Margazine

Prologue to a Zine

This is the very first issue of the Margazine, a self-published lil zine (pronounced "zeen", as in magazine) made by me! Recurring topics will likely be those of the world-building, fanfiction, and ranting variety.

I made it quite small with the hopes someone would print it one day (two to a page) and fold it into a proper booklet, heh. I may just do that myself!

I'm new to the art of newsletters and the like. My interest in news and news delivery only goes as far as casual conversation will allow. That is why a zine seemed a perfect outlet for all these word salads building up in my brains. Instead of proper content, I can just go crazy with whichever topic flows out.

Thank you for reading Margazine.

—metemo

Reading is fun!

Lately I've been reading House of Leaves. I'm trying to not think about it when I'm not reading it. There are pages that simulate the forbidden hallways, specific doors and rooms, recreating them with words and silence. It's almost like the book contains the hallways.

And that book is in my house.

Other times, it won't be the book's existence I fear.

Instead, I'll just think about Tom and feel sorrowful fear. That's the sort of thing that plagues my nightmares, just wondering how someone feels just before they disappear from the story forever.

Then there's the terrifying thought that a door could just appear out of nowhere in my house. That's the least of my fears, but late at night, the thought occurs to me.

In other news, I've been looking for some fanfiction to read lately, and it's not looking good for me folks. Everything I would want to read, I feel like I have. Is this what getting old feels like?

Thankfully, Nimona (the movie) has just come out. I expect fanfiction dammit! Lots of it.

Fanfiction

That leads us into the next topic!

I've been hardly working on the Pucca and How To Train Your Dragon fanfiction. I can't really share the fics in the state they're in right now, but since this is the first issue, I can at least talk about them.

Freaky Love

This is the Pucca fic, of course. By the way, this is me from November 2024 now, only to rant about fanfiction. September 2023 Me went on to have a stupid math rant, but not I!

Anywho...

Freaky Love is a dearly beloved fancomic of mine that was lost to an awful flash drive my mom bought me for cheap. It ran out of memory and then ate all my files, including that webcomic. Ah, man, that was probably the one and only time I was willing to draw all I did. And let me tell ya, I even surprised me with some of the scenes.

It was just the very beginning, but 50 panels is a lotta work.

The gist of the actual fic is this: Pucca, unnamed, is a pooka (fae) from some faraway land. Honestly, I always imagine Ireland, but I never mention a name. Pookas, in my stories, have a strict rule: no eating fresh food.

Basically, pookas eat trash, rotten food and such, and Pucca did not like that. It's basically sinful for pookas to eat fresh food, so she is forced to abstain for about a decade.

One day, the temptation of blueberries (or whatever berries may grow in Ireland's wild bushes) was too much, and she almost (almost) ate a couple. In the end, her brother arrived and she left the berries, but not before putting one in her mouth.

Honestly, it would've be easier to just swallow it, but nooo, she had to pretend she wasn't doing anything taboo. So she left a berry there, wet with her spit.

First of all, gross.

Second of all, very very irresponsible. See, pookas also have a substantial amount of venom in their saliva. It would cause a healthy adult to stay home with diarrhea for days.

Short story short: some kids come along, one boy eats the poisoned berry, he dies.

Yeah yeah, sorry, Pucca did accidentally a murder. Let's just sidestep that, okay? Anyway, she gets thrown out of Ireland and disowned by her family offscreen as a result.

Pucca travels the world in a fury for the first few months. And, oh boy, does the world feel it. Hurricanes, forest fires, tsunamis. Pucca kills a lot, but we don't dwell on it, okay? Especially because this is actually just a period of nothingness in her eyes. I don't even mention any of the specific disasters in the fanfic, I just allude to her terror, but I do hope someone gets the gist of my meaning when they read the single sentence describing those angry months.

When Pucca is finally less of a natural disaster, she is hungry. Just hungry.

She chances upon a kappa. This is where the comic was supposed to begin, by the way. The kappa, seeing her, kinda freaks out. I think he can tell she was not in the best mood, y'know? The meeting ends with him spilling the water out of his bowl and just freezing while sobbing waterfalls. Pucca doesn't realize this because she's never met a kappa before, but she asks him for food twice and then leaves the poor kappa after getting impatient.

RIP Kappa. Perhaps some kind villager will refill their bowl.

