Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Addendum Issue 072
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Addendum
URL: http://www.adden.tr.cx/
Issue# 72 : What Addendum means to me, the steak and kidney pie remix
23rd June 2002
Author: Steak
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a long tradition of phoenix doing something cool for addendum, me
thinking it's cool and then copying it, I have ultimately decided to do
my own version of what addendum means to me.
I have, of course, had and idea like this in my mind for some time now,
only mine was a little different, in the fact that it would be a
retrospective on what my life was like before addendum and how my life
has changed since addendum has become a part of it. Including references
to the start of addendum and how it came to exist. It was not, a smoking
pile of jibirish.
Before addendum my life was so cluttered. I was angry, very angry, I was
angry at people, I was angry at consumerism, I was angry at a lot of
things. And the worst thing about all this was I had no way to express
all my anger, it was building up inside me so much that, I was at one
point sure that I would explode into a mental breakdown if I didn't get
all this anger out in some way, I didn't know where to turn, I had
nobody to scream at, I had nobody to throw things at. I couldn't rebel
and the world was making me so angry with its constant "I don't give a
shit about anyone but myself" attitude. In my total abundance at suitable
targets for my views I would spend hours shouting at the TV
"NO I DON'T WANT THAT, IF I WANT ONE I'LL ASK YOU FOR ONE!" "GET LOST
SANDRA SULLY, I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR DISGUSTING UGLY FEATURES ANY MORE"
"CAN YOU BE ANY MORE VAUGE?!!? YOU CALL THAT JOURNALISM? BECAUSE I DONT!"
Alas no one ever heard me.
And I didn't feel very good about it either.
I went on the net and, thanks to winamp.com's strange propaganda links,
I came across an ezine, 'I bleed for this?' I enjoyed much of what was
written in this (now long defunct) zine, back issues of which can be
found at textfiles.com
Now 'I bleed for this' was a quite hostile zine, in the way that it
hated everybody, their readers, their enemies and their friends alike.
Somehow this appealed to me, all the anger that was being rapped up
and surprised inside me for fear of public ridicule could be outputted
in the form of this zine. A lot of the things that they wrote about I
didn't find annoying, at least not to write about them like they did,
Some of the things they wrote offended me, but I didn't mind, because
it was just blatant pure anger, and that was what I needed, it was my
time to rebel against authority, or at least in my kind of softy case
- read about rebelling.
In their first issue they had a section where they tried to pre-empt
the questions that people would ask them. One of the questions was
"how do I submit or join IBFT" and the answer was along the lines of,
"you don't, if you have a text file that you think is the best thing
since sliced bread then bugger off and create your own ezine and
publish it yourself!"
So I did, and here it is, a few issues in.
In their hatred I had found rebellion. And I had got it out of my
system, I had managed to get rid of most of the anger that was
waging a war with my better self inside me, and now was the time
to formulate my observations about the world into something less
destructive and more constructive.
I hardly ever read 'I bleed for this' anymore
I didn't really want to make a zine to offend my readers, I wanted
to make something that people could read, enjoy and relate to. I
don't know if I have done that, I hope there is someone somewhere
out there saying to them selves "wow, I feel like that!"
When I first started all this I was not really sure if I could
really find the time to write all the things that would need to be
written to make a zine. I didn't know if I would be able to write
very well, and I kept leaning back and forth as to wether I should
or shouldn't, it was a rather hard decision for me to make, and I
didn't know if I could find the time to commit to such a project.
But as Captain James T. Kirk said, "if somethings important, you
make the time" Taking this advice from the good captain , I
ultimately decided that I should at least give it a shot.
After I made the decision that I was indeed going to try, I sat down
and seriously tried to come up with a name for this production. I
don't really remember most of the ideas I came up with, I remember
coming up with loads of duds but I just can't recall what they
were, I do however remember one.
I was at one point toying with the idea of calling the new zine of
mine, "steakbin views". The reason for choosing that name to toy
with was the fact that my web site was already called "steakbin"
and, of course what I was writing where my points of view, so the
reasoning was obvious. I even created an ASCII version of a logo
for it, utilising the ASCII beast-wars style version of "steakbin"
and adding a "views" on to the end of it.
But in the end I decided that the name was crap and changed it.
I went through the dictionary looking for a cool word to use as
the title for this new zine, I thought of using the Latan dictionary,
as I have done in the past to come up with cool names for things,
but I wanted something people could remember, so I stuck with the
English dictionary.
I didn't get very far, page 14 to be exact. Here I came across the
word addendum. It sounded good, looked kind of cool and kind of
conveyed what I wanted to express. I came up with a catch phrase
around that time "Addendum, the addendum to life"
I decided that if I was going to do this for real I would need to
devote 100% of my time to it, which meant severely cutting back my
website, it went from a 4.5 meg, updated daily website to a 230k
website with a few pages, the DVD page stuck and the 'about me'
page stuck and the links page stuck and that was it. Everything
else was gone, and it was a lot.
With that I made a quick easy to navigate website, wrote a really
crap issue one and stuck it up on the web for all to see. Addendum
was born.
And now here I am, opened up to submissions, three regular
writers contributing (occasionally) to the issue count and three
or four months of issues under my belt. All in all I feel pretty
good about it all.
now my life feels so much better, I have somewhere to vent my
anger at society, I have some where I can turn if something in
this world makes me angry or upset, or if I want to make a point
I can make it here, if I find something beautiful or wonderful I
can write about it, or if I just want to pass something on to the
world that I find amazing then I can post it here.
In short addendum has really improved my life, and if I didn't
have it then I am 100% sure that in some way I would not be able
to keep a lid on my rising insanity
Thanks for reading
steak
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Addendum
(C) Steak June 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
