Avatar photoSteven Savage

Activities For The Civic Geek: Get Historic

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Love your fandom, love your geekdom? Get involved in archiving and preserving history.

History is important to all of us – to understand the past, to know where we came from, to predict where were going. Preserving history and recording history are important for that very reason. With our preserved and recorded history, we loose something.

So go and preserve and record the history of your geekdom.

With a little research, you can probably find some organizations, group, or club that’ll let you make an effort to expose future generations (or much younger generations) to the history of your given geekery:

  • There’s collections that preserve fandom artifacts like ‘zones.
  • There’s archival museums and organizations that keep track of rare artifacts like video game memorabilia.
  • There’s living museums, where people can see displays or even inexact with things like old games and toys.
  • There’s almost certainly organizations, mailing lists, and groups dedicated to recording history about given subjects.

You can probably find some way to help keep the history of your favorite geekery – and preserve it for others to study and learn from. From making donations of money to donations of artifacts, from recording history to pointing people towards useful research, you can do a lot so we can all learn later.

Or learn now . . .

Resources

  • Comics
    • Cartoon Art Museum – A museum for all forms of cartoon art, performing preservation, displays, events, and more. Established in 1984, it has a permanent home in San Francisco.
    • Digital Comics Museum – An enormous archive of researched, curated, public domain golden age comics available free – and always open for donations and assistance!
    • Wonder Woman Museum – A museum dedicated to Wonder Woman – and sponsors various charities as well.
  • Computing
    • Computer History Museum – A Silicon-Valley based museum of comptuer history, complete with exhibits, programs, and many volunteer opportunities.
    • International Internet Preservation Consortium – An international organization focusing on improving tools, standards, and practices of web archiving and preserving information. Reports, events, and memberships are available.
    • Internet Memory Foundation – A non-profit focusing on preserving the internet for heritage and cultural purposes, and develops a lot of technologies and projects. There’s opportunities to get involved.
  • General
  • Pinball
  • Video Games
    • Atari Party – A Californian organization that hosts events with hands-on use of classic Atari game consoles. Always looking for volunteers – and you can always found your own!
    • California Extreme – A convention of video game and pinball enthusiasts where the actual machines are brought into one big arcade. Includes panels and other events – and accepts volunteers.
    • Digital Games Museum – An archive of games and game memorabilia that does shows and displays. Based in San Jose, California, but open to support from anywhere.
    • The International Arcade Museum – A giant database of games that you can help with! Also contains huge archives of past relevant magazines and more. They even hope to build a physical museum someday!
    • Video Game History Museum – A video game history museum that covers a wide variety of subjects, histories, games, and focuses

 

  • Steven Savage

Update – Sailor Moon Book

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The good news is that Bonnie and I are back to the Sailor Moon Book – and making progress.  Work has me a bit busy, and the delay was a bit longer than expected, but we’re getting our groove back.

 

We’re at roughly a halfway point in our interviews, maybe more, and want to take time to analyze the data we have to see what we’ve found so far – it’ll hopefully give us some ideas of book structure and best approach.  Then we’ll get on with more interviews.  And, yes, that’s a hint.

Two things that are unexpected:

  1. We’re seeing some very common patterns, more than we expected.
  2. History of Sailor Moon is recorded very erratically.  It’s scattered among magazines, web articles, a few books, websites, and more.  This means we’ve had to add an extra month to just research things so we get the history right.  You could probably do a whole book on the history of Sailor Moon, but it won’t be us.  Yet.

I hope when this book comes out it inspires some full scientific studies of the series’ impact.  There’s a lot to study.

– Steve

Latest Update – Way With Worlds

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So I did a huge update on Way With Worlds this weekend.  About 80+ pages edited.  I’m actually pretty pleased with it – I think I was being a bit harsh on some of the less well-written areas.  A lot of it is pretty good.

I’m going to try and get it to pre-readers next week – which gives me a two month break while my pre-readers go over it.  Mostly I want to have a review conceptual review more than anything else – the grammar and spelling will be the domain of my editor.  Grammar and spelling can be edited – its getting the actual concepts right that’s important since that’s kind of the goal.  Worldbuilding isn’t exactly a science, and I want to make sure my modest contribution to it is clear and helpful.

It’s also still huge – 462 pages at the last count and probably be about 500 pages with formatting.  This is gonna be a hefty one, but should be worth it – plus it’ll make a great gift!

  • Steve