[009] Folkification

There are still spots available in my Old World Games class at North House Folk School if you are in the mood to spend a few days making ancient board games out of wood, leather,a

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"... as though evolution were suggesting, "if there's not enough of what you want, then want something else." This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry (2024)

Folkification (noun) A process in which a product, narrative, recipe, machine, or other object is made more accessible and less centralized.

Claire Saffitz folkifies candy, snack, and junk food recipes on her 2017-2020 show Gourmet Makes . Through sheer perseverance and creative genius, Claire decodes the arcane manufacture of industrially-produced foods and creates her own versions using accessible ingredients. The final moments of every video include a full recipe with ingredient measurements and individual steps. This is a folkification of centralized, opaque food manufacturing processes.

John Deere tractor software can be extremely restrictive . Farmers can find themselves locked out of essential systems, unable to repair their own machines. People have been jailbreaking these systems for many years , refolkifying the technology of a tractor. Everyone has a Right to Repair their own machinery.

Fan fiction is a folkification of narrative intellectual property of massive media companies. Stories belong to everyone: this is a truth asserted by fan fiction authors. Walt Disney took folktales and commercialized them. Now, we can do the same, by taking corporate-copyrighted narratives and folkifying them. (My favorite example of this is the Star Wars retelling inside the post-draconic-apocalypse world of Reign of Fire .)

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"Writing is not what follows research, learning, or studying, it is the medium of all this work." - Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes