TITLE:APOLOGY PALETTE:0223 0998 0bb4 099f BRUSH:03 3 MAGS TO READ AND MAGS TO LOOK 2 by Macno Second issue. Another breath of words that have to fill the empty soul of a floppy disk. Articles to give a meaning to a title, stories to justify the time spent in writing and reading them, efforts that have to underline our presence in the Amiga scene, as if it could decide our same existence there. I have read with curiosity and expectation reviews and comments about the first issue. It would be needless and absurd to say that I don't care of them, I care but I don't always understand. It seems to me that a diskmagazine for the scene is good if it has a nice design, a good code (whatever this may mean) and well matched colors. It almost seems that a diskmagazine without brushes is below average, that a piece of coding that doesn't include them is bad and easy. I wonder what the reader and the reviewer of a diskmagazine wants. Does he wants clip arts everywhere? Different fonts and a good intro? Does he still want standard scene articles, like the ones you can read on the majority of the scene mags? News that are always the same, comments about friendship and swapping, reviews of demos and interviews to scene guys? A diskmagazine with good design and ten real articles (have we really to count in their number the advertisments, the credits, the "how to write an article" texts, the two pages long meditations about the importance of pack disks in the scene?) will surely be more succesful than an Abnormalia. Well, if this is what the scene wants, if this is what the reader expects, then we have completely failed. I still think that a magazine has to offer something to READ, it doesn't matter if it looks marvellous. Once the code is fuctional, the graphics are not totally horrible and the music doesn't hurt your ears, what have you got to ask to a diskmag? What about some articles? When we decided to make Abnormalia we choosed to make it in this way for two reasons. First of all because that was the kind of mag we would have liked to read, second because we couldn't fight with the big names in the diskmags field with their same weapons, as many mags try to do. We had to find a different solution, we had to find different topics to talk about: new or not much explored fields where to pour our desire of fame but also new things to talk about, right in the way we wanted them to be. Maybe the average scene reader doesn't appreciate, maybe we have looked for a kind of reader that doesn't exist and this has influenced our impact around. Filippetto of Freedom Crack has written in his review: "If you want something GOOD to read in the screen of your Amiga, then load Abnormalia". Nice words, but the overall mark on the mag was quite low, due to the code and the design, considered of low quality. Now I don't want to comment the mark itself, that's not the point, but a magazine is something to read or to look? The most important part of it are the articles or the other things? To look a nice picture I load a slideshow, to listen a good music I use a musicdisk, to see some powerful coding effects I look for a demo, to read something I am supposed to take in consideration a diskmag. I'm not saying that the articles of this mag are better than the others, it's not up to me to judge, but I strongly would like that our work is judged for what it is intended to be. 2Judge what you READ of this mag, not the rest. This whole text it's crap, it's crap because it has had to talk directly about the magazine and its purposes, nowadays it seems that allegoric, lateral and maybe ironic speeches are not understood. If you want to be understood in the best way you must say things directly, if you try to be a bit elusive or ironical or sarcastic you risk of not being understood. I won't wonder if somebody will get angry for something written in Scenaria, without understanding that it's just an ironic and self-ironic scene chat. Well, here is what I really think of this mag, then. I consider its articles far better than the average articles of the average mags around, I think that the code is fuctional and does what it has to do, that the design is not ugly and the music is something worth to be listened. If you don't agree, you are not the reader we were aiming to (this doesn't impies that you have something bad) or we are just blind by our work. It happens often in the scene , it may happen also to us. As for the more or less original and abnormal things that this mag can boast, here is a direct and explicit list, I thought that it wasn't necessary, but maybe I was wrong. - A totally ironic part about the scene. Nothing serious and conventional about it (SCENARIA). - A female co-editor, Phoenix, who should be something new for a diskmag (she is real, you can touch her, hear her, read her words, she's not another Patsy in the scene). - No advertisments and a reduced number of "service" articles (credits, addresses and so on). - Few 1500 bytes texts just to fill space. - A section where all the languages are accepted (BABILONIA). - Serious scientifical articles, maybe too serious to be liked. - Stories, more or less abnormal. - No group under it. Abnormalia is made by persons, it doens't matter of what group. - The irony and the tragedy of the contemporary life. - Different kind of sections like BREVIARIA or CONCILIUM. - THE LAST JUDGEMENT and the SPANDIMERDA AWARDS. - A living mag which could say something worth to be read in every line. (or it could be terribly boring and patetic, but that's a matter of points of view). - A main editor who after this article feels himself a sort of traitor of the Abnormalia spirit, lateral and indirect, ironic and tragic, abnormal, maybe, (even if many people nowadays claim themselves to be abnormal, as if it were a sign of coolness) and a bit mysterious. There is nothing similar in these words, flip page soon... WHY the hell have you read this rubbish?! The aim of COMMENTARIUM, actually, is not to defend our choices and to explain the spirit of Abnormalia, it should be a sort of round table where people give their opinions about the short stories published. It would be nice to probe into the various, more or less deep, meanings of the stories, to discover maybe, what has been ingnored at a first read. For this time we have just to be enlighted by Ripper's critics on some stories, he only has understood what Commentarium is about.