It's been a long time coming.

would y'all read a bi-monthly publication that I write and put together all myself?

— ᴬᴸᴵᶜᴱ (@digipakd) 1 trillion years ago

Welcome to Issue 1 of WLN.Mag!

This is a kind of experimental blog format that I came up with while stoned a little while ago. Zines are cool but I'm an internet girlie and my scattershot interests and sporadic writing proclivities don't lend themselves well to zines. This is setting aside the lack of audience, printer, and distribution method. So I thought the best, and most fun compromise would be something like a digital magazine. Most of those are PDFs but here you can see I have a bit of a different approach instead opting to mimick 2-page spreads of a magazine on a web page to allow for easier viewing and embedding of elements.

Old Malls

• Intro
• REDACTED Centre
• Description
• Structure
• Why Talk About This Place?
• REDACTED Mall
  • Structure
  • Interesting Sights
  • Combination KFC Taco Bell
  • Me and the Mall
• Get Real

Intro

Community centres are reflections of their community. Even in the age of the car, land and retail space in high foot traffic areas are highly valued. Whatever businesses or entities that stick around are undoubtedly important to at least some members of the community. While we might associate this with downtown properties, a similar statement can be made of spaces within a small mall or community centre. Pretty obvious but I bring this up because I find it interesting to look at small malls and community centres whenever I come across them.

Description

From the outside, it's this plain, brown brick structure. Its precious few unshuttered and uncovered windows typically avail little if anything about the goings on therein. Most are instead covered by adverts and other posters put up by the business owners. Aside from the ocasional little business willing to show their storage or backrooms to the world, this place is pretty closed off from the outside. The entrances, like the windows, are framed with these red, sunbleached to a kind of orange, accent pieces and a welcome sign whose design has just the perfect amount of negative space to feel off-balanced, off-center, and awkward but still intentional. Inside is more of the same aesthetically, white walls and some faded yellows, white square tiles small enough to look busy and monotonous enough to be monotonous looking, recessed light fixtures of the fluorescent-tube-array-behind-a-diffuser-panel variety punching up the meagre lighting capabilities of the centre's small skylights.

The first thing I want to draw attention to on the inside with regard to the storefronts is the food court setup since I think it serves as a pretty good tone setter for the rest of the centre. The food court setup consists of a row of asian restaurants, some boba shops across in the cubicle style store lots, a low-b/high-c tier pizza chain across the way on the other side of the mall but still within a reasonable distance of the food court where if you're at the food court you'll probably still be considering it, a mini Filipino (seemingly redundant combination of words) grocer/snack shop in a similar position to the pizza chain, and a random hair salon between the food court and the pizza.

The boba is similarly pretty scuffed. Their battlescarred menus have a thick lamination layer at least but still just stuck haphazardly to walls and boards outside of their store space because yeah you can't exactly fit their boba operations inside of the cramped ass retail space they're locked into. The three competing boba shops all sell the same tofu dish and fish balls which I just love for them.

The pizza place is just about no one's first choice for pizza, low b-tier is pretty high praise for that joint. Nothing there is unique, it's got the same energy as like random ass pizza joints named Johno's Pizza or mf PIZZA TIME. The only other thing of note about it is that, like the boba shops, it too struggles to fit within its space!

The only places that seem to fit within their allotted space are the asian restaurants and the Filipino snack shop. I thought the place was unmanned for a little bit. But no. The owner was just behind the register.

"The storefronts are even better!" is what I would say if I could confidently vouch for them. They were all mostly closed for midday on a Saturday which doesn't bode well. I get that hobby stores are a bit of an unemployed energy type place but I don't think that means some random weekday like a Tuesday would be their peak hours.

Does that make sense? Am I switching tense in my writing?

Structure

Not wholly moving on from the contents, I want to discuss more about the structure of the place. It feels meagre in a way that I can't quite pin on any one single aspect.

The natural skylights are small and dim, requiring artficial lighting to bring it the rest of the way there but even with their combined efforts there's still many a dark spot within the centre. Many of the retail spaces are closed most days and a few are just left vacant with a hastily scrawled "for rent/lease" sign on the glass or in the plastic of the rolling door. The storefronts that are open seem to fit awkwardly in their spaces, ranging from the appliance store struggling to fill out its space to the clothing stores spilling out into the halls.

