/pt/ – Petrarchan

>>6053 (OP) Disappointingly shitty, especially given there was a year and a half since 019 and with no schedule he could have taken as long as he wanted to drum up more submissions and do a decent job typesetting it. There are some decent spreads, like the titlepages for HAHA and the MNM-DR drawings, or the orange page with the stone face, but the problem is they're like bookends with a few looseleaf sheets lying between them. He could have even asked for a few token pieces from the guys online who still associate with him, though maybe he did and the Adem and RPV pieces are the only results. I'm glad to see that none of the supposed entrants to the aborted &amp contest got used, since that would have been a huge dick move after promising money for those submissions. >HAHA Takes up about half the issue and drags way too long. After I read this I read Mixtape Hyperborea, also by Adem, and found it really hilarious at times, and there are some redeeming features in HAHA (especially knowing a little more about the ideas he's trying to get across, given Mixtape as context), but it's just "could be good" territory. The second-person voice mechanism he's using doesn't feel like something that should be dragged on so long. The only written piece treated with any visual decency, but it taking 24 pages is a different kind of affront. >Tiller Not very good. A little awkward, fumbles the climax. Bigger problem is the awful formatting and design. Linespacing is way too tight, the indents are so small that the paragraphs are nearly indistinguishable, making the thing a bitch to read. There's no excuse of trying to fit it all on one page since there's tons of extra space there, or hell, plenty of filler pages to reclaim. The titlepage's background is simultaneously Vaseline-smearily upscaled and jpg-artefacted. >Apprenticeship for Hobbledehoyhood Typical RPV stuff, wank-y, and I'm going to go ahead and say after having read it aloud to myself that I actually think it sucks. Four lines per page and four pages, and each page is a new badly rendered AI girl face. Some clipart bookends. RPV translated a couple sonnets and those are treated a little better. >Letters from the editor Mostly nonsense, mostly illegible. Some of the scant few semi-coherent parts try to weakly fan the flames of old drama, which is disappointing. Then he says some stuff about the cult he's been off-and-on with, which makes me assume he's properly off the deep end again. I assume the "piece" was mostly just a vehicle for the design, and the design is just effortful crap. Ryan's design work, overall, to me, is like RPV's poetry, where in the latter for a few lines I might think it's novel and exciting, but a few more lines and it's just more of the same maximalist over-production. I don't hate RPV's poetry, and I figure he probably has some technical merit buried in there, but my eyes gloss over when I see it. Ryan's design work is more offensive to me because he's generally screwing other people's work in the process and seeming to make no effort to improve fundamentally after all this time. >Selected MNM-DR drawings If these were new it could be a little cool, but I'm pretty sure they're all from the guy's Twitter, and he's spitting out new ones constantly. >photos & AI slop Like I'm browsing a Tumblr feed with some faux-tasteful custom CSS. To be fair I don't care about random photos in a /lit/ mag in the first place. The awful DPI/scaling on some of it is annoying. >164 MB >not even a second compressed copy come on There were plenty of ways Ryan could have made something decent as a gasping show of life for &amp, and instead it was this. He could have come back from the dead having done a good job and shown that he's learned something, but he didn't. If after 17 months there was this little writing (barring the scraps Ryan said he, untrue to form, left out), then it's hard to imagine anyone new being inclined to submit given the current showing, whereas something good and exciting may have pushed things the other way (not that I think &amp should keep shambling forward, just that I think this was dumb). Huge vain self-suck. Sorry for the mounting seethe, but I spared myself posting this to /lit/ when there was a release thread, so you get it all now. #1 &amp critic right here.