I don't want to automate my work even though I should
I make zines. Probably too many. It's very tl;dr.
My current process is dragging 32 images onto a LibreOffice Draw odg template from a million years ago. It's fun. I just put on Raw or something and spot little changes that need to be made. The whole process has become surprisingly therapeutic. It's like a warm baked potato in the winter. Drag drop, edit, drag back, ect. That's all great when you have time. I've wasted too much of mine, and so the remaining bits are going to have to be economized (at least a little).
On my zine blog I've already proompted my way into a thing that prepares my cdn links. That shit was getting very tedious lol. But, at the same time, I kinda miss ctrl+right arrowing through and changing the numbers. It wouldn't be hard to proompt (I know, LLMs are a huge waste of resources and lame). It'd just be powershell (sorry for that too lol) and ghostscript fitting 8 images into 2.625" by 4" slots with 0.25" margins and generating a PDF. Fuck it. It's happening. Sorry odg. I'll still use you for stuff, just not as much. ngl, imprinting on software, or even just enjoying its workflow too much, can make you way too change averse. Just ask Excel VBA users. Just ask Access users.
I feel so bad for people who depended on MSPublisher. Of all the shitty things Microsoft lately has done lately - all of the power and water wasted by ai slop, their shitting up the world - this has to be the worst. They can't even let little old church ladies put out their weekly bulletins. I'm not saying Draw is a replacement. It's too jank in dumb ways. Like, if you make a text box and change the font, the font still reverts back to the defaults. Like a lot if LibreOffice, it's very nice to have an alternative and it's amazing how much effort went into it, but wow, just wow, are there little things that will annoy the shit out of you. I don't expect Ruby text to be as smooth as it is on Word or Ichitarou ffs, but damn. It's rough lol. That said, there probably a good WYSIWYG publishing tool like Publisher/inDesign/Draw, I'm just not too knowledgeable.
unrealistic goal I've been daydreaming of (may have to pull some strings):
Put out a daily zine. Sleep 4 hours. Make the zine. Print it. Leave it at the pizza place. Repeat ...for like a month? That seems doable. (not lol)
