Newsletter Nostalgia

As the title suggests, this post will contain useless facts about the things I've done. I may be twenty or thirty years too early to be nostalgic but it's never too late to get used to being old isn't it? To make a long elaboration into a short single sentence summary, this is the story of how some newsletters I've written for came about.

Because name me one kid who didn't try starting up their own newsletter for fun on pieces of stapled scrap paper.

The International Science and News Magazine was a self-published magazine I made at the age of nine. The price was written as "20 cents" but was actually only free for borrowing. The articles in it weren't very reliable, after all most of it derived from whatever health fad my Mom went through at that time and whatever theories my father and brother came up with to disprove its effectiveness.

Nevertheless, I wrote short eight sentence articles along with messy crosswords drawn without a ruler and animal facts from The Hemisphere Kid which I subscribed to back then but never bothered to actually read. I stopped writing for this magazine after a few issues.

Other than writing newsletters and stories on scrap paper to entertain others, I was eleven when I discovered a newspaper written by another class. They published a newspaper and a magazine named after their own class which was read by their own classmates.

Fascinated, I thought about starting up my own but needed help in gaining readership and people to help with the articles. Lucky for me, a friend of mine liked the idea of starting a class newspaper.

We spent Science lessons coming up with ideas and finally writing them down on pieces of foolscap paper stapled together. She did most of the main illustrations and I got to do some of it. Articles in the newspaper was mostly taken from websites and news travelling around the school.

Fake advertisments were placed in there including sign-ups for the "Official Whiny Netball Club" for people like me who were afraid of playing netball. The advertisement promised that upon joining the club, a box with the color of your choice, will be given to you so that you can put it over your head so you can't see where the ball is headed during your P.E. lesson.

The newspaper even had a comic section filled with dry and morbid humor. There was one page at the end left for me to write in which I called "Aunt Sarcastic".

Well, as I believe, in every cheerful sunshine-and-fluffy-kittens kid there is a sarcastic and ever sceptical person waiting to get out.

For my eleven year old self, it came in the form of a grumpy old lady with a college degree in evil.

Aunt Sarcastic was a cartoon elderly woman who wore soft grandma cardigans with a beanie and a skull and crossbones t-shirt. She mostly had a snappy and rather rude retort to every letter she got as she was pretty much the opposite of an Agony Aunt. Again, the dry sense of morbid humor was applied to Aunt Sarcastic's letters and an email account was created for her but I have never used it.

So that's the story behind some of the newsletters/newspapers/magazines I've written. I've written more than these two but I didn't have as much fun writing the other newsletters compared to these.

Now I can't seem to figure out a better way to end this post.

Would this be the appropriate moment to say go figure?