Fountain Pen Activism for Locked Down Steampunks

[Lord Alden]

I recently stumbled onto a Democratic get-out-the-vote project that rings a couple of my bells so I thought I'd pass it on. It involves writing and mailing actual retro letters (paper, envelope, stamp, post office) to people who are registered to vote but don't always vote. Your letter encourages them to go ahead and vote in the upcoming election. Obviously you're trying to reach Democratic voters.

I find it very soothing now, every morning, to get out my fountain pen and my stamps and crank out six letters. They're short, takes about 15 minutes, and I'll have done a thousand of them by the time the election comes.

That's it. Just wanted to mention it. The website is https://votefwd.org/ for anyone who is interested. Sorry to introduce politics into the forum, but the whole idea of influencing the election by writing actual retro mail for the morning post just feels very steampunky to me and I thought others might like to know about it.

[J. Wilhelm]

While I appreciate the sentiment of prodding people out of complacency (and we reaaaaally need it now), and I like the idea of writing letters, you're crossing a very well defined rule in this forum when we say "no politics are allowed." We really mean it. The link you give is directly tied one political party. It's no different than me saying that we should build a candlestick phone and call strangers in Mexico City, but I give you a list of phone numbers of people likely to make sure we vote out the Hard Left Populist president AMLO, or send Morse Code to selected people in Rio de Janeiro to influence the election against Hard Right Populist President Jair Bolsonaro. Perhaps send letters in Sanskrit written on original British Colonial stationary to New Dehli to make sure Modi is not re-elected? Build Marconi radios to talk people in the UK out of supporting conservative MPs? No difference, Steampunk or not.

Thread is blocked. Otherwise outside the forum I like the idea of bringing down demagogues in Steampunk fashion. But rules are rules.