Pucca eventually stumbles into Sooga village, at the perfect time: lunch time. There's already a mob of hungry villagers floating toward food. Literally floating.

She is equally entranced by the smell of noodles, and floats along behind them. They all enter while she takes a moment outside to decided whether breaking the pooka commandment is worth this delicious meal.

Finally, she kicks the door down, pure Pucca style baby, and the villagers see Pucca for the first time.

And...that is where I left off. I wanna cry, it's not much at all. Here are some key things I wanna get through anyway:

(1) Pucca practically imprints on Ching. They are the bestest-estest friends in the whole wide world. Pucca can, in fact, talk, but she's just more of an "actions speak louder that words" type of girl.

Like Ferb from Phineas and Ferb!

(2) Her uncles adopt her and she loves them very much.

(3) The spit thing is very important to explain why Pucca never kisses Garu. She already killed one boy, she refuses to do it to her boytoy.

(4) Pucca is a little more sadistic in this story. Or, rather, I think the OG Pucca was pretty sadistic, and I'd like to let that shine here.

(5) Jealous Garu.

(6) Fae and spirits and magical beings of all kinds! A story where Pucca is explicitly fae is the perfect setting to explore how half of Sooga's population is straight up not human! I love it, especially because Pucca comes from a place where fae and humans lived separately for various reasons, mostly hate.

(7) Uh, spoiler maybe, but Pucca's probably part dragon. It would explain why she could never manage to shift into a specific species of animal: she can only shift into and out of dragon form.

Also, her human form looks Chinese, so she stuck out in Ireland. In Sooga though, uh... Well, no one really sticks out in Sooga, not even Santa Claus. So forgive her if she never realized she'd angrily stomped her way to her parent's homeland.

Okay, end Freaky Love rant!

Toothless Daydream

I won't say much about this one because I'm much closer to having it become a real work-in-progress that I am with Freaky Love.

The gist is, this is a world in which Night Furies probably don't exist, or at least not anymore. There are certainly legends, but no one's ever seen one.

After destroying half the village, Hiccup is sent home (yeah, this is the first scene from the movie, just without shooting down a Night Fury).

Hiccup runs out into the woods to be rebellious. Suddenly, a the ground opens up and swallows him down. Crazy, he follows the tunnel and finds...a tiny green dragon with no teeth.

It's a movie and book crossover! Yes, this is indeed little Toothless from the books. And yes, dragons talk. They just have a harder time remembering words when they're being brainwashed by a giganticus seadragonus maximus.

The best part about this story, me thinks, is that I totally plan to reincarnate my beloved book trio by bring together Hiccup, Fishlegs, and Ruffnut! Oh, it's so rad no matter how much I think about it!!!

Fishlegs already knows how to speak dragonese, by the way. Arena dragons, already knocked out of mind control, can have interesting conversations that only a truly geeky Viking like Fishlegs would happen upon.

Hiccup and Fishlegs become buddies first, then Ruffnut happens upon a Toothless and falls in love with that adorable nuicance, bada-bing bada-boom! Trio!

Oh, I can't wait to someday maybe write, uh . . . any of this!

¿Do you like numbers?

I am determined to become good at multiplying numbers from 1 through 10 on the duodecimal system (10₁₂). I worked on elevens the other day, realizing that the last digit in the system seems to have similar behavior no matter what number system I'm working on.

That is, if you recognize the pattern. I've met many people who seem to have either never realized or not remember that multiplying a number from 1-10 with 9 gives a product with the same properties.

Let's say $x$ is the product of the numbers $n$ and $9$, where $n\in \left\{\mathrm{1,\; 2,\dots ,\; 10}\right\}$. In that case, $x$ is a two digit integer with the following properties:

• The first digit is the number $n-1$.
• The sum of the digits is $9$.

Exhibits A-J

1. $1·9=09$
2. $2·9=18$
3. $3·9=27$
4. $4·9=36$
5. $5·9=45$
6. $6·9=54$
7. $7·9=63$
8. $8·9=72$
9. $9·9=81$
10. $10·9=90$

Turns out, this actually works the same on the last digit of pretty much any number system. In that case, I'd like to rewrite the theorem.

