Page 4 - How to start, keep going...

I wrote a zine on how to make bots, back in August at the WavelengthConf zine workshops. That zine is what we're walking through right now. (If you missed the WavelengthConf zine exchange, you can download this page, print it out, and fold it into a zine yourself.)

A photo of how I drew the following text into a zine
(view full size)

Front cover #

How-to "Generate a How-To Zine" Zine

A
Wavelength
Progzine Template

Page 1 #

How-to

write a 🤖 bot
that makes 📓 zines

SO THAT YOU CAN

make the best
zine-ziner-zines

Page 2 #

I have many ideas on
how to craft a zine,

but struggle with picking
the best phrasing.

Page 3 #

With a 🤖 Tracery bot,
I can generate
many different phrasings
and pick my favorites to draw!

Page 4 #

Step 1

Open up tracery.io in your web browser

Step 2
Tap the button ( Jump into the editor )

Page 5 #

Step 3

Type in a bunch of JSON
{
"origin": "#Cover# \n\n---\n\n #Page 1# \n\n---\n\n #Page 2#..."
"Cover": "How to write a bot...",
"Page 1": "How to do a thing so that you can outcome ..."
...
}

Step 4
Find all the generalizable phrases and "refactor them" into

"blah blah #generalizable phrase# blah blah"

and

"generalizable phrase": [ "say it normal", "say it some other way"]

Step 5
Roll the dice a few times and see what you like!

Page 6 #

How to Write a 🤖 zine bot
---
How to compose a script to make the best zine
---
...

How to Craft a 🤖 Tracery Bot
---
How to generate zines from scripts
---
...

Progzine
What if we wrote a bot to draw a zine on writing bots that draw zines? Learn how to craft a no-code script to randomly generate zine titles, stories, and art—then run it immediately in your browser. – andytuba (they or he)