Aevee Bee is creating
Mammon Machine: ZEAL
The Official Mammon Machine Zeal of Quality
181
$865.50
Milestone Goals
We've got enough for a game!
The minimum for ZEAL to break even, for us to write an essay in-house or to hire a guest contributor!
Guest Art
Zeal is now generating enough that we can pay artists their going rate for their work, which usually averages to around $150—sometimes more, sometimes less. This milestone ensures we can pay reasonable professional rates!
Guest Writer
$50 is a really nice token amount but I think $100 is actually a lot more reasonable, and ZEAL is big enough to pay writers a pretty generous rate that's closer to what our artists make, and it lets us commission longer and more exciting stuff! It's also what I make, so fair's fair?
Aevee actually gets paid for all the editing and art directing and business side of things!
Coordinating all of this stuff is a lot of work, and the first milestone includes all the expenses of game acquisition, which as you're aware can sometimes be a whole lot! At this level I get paid for all the work that I do! Thank you!
Slept In Comics (1 feature)
A brand new imprint of ZEAL, Slept In Comics is a collaboration with artist and friend Rory Frances to bring what ZEAL does for video games to comics!
I’ve been making ZEAL for a full year, and through it we have discovered and befriended illustrators who are creating fantastic work in the world of comics which has made me, whoa, suddenly so excited about comics again! ZEAL is indebted to rad folx like Iasmin Omar Ata, Mia Schwartz, Annie Mok, Sophia Foster Domino, Rory Frances and many other wonderful artists who have contributed the art that makes ZEAL beautiful. We love the art of ZEAL so much we want to make a small little place for comics and artists and talk about comics and art that’s like the little place that ZEAL is; sustainable, cute, diverse, smart, and extremely powerful.
Slept In Comics is a small place for important comics and important talks about comics, like comics about how weird and inconvenient bodies are and our unquenchable internet thirst, as well as and panels and essays about how effete disney villains and unlikeable anime heroines made us gay, or the untold history of animal comics. A safe place to talk about all the embarrassing stuff we liked when we were kids and the ways we appreciate and understand it today. A place for the comics we wish we real and as it turns out, actually are.
Patreon's a neat little thing that gives us a lot of flexibility to do whatever we want, and we have some people we want to be regular features and lots and lots of people we have in mind for guests contributors, and of course people like me who can talk forever. We are very excited about comics again! Please be excited with us too.
I’ve been making ZEAL for a full year, and through it we have discovered and befriended illustrators who are creating fantastic work in the world of comics which has made me, whoa, suddenly so excited about comics again! ZEAL is indebted to rad folx like Iasmin Omar Ata, Mia Schwartz, Annie Mok, Sophia Foster Domino, Rory Frances and many other wonderful artists who have contributed the art that makes ZEAL beautiful. We love the art of ZEAL so much we want to make a small little place for comics and artists and talk about comics and art that’s like the little place that ZEAL is; sustainable, cute, diverse, smart, and extremely powerful.
Slept In Comics is a small place for important comics and important talks about comics, like comics about how weird and inconvenient bodies are and our unquenchable internet thirst, as well as and panels and essays about how effete disney villains and unlikeable anime heroines made us gay, or the untold history of animal comics. A safe place to talk about all the embarrassing stuff we liked when we were kids and the ways we appreciate and understand it today. A place for the comics we wish we real and as it turns out, actually are.
Patreon's a neat little thing that gives us a lot of flexibility to do whatever we want, and we have some people we want to be regular features and lots and lots of people we have in mind for guests contributors, and of course people like me who can talk forever. We are very excited about comics again! Please be excited with us too.
Slept In Comics (2nd feature)
Slept In Comics will produce either a feature—interviews, panels, essays OR a comic until this goal is met, which will allow us to do both!
About
Aevee Bee is a flannel anime queer and the editor of ZEAL, an online micro zine with cool art and games coverage of overlooked games from exciting new writers and artists. She runs an extremely self-indulgent twitter account and tumblr, and contributes regularly to wherever.
Location
Olympia, WA, USA
Top PatronsSee all 181
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ZEAL is an online Micro-Zine that produces the following each month:
1 (one) essay of craft and design on a beautiful old(ish) game almost no one has talked by Aevee Bee, games critic and twitter account haver.
1 (one) illustration for said beautiful old(ish) game, by an amazing and radical guest artist.
1 (one) guest essay from an exciting writer who I think it is very important that you read, about topics way outside my expertise but that I really want to know more about and think you should too.
