newsstand magazine review

NEWSSTAND MAGAZINE REVIEW


Okay, okay. I’ve finally pulled my head part way out of my butt. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m still fighting with this damn cold/flu/crud two weeks later. I’m blaming that for my more than usual amount of dumbassness. Since I mega-dose on vitamin C and have for many years, I can only think of three reasons the thing is hanging in so long ( when my co-workers, who are usually much sicklier, get over it in days ) One, since China produces almost all of the globes ascorbic acid, they are poisoning me. Two, Baby Jesus is infecting me with the worse strains in order to boost my immune system so I can fight the Super Deluxe Obammy Barnyard Flu soon to be unleashed on mankind. Or, three, I’m sucking in Japanese radiation and so my immune system sucks. I like number two, personally. My probably final word on the new magazine to be is this. Rather than more blog drivel, rather than a thrice yearly book, I’ll still put out a monthly mag but make it a booklet on one subject. That should be worth a buck. With m original idea, I was in essence begging you for charity. With the idea for a book, I’d soon run out of ideas for a thirty or forty thousand word book ( the reason I haven’t put one out in years ). With booklets, I thoroughly cover on topic. You should get perceived value added. And I shouldn’t run out of ideas. Month one will be junk land. The second will be firearms. Since I have to start over again next weekend, I’ll just post the articles I wrote last weekend. That way I’ll have time to do my tax return. Thanks for your patience while I thrashed around for a viable alternative to declining commissions.

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If you simply love your books on CD and you positively love your Kindle to the point of indecency, a paper magazine would undoubtedly fail to move you. But for those of us that prefer paper reading to electric reading, who associate a book with joy and learning, a paper magazine has the tactile reinforcement that a web page is never going to match. Granted, electric media is the only reason self publishing is now possible on such a scale. None of us has much choice in whether we can read much if anything on paper. But when we have a choice, it sure is nice to hold our reading material in hand without the aid of electrons. I like survivalist magazines not because of the content so much but because it is paper and it does provide a better advertising medium ( I don’t buy the Yuppie Vermin Bastard Scum products by and large, but it is nice knowing what is out there and available ). But the last paper survivalist magazine was ten years ago. Why they failed is beyond me. They had a monopoly and they had oodles and gobs of advertising from Y2K. Granted, the ads fell after that date, but look at Wired magazine. They had a much more drastic fall in advertising after the Tech Wreck and they stayed in business. Of course, you could look at Blockbuster and wonder how a business with a monopoly in retail video rental could fail. Sure, Redbox and Netzero were competition, but with retail you could search for a movie you didn’t know you wanted. And, their acquisition cost had been reduced to nearly zero. They paid a percentage of sales for each movie- they didn’t have to buy the movie up front. It could have been the real estate bubble that did them in ( rents went up drastically ), or they just could have been grossly incompetent. I suppose American Survival Guide had about the same story. Even though low paying hacks were churning out worthless drivel, so were obviously low paid ( reading their output at times it almost seemed a computer program was churning out the stories ), perhaps the magazine still couldn’t handle the drop in ad revenue.
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The other day I was at the bookstore. I wanted to buy something besides a discard table ten cent book ( you have to help them pay the rent so they keep that table ) and couldn’t find anything worthy in sci-fi ( all the Apocalypse books had been wiped out just before Christmas ) or in my favorite authors in the used section so I went over to the magazines. I had resigned myself to having to buy the newest Backwoodsmen ( a fine magazine, but I hadn’t found many articles that interested me in the last year or so ) but there was a message from Baby Jesus himself ( I easily translated the message, “I love you like the red headed stepchild I never had, and I admire your hair, so unlike my mangy hippie freak show of a mop” ). A newsstand magazine of survivalism. How the heck had I missed this for the last year? There it was, issue number five of the bi-monthly “”Survivalist”. Which, by the by, has the obvious web address of Survivalist dot com. I was so excited that the retail price of five bucks bothered me not in the least, and that was just for 48 pages which included both covers.

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Let me tell you, compared to the old American Survival Guide ( they changed the name just before they went out of business but I never remembered what it was ) this thing is the pinnacle of professional prose. ASG was pretty predictable in its contents. Every issue had an article on a gun none of us could afford, and the required ( by law it seemed ) article on cold weather survival. The rest was pretty much all ads. They could have won a contest with Shotgun News ( which, speaking of competent business practices, has weathered the death of the amateur gun dealer and the huge surge in gun prices ) to see who had less writing and more advertising ( for the few out there that never saw a copy of Shotgun News, it is nothing BUT advertising from gun jobbers to gun retail dealers ). But ASG was great in that it was the connection each of us needed to the survivalist community. Nothing since has really filled that void, be it chat rooms or even Rawles ( he comes close, but it is hard to feel the connection through the computer screen. Hey, I’m not a total Luddite. I love books, but I also love the fact I can publish a lot more of my writing when I don’t have paper costs or postage cost to factor in. Before, I sent out a monthly eight page newsletter. Publishing electronically, I do that two or three times a week ).

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I don’t know if “Survivalist” will fill that void left by ASG, but it should. The movement needs its paper mag rag again. Okay, the writing is inoffensive, non-alarmist and pretty basic. But at least it is by talented writers that care about the subject. This magazine has Doug Bell ( who used to be my gun go-to guy before we lost touch ), Jerry Ahern ( still a hack writer, but OUR hack writer ) and guys I’ve kinda heard of like Robert Scott Bell and C Green, Jim Richter, Mat Stein and Ed Corcoran. The subject matter in issue five covered Martial Law, communications, gold and silver, collapse investing, CDC propaganda, suturing, Is The Family On Board?, emergency lighting and grid down, EMP, the interview with Rawles hawking his new book ( I guess this issue has been on the newsstand since October ), lasting survival shelters, essential oils, Did Civilization Peak In The 70’s?, frugal fire lighting ( by some fool pretending to be the Frugal Survivalist ) and a few unexciting classified ads. The regular page ads were NOT overwhelming. A Goldilocks amount of advertisements, in my opinion. Nothing you can’t pick up on the web as far as the articles, granted. So, honestly, this is just a luxury item. But I love it. I’m already decided, I’ll pay the under $20 subscription price.

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Is it worth even the reduced $3 an issue? Like I said, a luxury item. But come on! $3 every other month? Who can’t afford that? I have a pretty high standard for content and I was satisfied with the items offered. Most of that could just be nostalgia, sure. The articles were really too basic and too short and too timid, by and large. But for the cost, if you pick up just one or two pertinent pieces of information it will be worth it. Frankly, we are all way too spoiled by the Internet. We pay $30 or $50 a month for access, and then assume everything on the web should be free. Hey, writers don’t get a share of that $50. Greedy bloodsucking corporations do ( I’m not anti-free market, but corporations can be, and usually are, pretty damn evil. My Payless boots just got their hole big enough to show socks. After a mere four months, less than a thousand hours of use. Piss off you whores! ). And while the magazine writers don’t get paid much more, they get exposure and pay in other ways, hopefully, eventually. So do your part and part with a buck fifty a month to put some profit motive into the movement ( better to pay that, and a few bucks a year on any new survival books, than buying a $500 wheat grinder to keep a Yuppie Survivalist equipment seller in business ).

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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