MeFi Projects

Visit virtual worlds of the past! Meet the netizens keeping them going. Let's re-wild the information superhighway! Can cyberspace be a better place? A streaming documentary series on the cultures and communities of antique virtual worlds. Every episode is standalone, so you don't need to have seen season 1. [more inside]
posted by One Second Before Awakening on May 22, 2023 - 0 comments

"Fix My Code" uses the eponymous 2021 book as a launching off point to talk about internet history, the allocation of capital, and the artificial barriers created by traditional notions of intellectual property.
posted by schmudde on Oct 14, 2021 - 0 comments

Preserving Worlds is a documentary travelogue through aging but beloved virtual worlds. Join us as we explore dated chat environments, appreciate player-created art, and meet people working against obsolescence to keep the communities they care about alive and accessible. [more inside]
posted by One Second Before Awakening on May 14, 2021 - 2 comments

The Hip-Hop Radio Archive aims to digitize, preserve, share, and contextualize recordings of hip-hop radio from the 1980s and 1990s from commercial, college, community, and pirate stations of all sizes, telling the stories of the shows and the people that made them. [more inside]
posted by laze on Jun 14, 2018 - 4 comments

Each year since 2012, we've compiled a survey of the past year's historic preservation gains, losses and the bittersweet things that teeter in between. Today we released 22 for 2015, where you'll find all our favorite funiculars, cafeterias, neon signs, giant hot dogs, celebrity pet hospitals, tiki bar fish friends and so much more. If you dig old L.A., stop by and see if your favorite place made the list.
posted by Scram on Jan 1, 2016 - 0 comments

Esotouric turns the notion of guided bus tours on its ear with excursions like Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles and Pasadena Confidential. Now you don't have to get on the bus to get the skinny. Each week on the You Can't Eat The Sunshine podcast, join Kim Cooper and Richard Schave on their Southern California adventures, as they visit with fascinating characters for wide-ranging interviews that reveal the myths, contradictions, inspirations and passions of the place. There’s never been a city quite like Los Angeles. Tune in if you’d like to find out why. [more inside]
posted by Scram on May 12, 2013 - 0 comments

From Esotouric, the offbeat Los Angeles tour company, here's a very opinionated list of the past year's most notable historic preservation gains, losses... and those bittersweet moments that hover somewhere in the middle and keep us up nights.
posted by Scram on Dec 30, 2012 - 0 comments

In July of this year, I proposed the idea of Just Solve the Problem Month, a month (I chose November) where an untold mass of people descend on a problem that's probably a peach if only enough people descended on it. To try out this idea, I proposed solving a Problem that has dogged anyone who tried to rescue old electronic or online material: the File Format Problem. (That first link describes the File Format Problem in detail, but it comes down to there being a massive mess of formats out there from decades of computer use and operation, but scant collection of information about many of them.) The idea gained some traction, so here it is the end of October and we've ramped up the very first Just Solve the Problem Month with a Wiki, justsolve.archiveteam.org, where we'll be enumerating information, examples and links to most every file format we can discern. The hope is to have hundreds of people take on this issue and result in a version 1.0 of a directory of file formats, effectively "solving" the problem by providing deep and rich linkage on how to recover any old media in any old format. I've written an entry with a high-level overview of Just Solve The Problem: The File Format Problem, and an entry that's an extremely detailed version of same. I'd love for the lovely folks of MetaFilter who are interested in such a project to register for an account, or spread along the news of this project to the special overthinking classificarian in your life. The official start date is November 1st, but we've started working on the whole shebang now.
posted by jscott on Oct 26, 2012 - 1 comment