LIPSTICK & LAUNDROMATS - due May 12

The Mystic Moneymaker is a proud black & white publication but some days you need color, so today’s issue is punctuated by some of our favorite recent full-color submissions. Here’s what’s in it!

1. ISSUE FIVE: theme and important dates!

2. REQUEST: remarkable feats of dumb endurance

3. ITEMS OF PRINTEREST: tic tic boom

1. Issue 5: Lipstick & Laundromats, submissions due Monday May 12

Issue 5’s theme is Lipstick & Laundromats: think unexpected windows into the lives of strangers; curls of cigarette smoke under droning neon; catching your own reflection over the bar at the end of the night and looking so goddamn sexy you surprise yourself. We did a little photo shoot for the theme: thank you so much to Lianne, Tif and Juan for agreeing to apply makeup in laundromats on a random weeknight. Submissions are due Monday May 12.

We’d also like to host more get-togethers where people get together and work on art projects: the point here, after all, is community. To that end, weather permitting, we’re having a little art picnic at Sacramento Field this Sunday, 4/20, 1ish onward. We’ll have art supplies on hand but feel free to bring your own + any consumables.

For those of you not in the Boston area: in the past, we’ve hosted pretty pleasant art nights over Discord as well, so if you’re interested in joining or hosting one of those, just let us know!

• Sunday, April 20 (this Sunday): art picnic in Somerville

• Monday, May 5 (20ish days): advice questions due to [email protected]

• Monday May 12 (one month!): submissions due

2. REQUEST: Remarkable feats of dumb endurance

We are frequently asked what sorts of things to send into the Mystic Moneymaker, and frequently told that “literally anything” isn’t a super helpful response, so here’s something I (John) have a specific jones for…

REMARKABLE FEATS OF DUMB ENDURANCE (alternately: DO SOMETHING WEIRD AND KEEP A DIARY ABOUT IT).

The other day a friend and I were reminiscing about a type of article that is hard to describe but was unmissable in the early-2010s Internet, when online news startups were swimming in cash and hungry for clicks. I’m calling them, in the most complimentary way possible, “Remarkable Feats of Dumb Endurance” and to my eye, the canonical example is Caity Weaver’s harrowing 5000-word essay “My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers”. Slightly more obnoxious runner up: “I Played ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out”.

It’s difficult to describe in non-condescending terms. Excessive? Frivolous? Paradoxically, I think this kind of writing is both frivolous and crucial! We need dumb little adventures! Fun is something you’re allowed to have!

So please: find a dumb adventure. Think back to the last late night with a few friends where someone said “ok but seriously what if we…”; pick a day; and go do that thing. Bonus points if you bring a notebook & jot down the experience: we’ll print it! Meaninglessness is meaningful, especially when our daily feeds are such a conveyor belt of ghoulish horrors. Eleven years after the fact, Caity Weaver’s mozzarella stick odyssey haunts me on a weekly basis.

3. ITEMS OF PRINTEREST: tic tic boom

Items of Printerest (That’s So Printeresting?! tbd) is stuff we’ve learned home-printing the magazine. It will probably be most interesting to other would-be zine printers or DIYers…or maybe is just of interest to us? (It is at the end for a reason.)

When people ask us how many copies of a given issue we tend to print…we shrug. Not because it’s secret, but because we genuinely don’t know. We buy a single cartridge of toner (~$90 or so) for each issue; sometimes that gets us 65 issues, sometimes it gets us 45.

Why such a big range? Toner usage. One of the most maddening challenges of home-printing is estimating how much ink a given issue will need. It varies by page - an essay or article typically “costs” less ink than a full-spread photo - and gets even more complex once you factor in variable page count. MM issues have been anywhere from 32 to 48 pages.

Ultimately, more copies means that more people get to read the Moneymaker, so we wanted to get a bit more scientific with this to better forecast our print runs. Enter: Total Ink Coverage! (TIC) sometimes also known as Total Area Coverage (TAC). This is a %-value, per page in a given PDF, that shows how much ink coverage it requires, which you can use as a starting point to get a sense of relatively which pages & issues are thirstiest for toner.

My initial hope was that somewhere in their vast monopoly of design software, Adobe would have stolen acquired a simple tool that measures TIC/TAC. Maybe they have, but unsurprisingly, what little I could find was user-hostile and buried in sub-menus. Get Ghostscript! It’s a free and open-source PostScript interpreter, and the inkcov method described here will spit out page-by-page TIC for your PDFs.

I bring this up to make a larger point, one of my most gratifying discoveries. If you get a little comfortable with the command line (Terminal in Mac, PowerShell in Windows), a lot of tasks for which Adobe charges monstrous subscription fees can be done for free and with greater flexibility. I’m not by any means a command-line expert (as any software engineers reading my clumsy half-explanations here can tell you). And yet: with some trial & error, I’ve been able to measure TIC, splice photos into GIFs and all sorts of other stuff without touching the Creative Cloud’s proprietary mishmash, and there are few better feelings in the world than eating Adobe’s lunch.

On that note. Thank you for being here! Enjoy the spring weather.