How a game about making zines helped me recapture my creativity in lockdown

I only came across the concept of zines the past year, while in lockdown. That coupled with the growing nostalgia for "the old web" gave me the idea to create a Neocities account for "creative idea brain dumping". The intent is for it to hold the creative work (e.g., photography, fiction, or just plain web/coding experiments) that I have not deemed good enough for my usual self-promotion channels (like DeviantArt and FB for my photography, GitHub for coding). I've never experienced zines but I feel like this captures their spirit; publications that can't get any more amateur if they tried.

Alas, I got caught up in the project planning tendencies I've acquired from work. I got to design homepages for two projects/e-zines but that's pretty much all I've finished. Nested in my project directories are markdown files of stories in various stages of completion, a portfolio of digital paintings that have lost stylistic cohesion, CSS and JS files for half-baked "cool ideas". In my Trello boards are concepts and character backstories though, right now, there's only one card in-progress and null finished.

But I'm not disappointed with it! I definitely learned a lot in this ultra-unfinished project. It gave me the impetus to finally learn CSS and JS properly (as opposed to copy-pasting SO snippets to meet deadlines). And I bought a Wacom tablet and learned digital painting which is a really cool hobby to wait lockdowns out.

It is exhausting trying to do everything as a one-man team but the act of brainstorming itself is creativity-refreshing. I'd still like a finished work to point to but, with all I've already done, I have found internal satisfaction.

Link to game: https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker

This reminded me of the joys of self publishing physical media. I used to write instruction booklets that taught people how to grow hydroponics. A highly technical subject that I was trying to make accessible to people who were not technical. I got a lot of this satisfaction from writing and distributing my own software as well. Most of my enjoyment came from the interaction with others that these made possible. I also realized that I'm suffering digital burnout and I feel much the same way as the author of the article. I have considered leaving it all and probably would have were I not responsible for my family. I think this served a a powerful reminder to me about the need to create things and transmit ideas that aren't reliant on the fleeting nature of our digital world.

I've been wanting to make a photography zine of some pictures I've taken over the last couple of years, but I'm at a loss for layout tools. I used inDesign in college, but I'm really not looking to dip back into Adobe, even if it's "only" $20 a month.

Does anyone know some open source layout tools?

This program would be great for art classes! Showed the zine maker to my girlfriend who is an art teacher, she loves it. She regrets already teaching zines this year.