A Wild Idea - Let's Start a Rotator

OK, so, in my long post a while back, I mentioned "circulars" and that was the wrong word, but this is the post where I go into detail about what I meant.

This goes back to the fanzines I read. While the library I was cataloging had a lot of very old fanzines, the majority of them was something called the Fantasy Rotator. You can actually see some of the older ones here. If you find yourself interested in what I have to suggest here, you may want to specifically read this FR constitution. It's funny and silly and a bit over the top, so don't think by any means I want to adhere to these standards.

So let me unbury this lede. I'm suggesting we try to revive this idea. Hell, for all I know it's being done all over the place and I just haven't seen it.

But. Yeah. Why don't we make a rotator?

What the fuck is a rotator? Well, in print zine terms, it was a collection of "letters," (often full articles, let's be real) with an editor who was on the hook for producing the zine -- and then editor duties would rotate to the next person on the list, who was responsible, and so on and so forth. Members of "the Cult" were responsible for writing in on regular schedules, to populate the zine itself.

This is, I suspect, a little much, especially as they originally intended to do this every three weeks.

But, and here's a general proposal for you. One person acts as editor, which in this case means just opening themselves to the group's submissions, putting them together, and putting them on their site or blog. Or maybe a free Bear blog or something, I have no idea.

Editors can pose themes, but keep them fairly simple. And at least three people need to "write in," though more can. The editor is responsible for hectoring the three people, presumably folks they thought of when they thought of the theme. And folks should get to rest, so no one person is writing every single time.

The schedule should be way more generous, clearly. Maybe every other month. Maybe every six weeks? I don't fucking know. The obvious difference is that only members got to see the rotators, so there was more cohesion, making it easier, not harder, to produce it. Though I can also tell you that the later issues often talked about struggling to get issues together. I think, among other things, the group was aging and didn't get a lot of new members, so, you know, energy was low, it's likely true and also sad but still true that some of them were dying.

Is this insane? Will this work? I have no idea. People did it. People did it on home printers, and before that presumably mimeograph machines. People did it for decades. That site I linked to runs up to 1990, but I can assure you the FR was going into the 2000s.

What extra junk would be useful, but not necessary? A devoted site would be good, just a neocities or nekoweb or something that links out to all the entries, or maybe collates them instead. By the way, if we do this, I'm calling "not it" on running the site. Absolutely not. I still break my personal site every few days. I am willing to be the first editor, since this is my cursed fucking idea, though.

The Fantasy Rotator obviously had a theme, big and general though that is. What would this one be? I'm imagining this more like a way to reproduce cohost's ability to send a post into the wild and see responses, reactions, and further essays. I think two of the best essays I wrote for cohost were reposts. So that's the thing of it. More than a specific topic, it's a specific method for topics a rotating cast of delinquents, ne'er do wells, and reprobates choose out of their brains (us, we're the delinquents, ne'er do wells, and reprobates).

I'm not going to be gauche enough to tag people in this post who I'd like to see join the hypothetical group that doesn't actually exist yet, but I'll probably quietly bother some people in their asks, in a way where they can privately say no, or ignore me altogether.

Know, though, that if you decide to join, you're on the hook for putting out an "issue" at some point in the future. I want that to be as easy as possible, because I'm going to have to do it too, but it's still work, running people down, hassling them for their essay... I did one or two little "zines" of semi-academic writing on anime and it was a delight but also everyone is always late. Note that unless you want to, your stint as editor doesn't have to include traditional editing duties. You're copying text into a document and dropping it on your web page, with the right links and such. I'll probably call it "coordinator" or something.

No, I have no idea what to call it. The Eggbug Memorial Rotator? The Reposter's Rotator?

Will it fail entirely after like 3 months? Maybe! Who knows?!

And yes, I realize this is exactly the sort of project that would have been good to do with cohost's alt account and group account stuff. Yes, that's one more reason this sucks.

This is my attempt to kind of try to do something more, to do something other than make a personal site and hope people wander by. It's not like I don't have shit to do. And in fact since most of the shit I have to do is grading, it's suspiciously like this, so I am very much giving myself more work that definitely feels like work. But we'll see.