We're all trying to figure out how to move forward after the election^[1].

I want to get more involved in my local community, and I'm hoping that involvement can be an antidote to the powerlessness I've been feeling.

Over the weekend I helped a friend who was making a zine on how to make activism accessible. They live in a fairly rural area, so I offered to help them circulate it. We printed a few dozen copies and I took a stack home to distribute in my city. There are a lot of Little Free Libraries in my area--I was able to hit 10 or so within just a mile radius of my apartment--so the plan was to drop a copy in each one.

It's such a tiny act of resistance, but it felt good to do something. Even just as a distraction.

Since doing this, I've been reflecting on how powerful and relevant zines feel as a medium, even as I type this for my web log. There's something deeply intimate about printing 20 zines and reaching 20 people in your local community, as opposed to publishing to this log and reaching an unknown number of people not bound by geography.

And I realized that I can do it too; I can make my own zines and circulate them in my community. It feels silly that this comes as such a shocking revelation for me--that I can print and fold paper instead of building complex web apps with a global reach--but I'm excited by the possibilities. Maybe I can put my typewriter to use for it, even.

One friend joked I should make a zine to proselytize about Linux. That would actually be very silly and on-brand of me; maybe I should.

1. If you're reading this in the future or from outside the US, I'm specifically referring to the 2024 US presidential election. Depending on how the next four years go, future readers may not need this disambiguated. ↩