This post makes me discover "zines". This is an efficient way to share some knowledge on a tool like strace [https://jvns.ca/debugging-zine.pdf]. Having this applied to academic papers and ideas is really a cute idea.
Oh, I love those Julia Evans ones. Kind of wish you could buy physical copies - I appreciate them being free, but don’t really have a printer.
These have been popular for a long time in various alt/underground/subculture communities either for disseminating news/information or publishing literature and other printable media in a low-budget way (eg. interviews with artists, a "how not to starve on tour" guide for punk bands, etc). Interesting and slightly jarring to see them used in a "high tech" context.
Professor Kuper, thank you so much for pushing the envelope on new teaching ideas at the school. With the over enrollment in the program, personal interaction between the professors and the students is sometimes lost. I commend you for helping to engage the students on a more personal level beyond grading scripts and crowd graded assignments. I hope you continue giving creative assignments in your classes to help combat the assumption that Computer Science is a field where creativity is not valued.
If you don’t have a long-arm stapler for binding, you can take two normal swing-arm staplers and use the anvil from one to strike against with the other. Not as neat but can do in a pinch.
Also I mush prefer PDFs that aren’t formatted for print: printing booklet order is trivial, but undoing the formatting into single-page is a nightmare
Reminds me of the cartoon guides to xxx series by Larry Gonick. Strangely fun, even for non cartoony topics like calculus and genetics…