I knew this fundraiser would be trouble for me, as it coincided with a probable work crunch. I’d actually been counting on a bit of trouble, in fact, as I figured the deadline pressure would help lift me over my COVID-19 lethargy.

It didn’t pan out that way. Quite the contrary, in fact; after ticking off my absolutely-must-do-or-else items, I crashed. That coincided with yesterday, which was supposed to be my catch-up day for fundraiser tasks. So as I’m typing this, around when I was supposed to go live with some Stardew Valley gaming, I’ve still got some graphic design work to finish off and splits to write before I can go live. The good news is that it won’t be delayed more than two hours, very little of my gaming setup has changed since last time so I’m not reinventing the wheel.

My post advertising the Among Us game kept getting kicked in favour of those absolutely-must-do-or-else items, too. At this point I’m probably better off writing something an hour before it premieres and linking to the resulting video. But it too doesn’t require much work on my end: the recording was all done a week ago, and Zankou over on the FtB Discord delivered an edited version of it to me, so I just have to slap the aforementioned graphic design on the start and end of it and fire it off to my YouTube channel. If I can’t get that finished today, something’s gone horribly wrong.

My big worry is that streaming guide. I’ve already got forty-plus slides for it, practised one of the live demos I’d planned, and know what I’m going to do for the other, but there’s still a tonne of recording and prep work to be done. If everything falls into place perfectly I could still get it out the door today, but I doubt my luck is that good. Tomorrow works better, in fact, as my plan was always to split Stardew Valley across two days. Four hours of gaming in one day is just…. woof, so this fundraiser has always been a two-day affair for me.

So sorry for the delays, but I don’t intend to roll back my plans for the fundraiser. It’s the least I could do to pay back your generosity.