Friday, April 12, 2013

Abandoned First Anniversary Kickstarter Projects

The Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together blog turned one yesterday, and a few weeks ago when The G pointed out that the big day was on the horizon, he asked me what we should do to celebrate. I had a lot of ideas. Big ideas. Ideas that would cost money. Yet we are but lowly blog contributors; we are not made of money, nor are we any of us accumulating it with any great haste. So where do nerds go when they have ideas they can't pay for? That's right --

!KICKSTARTER!

So here are the ideas I presented to The G for our First Anniversary Nerds of a Feather Kickstarter:

Nerds of a Feather Retro Collection
Make your own thrilling retro cover here.
Nerds of a Feather, the Book
The interwebs are great and all, but you can't hold them in your hands. So what better way to commemorate the first year of Nerds of a Feather than by printing up and binding all 365 posts from April 11, 2012 to April 11, 2013 (and yes, by an odd coincidence, there really are 365)? As a special treat, this handsome volume would also include all of the posts that The G started but never finished. You know, for the Nerds of a Feather completist out there. Sadly, this was a nonstarter among the contributors, with the feeling being that we are living in an increasingly ephemeral time in which, soon enough, ones and zeros will replace all of our worldly belongings. So a book was out of the running, but there's always...

Nerdy People, the Movie!
Well, we had to get *somebody* with box office appeal.
Nerds of a Feather, the Movie
Based on the true story of a humble graduate student who had a vision for ranting about nerdy things, like why Robert Heinlein is dumb and movies about killer sharks are super awesome, the story would have followed the creation of a small, nationwide team of highly specialized geeks, all crushed under crippling student loan debt, and their bloody rise to power before succumbing to coke-fueled excess and a late career lapse into saying "hoo-ah!" at inappropriate times while writing run-on sentences. Sadly, the $33 million production budget put it out of reach for Kickstarter. But Amanda Palmer has to make another album someday, so maybe next year the $33 mil will seem more attainable.

Nerdlinger: The All-Geek Supergroup
I cheated and picked the band name myself, but generate your own random album cover and title here.
Nerds of a Feather, the Supergroup
You may not know this, but Nerds of a Feather contributor Molly has a lovely singing voice. I have a voice that sounds a little like crushed gravel by the side of the road, but I write folk songs, so I figure it's cool. The G has more than dabbled in electronica, and I'm sure the rest of the Nerds Feather crew can wield a mean tambourine and/or pair of maracas when pressed. So why not -- why NOT! -- I asked, create a supergroup? This is actually kind of a good idea...we might wind up doing this, Kickstarter or no.

But Finally...
For so, so many reasons, we weren't able to get any of these projects up on Kickstarter, and in the end we decided to keep it simple:
Yoda Cupcake
It's not every Jedi can balance a cupcake on his head while fighting.
A sincere thank you to all of our wonderful readers for a great first year. Here's to not going down in flames in the next 12 months! Follow us on Twitter @nerds_feather.