LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
ALUMNI MINI ISSUE 1 Editor Marketing
FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
Cover art
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WAT IS ZINE? Editor-in-Chief TEAM LEADS Submissions/Editing Layout Design Art Marketing Events Treasurer Secretary
For a while Wat is Zine? has toyed with the idea of doing an alumni zine. It just so happened I was graduating and a club member, and therefore the natural choice to take charge for the issue. The issue is not mini in terms of physical dimensions but mini in terms of length. My hope was to keep the look and feel of the main zine, just in a shorter, more compact format with alumni work. Another thing differentiating this from the main zine is I chose not to have any one defined theme. The only thing consistent is the colour scheme dictated by the cover (I hope to continue this in all future issues). Our submissions this time are also more text-heavy than submissions in the main zine. It’s exciting to offer something a little from the norm. I think these submissions give us an opportunity to reflect on the way life still goes on, regardless of the trying times. This is my first time really putting together a zine, but in the end I’m feeling pretty proud of how it turned out. It was a lot of work to put together, so I hope you enjoy the outcome! A HUGE thanks to all the contributors this issue! Thanks for working with me so last minute, this wouldn’t be happening without you! As with our previous issues, I hope this is a little light in the pandemic darkness. Thanks for reading!
LILY ROTH BA 2020
Goodbye …………………………………………. 1 Escaping my current reality by journeying into the Grim Dark future …………………………………………….. 3
Poem …………………………………………………. 5 Adventures in Player Agency …………. 6 About the cover of this zine …………… 8
Original sketch for ‘Goodbye’
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Goodbye Sarah Squire Oil pastel and pencil crayon Graduating in the middle of a global pandemic certainly leaves a sour taste in your mouth. My biggest regret was that I wasn't able to properly say goodbye to the place that I called home for the past 5 years of my life. As I was reflecting on my time in Waterloo, I remembered an old sketch I made after walking home from a first year lab on a rainy autumn day. At the time, it was nothing more than a simple sketch, but I see it differently now. I decided to redraw this sketch as a way of saying goodbye. To me, it represents all the mundane days I spent on campus and how I'm moving on to follow another path this coming autumn. I may have been robbed of a proper graduation by a certain virus, but I can still say goodbye in my own special way. Art is pretty cool that way. (p.s. The setting is a real place on campus. See if you can figure it out!)
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Escaping my current reality by journeying into the Grim Dark future Andrew McMurtry With COVID-19 still continuing to affect our world, we have all been seeking an escape from our disheartening reality. Some have chosen to refine and practice their baking skills. Others have used the time to fully clean and organize their homes. I have taken to spending long hours assembling and painting miniature figures, mainly those from the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop board game series. In the months leading up to the full lockdown, I had slowly been collecting, building, and painting. When the news that a lockdown was about to be upon us, I ran out to my local hobby/board game store and purchased one of the larger boxes of figures to give me a project to do while in isolation. As the months went on I continued to expand my collection, practicing my building and painting skills. One of the things I enjoy the most about the hobby is it has just the right amount of creative freedom. Give me a blank white canvas and ask me to draw anything I want—I would sit there frozen deciding what to draw. Each box of figures has an instruction manual on how to put the figures together with its own colour scheme. Then, it is up to you to decide how far outside the guidelines you want to go. Maybe you switch out one colour for another or maybe you draft your own colour scheme entirely.
Above: Example colour scheme on box. Right: Andrew’s chosen colour scheme, quite a departure from what was suggested.
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Day 1
Day 100
Another thing that I really appreciate about the hobby is each figure represents a marker of progress on my creative journey. While you should not judge your day one by someone’s day 100, you should judge your day one by your own day 100. While I am tempted to go back and repaint my older figures to improve them, I leave them be, so they can fully showcase how much my painting technique has improved over the last few months. Figure painting offers an excellent escape from regular digital life. Most of my job is spent in front of a computer screen and most of my free time is either in front of my phone or in front of a TV. This leads to a lot of eye strain, headaches, and general need to get up and walk away from any digital screen. Painting figures gives me time to look at a physical object and take things at my own pace, allowing my eyes time away from a screen. While some of the boxes can be a bit expensive, the general pride and accomplishment I feel from my completed figures far outweighs the cost. As things have opened up I have been able to share my completed figures with more and more of my friends and colleges in person. I hope to continue improving my technique for many years to come.
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The heart with which you love yourself Is easily quieted But not easily snuffed. A bear in winter, Snuggled to her cubs, Fat with a fall feast, Pregnant with the possibilities of spring. It is the knowledge of swimming, The only one in a million miles of river. Or riding a bike, Never truly gone; Ghostly ďŹ ngertips of a parent Providing stability, Waiting for the right moment to manifest. Now that your ock is off to pasture, You will tend to yourself. Remember this taste of fresh fruit, Contrast it with the scraps you had settled on before. Save a plump peach for yourself, Even when you must feed your children. Your love for them will be sweeter For the juice running down your lips and breast.
Erik Mohr
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Adventures in Player Agency Sarah MacKeil What attracts you to your favourite games? Personally, I’m drawn to games driven by narrative and player choices. For example, Disco Elysium excels at weaving agency into how your character develops and interacts with the world. I am an undergraduate alum of UWaterloo, and (fingers crossed) nearly a graduate alum as well. One of my final English grad courses focused on Game Studies. In addition to more theory-based and discussion-based assessments, we each shared an open-ended creative project. Like many others, I decided to prototype a game. Inspired by the creative "choices matter" games I'd experienced, I wanted to try my hand at a basic RPG game with diverging dialogue. If you're interested in playing, feel free to visit optimistinmotion.com/Epic-Game/index.html before reading spoilers below.
