Z1NZ0L1N has been published by Anthony Nelzin-Santos since January 2025.

Writing

I wouldn’t want to live in a world without notebooks. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the lovely Roterfaden Taschenbegleiter SO_20 with a calendar insert and a single notebook. I usually write with one of my many fountain pens inked with one of my many purple inks, but in a pinch, I don’t mind using a Zebra Sarasa Clip rollerball or a Caran d’Ache 849 ballpoint. If I don’t have a pen handy, which is rare, I use the tiny-but-mighty Bloom app on my phone.

When I finally sit down to organize my thoughts, I drag myself in front of an old MacBook Air or an even older Mac mini. Should my wife enquire, tell her my expensive mechanical keyboards are a preventative measure against future health issues. I begrudgingly pay for a subscription to Ulysses, which is still one of the best writing apps out there, even though it seems to be getting slower with every release. When I need a change of digital scenery, I turn to the venerable BBEdit, the only Mac app that doesn’t suck. Every piece I’ve ever published has been edited with the help of the trusty Antidote proofreader.

Shooting

I could wax lyrical about the delightful tactility of my Pentax K1000’s dials or the unique quality of my Fujifilm X100’s pictures, but the truth is that I mainly shoot with my phone these days. I’ve been a long-time user of Halide, and I’m delighted that it now offers a ‘Process Zero’ mode which lets me bypass Apple’s tacky AI-driven overprocessing. When I need to reach a little further out than my iPhone 16 Pro allows, I use a Canon Powershot G5X.

I would be lying if I said that I needed a more powerful application than Apple’s Photos for organizing my pictures. I find its editing features to be quite limiting, though, so I prefer to use Photomator with a set of custom LUTs that somewhat emulate the colour shifts of Kodak Portra 400 film. It works, but I still miss Aperture. In recent months, I’ve been sharing a selection of my pictures on Unsplash.

Reading

You can’t be a good writer without being a great reader. As I aspire to be the former, I try to be the latter. I’ve always been a voracious non-fiction reader, but in the last few years, I’ve made a conscious effort to read more fiction. I enjoy reading murder mysteries, sci-fi and fantasy once in a while, but always come back to literary fiction. I’d like to read at least one book from each country in the world.

I have a sizeable library and love to spend my Saturdays at second-hand bookshops. That being said, I’m not opposed to e-books, quite the contrary. I’m fascinated by the primitive e-readers from the 1980s and the 1990s and still own my original Kindle. These days, I use a Kobo Libra Colour. I would listen to audiobooks if I didn’t have a nasty podcast habit.

I’m lucky to be paid to spend a lot of time browsing the web. I primarily use Safari with a robust set of extensions – 1Blocker and StopTheMadness being the two most important ones. Reeder is where I read my RSS feeds and GoodLinks is where I save articles for later. I’m a happy subscriber to the London Review of Books and a few assorted newspapers. I’m not on social media.

Publishing

Over the years, I’ve used many content management systems (Joomla, Drupal, Stacey, Pico, Automad, Anchor, WordPress, Statamic, Kirby) and a few static website generators (Jekyll, Pelican, Hugo). I’ve finally settled on Ghost, the most elegant publishing platform I’ve ever laid eyes on. I drew inspiration from the Inter typeface family and the Phosphor collection of icons to design a colourful yet minimalist theme.

Z1NZ0L1N is ad-free and doesn’t use trackers. I guess I could go over my server logs with a fine-tooth comb to learn everything I’d want to know about who reads what and when, but I couldn’t care less. That being said, I do use affiliate links to offset the cost of hosting (€15/month) and domain registration (€10/year). If you enjoy my writing and want to support me, I’d be grateful if you bought me a cup of coffee.

You can keep up with Z1NZ0L1N through your RSS reader of choice, on Bluesky, or on Mastodon.

Want to know more? Feel free to get in touch at <anthony@nelzin.fr>.