MN90 does tiny blipticles on Minnesota history, spoken audio micro-articles in 90 seconds as downloadable MP3 files, with music and FX. One of their latest is “Pen Pals with H.P. Lovecraft”…

In 1926, Donald Wandrei was a 19-year-old university student when he decided to write a fan letter to H.P. Lovecraft. Britt Aamodt has an account of Wandrei’s summer hitchhike trip to visit the horror writer and how that friendship led Wandrei, years later, to found Arkham House to publish and preserve Lovecraft’s fiction.”

I like the idea, but they probably need to get MN90’s uploaded to YouTube as videos with static pictures. Then people can easily make and share their own playlist compilations of the episodes. 90 seconds seems too short, judging by this Wandrei release. I’d say 3 minutes would be a better format.

Incidentally I’m pleased to see the Hevelin Fanzine Collection appears to have switched from tiling their fanzine page-images, switching over to big static single page scans. Tiling is no protection for big public domain images, as there’s a fairly easy capture/re-assembly workflow. But my guess would be that the apparent changes at Hevelin’s transcription portal are to accommodate transcribers who want to download and OCR. OCR can increasingly be machine-learning trained to work with awkward things such as hand-lettered comic books and also, one assumes, the stencil-punched and ink-leaked words on old Gestetner duplicated fanzine pages. But the change also has the effect of making it easier to extract, clean and fix fannish artwork… such as this from Virgil Partch in The Acolyte for Winter 1945, depicting Donald Wandrei in uniform…

Picture: Virgil Partch sketch of Donald Wandrei in The Acolyte for Winter 1945. Newly extracted and cleaned.