Hey, any interested MST3K Archivalist,
I have copies of the old, “Satellite of Love News” email newsletters, dating from December, 1991, through February, 1995, from the maintainer at the time (“Rich K”). 35 newsletters, plus a few “info” ones.
Can anyone think of (a) a reason to keep them for posterity, and (b) a place to keep them other than my local storage?
–DaveSp
Scan them and post them here.
Email newsletters? From that era I’m guessing they’re just plain text, right? So you could copy/paste them as posts here maybe?
I have a few still in storage somewhere. Some friends of mine still have all theirs. They are just wonderful to look at everyone once in a while. Always give me smile. That’s why I kept them.
yes.
Oh you meant to suggest a reason. Well your question answers itself. 
For posterity is the reason to keep them.
Sorry for the delay in responding.
After much searching, it turns out I don’t have anywhere near the volume of content I thought I had. The text from the “final” one is below; maybe it will inspire someone to recover their old email stash and fill-in the blanks.
–DaveSp
From rsk Sun Feb 19 16:31 CST 1995
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 95 17:28:03 EST
From: rsk
Posted-Date: Sun, 19 Feb 95 17:28:03 EST
Subject: The Satellite of Love News – the end
(Apologies if you get multiple copies of this, but the “To:” list has
been constructed from a large variety of sources.)
I’m getting out of the MST3K game – not that I’ve really been
in it for well over a year now. This means the end of the Satellite
of Love News, which was fairly well dead already, the end of my
maintenance of the MST3K FAQ’s, and the end of the small FTP site
here which archived both.
The reasons are many:
(1) lack of time to effectively manage what was rapidly becoming
a huge mailing list. There are something like 2700 people reading
this note, which has been sent to everyone who's ever written
for the Satellite of Love News or has written to me about MST3K.
Frankly, that's just too much for me to keep up with, given
other demands on my time.
(2) inability to keep up with the torrent of information coming
in via mail, and the three (redundant) mst3k-related newsgroups.
Anybody who tries to read those groups is familiar with the
huge volume of articles; add to that the traffic from all the
people in (1), and that's a lot for anyone to read, let alone
incorporate into FAQ's and newsletters.
(3) the lack of machine resources to support the mail/ftp traffic.
This machine is used for medical image processing research, and
that use must always come before other uses. Despite my requests
in the FAQ and in the top-level "README" in the FAQ archive,
many users made heavy use of the ftp site during the day, greatly
impacting folks who are trying to figure out how to keep
other people alive. That's why, by the way, the images and
sound samples were removed some time ago. And even with some
care taken in how it's done, sending mail to 2700 people
chews up a lot of CPU cycles. This place operates on a shoestring,
and can't really afford this kind of impact.
(4) a number of differences of opinions with some of the more
hard-core fans. I don't care to rehash those; I've already argued
about them once. I still like the show, I still watch it, and
I probably always will; but I don't think I have the "fanzine"
mentality that would enable me to produce a publication that
would appeal to those who do. That doesn't make me right and
those people wrong; it just means that we have a difference of
opinion. But I do urge the more fanatical among the fans to heed
William Shatner's famous advice to a roomful of Trekkies during
his Saturday Night Live appearance some years ago.
(5) the plagiarism of the mst3k FAQ's. The fact that they're
copyrighted doesn't seem to have stopped several people from
labeling them as their own original work. Counsel has
advised me that the lack of a viable authentication mechanism
for mail and news probably prevents me from seeking a legal
remedy to this, which is really frustrating, because I actually
do have pockets deep enough (at the moment) to fund it. However,
the most I can do is get angry about it, and, frankly, I'm
pretty much past that...so now I'm just very sad and disappointed.
Stealing someone's work is not the way to convince them to
do any more of it.
(6) the probable redundancy of the mailing list. There are now
three mst3k-related newsgroups, all created in haste, all
overlapping, and none reflecting a coherent means of providing
mst3k items via news *and* mail to the Internet community. I've
recently seen a proposal by Mike Inglis (mikeyi)
which would go some way toward sorting out the mess; it's
a good start. But regardless of my feelings, the practical
upshot of this is that nearly everyone can get more mst3k that
they'll ever want by utilizing Usenet newsgroups. (If your
Internet provider doesn't carry them, get another provider;
it's a wide-open market with hundreds of players.)
(7) the refocusing of my energy in other areas. As some of you
know, I'm an avid kayaker who competes in whitewater slalom.
(If you've never seen it, watch for it in the '96 Olympics;
it's somewhat like ski slalom, with the notable difference that
in whitewater slalom you not only go down, you also go *up*.)
I spent six months of 1994 away from work in order to train
full-time; I'm now continuing my training in an attempt to do
well in this year's New England Cup and Pennsylvania Cup series.
Training and competing takes huge amounts of time and energy,
especially since I'm not 17 any more. :-)
Arthur: Old woman!
Dennis: Man!
Arthur: Man, sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?
Dennis: I'm thirty seven.
Arthur: What?
Dennis: I'm thirty seven -- I'm not old!
Yeah, okay, I confess, Dennis and I have a lot in common. :-)
So, there we are. There are really only three things that I’d like to
take care of before fading into the woodwork:
1. The SOLN newsletters should probably get archived at one
or more of the MST3K archive sites. A couple of the other
odds-and-ends that are here should probably go with them.
Total volume: about 1.5 megabytes. (I'll be removing them
from the archive here in the near future.) If you run one
of the archive sites, please contact me.
2. I'd like to hand over the FAQ's, which are much in need
of an updating, to someone who will take good care of them.
If you're one of the people who ripped them off, don't even
bother asking. If you're someone who understands what "Copyright"
means and who thinks you can do a reasonable job of maintaining
them, please contact me.
3. Most important: I'd like to thank all of the people who
contributed items for the SOLN or for the FAQ. (Look at
the acknowledgements section of the FAQ, or at any SOLN to see
who they are; there are far too many to list here.)
These people deserve all the credit in the world for giving
of their time and knowledge. If you like something they've
written, take a minute, drop them a line, and tell them.
I think that’s it; this has gotten too long already.
Bite me, it’s fun,
—Rsk