies how long she has endured through endless cycles, unable to break the wheel herself, and become entrenched in her own despair-driven futile rage as a result. and of course i'm a huge fan of 82 white chain's character arc involving an allegory for transition (specifically coming out as transfem) that also actually culminates in her transitioning (again, the symbolic and the literal go hand in hand with angels).

theres also this YA book called 'angel' by cliff mcnish that i read when i was like. eight? nine? i remember very little of it, and don't think it would hold up at all if i reread it now, but i do recall that one of the guardian angels in it died while saving one of their wards in a car wreck. the idea of angels as something that can be hurt and destroyed, that could be created to suffer and die, that could feel pain and experience grief, and potentially be imbued with supressed self-preservation instincts to serve their purpose, really flipped a switch in my brain.

artwork from Citizen Sleeper

if the li's went to therapy what would they be diagnosed with? :3

ronin - i don't think the therapists know what's wrong with him 💔

angel - depression + anxiety

misaki - adhd + anxiety

v - autism

This links to a wheel with nearly a hundred fic tropes for plots, settings, and more. Spin it twice.

This could also work with art inspiration, but the buttons only allow for so many characters on them. And please do ramble in the tags! I'm going to have no idea what most of you are talking about, and it's going to be great.

the curse of the gloamglozer is such a good frankensteinesque story. except instead of a stitched-together corpse it's literal fucking satan. unparalleled

pinned. go away also.