I spent over four hours on the phone last night with Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentaryand founder of Textfiles.com. Jason is working on two new documentaries: one covering the history of text adventures titled GET LAMP, the other (and the inital reason for the phone call) covering arcades (tentatively titled Arcade: The Documentary). And when Jason says he's covering "arcades", he talking about the complete history of arcades. It's an amazingly broad subject, the scope of which I cannot completely fathom.

Jason's BBS Documentary and my book Commodork are similar in subject but different in approach. His documentary (which spans 3 DVDs and is 5 1/2 hours long) documents the entire BBS experience, while my book tells the story of BBSes through one person's experience (my own). As I said on the phone last night, his documentary is kind of an inverted pyramid that tells hundreds of people's stories. My goal was the opposite, to tell hundreds of people's stories by telling one person's. Different takes on a similar subject.

During our conversation, Jason offered me some great advice pertaining to sales and marketing of my book along with his opinion of it (yes -- he bought a copy and read it!) He definitely rekindled a fire in me about the book and writing in general.