Frank Hayes, Leslie Fish, Julia Ecklar, and Alexander James Adams are well known to the filk community. But what exactly is Filk?

We know it's not just music about SciFi/Fantasy. Plenty of wonderful songs seem to be from mythology, from personal experience, and from original fictional settings that seem to exist just for that one song.

A friend mentioned that Tom Lehrer was doing Filk long before it had a name. One might even call Johnny Horton an early filker, with his historical songs you've almost surely heard.

Filk is the folk music about stuff nobody else writes about. It's the stuff that might or might not have happened, but we can all relate to anyway. It's everything everyone else thinks is too ridiculous to bother singing about, but you do anyway.

Because this stuff matters. Because people meet their best friends at the DnD table. Because your favorite fantasy novel might help you find the strength to speak up when you need to, or shut your face when you don't.

Because there's stuff that people care about, but nobody talks about.

The current algorithms on the internet don't show us that kind of thing. They show us the slickest new tech with the biggest marketing budget, the biggest controversy, and a thousand insufferable “Life pro tip” videos with excellent editing and highly obnoxious content.

So you have to look for it. Nothing's changed there. Before the internet, the first cosplayers, the first LARPers, all had to find things themselves.

Even the early computer programmers, the people who planned litter pickup projects before #trashtag, and a million others mostly found their own path.

So if you're feeling like that expensive metal drinking straw isn't savings the planet, Facebook likes aren't real connection, and everything's going to crap….

You'll just have to find what you're looking for yourself, just like we always have.