The Dilemma of the Editor

Afghanbashi/El Afghano


Editors are in the scene. And they are not in the scene. At the same time.

They are supposed to know everything, as they inform the scene. They should kind of lead the scene. Their mags are the means of propaganda of their interests. They could also be a lobby's interest. But there is no lobby because most mags are group-independent, and the editors are usually not so interested in the scene that they'd really use the chance to manipulate heavily. A mistake.

Similarly to most writers, editors nowadays watch the scene and describe what they see. That's their way of writing articles. But they're often not "in" the scene. They see only the outward facade. They bring uninteresting reports. I call them uninteresting because the readers could easily have found out everything themselves, either on the web or simply by asking some people.

Editors need to get internal, perhaps even confidential information and make it public to offer something new even to scene insiders as most of their readers - in most cases - are. But they're too busy or lack interest. This is because an editor's work is highly manual. Editors have to check through texts, find mistakes, insert heaps of formatting codes and fuss with the pictures, which is really a lot of boring work.

As a consequence they have little time for really creative work. And their brains eradicate. And they get dumb. And they lose all interest in coding or gfx or whatever they did before they became an editor. There is no incentive to resume learning how to code because the top coders are already so far ahead of you that you'd need a year to catch up even if you were extremely fast. All the dreams of making a demo after quitting the mag are gone. You can't release crap demos when you have the image of a top editor, can't you? You'd immediately be regarded as the biggest lamer, and everybody would question why he admired your mag so much.

Yes, mag-making is stupid, hard, hardly creative work. It's no fun, it eats your brain. With one word: it sucks. But, on the other hand, being active in the diskmag area could also be fun if you were a mere writer and didn't have to care about fools sending you crap texts full of spelling errors and other shit. And if you didn't have to care about organizing graphics for your mag, and all this stupid fuss, this exhausting work of convincing people to help you and being disappointed when, although they agreed, they don't show any result in the end. If you were really able to make a mag all alone, independent of anybody, just choosing if you use other people's stuff when they send it to you - then you would be free. That would be the ideal. Even better than being a mere writer or "co-editor" at another diskmag and leaving all the hard work to someone else, the editor.

But this is hard to realize, as editors mostly suck at what they need most badly. If I were only a graphician! If I could paint a picture I like that everybody else likes, too! Then I would be able to realize my dream ever since I got active in the area of diskmags.


Afghanbashi/El Afghano