Save HOUDINI Magazine

HOUDINI Magazine just had its best day ever Eight thousand new readers. In one day. That's almost three thousand more than our previous high. And that's new visitors!! When I say "our," I mean "my," because aside from a small and loose group "Draculas". This is me. I built this. I write it, I edit it, I code it, I publish it, I do the outreach, I design the covers, I format the posts, I send the emails, I fix the bugs. I built this, and I'm not ashamed to say that. No social media posts, no ad campaigns, no algorithmic boosts, no paid promo, no one driving traffic except me, doing everything by hand. Writing. Editing. Laying out the site. Uploading stories. Formatting the XML. Fixing typos. Reading submissions. Going back and forth with contributors. Thinking of new features. Thinking of ways to grow it without compromising it. Answering emails. Reaching out. Following up. Staying up all night because if I don't do it, nobody else will. It's me.

"I'm trappin all day and that's why I fuck with Houdini Mag"

Artist, OXY

The fact that it's gotten this far, the fact that 8,000 new people visited the site in one day—that's nothing short of a miracle. That's not how this is supposed to go. That's not how the internet works anymore. The algorithm. The Mr Beast Hyperoptimization. The "unalived" word salad censorship should have prevented this. The corporate language control should have won. But it happened. 8k new readers in one day. Welcome. It means something. I know it does. But I also know I'm about three days out from being unhoused again, not cap.

That's why I'm running this GoFundMe. Ten thousand dollars. That's the number I came up with that lets me do this full-time for the next six months without losing my footing, that let's me keep momentum. That's what gives me a shot at printing the books I've written, giving people something physical they can hold. That's what lets me pay contributors. That's what lets me breathe, maybe for the first time in over a year. I don't expect it all at once, this will be a persistent fundraiser over the next 6 months.

The first $2,500 raised will go straight to keeping a roof over my head—no delays, no middlemen. Right now, I’m days away from losing the motel room I’m working from, and if that happens, HOUDINI grinds to a halt.

I've already released two eBooks under the HOUDINI Magazine. The third, well it's taking a bit longer to edit than expected, given the current conditions, but it'll be out soon. I had planned to run a Kickstarter to fund physical printing. But I can't run a Kickstarter and a GoFundMe. That's just double-dipping the same people, that just ain't correct. So I killed the Kickstarter. This is it. This is the only fundraiser I'm doing. If this doesn't work, nothing else is coming. The chips are on the table.

HOUDINI has a real audience—550,000 unique visitors, nearly half of that in just the past six months. People are paying attention. But the only way to keep building this is to be able to do it full-time. No paywalls, no bait-and-switch donations, no hiding content behind tiers. I want this to remain open, accessible, and funded by the people who believe in it.

"Reading HOUDINI feels like reading the last magazine of all time. It's a late-night bus terminal of a platform, full of bizarre enthusiasms and insomnia and sketchy lighting. When the sewer mutants of the future take their well-deserved decontamination breaks by the cold glow of some bioluminescent fungus, believe me, they'll all be reading HOUDINI!"

—Artist, Mindape

I moved to Lakeland with $1,200 and another $1,200 came in days later. The room I planned to rent didn't pan out. She ghosted me big dog. So I'm stuck in a motel right now, in housing precarity. If I took a job at McDonald's tomorrow, I'd still be unhoused and the magazine would collapse in weeks. Here, in the dirty south? The repression is real. The tendrils of well to-do liberals haven't caught their grubby little hands into the culture and that's why this is the perfect place to do the hard, hard work. This spot hasn't been gutted yet. There are no bitcoin billboards on every block bloating the air with the smell of "fuck you, got mine." The techbros haven't found it. Gentrification hasn't steamrolled everything yet. Moving here was the correct play. But if I'm going to be part of it—if I'm going to contribute something—I need to be housed. I need a stable place to live, to work, to write. Not luxury. Just somewhere I rest.

I just got here. I ain't about to go round asking for favors from a community I ain't even had the chance to earn my place in yet. That's just not how I operate. If I'm going to be part of something here, it has to be because I built something worth bringing to the table. You gotta put in before you can take out. I'm just hoping this magazine is enough put in.

If you've ever read one of our articles and felt like someone finally said what you were thinking, if you've ever seen one of our covers and felt a little jolt of "what the fuck is this," if you're one of those 8,000 people who showed up in the last 24 hours, or if you've been here since the beginning—I'm asking. Throw me a dollar or three.

I'm not good at this kind of post. I hate asking for help. I hate writing like this. Every crowdfunding campaign I've done someone has had to convince me it's something acceptable to do. But I'm three days away from being out of housing, again. I've done this before. I've slept in Wal-Mart bathrooms. I've slept in cars. I've begged friends to let me sleep on their couches, in their garages. I can't run HOUDINI like that. Not at this scale. Not now.

I'm asking. Help me keep this thing going. Help me stay housed, stay working, stay building, stay grinding, stay ground. And in return, I'll keep giving you everything I've got.

This GoFundMe is it. This is the only fundraiser I'm doing for the next six months. It covers housing, workspace, contributor pay, infrastructure, book printing—everything. A woman who called a child a slur raised nearly a million, surely underground working class media can pull $10,000 over 6 months.

"The world is being violently strangled by, to quote William S. Burroughs, “the shits” and there’s nothing we can do.

L I E D O W N A N D D I E

No, that’s easy way out.

Creativity solves all problems. Never forget. A community of creatives can change the world, and Houdini knows this. He knows that there’s an underground beneath the underground. The real underground. A place for those who not only want a better future, but those who dare to imagine it. A place where the rotting corpse of contemporary culture becomes a plant bed of new voices. A mycelium of disparate, odd micro-cultures tangled together into something much more substantial.

Money is an energy. Your energy to make a difference. Don’t pollute the world by handing your hard-earned energy into the cataslymsic, slimy hands of some human-shaped thing who only views your existence as a toy for their mind-forg’d algorithms.

Put your money where your voice should be. Make a difference. Does that mean you should fund HOUDINI? That’s for you to decide. But, if you’re sick of the world we live in, why not help make a better one?"

—Writer, Shem Shelley