~???? by ????, exciting mysterious bonus features when/if goals are reached~
This is the tiny world of ZEAL. We are very proud of it. Here is what we are:
A little while ago I made the case for NEVER TALKING ABOUT AAA GAMES AGAIN. I was joking, but also: I was not joking. Every time there is a Bioshock or a grand theft auto or a heavy rain we all end up writing about it, even if its main virtues are “existing” and “selling 8 million copies.” These games sometimes accidentally become a culture touchstone for important conversation, but there are games ten years old and more that are light years ahead of everything you saw a trailer for at E3, truly progressive in ethics, nuance, emotion, and design.
Rad person and friend creature Mi̚châe͚l Br̔oṷg͊h (the artist of our title banner!) tweeted this at me almost exactly one year ago: “7/10 is the score of amazingness. 10/10 isn't perfection, it's mainstream bullshit. anything genuinely interesting gets 7/10.” A 7/10 isn't perfect because it took a risk. A 7/10 wanted to be something new. A 7/10 tried so much it couldn't get all of it right.
I write about 7/10 games. I write about what went right, and what we can learn from their design. I am a creative writing MFA, so my approach is orientated around figuring out how it all works rather than all that it means. How does a game make you feel a thing? How does a game take you to a place? How does it introduce you to a character? Creative writing analysis is for figuring out how to copy and use important techniques of craft and form, and that is what I hope my games writing will do too.
This was the original goal for ZEAL, but I have been much more successful and my patrons have been much more generous than I had ever expected! Extra money is scary and it is hard to feel like I deserve it, but I absolutely love reading about games and looking at pretty art about games. When I first started out in games journalism, Simon Carless gave me a for real paid column at GameSetWatch (may it rest in piece) with almost no qualifications at all. I do not think I was a very good writer at all but I am a much better one now because of the chance he gave me. I would like to pass on a little of that by paying writers and editing them, which is I think an actual human thing to do instead of forcing innocent creatures to churn stuff out without getting to be critical and never getting any compensation but exposure, which is a thing you can die from. I also love pretty pictures and the people who make them; artists should be rewarded for their work and allowed to survive even if our only option for doing so is to participate in a horrible garbage system.
This is why we exist and this is what we do. Everything ZEAL produces is free! We ask for your kind donations to help make this happen for everybody, kind of like NPR. Please continue with me on this lovely journey. Thank you~
1 (one) essay of craft and design on a beautiful old(ish) game almost no one has talked by Aevee Bee, games critic and twitter account haver.
1 (one) illustration for said beautiful old(ish) game, by an amazing and radical guest artist.
1 (one) guest essay from an exciting writer who I think it is very important that you read, about topics way outside my expertise but that I really want to know more about and think you should too.
~???? by ????, exciting mysterious bonus features when/if goals are reached~
This is the tiny world of ZEAL. We are very proud of it. Here is what we are:
A little while ago I made the case for NEVER TALKING ABOUT AAA GAMES AGAIN. I was joking, but also: I was not joking. Every time there is a Bioshock or a grand theft auto or a heavy rain we all end up writing about it, even if its main virtues are “existing” and “selling 8 million copies.” These games sometimes accidentally become a culture touchstone for important conversation, but there are games ten years old and more that are light years ahead of everything you saw a trailer for at E3, truly progressive in ethics, nuance, emotion, and design.
Rad person and friend creature Mi̚châe͚l Br̔oṷg͊h (the artist of our title banner!) tweeted this at me almost exactly one year ago: “7/10 is the score of amazingness. 10/10 isn't perfection, it's mainstream bullshit. anything genuinely interesting gets 7/10.” A 7/10 isn't perfect because it took a risk. A 7/10 wanted to be something new. A 7/10 tried so much it couldn't get all of it right.
I write about 7/10 games. I write about what went right, and what we can learn from their design. I am a creative writing MFA, so my approach is orientated around figuring out how it all works rather than all that it means. How does a game make you feel a thing? How does a game take you to a place? How does it introduce you to a character? Creative writing analysis is for figuring out how to copy and use important techniques of craft and form, and that is what I hope my games writing will do too.
This was the original goal for ZEAL, but I have been much more successful and my patrons have been much more generous than I had ever expected! Extra money is scary and it is hard to feel like I deserve it, but I absolutely love reading about games and looking at pretty art about games. When I first started out in games journalism, Simon Carless gave me a for real paid column at GameSetWatch (may it rest in piece) with almost no qualifications at all. I do not think I was a very good writer at all but I am a much better one now because of the chance he gave me. I would like to pass on a little of that by paying writers and editing them, which is I think an actual human thing to do instead of forcing innocent creatures to churn stuff out without getting to be critical and never getting any compensation but exposure, which is a thing you can die from. I also love pretty pictures and the people who make them; artists should be rewarded for their work and allowed to survive even if our only option for doing so is to participate in a horrible garbage system.
This is why we exist and this is what we do. Everything ZEAL produces is free! We ask for your kind donations to help make this happen for everybody, kind of like NPR. Please continue with me on this lovely journey. Thank you~