Long ago, in the days before personal computers were ubiquitous, there were “zines” (short for magazines, correctly reflecting both non-professional status and less-than-totally-serious content). There was a wide variety of zines for all sorts of interests — rather like the back corners of the internet today, except they were physically distributed using the post office (and therefore had to stay within certain boundaries to be safe). Clive and I used to publish a zine for postal Diplomacy:
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If you want to read ’em — and I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you didn’t — you can download a PDF of each issue from Doug’s Diplomacy and Eternal Sunshine. You’ll note that it was a much more innocent time then, as we not only listed our own contact information, but that of many others through the game listings and other parts.
Doug only has issues 11 and 12 available, but they’re a generous representation of what the rest of the production run was like: amateur, laboriously assembled, totally ignorant of both copyright and appropriate credits, and full of in-jokes that nobody aside from the production team would hope to understand (except the “Skulking Cavorter” column: even the publisher and editor had head-scratching moments over that, but it had a noisy fan club among the subscribers). It was a lot of fun to do, and once we ceased production I found I missed it a lot (but not enough to get back into doing it again). I published a few other zine-like things over the next few years, but didn’t get back into a regular publication schedule until I started the blog.
So, thanks to William Plante for digging up these musty relics and bringing them to my attention.
