If you don't pwn this, then you ain't leet.

Recently I stumbled across an amazing documentary on Bittorrent called "BBS: The Documentary". It's a series of hour long episodes covering the pre-internet world of the early BBSes and it really brought back some memories. I can't really say enough nice things about this series. It is a very in-depth look at the BBS system of the 80's and 90's, yet despite the breadth of the series, the fantastic editing makes it very watchable. The soundracks are mostly excellent (especially the fantastic Atari-inspired tracks on the episode "Art Scene"). Anyway, it was released (in part) under the Creative Commons license, so you can feel good about downloading pirated copies of it. The director, Jason Scott, even sells blank packaging for $10.00 to people who want to burn their own copies. If you are a geek, nerd, hacker, phreaker, craker, tweeker, or anything in between, rush the hell out and get a copy of this awesome documentary. It will be the best $40 you ever spent. Seriously, I haven't bought a DVD in 3 years (I think I own like 5 DVDs in my 1500+ movie collection). But when I saw this thing, I just couldn't resist. This is the kind of independent production that you always talk about how great it is to support. So go out and support it, cuz if you don't own a copy of this documentary, then you ain't leet baby.

Also, if you spend an extra $10 you get an extra DVD-ROM that includes all the original ANSI artwork mentioned in the "Art Scene" episode. You'll probably never get another chance to obtain as comprehensive a collection of ANSI artwork from the old BBSes again, so it's definitely worth having too. It comes with viewer programs so you can view the old ANSI files on your "modern" Windows system, so no worries about not being able to view them for many years to come.

Anyway, if you've seen BBS: The Documentary and liked it, you'll probably be happy to hear that Jason Scott is working on another documentary, this time covering the old text-based adventure games such as the old Infocom games. This is just too cool, because if you're like me, and watched the BBS series with a friend, you had to stop it several times to talk about your glory days of Zork and early PC gaming. So I was super-happy when I heard there would be another documentary on the text adventure games. It won't be as long as the BBS series, but I'm sure it will be great. You can read all about it at www.getlamp.com.

Just so you know, I am not affiliated with, nor have I ever met Jason Scott or anyone involved with the aforementioned documentaries.