Editorial
by Axel of Brainstorm

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Half a year has passed since ZINE 12 came out and a lot has happened since then. On a personal level, I became a proud father and moved with my family to a house last Autumn. This pretty much knocked me out for almost three months. Those circumstances made it impossible for me to stick to my original plan of releasing ZINE 13 before Christmas. I have to admit that the plan was probably a bit too ambitious after all. Apologies for that. And Smash wins the bet.

Secondly, due to admittedly legitimate comments about ZINE 12, we've dumped the user interface and came up with something new as you can see. We hope this is more intuitive and more user-friendly. I think Smash and Hyde did an excellent job with that.

Thirdly, we've decided that it will be more important to release the mag more regularly, instead of having 50 articles in every issue. How regular that will be, you'll find out for yourself. Feedback from readers has made us believe that there were too many articles in ZINE 12, so we'll reduce the number of articles per issue but we'll knock at your door more often. This has various advantages: We can be more selective with articles and we can better react to more time-critical topics.

It's my utmost conviction that the demoscene benefits from a magazine that gets released regularly and constantly. We want to get rid of delays.



I have to admit that I felt quite insecure about ZINE 13 when we decided to dump the established workflow processes, design, layout and user interface. I felt tired to discuss everything from scratch again, and I'm pretty sure that everyone on this team felt similar. It wasn't until I saw Critikill's design and Prm's first article layouts when I totally caught fire and thought 'damn, it could be that we're really up to something special'. Now that I've seen some more layouts such as the interview with Skaven, the article about Aasemoon or the SIGGRAPH 2007 article, I'm realizing that this is what we've originally wanted to pull off with ZINE 12 but which we miserably messed up in the final stretch. I think all of us think we've made a significant step forward with ZINE 13, and we sincerely hope that you share our excitement.


Axel editing "The Making of Candystall"

I'd like to state though that you shouldn't expect us to change the design for every issue. I think it's a bit of an exception that we've completely revamped everything. Future changes might be more subtle. All I can say at this point though is that we're committed. We're already planning stuff for ZINE 14 and ZINE 15, so you better expect us to stick around.

If you feel like contacting us for article suggestions or general feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us at zine (at) bitfellas (dot) org. We wish you some quiet moments with ZINE 13 and look forward to seeing you again soon.

Now, where did I put those diapers?