Open Road Trip Interviews

The interviews from the Open Road Trip project are posted. What is up there is not the final highest quality versions, but a preliminary Ogg Theora version. If you want to see what I look like and the distressingly weird way my mouth moves when I talk, you can see that. You can also see what the downtown Conway riverwalk area looks like. We did the interview on the banks of the Waccamaw River, a frequent walking spot for us.

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?

Interview Me!

I’m back in the interviewing ring. It’s kind of odd how I go months between being interviewed by anyone, and then I get a few in a few days. This has happened multiple times, and it’s happening again now.

Last night I was interviewed by Tim Bourquin about the session I’ll be doing at Podcast and Portable Media Expo. Since it’s still several months off, I have thought about the themes a lot but not in the specifics so much. As such, there was a little tap dancing while we talked but I think it went well. Talking about it helped refine my thinking a little, and I think much like last year I’ll kick around draft versions of the talk in the podcast and let people provide their feedback and hone it that way. It was really successful and satisfying working that way last year.

Today, I was interviewed on camera by Scott and Brandon of Open Roadtrip. As they travel from D.C. to Savannah, they spent last night in Myrtle Beach and around lunchtime we met up at the river front in Conway to talk podcasting and new media and open culture and creative commons and such. I was a little over my head at certain points when it got legalish and policy wonky and such, but I tried to soldier on. I did read a little from my hymnal, talking up the value of creating media for the sheer pleasure of it and for the beneficial effects it has on you. Between the two interviews, I think I’ve figured out the skeleton of my talk.

Scott and Brandon will be posting all the raw footage, audio and photos from their trip so when my interview is available (it might be a while) I’ll link to it. They have an interesting possibility in assembling the documentary. They are taking footage of themselves doing the road trip as well as the interviews. I think the two narratives might just work quite well together. And, if you don’t like the job they do you can always edit together your own cut. When you look at their footage from Conway, South Carolina the bit with them fishing a frisbee out of the marina was shot by me. Send the blame for the shakiness, bad framing and the inability to work the zoom my way.