Saturday, May 15, 2021

Help Wanted: Curator(s)

As we’ve been floundering around and going off in six different directions simultaneously, a number of projects have fallen by the wayside for lack of time and someone to work on them. One of them is a bit awkward, and it is—

Well, to be honest, in the past eleven years we have published hundreds of stories: so many so that we’ve actually lost track of what we published when and where. Our several misfired attempts at launching a webzine version of Stupefying Stories didn’t help much, either.

Therefore, what I’m looking for now are one or more volunteers willing to go crawling through our web sites, tracking down and capturing the links to the stories we’ve published. What I’d like to end up with is something like an updated version of this—which, unfortunately, we stopped updating in 2013.

Rampant Loon Press Cataloghttp://stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com/rlp_catalog.html

What I liked best about the old RLP catalog was that you could find stories by publication date or author name. I think that’s a good feature and would like to expand on it. 

If you feel like volunteering for this, note that the job is complicated by the fact that you’ll find stories on the original SHOWCASE site:

http://stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com/backissues.html 

The “crevasse” version of SHOWCASE (so named because it was stark, white, and stories fell into it and disappeared, never to be seen again):

http://stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com/index.html 

The WordPress version of SHOWCASE:

http://stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com/

And on this blogspot site:

http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com

Most of the stories on the blogspot site should be tagged with the “Showcase” label, so that this search string finds them, but I wouldn’t want to bet that they all are:

http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/search/label/Showcase


Anyway, that’s the job. The good part of it is that you’ll get the chance to read around 200 stories that you probably haven’t seen before. The bad part is, there’s probably enough reading here to keep you busy all summer. 

But then, is that really a bad thing? 

If you’re interested in volunteering for this, let me know.

—Bruce Bethke


2 comments:

SaganJr said...

As an amateur sci fi historian, I'm intrigued by this project. But I would have no idea how to proceed, except to do searches on Wayback Machine and other internet archive sites. There are plenty of people out there who have more technical expertise than I do.

SaganJr said...

Okay, I'm in. My fear of seeing a good sci fi periodical get lost outweighs my fear of whatever new tech difficulties I may encounter. The trick is, how do I contact any of you? I'm 50, but I'm not blind. I should be able to find some sort of contact information that actually works.