the zine of Orthodox Discordianism

Back in the early to mid 1990's (god, I'm dating myself), I used to publish a Discordian zine, called Tsujigiri (Japanese for "to try out one's new sword on a chance wayfarer" - I am a  pacifist, and the title was purely metaphorical, mind you). Again, for those of you too young to know, a "zine" (short for magazine") was a self-published newsletter type thing, printed on something called "paper." This was before the Internet was readily accessible, before websites pretty much. Zines started in the 70's with cheap mimeographs being available, one could type a fanzine (most early zines were written by fans of bands or TV shows, lots of science-fiction, or whatever), but when home computers (yes, I remember when having a home computer was unusual) became ubiquitous and had easy to use word processors and page layout programs (though a lot of zines, like the first couple of mine, were done using actual physical "cutting and pasting," like with scissors and a glue stick), plus the plethora of stores that let you use copy machines (Kinkos used to be a hipster paradise back in the day), DIY printing created a boom in the zine world.

My zines (five issues plus one that was never finished) have never before been available online, but I think I now have the technology and know-how to get them on the Internet, in case anyone wants to check them out. Keep in mind I was much younger then, had no spell-check program for most of them, and was on lots of pain medications (note: when one has chronic pain, pain killers do not cause one to get high, but they do cause a great deal of brain fog), I had no money and gave the zines away for free (donations were quite helpful, and many of my subscribers did send "the usual," a couple bucks to cover stamps or an exchange of their zines). The first issue is indicative of the lack of money, I tried to squeeze as much as I could into as few printed pages as possible (turned out to be five pages, five being the sacred Discordian number), the tiny print may have caused a few reader's eyes to bleed, but putting them online will allow you to zoom in as you read it.

The reason I'm putting them here (besides not knowing where else to put them), is that when I started writing them, I encountered a synchronicity monsoon which would ebb every time I started working on an issue. I ended up having a § (that's my symbol for "synchronicity," remember) article in each issue, describing the major ones and contemplating their meaning (if any). It will give you something to read while I take forever updating my blog, at least. I'm only going to put the first issue online for now, as I want to make sure that what I'm doing is working (they should be in a zip file, as PDFs, which I hope will be able to be downloaded and read by anyone on any computer system). Please email me, at acausality@gmail.com, to let me know if you could successfully download and read this, or if there was a problem. I have a Mac, so I don't know if this will work on other systems, but I think PDFs work on all platforms. So, cross my fingers, Hail Eris, here we go:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B15HsWO3aK2KaGtldklGS1FfTDg/edit?usp=sharing

You might have to copy and paste the above link to your browser, where you may or may not be able to download the zine. Apparently, you cannot post PDFs directly into a blog, so I had to jump through some hoops - you'll have to download the zines, unless I figure out some other way to let them be displayed online. Of course, being old school, I recommend you download the zine and print out a copy onto paper, the way zines were meant to be read!