Check out the latest installment of Penn Jilette’s “Penn Says” vlog to watch him pitch Desert Bus hardcore. As one of Desert Bus’s co-creators, he knows full well the fury of the desert, and we truly appreciate his support.

Onwards towards $60 000!

While I realize it was a long weekend for those of you in the states, I’d hazard to say it was even longer for our drivers. Our ongoing torment will see reprieve today, however, when we receive a call from the beautiful and talented Felicia Day of The Guild, Buffy and Dr. Horrible. If you have questions you’d like us to ask Felicia, please post them here. We don’t promise to read all of them (see our previous Wil Wheaton call-in for reference), but we’ll certainly choose a few .

Our Friend Sean Baptiste, community manager from Harmonix will be calling in around 3:00 pm. His company makes Rock Band, and surely you have questions for him. Personally, I want to know how long ’til we get Pinkerton for DLC.

Post your questions in the comments for this post!

Thanks again to John from What They Play for coming on and chatting with us . . . and for the link-in!

While John had little information on the mysterious EGM Desert Bus preview of 10 or so years ago, we’re interested to know more. Unfortunately, we don’t know the date or issue number . . . but if you have a copy and can somehow replicate it for us, we’d appreciate it a lot! stuff@desertbus.org

Here we are. It’s mid November, and Desert Bus 2 is just on the horizon. I’d like to appologize for leaving the announcement so late this year. We encountered a number of complications over the last couple of months, and we weren’t able to finalize the details until last night. We’re scrambling a bit to pull things together, but rest assured, Desert bus is happening, and it’s going to be even better than last year.

First off, as you’ve probably seen in the announcement posts, it’s going to begin at 6:00PM on Friday November 28th. It’s Thanksgiving weekend for the yankees, I know, but hopefully you can find time to fit us in between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, or somewhere in between the pie and the requisite midnight turkey sandwich. At the very least, you’ll presumably be home with your families, rather than out at work, so may I suggest you take the opportunity to introduce them to LoadingReadyRun, and get them in on the Desert Bussing action?

The second thing to know is that we’ll be running from Victoria, BC again this year, although we have a location other than Bill and Morgan’s living room. If you live in Victoria, keep an eye out, I’m sure there will be opportunities presented to meet the team or prticipate in a more direct way than simply watching the feeds.

We’ve also finalized our roster of drivers for this year! Returning to the driver’s seat are James, Bill, and Morgan. I’d have thought that they’d learned their lesson last year, but I guess I was wrong. Paul has been dropped from the lineup this year so that he can direct his focus to the technical elements – the stream, recording elements of the event, lighting, audio, the chatroom, and so on. We’re hoping to have things go a little more smoothly in the technical area this year, and we think freeing Paul up to handle it was the right move. Replacing Paul in the lineup this year is our very own Jeremy Petter. I think he’s pretty excited about taking the wheel this year, so I hope you’ll all be out in force to support him as he drives his legs of the trip. Graham and Kathleen are taking the roles of official pit crew this year, they’ll be ever present at the driver’s sides, supporting them and the audience in whatever capacity they require. And if you haven’t figured it out already, I’ll be handling the communications. I’ll be your main point of contact whenever I’m around (which should be essentially all the time). I’ll be handling the blog, updates, running the twitter feed, and moderating the IRC channel. additionally, I’ll be frequently checking e-mail, and keeping you up to date on dollar totals, and special events. You’ll be able to contact me in a wide variety of ways over the course of event, and if you have any questions, or comments, feel free to direct them to matt@loadingreadyrun.com, or contact@desertbus.org . I’ll be checking both regularly.

As you can see, Paul has just launched the new, improved Desertbus.org , so check the site periodically, and see what’s up. We have a lot of plans for this year’s drive. Some of those plans we’ve finalized, others we’re still pulling together. I’ll be filling you in with more information as it becomes available, so make sure you’re following one of our many information streams, either the twitter, the announcement thread in the forum, the blog, or here, at www.desertbus.org .

We’ll see you on the open road!

-Matt