Let $x$ be the product of the numbers $n$ and $z$, where $n\in \left\{\mathrm{1,\; 2,\dots ,\; 10}\right\}$ and $z=10-1$ in any number system. Then $x$ is a two digit integer in which…

1. The first digit is the number $n-1$.
2. The sum of the digits is $z$.

So $n·z=10(n-1)+[z-(n-1\left)\right]$.

Ergo, the list of multiples of eleven from one through twelve, in this case written: multiples of $\mathrm{E}$ from $1$ through $10$ is as follows:¹

1. $1·\mathrm{E}=0E$
2. $2·\mathrm{E}=\mathrm{1T}$
3. $3·\mathrm{E}=29$
4. $4·\mathrm{E}=38$
5. $5·\mathrm{E}=47$
6. $6·\mathrm{E}=56$
7. $7·\mathrm{E}=65$
8. $8·\mathrm{E}=74$
9. $9·\mathrm{E}=83$
10. $\mathrm{T}·\mathrm{E}=92$
11. $\mathrm{E}·\mathrm{E}=\mathrm{T1}$
12. $10·\mathrm{E}=\mathrm{E0}$

Isn't it just so exciting to see it written out?

Some rules are just universal. For example, if $10$ is an even number, then multiples of $10/2$ end in either $10$ or $10/2$. In the case of ${10}_{12}$, $10/2=6$.

Another way to write the zed equation to work with any number, not just the last digit, is:

$$n·z=(n-1)·(z+1)+[z-(n-1\left)\right]\text{.}$$

This also means that the nine rule doesn't only work when $n\in \left\{\mathrm{1,\; 2,\dots ,\; 10}\right\}$, it works for all integers, even zero.

$$0·9=\mathrm{-1}·\left(10\right)+[9-(\mathrm{-1}\left)\right]=0\text{.}$$

Also including larger numbers:

$$11·9=10·\left(10\right)+[9-(10\left)\right]$$

$$=100+\left(\mathrm{-1}\right)=99$$

$$12·9=11·\left(10\right)+[9-(11\left)\right]$$

$$=110+\left(\mathrm{-2}\right)=108$$

$$13·9=12·\left(10\right)+[9-(12\left)\right]$$

$$=120+\left(\mathrm{-3}\right)=117$$

It just gets harder to see the pattern with large numbers because the tens start adding up, and you gotta start adding negative numbers.

Hey. Did you notice the multiple's digits now add up to $18$? In fact, the pattern continues! In a way.

As soon as we cross paths with $9$, the digits sum up to the number $18$, which could mean every time $z$ is passed, the sum of digits will increase by $z$.

Also, instead of $(n-1)\left(10\right)$, the new zed formula will look like this:

$$n·z=(n-2)·(z+1)+[2z-(n-2\left)\right]\text{.}$$

I can only assume the pattern continues, so the zed equation may be adjusted to:

$n·z=(n-i)·(z+1)+[iz-(n-i\left)\right]$, where $\mathrm{n,\; z}\in \mathrm{\mathbb{Z}}$ and $i$ is equal to…

Well, I can detect a pattern, but how to explain it?

The number $i$ has increased by one by the time $z$ appears in the ones place.

This moment also coincides with the moment $n·i·10$ is reached, which is also the number in which $i·z-(n-1)=0$.

So $i=Ceil\left(\right(n-1)/z)$!

Well, wasn't that exciting? Let's never do it again, this surely exists in some magazine someplace already, but it was fun concluding it. I'll try to avoid maths in the zine from now on.

The full zed formula looks like this:

$$n,z\in \mathrm{\mathbb{Z}}\text{,}$$

$$i=\lceil \frac{n-1}{\mathrm{z}}\rceil \text{,}$$

$$n·z=(n-i)·(z+1)+[i·z-(n-1\left)\right]\text{.}$$

Proof:

$$n·z=n·z-i·z+n-1+i·z-n+1$$

$$=n·z$$

End Note

I'm not making another issue, what are you, crazy? This one took a whole year to come out and it was mostly about math!

I've got other things I wanna do. Maybe one that I will make #2, but it won't be because I want to make #2, it'll just be because a zine will be the most fun way to express whatever it is I'm gonna express.

Anyway, I won't say this wasn't fun, 'cause it was, but oh boy did it take long coming out!

Just go to Main Site, there's cooler stuff there. Play Flighty Fall.

—metemo