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I won't completely spoil the plot, but players can choose how to treat the people and animals they meet, and these choices affect their possible endings. In addition, they eventually find (and must cooperate with) their own alter ego who made different initial choices. There is no "right answer" in sight, save for cooperation as a moral good.
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Game Overview
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There is no major take-away here. I created a thing, enjoyed the process, and hope it brings players joy. However, this semester gave me a reason to critically analyze games, which I hadn’t done before. Approaching from the creator side helped me to value games even more. If you’re on the fence about creating something new, I’d say “go for it”. If you have the time and interest, why not? Original presentation PDF (including credits): https://bit.ly/34trqai
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About the cover of this zine Lily Roth The cover of this zine is kind of unusual. As such, I thought it would be interesting to write a little bit about my inspiration for the cover and some of the choices I made. As with all art, I hope it made you feel something or, at the very least, caught your attention. First off, I love art and am very interested in the study of art, but am not a particularly skilled or talented artist myself. I gravitate much more to what people would call craft; tactile things like fibre art are much more my speed. I do like painting but have very little formal training. Because of this, I find digital art exceptionally hard since it lacks the physical element. I have what you’d call a “good eye” for composition, but I can’t make art digitally nearly as well as I can physically. I wanted to have cover art for this issue well ahead of time. Since it's the first issue, we were unsure what the response would be. In my head, I had already been toying with the idea of doing some sort of digital art that was less about creating from scratch. I wanted to do something with arranging, manipulating, altering, and combining existing images into something new. I figured this cover was a good way to try. Collage, found object—none of these are new concepts, but they are often unexplored in digital due to copyright and the rightful discouragement of using others' work uncredited. One of the largest challenges I had when thinking about how to make the cover, was how I was going to do it legally. Then I had the idea to use stock photography or copyright-free images that allow for use, alterations, and distribution without restriction. The bulk of the cover was created this way. First, I picked a couple of search terms to use to find images: “one”, for issue one, and “spark” since it’s the spark that lights the fire (I’m hoping this version of the zine will have more than one issue). Then, I selected a variety of images I thought might work and played around until I found the concept that I liked the best. Next, I edited and altered the images to what I wanted, assembling them once they were ready. Finally, I added the “text art” and final touches. All in all, I think it took about 5 or 6 hours to do. One of my biggest inspirations for this concept was the cut and paste origins of zines. The idea of using what you have to create something else entirely—or seeing a part of something, divorcing it from its origin, and making it something new—that hap-hazard nature is so compelling to me. I think part of what makes it exciting is its accessibility. Anyone can make a collage and have it be successful. Zines have also historically encouraged amateur-ness, typically rejecting an overly curated look for something more boundary-pushing. While making the cover I actively tried to resist my perfectionist nature for that more natural feeling aesthetic.
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Another huge, probably quite apparent influence, was the vaporwave
aesthetic. Most obviously this is found in the choice to use the Japanese word for spark, hibana, in the piece. This is a typical trope in vaporwave, as is the late 90s web design look I was trying to invoke. One added benefit of using a limited software (Google Slides, the same program we make our zines in!) is it contributes to the early-internet look since you have to find workarounds to get exactly what you want. Both the zine and vaporwave aesthetics make use of found objects (in this case found image) principles to create the work. I’ve always found object art fascinating because it forces us to think about something, usually mundane, in a different context. If you’re not really sure what I mean by found object, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is probably the most famous and controversial example (I’ll leave the googling to you). I hope that to some degree the cover I’ve created does this. Another interesting element of the piece was how I chose to do my signature. My usual loopy and chaotic signature doesn't translate well digitally. I've been taking Japanese calligraphy classes via Renison’s CAPE program. A typical way for Japanese calligraphers to sign their work is by using a stamp called inkan. There are many different types of inkan with different kinds of uses, but they all function like a signature. The design of inkan is quite streamlined and that’s why I liked the idea of using one for this digital art—the bonus being it plays off the vaporwave obsession with Japanese. My “stamp” is read like you would read Japanese, left to right, top to bottom. On the right side, I used the Japanese translation for my name Yuri. On the left side is my middle and surname. I had to get a bit more creative with these, so I looked up the etymology of my names and used the meaning to choose a character. Kramer means shopkeeper or merchant so I picked the character shō which also means merchant. Roth’s most common meaning is red or red-haired so I simply picked the character for red, aka. The bottom is just my initials and stars for funsies. Anyway, I hope this enriches your understanding of the cover. As I said, I hope it caught your attention and made you read the rest of the fabulous work in this issue! Find more of me on Instagram @lilymakestemari.
COVER ART CREDITS Match Cosmos Hand Banknote Sign Circuit texture
ADDITIONAL GRAPHICS FOR THIS ZINE FROM AnnaliseArt CreatureSH fjdafdafafa GDJ OpenClipart-Vectors
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⚝ CONTRIBUTORS SARAH MACKEIL, BA 2017
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ANDREW MCMURTRY, BGBDA 2018
ERIK MOHR, BASc 2020
SARAH SQUIRE, BSc 2020
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Alumni Mini Issue 1 August 2020