Listen up, deskbound, avatar-wielding nerds! Cinematical has some exciting news for you!

It's only four years old, but the online virtual community known as Second Life has already played host to press conferences, university classrooms, and honest-to-goodness foreign embassies. Last year, the Sundance Channel even established a virtual venue for screening and promoting indie films, including Four Eyed Monsters.

All this means that Second Life was ripe for the documentary treatment, and, as Cinematical reports, the rights to a 35-minute Second Life feature have been sold to HBO. In a twist that will either intrigue you or leave you moaning that you are now officially too old for pop culture, the feature -- titled Molotov's Dispatches in Search of the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey -- was filmed inside Second Life.

A virtual documentary about a virtual world. Seems like something out of a terrible sci-fi story, but HBO's excited enough that it's already saying Molotov will be submitted for Academy Award consideration -- and the network is planning a seven-episode Second Life series.

Estimates of Second Life's actual size vary wildly -- some have heralded it as one of the Web's official Next Big Things, while others have dismissed it as little more than a virtual rumpus room for fringe geeks -- but whatever your feelings on the community (and the whole virtual-doc thing in general), this is an interesting development, and one that should net HBO some healthy buzz.

Source: Cinematical