Today in surprisingly well-funded fandom:

Pictured: Some guy brandishing a
bladed weapon outside of Comic-Con.
Not pictured: police intervention.

Fan films are the highest form of nerdery, and this one promises to be worthy of song. Songs written in Klingon. Like, by people in homemade costumes. Here, enjoy. It's a trailer for Prelude to Axanar, a short film which will lead to the full production Star Trek: Axanar. The short alone beat its Kickstarter goal by a factor of 10 and put the production team well on its way to funding the movie as well. More than 2100 people pledged over $100,000 just to make the short. In unrelated news, NASA can't afford a mission to Mars.

Anyway, back to Star Trek. 'Prelude' is a fictitious Ken Burns-style documentary about an equally fictional battle between the Klingon Empire and the Federation. The battle itself will be the focus of the movie, Star Trek: Axanar, to which the prequel to which will look back on the events of. I think. It's hard to say, I may be bleeding from the ear.

The film will be dedicated to the memory of the many fictional people who pretended to lose their
imaginary lives on both sides of that terrible conflict we're going to say happened. Lest we forget...

I urge you not to think about it too hard.

Still with me? No? Let me muddy the waters a bit more: the titular Battle of Axanar takes place before the original Star Trek series but well after the more recent prequel series Star Trek Enterprise. Also, it's important to note this is all set in the 'Prime Universe' as opposed to the 'Alternate Reality' established in the rebooted J. J. Abrams movies. What that means is that the movie is set in the past of the future, but in order to be consistent with the look of the 1960's series, Axanar will kind of look like the past's idea of what the future will be like.

Also, he may be a wizard.

Ok, so that's great and all but my question is this: can we get this guy some funding? His name is Harold White and he's a physicist at NASA who's working on building an actual warp drive. And no, he's not a kook, he is seriously looking into ways to shorten the travel time between star systems by bending the fabric of space time thus getting around the universal speed limit of light. How? I don't know, something to do with science I suppose. He's going to science it.

Bo-ring right? Wrong. White recently teamed up with a graphic artist to come up with some super-rad images of what it would look like because, and let's be honest here, physics papers don't beat Kickstarter goals. Behold:

For added authenticity, White plans to hire a drunk Scottish guy to be in charge of the anti-matter.