The Thread for Intermittens #3: Weirdness

[AFK]

Also, I know I didn't use that Scribd thing or whatever for the layout.  But I felt more comfortable using something I'm familiar with, for doing publications.  But I figure, mine can be the Super Mario Bros. 2 of the publication.   

[Cainad (dec.)]

I can't make the download work.

[Jenne]

Hm, maybe Rata can help you with that, Cainad.

[Telarus]

Also, I know I didn't use that Scribd thing or whatever for the layout.  But I felt more comfortable using something I'm familiar with, for doing publications.  But I figure, mine can be the Super Mario Bros. 2 of the publication.   

Rev, what program did you use? I may be able to help you with your pixelation issues.

[AFK]

I did it on MS Word.

Yeah, I know, but it's what I had to work with. 

I'm going to play with the images on Monday and see if I can make any improvements. 

[Cramulus]

I feel your pain regarding laying stuff out in MS Word. I absolutely hate that thing. But here are a few suggested edits - feel free to take 'em or leave 'em, it's just nitpicky stuff that occurs to me...

Table of Contents: change the title of my piece to "Weirdness in 3175".
Page 7 - 8: Needs some explanation. Also needs linebreaks or intentations.
Page 10: change the title of my piece to "Weirdness in 3175".
Page 11: in text box at bottom. Delete "-cramulus" - unnecessary, it's already my article. 
Page 16: move author's name from end of article (p17) to byline
Page 18: change “It was a very rewarding experience, but I totally came when they brought out the bacon explosion.” to “For a supposedly primitive culture, they are surprisingly proficient with MS-Paint. We could learn a lot from these nomadic spags.”
Page 19 - 22: needs indentations or space between paragraphs. You might accomplish this by making "click" a different style. (like bold or italic) Article needs a heading, too. Move "lmno" at end to byline.
Page 27 - 28: is there a title for this piece? Poems shouldn't have the phrase "a poem" in the title.  If all else fails, use the first line of the poem. This might also look better if you compressed it down to one page -- might be able to pull this off by setting both pages in 2-column mode, left aligned, in a smaller font. If possible, a poem shouldn't spill over a page break.
Page 29: Cain's piece needs a heading and byline. To break up the text further, you might sprinkle the flying ass ghost dance pix throughout?

General: a lot of this text would look better Justified instead of left-aligned.

regarding fonts: magazine body text is generally a serif font whereas heading text is generally sans serif. Ms-Word Protip: you can actually change the whole damn issue at once by editing the "Normal" style. Try to avoid using times new roman and arial because they can really make stuff look like an ms-word document. 

be sensitive towards style choices - when you do something one way, be prepared to do it that way for the rest of the issue. For example the bylines - sometimes you use "By: name" and sometimes it's "---name" at the end of the article. The body fonts go back and forth between serif and sans-serif seemingly arbitrarily.



Overall Rev, I'd say you did an awesome job -- especially for using MS Word! There's a lot of great material in here. It's so badass to see everybody's work in a sexy PDF like this.

[AFK]

Okay, so then I need input from Ratatosk, LMNO, and Cain as to what to tile their pieces, or in the case of Ratatosk, if he wants his renamed inlight of Cram's suggestion, if not, I will just let it be.

I will standardize the by-lines and make the changes to your pieces Cram, as you suggested. 

I'll take a look at the fonts and will experiment with a couple of different ones.  Though, I have to confess I am a bit of a stubborn bastard and will probably not make all of the pieces look exactly the same with exactly the same fonts.  It's just an aesthetic thing for me and I kind of like each piece having its own personality.  It's how I did things when I did the literary zine back in the day.  It's just my stamp I guess.  I'll try to have those changes done today and see if I can get the pictures to come out better. 

As I said, in the end, this one may stick out like a sore thumb compared to the 2 prior and the ones that will follow, and I'm okay with that and I hope others are too.  I also know I won't be volunteering to do this again just because it is way too time consuming.  I'd rather just contribute writings going forward. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

"Strange Times..."

How's that?

[AFK]

It's your piece.  I'm fine with whatever you want to call it.  So if that's what you like that's what I'll go with. 

[Cramulus]

I hear ya Rev.

The idea of Intermittens is not to publish a sexy commercial-quality magazine, so I wouldn't sweat it too hard. Like I said, I think the issue looks great. 



Ratatosk:
since there's already an essay called "The Strange Times", a poem called "Strange Times" seems a bit confusing though, no?

[Cain]

My piece can be called "Get Ready for the Wierdness" or something like that.  I'm not too worried.

[AFK]

Well since Mr. Alphapance clearly thinks his job is more important than Intermittens I'm going to go ahead and call his piece.  "Vocoders:  Why I love Frank Zappa."   

[LMNO]

Fuck you, it's called "Strange Times".

[Cramulus]

  eat butts, all of you

[LMNO]

Lick my big blue upside-down cock, biker boi.