{"id":1066,"date":"2009-08-22T13:04:31","date_gmt":"2009-08-22T01:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2009-08-22T13:04:31","modified_gmt":"2009-08-22T01:04:31","slug":"the-oranges-of-zeus-plug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/?p=1066","title":{"rendered":"The Oranges of Zeus Plug"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"oranges\"<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Being a retrospective of Zeus Blog’s precursor, the 2006\u00a0pubzine Zeus Plug.<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Part One: An Immaculate Conception<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Zeus Plug<\/em> was born the hotel bar at the City Life hotel,\u00a0with the first proper ideas being thrown around at the Vulcan cafe on Vulcan lane on a Saturday morning in December 2005. Jono and I had discussed the possibility of working together on something zine-like since the days of Telos<\/em>, and it happened that by then, perhaps a year after interviewing him about Telos<\/em> for RTP!,<\/em> and with the new series reviving interest in fan activities, we realised that the time was right. But we weren’t going to settle for the traditional route. Perhaps because we’re both rampant egotists, we declared that our creation would be unique, and unprecedented. It wouldn’t be a fanzine as others would know it, but a sort of social experiment, albeit one set within a very small community – the lesser-known New Zealand Doctor Who<\/em> fan. Who drank in pubs.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I’d seen pubzines before – Concrete Elephant<\/em>, a mainstay of the Fitzroy Tavern was one that came to mind, and I recalled the excitement when it \u00a0<\/span>arrived at the gathering I’d attended – copies were small, free and low in number and they went very quickly. I’m no economist, but I could see the lesson of supply and demand working very well. And neither Jono and I were in it for the money. As it turned out, it was a good thing we weren’t, or ZP<\/em> would never have existed.<\/p>\n

Over a cooked breakfast and too many hot caffeinated beverages we drew up a manifesto that was scintillating in its simplicity: no\u00a0 <\/span>reviews, no lists, just opinion. We decided that having been fanzine readers for long enough the one thing we really wanted out of any fan publication was something worth reading, and that’s usually an opinion. Reviews can have opinions, but are sometimes tied down through wanting to please everyone, whether it’s the distributor of said merchandise who offers the zine free copies, or (in post-original series days) the creator – a fan themselves and therefore only a few degrees of separation from the reviewer. If we could deliver short, sharp bursts of opinion and argument packaged in a neat portable product that any unassuming fan could stuff in their pocket or read on the bus, then we’d be breaking the A5 mould that so many zines before us had shrugged themselves into.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We got bolder – make it a fan experience by refusing to send issues out to people, instead making ZP<\/em> something you had to make the effort to go somewhere to collect and therefore meet other fans and (uh-oh!) interact with them. Tied to a neutral venue like, say, a pub, and you [should] avoid any suggestion that the zine was a \u2018chapter\u2019 thing. We wanted to be guerrilla. It didn’t always work – Christchurch doesn’t really do pub meetings, so it became associated with their chapter meetings (although RTP!<\/em> is essentially a chapter zine anyway, so little lost there), and early on the ‘c’ word was linked to Auckland pub meets and ZP<\/em>. We made an effort to stamp that fire out quickly. The last thing we wanted people to do was to take the issues home and\u00a0place them in an airtight folder in between Zeta Minor and Zo\u00eb Herriot.\u00a0 If there ever was a publication that wasn’t aimed at a completist,\u00a0this was it. You should pick it up, read and then use it as a beer\u00a0coaster for the rest of the evening. Never happened though… We were\u00a0just too damned desirable!<\/p>\n

Most of all we wanted to change zines. We thought they’d become stale and predictable, relying on the same names and tropes and formula. We actually used some of those same names, and a formula of sorts was noted by RTP!<\/em> in its review of the early issues early on, but our response to that was swift. We, I believe,\u00a0also didn’t hang around long enough to really get predictable and stale, quietly leaving the party just before the zine’s debut as a TSV<\/em> supplement. There was the general sense between Jono and I that neither would be around for the long haul. And that was fine by us.<\/p>\n

PA<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being a retrospective of Zeus Blog’s precursor, the 2006\u00a0pubzine Zeus Plug. Part One: An Immaculate Conception Zeus Plug was born the hotel bar at the City Life hotel,\u00a0with the first proper ideas being thrown around at the Vulcan cafe on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zeus-plug"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1073,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions\/1073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}