[DEATH TO THE CLIMAX] Sanity and The Omen

[Aaron F. Buchsbaum]

Hey y'all.  So after fineygling (poor yiddish transliteration) with
InDesign in Cole, the issue finally got printed out.  The basterdly Macs
didn't have Bluehighway as a font, and thus ALL the titles and ALL the
bylines had to be changed.  Other than that, the transition from InDesign
1.5 to 2.0 was fairly good.  As an added bonus, a PDF version of this
issue has been saved onto my folder on nspublic.  It was insanely easy to
make.
So that's the goodish news, and instead of balancing it out with baddish
news, I'm simply going to make a few suggestions, all of them related.
1.) More staff.
We have had a lack of layout staff this semester. We all joke about
the staff boxes from last semester compared to this, but it's really a
problem.  As has been noted before there is a 'silent majority' that
would like to see the Omen keep publishing, and publishing well at that.
We need to recruit them to prevent more work from being distributed
between
less people.
2.) Layout
It's no secret that I'm a workhorse, and I'm perfectly willing to whore my
time to make sure something decent gets
printed up. However I won't be around next semeseter, and some one (or
preferably several people- I'll get to that in a moment) needs to step up.
Presumeably this will fall to Jeff, and god-willing Shalin as well. Jeff
we know has the skillz as a layout editor, and I have no idea about
Shalin's, but I assume they're pretty good.  What I want to stress
is the distribution of responsibility between you guys, and hopefully even
a few others. The more one person sits in front of Shitty Mac, the more
they get aggravated, and by consequence the shittier the Omen looks. Back
in the day
there were
individual editors for individual sections- it might be decent idea to go
back to that, or at least divvy x number of pages between several people.
3.) Signers responsibility
There was a reason Zole made a formal distinction between layout editor
and editor-in-chief after his reign.  It's stupid for one person to be
attempting both.  We have 3 signers.  As I see it, one needs to oversee
layout, one
needs to oversee PR, and the editor-in-chief needs to run meetings,
deal with funding, collect articles and possibly even read them (to
decide appropriate sections) beforehand. I think thing's went
reasonably well in these respects towards the beginning of the
semester, but definately not towards the end.  Much of that I feel was due
to having a second semester Div III as an editor. God-bless you Justin,
you're totally out of your fucking mind.
My concern really is for next semester, as the 3 prime candidates for
signership are ALL going to be Div III's.  This is precisely the reason
I'm writing this e-mail, and why I think it's a good idea to get
reasonably organized before the spring semester.  Correct me if I'm wrong
Jeff, Rebecca and Alli, but come half-way through spring, y'all are gonna
be wantin to do other shit.

So basically, we need to recruit and figure out a good way to divvy tasks.
I realize I'm stating the obvious
through much of this e-mail, but it's gotta be put out there that this issue
may be the last one I ever lay-out. I think you all know me well
enough to know that I'm not being narcissistic here- but when a
weirdo who's willing to put in 14+ hours of work on the Omen in a given
weekend is leaving for at least 1, if not two semesters, it's gotta be
accounted for in some way that won't make those who're left (and
already share some responsibilities) go nuts.
If you like the Omen, clap your hands (clap clap). Also, make sure it's
still lookin
good when I finally do come back.
That's my very disjointed 2 cents. Someone should send me issues while I'm
in Ireland.
Latre
 Aaron