Happy Halloween! I’ll celebrating by dressing up as a train conductor — likely thing for me to be — and handing out Reese’s pumpkins to hoards of children, followed by a simultaneous viewing of the World Series and Billy Streams. Great day to be overstimulated.

If you’re in Baltimore, head to Pickett Brewing today and tomorrow from 2–6 for a great event featuring a market with some wonderful and talented artists, many of whom work with the zine. We’ve got a table there, go say hey to the zine-team’s Forest City Press.

Onto the rest of this electronic dispatch…

Number one:

• Merchandise is open for pre-orders now through next Friday

• The hats are ready to ship, so if you just get a hat it’ll go out pretty quickly

If you are interested in purchasing a shirt involving the last zine cover or a very basic Train Songz shirt with just a logo on the chest and nothing else, we’ll put those in the store early next week. I’ll email out when it happens.

I was not planning on offering those, but I got enough requests to realize that leaving them out was a mistake. This is a very tiny operation! Make your voice heard in a reasonable way, and we’ll probably listen!

Number two:

• Please do this survey! Please!

As I was saying, this is a very niche operation. We genuinely want to hear from you. We’re asking what you like about the zine, how you engage with the zine + our digital content, and a few questions about you.

I would really, really, really appreciate if you took 5 minutes to fill this out! So much so that I’ll be giving a few random filler-outers 99% off this round of merchandise.

Please help us improve the next issue and get to know you a little bit! As we look to the future of the zine, we’re interested in improving the physical product as much as possible and also beefing up the digital experience of subscriber-only content (playlists, YouTube recs, etc.).

• Did you know we make YouTube playlists?

• Did you know we have a whole-ass Doc Watson playlist on Apple Music and Spotify? And a bunch of other playlists?

If you have not yet received your zine, please let me know!!!

–The Conductor