Fundraiser: Among Us in Fifteen Minutes

Yeesh, I always forget how long it takes to encode video. All complaints aside, FtB’s Discord has started running a usually-weekly game of Among Us among the commenters and bloggers. For the fundraiser, I asked if we could record one of our games, and the group agreed! Lyrandar, Zankou, and myself recorded our streams, and Zankou did the heavy lifting of stitching it all together.

Follow this link, and in about fifteen minutes you’ll get to watch the results. If you like it, or just like what we do around here, think about forking over some funds to us or Skepticon to help pay off our legal bills. This is just one of many events we’re putting on, too! Check’m all out.

Fundraiser Update: Catching Up

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.

Fundraiser: Stardew Valley

My thought process for choosing this game was pretty straightforward: fall is a time of harvest, some sort of game where I’m harvesting makes sense, so why not play Stardew Valley? I’ve fallen head over heels for sandbox games, yet never played Harvest Moon. And Stardew Valley is an indie game originally made by one person. It ticks every box.

Alas, it also ticks one more: colonialism. The game gives you a farm once owned by a grandparent, for free, and allows you to develop the place into whatever farm or mining business you want. The context and location sound very North American, which implies there were once First Nations people on that land (though apparently the game actually takes place in Russia?). In reality, if you’re stuck in a soul-sucking job there’s no shortage of options to wiggle out, like starting up an art collective or striking for improved work conditions; in game, though, your “choice” is either to remain in stasis or move into someone else’s place. The game never gives you that choice, though, the moment you gain control of your character is the moment after you’ve taken over this new space. To add insult to injury, you’re still not free of capitalism; oh no, you’ll spend a fair bit of time finding ways to earn cash to trade for goods and services, planting the seeds of your old society in this new space.

This doesn’t make the game any less fun, but it also lingers over it like a faint smell. On Saturday December 5th, at 10:00 AM MDT, I’ll be both enjoying and dissecting this game on my Twitch channel. If you like the concept, consider donating to our fundraiser. It’ll help pay off the legal fees we’re still paying thanks to Richard Carrier. Alternatively, toss some money at Skepticon to pay off their Carrier-related bills. No funds? Not a problem, though you might want to read this to get into the spirit of things.

Fundraiser: Monster Prom

After the game stream, a quiz show, and an edit session, I got to work yesterday on defiling my computer with Windows in order to (maybe!) run Monster Prom. Fortunately I’d done most of the legwork on installing Windows weeks earlier, back when I thought I didn’t have hardware-accelerated video encoding with the Linux version of OBS. Installing OBS and all the other support software was non-trivial, though, let alone configuring it. For a while there OBS would kill the output to my bluetooth headphones, until I remembered all such headphones can operate in two modes and Windows would be “flexible” enough to allow you to switch between them easily and yet block all audio playback if the sampling settings mismatched. As of late last night, I had a duplicate of my streaming set up the Windows side that mostly worked.

Then, this morning, this happened:

MY BRAIN: Did you try running Monster Prom with Proton?
ME: Why on Earth would Steam allow you to run the Windows version of a game via a compatibility layer, when the game natively supports Linux?
MY BRAIN: How long have you been a programmer for?
ME: … Yeah OK, it’s easier to roll out the same feature for all games than set up some sort of master compatibility list. And since Steam is already multi-platform, it’d be trivial to grab the version for an arbitrary OS. Still seems like a long-shot.
MY BRAIN: Won’t know it until you take that shot! And if it works, it’ll integrate pretty smoothly into the Linux streaming setup.

Didn’t I say I was pulling all the stops out for this fundraiser? Fortunately, you’ve done the same; as of this morning, you’ve donated $2,377.45 towards FtB. There was some debate whether we’d even hit two grand, so you’ve exceeded our expectations. Take a bow, y’all! Then fire up my Twitch channel in twenty minutes for a little monster smooching, or check out some of the other events we put on for your benefit, or maybe even top up our or Skepticon’s legal fund.

I, in the meantime, have a Twitch stream to set up.

Fundraiser: What’s So Scary about Climate Change?

There’s a sort of inevitability that’s common to all horror. When watching Jason or the xenomorph, you’re already certain people will die. The real question is who, when, and how. Sometimes its fairly obvious, for instance that lone person in the vent is a goner, in which case the focus is more on how everyone else copes with the loss. Other times, the death comes out of nowhere; Annie Phillips steps into a car on a sunny day and chats up the driver, only to have her throat graphically slit a few minutes later.

This is a lot like climate change. The basic physics has been known since the 1890’s, so there’s no debate over whether it’s happening (unless you’re the Mayor, of course). The focus is on who, when, and how. Desert regions will get hotter, but maybe plants will also get more poisonous? Tinkering with an entire planet will inevitably lead to unforeseen or odd circumstances, most of which will be unwelcome.

So Abe Drayton has joined with PZ Myers, Joshua Johnson, and a sacrificial lamb (me!) to discuss the spooky side of climate change. It’ll be premiering in 45 minutes over on my YouTube channel. It’s just one of many things we’re doing to help pay off our legal bills, so if you have some spare candy please consider donating it to us or Skepticon.

Fundraiser Update: Crypts Were Necrodanced!

Gaaaah, I wanted to have a post up just before I did my game stream, but I was too time crunched. You can still watch the stream here, though! It was a blast to play, though unfortunately I couldn’t do much colour commentary; forcing you to move on the beat meant I was constantly focused on nailing that beat while thinking a few steps ahead. Ah well, we got to see a cutscene, and other than a malfunctioning split timer there were no technical glitches.

I’ve also got a funding update! FtB’s Paypal account now sits at $2,109.93, which I’m quite happy with. For the second month in a row, you’ve opened your wallets up to help us pay off these legal fees, and I’m again eternally grateful. Don’t forgot Skepticon has their own Paypal, too, for their own slice of the fees.

This fundraiser does have me dancing, though. One reason why I was so late to type up this post was that I was participating in the quiz show. After I punch “publish,” I’ve got to finish editing the Climate Change panel and post it to my YouTube channel; I’m aiming for 6PM MDT, which is ambitious but doable. And after all that, I’ve still got the slight problem that Monster Prom crashes on my computer. As mentioned, I have backup plans, but this fundraiser will still consume almost all of my day.

Hey, it’s a small price to pay if it helps with our and Skepticon’s legal fees.

Fundraiser Update: Only Minor Explosions So Far

It doesn’t always show, but there’s a lot of prep work for these fundraisers. I’ve got a half dozen illustrations to create, a scene to render, and a video file to edit, most of which has to be finished before Saturday. I’m also finding Steam games are finicky; Crypt of the Necrodancer disables my secondary monitors if I try to run it fullscreen, and only properly recognized my controller once. It still works with a controller, mind you, but the digital pad is disabled. Monster Prom fails to load at all! I’m guessing it does something funky when initializing OpenGL, but without proper debugging symbols I can’t say much. I have both a plan and a backup plan for Monster Prom, so it should still be a go.

Last I heard, we were up to $1,629.34 in donations towards FtB. That’s a few days old, but my general impression is that we’re not pulling in as much as we did last month. There’s no shame in that, times are tough and this fundraiser is a marathon. If you’d like to boost those numbers, your two choices are FtB’s PayPal or Skepticon’s Paypal. The GoFundMe is still down, and at this point I doubt it’ll come back up.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hard drive to reinstall.