Who?
I'm Earl. I've been doing theLogBook.com since 1989, when it wasn't theLogBook.com, but was merely the LogBook, a collection of episode guide files shuttled around from computer bulletin board system to computer bulletin board system, back when the Earth's crust was still cooling, the outer planets were still forming, dinosaurs were starting to give serious thought to walking the Earth, and Milli Vanilli was on the radio a lot. I've been at this a long time.

When?
The neat thing about that is, that means theLogbook.com has been continuously growing - often in many different directions - for 25+ years, amassing a depth of material and expertise that not a lot of sites have. In recent years, I've begun translating, updating and expanding that material in print form and in podcast form. Because if there are two things I'm good at, it's writing and talking to myself (while you listen). I try to impart the site's same vast depth of material and knowledge through the books and podcasts, and try to do both as professionally as possible - I've been doing print layout and radio/voice work since the '80s and I try really hard to make sure that some of that expertise translates into the stuff that I put out there.

What?
The site's main areas of focus at present are:

Podcasts - Retrogram is a retrospective of vintage genre TV from decades past, and is our current "flagship" podcast. Select Game covers video game history through the lens of the Magnavox Odyssey2 (both as a podcast and a videocast). Past/currently dormant podcasts include Don't Give This Tape To Earl (my general geekery podcast), and theLogBook.com's Escape Pod a daily geeky history show which completed 366 episodes (one for every day of the year, including February 29th for leap years! (The Escape Pod's journeys ended so I could work on its spiritual successor, Sci-Fi 5, for Roddenberry Entertainment.)

Videocasts - Phosphor Dot Fossils is a short burst of game history and classic game play, arriving in convenient bite-sized chunks a couple of times a week. Voyages Of Shelf Discovery is an occasional series unboxing geeky goodies both past and present (as budget permits). Other video projects are in the works, time permitting (I also handle video production of shows such as Mission Log Live, Mission Log: Prodigy, and Mission Log: The Orville for Roddenberry Entertainment).

Books - books based on the site's content gather and organize that content differently than the web site does, and takes that content to a new audience beyond theLogBook's loyal readership. Titles to date include VWORP!1 and VWORP!2 (massive comprehensive guides to Doctor Who, with episode-by-episode critiques, credits, and trivia), Fatherhood, Fandom And Fading Out (a book of essays, articles and humor, focusing on being a geek who happens to be a dad), and WARP!1 (covering Star Trek in the same format as VWORP! covers Doctor Who). As to the question of why a Patreon is needed with all of these listed on Amazon: they're all self-published titles with a decidedly niche audience.

Site updates - updates are ongoing in several sections of the site, primarily the day-in-history timeline and the LogBook itself, which is a sprawling survey of science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction covered in the LogBook's signature style, with summaries, credits, and original airdates/premiere dates, covering TV, movies, fan films/internet productions, audio/radio productions, and more. Other site sections, such as music reviews and book reviews, have become dormant for budgetary reasons (the items reviewed there have to be purchased, obviously), but could "wake up" if I can afford the items reviewed there. The site itself is where future book and podcast projects are born. Social media presence is maintained on Facebook and Twitter to promote all of the above.

And that whole other site - in 2021, theLogBook.com absorbed Vic Sage's Pop Culture Retrorama site, archiving all of its content and its podcasts (and leaving the door open to new content in the future) - and all of this with Vic's permission of course. In tech terms, this means that theLogBook suddenly ate an extra four-and-a-half gigs of content, and started getting a lot of that site's audience and bandwidth as well, which brings us to...

How much and why?
I'm being told by our hosting service that the site's traffic and storage are such that it needs to step up to a dedicated server soon (it's currently on shared hosting). But that means going from a $125-a-year hosting bill to that much per month. But that's the goal - that means the site is standing on its own.