Hi All! As I mentioned in my last post, we’ve had a couple of surprise expenses pop up in the first half of this year. The most prominent is that the remodel that turned our cafe in to a bookstore and cafe ended up over time and over budget by a fairly substantial amount, but that was just the start of what looks to be a string of bad luck. This post details some of those things, and lists some of the ways you can help us get through it.

I wrote a few weeks ago about our efforts to digitize, score, and restore the 1918 science fiction cliffhanger serial The Master Mystery. That work continues, and as it does, we’ve found a few other, related items. Namely the novelization and a great audiobook of that novelization from Project Gutenburg and LibriVox.

To celebrate public domain day, here’s a new album from Analog Revolution featuring new recordings of public domain music by the incomparable Doctor Deathray and public domain recordings by their original artists of some of the essential sides of the early 1920s.

I spend a lot of time and energy digitizing and cataloging episodes of Space Patrol (1950), and I haven’t talked about that much recently, so I’m going to talk about that today. Space Patrol was an American science fiction Space Adventure television program that aired from 1950 to 1955. For most of it’s run, it aired 6 days a week, producing a 15 minute episode every weekday in the tradition of the soap opera (or I suppose, the Space Opera), and a half hour episode every Saturday. It aired 52 weeks a year, producing more than a thousand episodes of television (in addition to several hundred episodes of the Radio Program!) All of these episodes were produced Live, with little rehersal, and broadcast live out to the world. Video tape would not enter in to common use until 5 years after the show went off the air.

Yo! There’s not much time left before the holidays are upon us, and we’re probably already passed the safe shipping threshold for ordering things and having them guaranteed to be delivered by Christmas. That means it’s entirely the wrong time for a holiday shopping guide, so it’s a good thing that this is barely a shopping guide, and more of a meditation on giving. There is a gift guide at the bottom, it’s a little non-traditional. The middle bits are about consumerism and death, so maybe skip those if you’re actually looking for a gift guide.