I just got the occasionally appearing and very funny zine “Nice Distinctions,” from Arthur Hlavaty, who for years called the zine “The Dillinger Relic.”
It's hard to even keep up a paper zine anymore, what with the blog form edging it out. Arthur has a blog as well, maintained with a fairly high-level and fanatical amount of bells and whistles, e.g. links to friends, multiple daily posts, etc. In some sense the zine was the precursor of the blog.
Arthur was a junior when I was a freshman at Swarthmore College. He was 21, and he used to be willing to buy liquor for freshman such as me, which meant that I got to know him a little. I was impressed with how worldly and degenerate he seemed. How un-preppy. How seedy and iconoclastic. How recklessly funny.
Once in an early “Dillinger's Relic,” Arthur wrote something like, “I'm imagining myself at the pearly gates, and Saint Peter asks me what I did for science-fiction, and I say, 'I bought booze for Rudy Rucker.' And St. Peter says, 'But he wrote anyway.'”
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Speaking of Arthur vis-a-vis the freshmen, I found an amazing 11-frame animated gif of a Conus magus cone shell eating an innocent gobie fish.
That's the siphon on top, and the proboscis on the bottom. Apparantly the proboscis harpoons the fish with a detatchable poison tooth, then reels it in, with the proboscis opening up like a tunnel to another demention.
For full information, image credits, and a downloadable Quicktime movie, see the kickass Melbourne Conotoxins website.