Some of the storefronts occupy a strange type of space located somewhere between a proper inline retail space as one would expect of a mall and a kiosk. If you're familiar with Markham's Pacific Mall then I'd liken it to the stores on the first floor except a bit closer to an inline. They're substantially larger and more built out with walls and a sort of forehead on which to place signage but still retain a sort of cramped feeling as these cubicles need to leave clearance for the second floor landing but have no ceiling.

The second floor is similarly limiting. Constructed as a figure 8 with a large landing in centre, the floor space surrounding the holes in the 8 is constricted in order to render the skylight more effective on the bottom floor. This decreased floor space makes shops on the second floor much less approachable and the area much less wanderable (totally a real word). The third floor looms above with no windows or open space to look above or below making the openings to the sky in the ceiling feel bare.

Redacted Mall

REDACTED Mall, hereon referred to as "the mall" with capitlisation as demed appropriate, is in nowheresville suburbia's approximation of what a downtown might be in a strange alternate universe. Nestled between the local college and combination casino and racetrack, the mall's parking lot stays mostly empty these days similar to its neighbours in the upscale grocer, office supply shop, buffet, and other smaller businesses. All the money seems to have dried up from the area, drained into the combination casino racetrack whose long overgrown and undeveloped fields have seen new attention of late.

It appears that the owners of the land, seeing a lack of traffic to and in the area for their mall and casino realized that they needed to do something new. They needed to build another mall. But this time it's a more integrated part of the casino and not requiring a trek through 2 football field parking lots and crossing a 4x4 lane intersection by foot.

But we're not here to talk about that new development. Give it like 10 years for that one to die too and maybe I'll make a follow up post. We're here to talk about the original mall. And what a mall it is.

All over the mall are posters showcasing plans for its redevelopment. Featuring a 3-part megatheatre, new condos, expansion of store spaces, a convention center space, and a standalone waterpark. It's clear to see that it will never happen. The posters, like the mall, are in a state of disrepair. The larger ones literally coming apart at the seams revealing their construction as several other smaller square posters on fabric pinned together. Exuding the same level of professionalism as three kids in a trench coat. Evidentally they've been up for a while and none of what was listed has come yet. Scanning the QR codes and looking at local articles, construction on this was meant to happen pretty soon after the posters were put up and results would start appearing as soon as 2020. Little did they know huh?

It kind of reminds me of those end of the world graffitis you would see in L4D2 or TLOU. Got a laugh out of me like those L4D2 ones.

Some of the shops are just funny. I'll show those now.

You're eyes aren't deceiving you. That IS in fact Zellers in modern day. For the non-Canadians readers, Zellers was a discount department store chain that basically died in the 2010s. The few remaining stores that they owned were turned into liquidation centres for a different store owned by the parent company. After a while they seemed to just vanish from everywhere which makes this a shock to find. Then more recently they returned as a section inside of that different store. But now that different store is filing for some brankrupcy related thing so :/

E-rotic type shit. I can't get any of their videos to embed because they're all age restricted. fucking love that band.

The stuff in there was mostly what you would expect. 20:80 cotton-poly-blah-blah-blah. Materials determine a lot and there were a lot of tags in there that read "85% polyester 10% rayon 5% elastaine" which translates to "100% plastic and 0% worth your time and money", not to mention the fact that a lot of the materials spread their material so thin that they made heroin chic look curvaceous. They had jeggings. Can you believe that? Jeggings in modern day. I hadn't seen jeggings in years but they had stacks of it. And lowkey there were some cute things somehow? There was a cropped and lined faux fur vest with a hood with kemonomimi ears on it. Plastic fantastic for sure but still interesting. There's also another section just dedicated to swimsuits whose lighting is seemingly just turbo-cooked.

the hand

There are some pictures I can't post without basically doxxing myself so I'm just going to describe them here:

• a shop whose name is just telling you to buy shit with the tagline "cheaper than cheap"
  • it's all open boxes on pallets
• several closed stores that just have their eviction notices in the door still

Combination KFC Taco Bell

Nestled in the corner of the food court next to the washrooms sat an abandoned combination KFC and Taco Bell. I don't remember much about the signage or surroundings aside. The inside was mostly empty, only the sink and a few tables remained. At least I thought so until I looked to the side at a wall that's normally hidden unless you get really close to the counter at the right angle.

