Supporting Nerd Documentaries

One thing I’ve tried to be good about is financially supporting nerdly documentaries. I’ve got the money to do so, and I truly love to see members of the tribe creating them so I want to encourage more of them. I talked with the Open Roadtrip guys recently, which was a hoot. I don’t know if they are going to release a salable product or only a download, but if it is available for sale I’ll buy it.

I just got the email that the fan documentary of Firefly/Serenity called Done the Impossible is shipping next week. I can’t even remember when I pre-ordered but it was so long ago that I forgot that I did it. (According to the email, it was February.) This looks to be packed with features, and at $16.95 is quite economical. I haven’t seen it yet so I can’t vouch for the final product, but I’m excited about it.

I got the Jason Scott film BBS: The Documentary a while back. I was planning on buying it anyway, so I went ahead and joined the adventurer’s club. By doing this, I was purchasing BBS and pre-purchasing his next documentary. He used this money to upgrade his video equipment. It seemed like a neat enough idea that I just joined up on impulse. I see now that he has closed the club to new members, so I must have got in at the right time. My first deep connection to computers was calling local BBS lines from Augusta GA at a friends house on his Commodore 64 with an acoustic coupler modem. Actually hearing people tell the stories of these wacky systems was really fun. I’m looking foward to GET LAMP, which will be about text adventure games. I played some of them on that same C-64. It would be almost a decade after that before I owned my own computer, and by then the world had moved on from the genre.

Are there any other projects of this ilk that I should know about and be supporting?