Thanks largely to Evil_Jim donating his entire “Economic Stimulus Check” of $528 in exchange for changing the bus driver’s name (to Evil_Jim), we’re already at $7000!

7000 pleases Cthuhlu-God.

Turns out that mentioning how no one has donated recently leads to donations!

6000

So Fresh and So Clean!

Keep them coming!

EDIT: Just to be clear here, we will still be bussing, and you can keep donating, and we will have to keep going to much longer.

We haven’t even started bussing yet and thanks to one very generous donation of $3000 we’ve already destroyed our goal. Thanks everyone!

Can we beat last year? I believe we can. Let’s make it happen!

Wow.

Graphic from Simmemann

Looking at the donations, we’ve just hit three days of play time! You guys are awesome–we don’t even start driving for another five hours :).

I joined Justin McElroy for an interview on today’s Joystiq Podcast, which just went live a few minutes ago. This is probably the best gaming podcast of the post-brodeo era, so go check it out! Go-go-go!

Chipin is a great service that allows us to collect donations on behalf of Child’s Play without being hit with double paypal fees like we were last year. Unfortunately, it appears that their donation widget has some problems with caching that results in different people seeing different donation totals. In order to make sure that the donation total is always as up-to-date as possible, we have decided to forgo the widget and update the value manually whenever it changes.

All donations are still being handled by Chipin and the Donate link on the sidebar will take you to exactly the same place as the link in the widget did.

If you are having any problems or have any questions about the donation process, please email me at paul@loadingreadyrun.com

Hey hey, everyone!

Just wanted to give you a reminder that Desert Bus will be on The Zone tomorrow. If you’re up, there’s a strong possibility you’ll be tune in to 91.3FM and hear me on the The morning Zone with Dylan Willows and Jason Lamb. If you’re more of an afternoon type, then turn your radio on around 3, and listen for us on the afternoon show, with Jeremy Baker.

If you haven’t got a radio, or you live somewhere outside the range of the typical FM radio station based in Victoria, you can head on over to www.thezone.fm And listen via live streaming. Just click “Listen Live” and you’re good to go. That should help get your computer warmed up for the main event, too. Remember, we’re kicking off at 6PM.

Well, we’ve seen our first major link-in happen over the last couple days. This Article went up yesterday at suite101.com – and if you look carefully, you may note that it was written by our very own Tally Heilke!

It’s a great article, and I’d like to state my thanks to both Tally and suite101. com for their support.

Well folks, it begins. Less than a week, and already we’ve passed our first thousand. Thanks so much!

Just wait til we get rolling!

$1000!

And check back here every day this week for more countdown updates.

Well, we’re 3 days out, and we’ve been teasing you like crazy about our “grand plans” for this year’s Desert Bus. I figured it might be time to give you all a taste of what you’re in for this year, and why you’ll want to stay glued to our feed for the duration of the event. Naturally, I can’t say too much – mostly because not everything is written in stone yet, but we can’t leave you in the dark forever. We have been networking all year, and have been working with the following people to ensure that this year’s Desert Bus is an event you won’t want to miss. Keep watching, and you may see involvement from:

Wil Wheaton, the cast of ‘The Guild’, Sean from Harmonix, the Joystiq Podcast’s Justin McElroy, John Davison of What They Play and 1Up Yours, Microsoft’s Major Nelson, Jeremy Baker of http://www.thezone.fm, and Sam Logan of Sam and Fuzzy.

Naturally, we’ve also been in contact with Penn&Teller this year – they were unbelievably supportive in 2007, and they’ve done everything in their power to support our plans for this year. So I wanted to thank them both for everything they’ve done to help us along.

If you live in victoria (or even if you don’t) tune into Jeremy Baker’s afternoon show on The Zone on Friday the 28th between 3pm and 4pm. Members of the LoadingReadyRun cast will be on the air promoting Desert Bus and talking to Jeremy Baker about our event. If you want to listen, you can tune in to 91.3 FM (in Victoria) or you can stream live over the internet from thezone.fm.

Have a great week, everyone, and I’ll feed you a few more details as the start time draws nearer!

-Matt

Among the many awesome things we have planned for this year’s marathon, you’ll have the chance to win some cool stuff when you donate! It depends largely on our whims at the time, and how awesome you are.

So, if you have an XBox 360, listen up:

Thanks to the fine, upstanding people at Bizzarre Creations and Activision, we have a whole swack of free download codes for Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2! It’s a game we’re huge fans of personally (we even did a video about it), and we know you’ll like it to.

We’ll be giving them away over the course of the event, so you’d better keep watching!