Over the course of 2022, or really, from the end of 2019 until the beginning of 2023, everything changed here at Anthrospin. It’s been talked about at length and Anthrospin is far from the only entity impacted by it, but it’s also far from the first entity to sort things out and move forward. In January I mentioned what was up for the near future going forward. With the 42 brain cells available to be devoted to the immense amount of networking, planning, and clerical work to be sorted out over the next few months, somehow a lot has been accomplished since the start of 2023.

While in Germany, Anthrospin’s status as an incorporated nonprofit lapsed. Functionally this means almost nothing beyond an indication of how hectic it is to move out of a house you’ve lived in for 16 years with a one month old, and then move to Europe and back while publishing a book. Nonprofits can be incorporated or not, and when simply acting as a group in a manner consistent with that of a nonprofit, you’re kind of technically one of those. But now that we’ve merged with the proper timeline it’s time to get everything back on track. Which means getting in good standing with the state and resuming our incorporation, and getting back on track to that 501c3 status that we were so close to in 2021.

We are drumming up a refreshed board, and will be holding our first meeting in….probably April if not the second half of March. We’ve got a good amount of catch-up to play, with some minutes to get posted and some other accounting bits to get logged.

Anthrospin will never make anyone a millionaire, or honestly probably even a thousandaire, but by the end of 2023 we will be on track to plan to offer some amount of stipend for contributing authors. These are board meeting discussions, but the goal of Anthrospin is to be able to turn unpaid internships into semi-reimbursed internships by allowing students to write about their experience in the field for our website, and then collecting a stipend at the end of it.

That requires funding, and right now we’re only getting a few hundred per month, which has been repaying some personal investment in the company but by mid-year, that’ll all be going to the Anthrospin coffers, along with any other sort of funding we can secure, whether through Patreon, which has paid web hosting fees for a few years now, through individual sales, events, or just general gestures of good will. Nothing is settled on as far as time frame or amount of either stipends or dollars, but that’s the goal, and it’s absolutely an attainable one.

The next thing, and one I think is going to be really fun, is we are going to be posting once or twice per month using AI. It’s part experiment, part “one regular contributing author cannot keep up with everything that goes on in the world of anthropology,” but we’ll be adding Botty McBotface to our roster of contributors. Botty will be given prompts on various topics, which will be written and then proofread by a living human before being posted. I think it’ll be really interesting to see what sorts of content can be generated by scouring the depths of the interwebs for obscure information on, say, the evolution of the sagittal crest. Maybe that’ll be the first post.

At any rate, Botty’s posts are definitely something we’d like feedback on.

Before I conclude here, I just wanted to add that Lost & Foundry is well past the halfway point of drafting. I had to step back and read some more contextual stuff to flesh out the history of Providence a little bit more than I felt I’d been doing. I’ve still got some more to go with all that but it’s coming together nicely and I’ll be done with the current chapter by the end of this week (03/04/2023) and on to the next section, which will deal with Amos Barstow’s expansion into other cities in other states, the departure of his partner and primary designer, and essentially bring us through the end of the 19th century before turning back to the 1860s to discuss some of the individuals who worked there. Which right now includes an indentured worker (paid a real wage so servant isn’t quite accurate here) and at least one other individual whose letters to his sister have been resurfacing lately and who was apparently of some prominence in the stove industry apart from Barstow.

I’ll be revisiting some collections to read some old letters and business records related to Barstow, with a new perspective than the previous time/s I’ve seen them. Before I was just interested in the iron aspect. Now I’m more broadly interested in the businesses and life of Amos Barstow and how he helped shape the city of Providence. There’s a lot of information on that that I don’t have, even though I have a silly amount.

The National Park Service has already committed to two talks on this topic, as well as five other events unrelated to the stove industry, but as the specific dates and details are still being hashed out, I’ll leave that there.

And then, lastly for real, there will be 3 cemetery clean up events posted within Rhode Island, which we’ll be hosting starting towards the end of April. We hope to get a crew of 5-10 people for each, depending on the size and state of the cemeteries. We hope to see some of you there.

Stay tuned to this page, though, because come the end of this week there will be more updates, and by the end of March events will be scheduled and Scrimshaw will be back on the table.

It’s a lot, but also it kind of isn’t. It’s just like waking up a sleeping leg. It’ll happen once I start moving around again.