I've been reading Matt Novak's Paleo-Future blog since it launched in 2007. His obsession with "retro-futurism" has made him something of a scholar on the subject. Visit the blog today and you'll find posts on a "mechanical man" from 1930 and the futuristic visions of a French commercial artist in 1899.Now Novak wants to make a magazine, and you can help.

He's fundraising over at the collaborative fundraising site Indiegogo, and here's his vision for the magazine and the benefits of funding it into reality:

Paleo-Future Magazine will look at past visions of the future including: jetpacks, flying cars, meal pills, end of the world prophecies, robots, gender roles, architecture, fashion, videophones, monorails, space travel and much more!

If you're the podcast type, you can hear our interview with Novak last year for the UtneCast. You can also read Novak's Utne.com guest post about the best online archives you've probably never heard of.

Source: Paleo-Future

Welcome to the brand new Alt Wire blog. Never heard of Alt Wire? We launched this guest contributor series in early 2009 and loved the project so much we wanted it to be its own blog. You will love Alt Wire, we promise.

Here's how it works: we recruit our favorite magazine editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, and artists to assemble a list of at least five things that inspire them in the wide world of the webernet.

Subscribe to the Alt Wire RSS feed for spoon-fed inspiration. Or follow us on Twitter.

To get you started, here are 10 choice links culled from previous Alt Wire posts:

Fatemeh Fakhraie  (editor, Muslimah Media Watch): "The Muslim Sex Shop website takes a 'halal' approach to sex in the life of a Muslim, discussing issues frankly but humorously in the form of poetry, guest fiction, and cheeky merchandise."

Davy Rothbart  (editor, Found): "Creep, Kansas City is one of the most raw, sad and beautiful videos I can imagine, and I don't think a filmmaker could craft something quite this rich and pure. This girl has a ton of other similar, strangely affecting videos. This video, to me, represents the magic of the found bits available on YouTube "

Jason Marsh  (editor, Greater Good): "Researchers at Project Implicit have created a series of fascinating tests that help you detect your unconscious biases (along the lines of race, religion, sexual orientation, and much more). They’ve found, for example, that most Americans have an automatic, unconscious bias for white faces over black ones. Do you?"

Phil Yu  (blogger, Angry Asian Man): "Jen Wang and Diana Nguyen are the smart and sassy ladies behind Disgrasian, an ingenious, hilarious spin on the Asian American issues blog. Taking on politics, pop culture and current events with thoughtful wit and a healthy dose of snark, they often say the things I can never quite muster up the courage to say myself. And they're damn funny."

Jessica Valenti   (blogger, Feministing ): "Whipping Girl is one of the most important feminist books to come out in years.  The author, Julia Serano, is just brilliant and writes about gender, trans women and femininity in a way that not only educates, but inspires.  I wish everyone would read this."

Will Braun  (editor, Geez): "California artist Mark Bryan sees tanks in the shape of churches and steeples built of missiles."

Rinku Sen  (editor, ColorLines): "I always need the 'black bourgeoisie perspective on politics' of Jack and Jill Politics."

Dan Sinker  (journalism professor and founding-editor of Punk Planet): "While newspapers in the U.S. struggle to find footing in the great digital reboot, it's exciting to see groups like Ushahidi emerge where nothing existed before using suddenly ubiquitious technologies. Originally started to report on rioting following elections in Kenya in 2008, Ushahidi is now a system for distributing reporting using cellphones with basic SMS text functionality."

Matt Novak  (blogger, Paleo-Future): "After discovering the Prelinger Archives in college I spent about 3 sleepless months downloading and watching an amazing collection of old industrial and ephemeral films. You've been warned."

William Patrick Tandy  (beloved Baltimore zine maker): "The Johnny Eck Museum celebrates Baltimore native son Johnny Eck, who made a name for himself early in life through appearances on the sideshow circuit and, most notably, in director Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Freaks.  In later years, Eck became a renowned painter of window screens, a common practice in his East Baltimore neighborhood since the early 1900s."

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Matt Novak of Paleo-Future. We asked him for five links. He sent us the best online archivists you may not know (want more paleo-future goodness? Listen to our Utnecast interview with Matt).

Charlie Shopsin has cornered the market on 20th century popular science magazines. If you're looking for inspiration from pure American ingenuity, look no further than the Modern Mechanix blog.

While the name of this blog has never made sense to me, the collection of amateur photos from '50s and '60s tourists to American theme parks on Gorillas Don't Blog is pretty interesting to peruse.

The Animation Archive collects comic books, single-panel cartoons and animated films from all eras of illustrated history.

After discovering the Prelinger Archives in college I spent about 3 sleepless months downloading and watching an amazing collection of old industrial and ephemeral films. You've been warned.

BIO: Since he started the Paleo-Future blog 2007, Matt Novak has become an accidental expert on past visions of the future, and has amassed the world's largest (only?) library of media related to the study of paleo-futurism. 

Previous Alt Wire Guests: Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel , Anne Elizabeth Moore 

The year 2009 looked very different when seen from the 1950s. Nuclear powered cars roamed the streets and people feasted on meal pills for dinner. Matt Novak sifts through these past visions of the future and compiles them on his blog Paleo-Future.

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, senior editor Jeff Severns Guntzel and assistant web editor Bennett Gordon sit down with Novak to talk about what these paleo-futuristic visions mean to our culture, and what the future might look like. Other topics covered in the episode include the greatest hits of corporate jargon and a guide to war photography.