About

Welcome to my public research notebook.

This site is where I collect, pick apart, and analyze ideas about play, games, museums, libraries, media, and folklore—basically, all the weird and wonderful ways humans try to squeeze meaning out of the wonderful and everyday.

You won’t find any polished, peer-reviewed posturing here. Instead, you’ll find reading notes, raw observations, media autopsies, archival deep-dives, and the occasional stubborn tangent that poked me in the back and refused to stop until I paid attention.

Instead of waiting until I have some flawless, pristine conclusion to hand down from on high, I’m documenting the actual, messy process of inquiry. Some posts start with a nagging question. Others start with a battered book, a museum exhibit, a video, a game, or a forgotten artifact rummaged out of a digital bargain bin. But wherever they start, they’re all chasing the same fundamental truth: what we do when we play says everything about who we are, who we live with, and what kind of culture we’re building.

About Me

My name is Ellie. I’m an independent researcher, writer, game designer, artist, and library science candidate (graduation projection of summer 2026) with an enduring case of curiosity about play and culture. My radar catches everything from tabletop games, animation, and streaming culture to museums, archives, folklore, and public history.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a habit of collecting information, pounding disconnected ideas into shapes that make sense together, and dumping my discoveries onto anyone willing to listen. This notebook is my habit made public and weaponized for the internet. It’s a place to follow a question down whatever rabbit hole it digs, ignoring the arbitrary borders that usually keep these subjects locked in separate, suffocating rooms.

Why This Site Exists

Or Why We Need to Move Beyond the Echo Chamber

The rationale behind this site is aggressively simple: research shouldn’t be a luxury good.

Right now, mountains of fascinating, transformative ideas are locked behind staggering academic paywalls, buried in jargon-heavy journals, or trapped in stuffy conference rooms where only the initiated get to hear them. It’s a tragedy. Scholarly work is vital, but knowledge loses its teeth when it’s kept in a cage away from the very people who could actually use it.

Here’s the kicker, though: the ivory tower doesn’t hold a monopoly on brilliance. Some of the most vital research and preservation work on the planet right now isn’t happening in wood-paneled university offices; it’s being done by regular people fueled by nothing but pure, unadulterated obsession.

Think about the streamers exploring abandoned MMOs before the servers vanish forever, the YouTubers writing multi-hour video essays on forgotten media, or the lone bloggers meticulously recording regional folklore so it doesn’t dissolve into obscurity. That is real, grinding cultural preservation. It counts. But because these people don’t have a string of letters after their name or institutional backing, the mainstream gatekeepers treat their labor like mere hobbies.

This site aims to bridge that absurd, artificial divide. Consider Sporeshelf a two-way street: I’m here to translate heavy academic theory into language real people actually speak, but I’m also here to hold up the vibrant, un-credentialed work of the public and force the academic world to pay attention to it.

Research does not belong exclusively to universities, elite museums, or institutions with massive endowments. Curiosity is a human drive, and profound insights don’t care about sheepskins. I want this notebook to make research approachable, and I want to embolden you, dear Reader, to start poking around and documenting your own questions.

A Note on Sources

While this is an independent, boots-on-the-ground project, I don’t trade in rumors or sloppy guesswork. I respect the labor of research. Posts that rely on published works will feature proper citations and references using APA 7 style whenever appropriate. This site isn’t stringently academic, but I strive to maintain good habits. (Don’t want to get rusty, after all.)

Collaboration and Contact

This notebook doubles as my professional calling card. If you are grinding away in museums, libraries, education, game studies, digital culture, streaming, public history, or any adjacent trenches, let’s talk.

Whether you’re an archivist, a creator, a researcher, or just someone who wandered in off the street because a title caught your eye, I hope you find something here that opens your mind or fills it with curiosity.

Why “Sporeshelf”?

Because I like mushrooms. Simple as that.

But if you want the deeper, slightly more poetic rationale, think about how foraging works. You spend hours tramping through the woods, kicking over dead logs, and keeping your eyes glued to the dirt just to find that one specific, brilliant specimen hidden in the brush.

That’s what research feels like to me. I’m out here foraging for obscure ideas, dusty history, and cultural remnants, scraping them together, and bringing them back to cultivate them on my own terms. This site is my personal shelf where those spores get to settle, take root, and grow into something weird and unexpected. It’s messy, it’s grounded, and it requires getting your hands dirty. And I love it.

Keep your eyes open, check your sources, and don’t let the gatekeepers tell you what’s worth studying.