About The Astro-Kats

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Did you know that I make a bunch of weird little zines all the time?

The Astro-Kats is a zine subscription program. In the past, we explored shadow work through BTS lyrics and Las Vegas, style guides for each of the signs, passive aggression in Chinese literature, furry erotica, and I do the odd joke horoscopes now and then. The offerings are based on the astrology of the time.

If you're interested in receiving these weird projects, you can get two of them every month for $5 a month. That’s just $2.50 per zine! It’s kind of like you’re buying a cup of coffee every two weeks except that it’s not a coffee. It’s a little surprise in the form of a zine from me.

These zines are only available to The Astro-Kats and cannot be purchased separately after they have been sent out. If you’re in The Astro-Kats, you can send the zines to anyone you want so feel free to split the subscription with a friend. You can cancel or pause your subscription at any time so feel free to sign up when you’re into it, pause when you’re less into it, and come back if you’re curious again.

About Star Kids Club

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Star Kids Club is a monthly meetup group/virtual container. I don’t think anyone in the group would mind me saying that we’re a bunch of freaks, weirdos, and basically just people who get excited about random things together. The word kids is in the name but this is a group of all ages. Someone once described us as a place whose goal is to make the language of astrology come alive and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

Basically, we’re a group that is interested in studying magic together. We have a loose definition of what magic is but we know it when we feel it.

In the past, we’ve talked about forgery, the elusive power of naming, the constantly changing definition of nature and culture, and infrastructure. Sometimes we read poetry and stories together. Sometimes, I bring in cool people to do guest programming.

If you subscribe to Star Kids Club, you also get all of the zines that The Astro-Kats get but you don’t have to pay attention to that if you’re just here for the community.

A bit about community

My own expectation for community is that it moves at a nonurgent pace. Before starting Star Kids Club, I ran community programming for all ages across several boroughs and in five different languages for several years.

I think that the most common assumption that people tend to make about cross language programming is that it requires someone who knows a ton of different languages or translators to work. This is true if your goal is to communicate practical information at a fast pace. It’s less true if your goal is to build understanding in the long term.

It doesn’t actually matter if you speak the same language as someone. The most important ingredients of community making are patience and consistency. Even if you speak the same language as someone, you can misunderstand each other if you don’t actually take the time. On the other hand, you might be shocked at just how much you can communicate with someone who has absolutely no language overlap with you just from timing, gestures, and body language. You can communicate satisfyingly with someone who only speaks Tagalog and Spanish even if you only speak English and Mandarin if you see them every week for a year.

Star Kids Club is not urgent. You can come when you like and fade in and out as you please. You might see some familiar faces and meet some new faces at every meetup. I like to think of us as something a bit like the early web communities before social media platforms got too fast and overwhelming. I remember making lifelong friends on those web spaces. Some of those relationships lasted for years and continue to last for me. I also remember not feeling like I had to respond to everything and often taking a week to reply. I remember thinking very hard when I did reply and waxing long form because I cared a lot.