This week's issue features the most beautiful women in the world, a poem in the shape of a sigma, and four types of trout. It also features some original illustrations, a prize at the very end, and the work of 8 incredible writers (plus the editor himself).
It will take around 25 minutes and 18 seconds to read in its entirety, which is conveniently the amount of time it will actually take for your roommate to be ready to leave after he says he'll be ready in two minutes.
I'll have to read it again later because right now I'm getting distracted by people moving to adjacent rooms in my dorm. That said, I did like every piece that I could concentrate for more than a minute at a time and re-reading is something I'm actually looking forward to. However, I would like to give some praise to web designer and everyone responsible for choosing colour scheme. I'm colour-blind (bottom left on this picture is a good approximation) and had no problems reading or navigating. Whatever few URLs there are get highlighted after hovering over them, contrast is kept to reasonable (as opposed to "we have to make it zazzy and modern with pale green font on a deep purple/orange/puce background" that makes me want to strangle someone) and it's actually easy on the eyes. It's almost like you actually want people to read your magazine ;). MASSIVE props to your graphic/web designer, especially if they are not colour-blind themselves.
It wasn't directly on purpose (I didn't run the website through a color-blindness checker), but I think that a lot of web designers in my generation are picking up the importance of contrast in their work. Thanks for the feedback, this has been great to hear!
Crap, I forgot to update the post. Oh well, I'll say it here: I could live without poems, but I definitely don't hate them[1]. ;) Other then that, no complaints. Just took the test, seems like I've joined the DFW club with 86% ;). That poem wasn't that depressing, damn it. :P Regarding the colour scheme, I meant it. It's good to know that finally some people are trying to make shit readable. On some websites I need to resort to a browser that is only slightly younger than me and sheer fact that you even know about colour-blind checker is just heartwarming. [1] - Seriously, don't take it neither personally nor like I didn't like it on principle. Quick answer, I'm not a fan of poetry in general. Longer answer: nearly 100% of my exposure to it is Polish from school. Aside of being largely tedious to read, almost every single one was assigned to be memorised. It's hard to enjoy poetry when your immediate though is "Oh fuck! Another shit I'll have to remember and recite in front of the class" :/.
I admit, I'm not the biggest fan of poetry either. It requires a different frame of mind then prose, often forces you to read it multiple times, and sometimes I just don't get it at all. It might break the flow of the reading experience if there's too much. I probably hit the limit this issue, the next issue I'll definitely favor more prose.
Shit, good catch! And thank you, I'm really glad that I'm getting such a positive response!
Can I ask if you would have taken the quiz at the end if I had been upfront in saying it was a quiz? Was there anything I could have done to make you spend more time reading the issue? (this thing has been my baby for the last week and I'm totally excited to make fixes and take suggestions)
I can't resist a #quiz, but I think it's probably better to leave it an unspecified surprise. Maybe the next issue will have some other treat at the end, like pointing out something hidden in the magazine that most readers wouldn't notice. If I had a better attention span, I would have read another chapter of The Count of Monte Cristo instead of a random zine, so I enjoyed the 15 minutes of distraction the.lit.cat provided. The vertical scroll bar was good too. It looked like I was making progress toward the finish, then more content dynamically loaded and I had more scrolling to do. This issue was the majority of the poetry and fiction by unfamiliar writers that I have read all month.
weewooweewoo I hated this. Dynamic scrolling needs to go. Don't encourage it. Then again I failed to even notice the quiz, so I'm probably not the right person to give feedback. EDIT: 71 percent, a degree-earning score. I am David Foster Wallace. I did not really read the issue (yet). I am a fan of quizzes with odd numbers of questions which result in unusual scores.The vertical scroll bar was good too. It looked like I was making progress toward the finish, then more content dynamically loaded and I had more scrolling to do.
I was DFW too! Maybe we are all DFW. Why not? I can see the mendacious scrollbar both ways. If it really showed me how far I fad to go, I might have given up at the start. But it's mendacious. As a user interface design, I don't hate the "infinite scroll" pattern, it seems a little advantageous compared to paging. Probably this is far too much analysis for a zine that gives an estimate down to the second of time to consume. I plead irrationally, as one who dreads starting a thousand-page novel, then 400 pages in regrets that it's almost done.
Uh, I guess the whole thing is pretty mendacious. Everyone is DFW, haha. On the dynamic scrolling thing- the big reason it is there is for wasoxygen said, it's a lot more intimidating if you know how much you have to scroll to finish the whole issue. At the same time, I am very much against infinite scrolling, and wanted this to be an antidote to infinite-scrolling, which is why I have the amount of time for each issue at the very beginning. I'm totally glad that I got both of you to read some unknown writers! That's means I'm doing something right.