A mission statement of sorts
Some core values for the Very Zine.
- I’m a simple girl with simple dreams: to share the joy of art and culture, and to share the joy of sharing. I believe that everything is for everyone. When we make art, we try to reach people, find something in ourselves that we want others to see. What I want to write about for this site, hopefully with the help of my friends, is when art does that, how it does it, ways it could, ways it fails, about topics all around the realm of experience, like movies and tv, music and games, art and novels, and all the ways that those things reflect on our lives, our relationships, and the feelings that we don’t always have a name for.
- Joy is a driving force in art. I am sick of the cliché of the ❝starving artist❞, this warped idea that misery makes your work more resonant. In my experience, I write better when my stomach doesn’t rumble. I want to do more when it is with friends. I want to impress lovers and I want to hear a laugh across the room, and it makes me want to do more. Depression has carved grooves in my soul, and they do make for great texture, but I want to want, too. The wanting makes me do. So we’re gonna try to be well-fed artists around here, belly-laughing and hooting and hollering.
- I will not use any generative AI, in any form, for this magazine. What we write here is human. Generative AI is a tool of and for capital, and has no place in art, culture, or frankly any human endeavour that hopes to speak to the heart. There are uses for machine learning and language models, but they have no place trying to replace a person-to-person interaction. If it’s not from heart to heart, it’s not worth publishing and it’s not worth reading.