A while ago I started to talking to Taylor McCue about selling physical copies of He Fucked the Girl Out of Me at my occasional in-person shop and now they're here! Now, I'm not any sort of Official Distributor so if you want a copy from me, you've got to find me in person but copies should also be available to order from TCAF in April.
Related to that, I am also selling physical copies of Indiepocalypse! They'll be a available as flash drives in a neat little (numbered!) tape cassette case featuring that issue's cover. I've been wanting to sell Indiepocalypse physically (primarily for events) for a while but never knew how to properly package them. Flash drives were the obvious choice (rip optical drives) but you can't put the art on the drive itself and something like a dvd case seems excessive. But then when getting the template and cases for He Fucked the Girl Out of Me I learned that people have started storing Game Boy games in cassette cases and making custom labels for them! They're the perfect shape and size.
Indiepocalypse is available for $20 (+shipping) and is print-on-demand. If you want one just email/message me which issue you want. Eventually I'll make a store page, but they'll always be print-on-demand! No limited stock here!
This is probably the first truly self-indulgent thing I've ever done with Indiepocalypse. I doubt they're going to sell online and I'm not especially confident that they'll even sell at the zine fests/art markets they were theoretically made for. But I really like them! I think they're cool and will, if nothing else, make one for myself each month.
Making these is also another step of better putting into practice my claims that it would be easier to convince art people to get into games than it would be to convince gamers to get into art. It's been difficult to decouple myself from the idea of fitting into games culture. It's right there! I can see it, I know it's shows, it's publications, it's awards, and it all feels very close, but 3 1/2 years of rejections from most every known institution should probably be a clue that it's not all that within my reach! (at least in the present/near future)
And believing it was so close yet inexplicably out of my reach worked only to the detriment of myself, the zine, and the people around and involved in it. I clearly spent a good period of time as a bitter, entitled asshole who could not believe that I wasn't getting recognition for my "important work". (work that I also believed that everyone claimed to want, but somehow didn't want it from me? doesn't make much sense tbh) Speculating on the reasons for institutional rejection/disinterest is a likewise pointless endeavor!
I still submit/pitch Indiepocalypse around if it's free and fast enough to do so, but expecting (or even worse, feeling entitled to) positive results is a short road to becoming truly insufferable. Selling USBs inside cassette cases at a $50 zine fest table isn't as glamorous within The Game Industry as being selected by Indiecade or getting an IGN feature or the like, but the table also only cost $50 and is pretty easy to get. And have you seen the cassette cases? I think they're really cool.
Also, from what I've heard more game developers (not only tabletop, but digital) have been going to zine fest/art markets/etc. so if your a dev with games to sell maybe check it out? Even without USB sticks, there are untold numbers of ways to dress game codes so you can decorate a table with them!
