what is this

the rat-pit is a room. people are in it at four in the morning arguing about protocols, dead formats, bad anime and worse ideas. nothing is written down, nobody scrolls back, and by lunchtime it never happened.

the zine is the part we keep. a pdf, and on paper if enough people ask.

when?

there is a clock on the front page doing this to you on purpose. spring 2027, roughly. zines are late. this one will be late.

what goes in it?

a guide to a thing you actually did, failures included. an argument you can defend when somebody pushes back. short, unpleasant fiction. a scan of something nobody has put online. pixels. photographs of your own room.

one page is a contribution. two hundred words is a contribution.

what does not?

• generated text or images, and we will know
• reviews of things that are already popular
• anything you would put on linkedin
• bigotry, however carefully it is dressed
• writing about the zine, inside the zine

is there a theme?

no.

are you sure?

yes.

do i get paid?

no. neither do we. there is no money anywhere near this.

what if my thing is bad?

send it anyway. you get an answer within a week either way.

why does a zine that does not exist have a countdown?

because a deadline is the only part of a zine that is real before the zine is. ours is pointed at us, not at you.

do i have to be in the pit?

no. most people who end up in a zine were not in the room, they were told about it by somebody who was.

is this a cult?

there is a seal, a roll, numbers issued in order and a countdown. we hear you. no meetings though.

send an email. that is the whole mechanism. there is no form on this site because forms do not post from neocities, they only look as though they do, which we found out the hard way.

say whether you want to read it or be in it. both is fine. if you want to be in it, one line about what you are thinking of is plenty, and no, it does not have to be written yet.

the roll is kept by hand in a text file. it is not a database and there is no account. nothing about you is stored on this server, because there is no server, only files.

save it, host it, do not hotlink. if you put it up, tell us and you go on the roll without asking.