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We divulge our secrets on Blogspot
She tells all in a photocopied zine
Quimby’s bookstore manager Liz Mason, 35, wants to tell you her life story, including her days as a Hello Kitty mascot, a Ren Faire wench, a karaoke goddess and even a cancer patient. But don’t expect any real-time updates from this obsessive writer: She pens all her thoughts in her personal zine (or perzine) called caboose, a modest black-and-white Xeroxed collection of creative nonfiction. Mason literally cuts and pastes photos and text onto the page. “People say print is dead,” she says. “But every week it’s like Christmas when we get a new stack of zines.” Caboose is available at Quimby’s (1854 W North Ave, 773-342-0910, quimbys.com).—MS

We chew the fat on iChat
He hams it up on a ham radio
Getting in touch with Nick Krebs isn’t easy. He doesn’t do Facebook, Twitter or IM, and don’t bother texting him—he doesn’t own a cell phone. “As a network engineer, I spend too much of my time in front of the computer already,” Krebs says. “E-mail is even starting to annoy me.” So how the hell are we supposed to know if Krebs caught Glee last night? Power up your ham radio, because the dude is always on the air. Using the call letters KG9E, he chats with other amateur-radio enthusiasts over AM and FM signals and sends out Morse code to whoever may be out there listening. At least there’s no character limit. —GB

We scroll through our iPod
He pops in a cassette tape
While we load up our iTunes library with music we’ll ignore, Dustin Drase digs wide-eyed through the tape bin at Reckless. In October 2008, the 31-year-old—who estimates he has more than 1,000 tapes—founded the cassette-only record label Plustapes, which has put out music by locals Detholz!, Hollows and Mannequin Men. Aside from the medium’s durability, Drase (who admits he owns an iPod) enjoys tape’s unique fidelity (“this soothing denseness you don’t get with digital”) and the ritualism of the listening experience: “You have to put the tape in the deck. You can’t skip songs. You sit there and listen to the whole thing. You’re just more involved with it.” —JM

We send Evites
They send letterpress invitations
When Vanessa Shaf, 35, wants to throw a party, she fires up one of the four century-old letterpresses housed in the Evanston Print & Paper Shop (1125 Florence Ave, Evanston, 847-475-7674), the design studio she runs with business partner Eileen Madden. Shaf and Madden design and handpress one-of-a-kind invitations for personal parties and studio fetes. “It’s the ephemera of it all, to feel, touch and save something tactile in hand,” Shaf says. “It seems more special to hold onto a poster or invite that says, HEY, THIS PARTY HAPPENED.” Learn to love the letterpress in the EPPS’s beginner card-making class titled Holiday Cheer on December 10.—MS

We tap on a keyboard
He pounds away at a typewriter
Sliced-up sections of type à la William Burroughs’s cut-up technique occasionally appear in artist Rob Funderburk’s work; the 35-year-old has a big Underwood typewriter he inherited from his grandmother. But even for personal letters, a typewriter has been his machine of choice for more than a decade. “A typewritten letter is an artifact of the moment. If you want to emphasize a consonant, you can really bang that key to make it darker. Or if you get going really fast, the keys will gum up on each other, so you can feel the urgency or calmness based on the quality of the letters,” he says. “There’s a lot of communication that’s built into the letter just by the nature of the ink and paper.” —JM

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