My eyes went up the wall of hand washing instructional infographics, action plans, and schedules to see a whiteboard. It long outlasted it's frame, held still to the wall with duct tape. On the white board was some company slogan about working as a family. Surrounding the white board was something I didn't expect to see in a place like this. Group photos of holiday parties, random group outtings, and the odd candid of what looked to be their bosses in uniform at work, printed and placed lovingly around the border of the whiteboard and in the center where it prompted placement of a picture. Hand written notes addressed to one another saying their final goodbyes. A mini collage commemorating what was and wishing one another well one last time.

Me and the Mall

In truth, the mall is an old haunt of mine. I used to go there with my parents as a child and I have many a fond memory in its halls even though it's changed so much over the years to the point where it's near unrecognizable in some respects. I can still recall very vividly going to the amusement park, walking past the expensive ice cream shop I could never go to, the girls' clothing stores that always held a strange allure to me as a kid, the game store where I got my first ever figure (Artorias from Dark Souls), the theatre's beautiful mural and poster set up, the fast food burger place where whose chicken sandwiches I lost many baby teeth within, and all the stores that I never got to visit but wowed me every time I passed by.

I can't help but feel a bit forlorn and sorrowful about the place. Some of what I listed off is still there but most of it is gone. Covid did a number on the storeowners here and seeing it empty like this is just tragic, akin to seeing someone you once knew laid out on a hospital bed sick as a dog. Or well, I wouldn't say I'm that torn up about it but it's a sad thing to behold regardless.

I think, to some greater or lesser extent, every time I go to a mall I try to recapture a bit of what I first experienced here. And to see it gone like this is like losing a record of what once was.

Regardless, I come to lament how we've let our physical spaces for comingling and just plain existing without expectation atrophy like this. And the kind of apathy that people express when this is brought up.

I get it though, modern life has everyone down. The average person has seen their workloads rise, paid work hours go down, and wages stay stagnant amid skyrocketing inflation. Even those who are doing well for themselves are still locked into their daily, inflexibly scheduled grind that isolates them from anyone who has a different job scheduling from their own. Lately it seems that no one is safe from job insecurity either, lifelong careers and decades of toeing the company line only to be let go in the next round of layoffs. To top it all off, so often we end up pitted against each other to compete for scraps from the top, a zero sum game where we all only stand to lose by participating but what else can we do.

Recent visions of the apocalypse, most recently inspired by nature's healing amid the covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns though it is worth noting that speculative fiction has been on this wave for a good while now and an earlier spike in interest in this particular image of the apocalypse can be traced back to anxieties regarding climate change and the ensuing climate crisis though this topic is nuanced the recency I refer to in my use above is subject to interpretation also thanks for reading this far, see a world overgrown and taken back by nature. Many a colossus of steel and concrete and glass brought to its knees by roots and vine and moss and fungi. Where there was once a scant few weeds growing in the pavement there is now nary a sight of asphalt in the ocean of native green ground covering.

I hope for a future like that. NOT apocalyptic or world ending but one where these kinds of places are everywhere. Places to live and to exist within.

Maybe this is a bit much, thinking about the end of the world and the state of the society after going to some low foot traffic retail spaces.

But I think it's worth thinking about.

• the learning experience of putting this together and my future workflow
• what can be expected in the future.

As for what you can expect in the future, I don't want to over or under promise anything.

As far as length goes, I want to say 4-5 shorter articles around the length of Fragazine or You( and Me) and Digital Cameras per release since that seems pretty feasible for me to write in the span of 2 or 3 months. But part of me kind of feels like that's a bit small, I don't want to disappoint any readers if none of my articles stick for them and I also don't want to accidentally put out a shit ton one quarter then nothing in another. But then another part of me thinks that I might not be able to do it so idk. It's hard to say really.

As far as subject matter goes, you know me. Lots of gaming and tech. Although I do have a few ideas for different serials. There's obviously the Fragazine serial I started here but I'm also thinking of starting up Wonderland Picture Show to show off pictures and compositions I make, an aiming serial to talk about aiming, a fashion centered serial, a mini-series about dense levels in video games, and a media recommendation serial. Then there are the myriad standalone articles that I want to write about one-off topics like math or markdown.

I also want to write a bit of fiction but I'm not sure if any of that will ever make it into this magazine.