Start Select Reset Zine #015 | Monsters In The Mirror

Issue #015 of Start Select Reset went out by snail mail yesterday to my supporters (£5/month+).

Featured image for Start Select Reset Issue 15: Monsters in the Mirror - the zine by Jay Springett propped up next to a potted plant and two small figurines. — Start Select Reset is delivered straight to your snail mailbox four times a year, just like it’s 1994!

Issue #015 – Monsters In The Mirror

A hand holding the book MONSTERS IN THE MIRROR by Jay Springett, featuring bold black overlapping typography on a halftone cover against a white wall.

Issue #15 is the physical shadow of the audio essay of the same name.

It is an essay about artificial intelligence and cultural mirrors; mirrors as magical surfaces, instruments of mastery, and habitats. It turns on the transistor as a second Promethean moment, asking what it means to live inside the mirror and coexist with entities that wear language as their skin.

This print edition includes the full essay transcript, plus a new introduction and afterword written exclusively for the page; material that does not appear in the audio version.

Monsters in the Mirror Zine by Jay Springett - a hand holding a book with bold black typography on a white halftone background.

Buy SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy

This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5. Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo.

This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone.

£18 + shipping worldwide

Buy on Etsy

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.

Grey booklets numbered 001 to 004 in a row on a beige carpet, with a shallow depth of field blurring the copies into the distance.

Numbered copies of Jay Springett's zine, Monsters in the Mirror, showing copies 017 to 020 with a black graphic of three trees on the front.

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CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets.
Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.

Production Notes

International subscribers: please let me know by email if you run into any delivery problems, import charges, VAT, or customs weirdness.

This issue is a very different beast to previous ones, so I had to fill in the full customs details for each order. Everything was completed properly at my end, but tariffs, VAT, and handling fees may still apply when it reaches you.

I’d be very interested to know how this affects the value of the subscription, if you want a zine at all. I do have the option to print and drop-ship future zines from a US-based printer, which may make things easier for me and for you, but those copies would not be hand-stamped or quite as personal.

Please do email me with your thoughts. I’d really like to hear how this landed.

Well. It’s nearly the end of April, and I have now completed the full end-to-end production cycle for both Permanently Moved and Start Select Reset in their expanded, more ambitious, quarterly forms.

I wrote a bit about the state of the production process a month ago, just after the audio essay came out. At the time I was mostly thinking about the writing, recording, editing, and launch sequence. Now the physical zine has also gone out to subscribers, I feel like I’ve finally completed the whole loop. That loop has been about 5x five times more work than I expected. lol

But, as I wrote back then, the whole thing has been a learning experience, and I’m not going to beat myself up about that. The first time through any new production process is always ugly as you don’t know which parts are going to be easy until they turn out not to be.

In the end, I’m really pleased with how the zine turned out. Going with print.work as my printer was an excellent decision, their customer service is fantastic, and the quality of the finished object is really good.

Originally, when I was thinking about the new format, I thought moving to A5 was going to be the main change, and use that going forward. But now I’ve used them as my printer, I can see there is so much more I could do: square booklets, landscape booklets, posters, all sorts of things. The new range of possibilities this opens up is actually quite inspiring.

To cap off this zine launch, here are some of the first-time things I have had to learn, navigate, or bodge my way through for both the podcast and the zine:

Long-form writing: thinking, structuring, and delivering 8,000 words as one continuous audio essay.
Long-form audio editing: finding efficient ways to cut, shape, and polish something at that length.
Zine layout: wrestling with rivers of text, alignment, and typographic changes that did not break the whole document.
Print production: interfacing with printers and navigating the Easter holidays, which I had completely forgotten about.
Etsy: setting up the shop and getting the listing live.
Royal Mail Click & Drop: completing shipping and customs labels inside a truly byzantine user experience.
The post office ladies: arriving with 50+ international envelopes that all needed to be scanned individually for customs reasons, and because I don’t have a business account I didn’t have a single manifest QR code.

But you don’t find out unless you try. And having now tried; I can see the shape of the process much more clearly. The next one will be smoother because I now know where the friction lives.