International (ie. outside of North America) viewers!

We understand that viewers in some countries are unable to view the live feeds. If they watch the stream for longer than 60 second, Justin.tv is requiring them to sign up for a Premium Account.

We’re working on it.

We want our fundraiser to be as accessible to everyone and we’ll do everything in our power to find a solution.

We’ll post more information as it is received.

Desert Bus 5 has begun! We’ve had more donations before we started this year than any previous year! It’s a great way to start, but we have not yet begun to bus!

Watch us! Watch us right now!

We haven’t even begun the event proper, but we’ve reached $10,000 in donations before even one inch has been driven! This means we’ve safely avoided any Over 9000 milestone pics, to my everlasting sadness.

Don’t forget that if you want to send us a milestone pic, send your pictures to milestones@desertbus.org.

Wipe the dust on your Desert Bus wallet!

Silent Auctions will be starting in under an hour and we’ve got 3 excellent prizes up for grabs:

The biggest Big Bag o’ Dice  I have ever seen, which equates to roughly a metric tonne, or ~ 300.

The plush crocheted pig of cuteness.

Astro A40 Black Headset – the headset of champions. Or people who just really like high quality audio while they’re gaming. So pretty much everyone

The final update before we go live, our last prep weekend!

Penny Arcade, Inc. started as a simple webcomic about two roommates waiting for a game level to load. In the intervening thirteen years, it has become the undisputed king of gaming webcomics, spawning a gaming convention, a parallel video series, a video games of their own and Child’s Play.  Between 2003 and 2010, Child’s Play has raised almost nine million dollars. There may be irony in a deeply profane webcomic starting a charity for children, but the enormity of the contribution is undeniable.

The great folks at Penny Arcade and Child’s Play have been nothing but supportive of us and our craziness, and this year they’ve gone the extra mile and donated some amazing games and swag they’ve received (but isn’t appropriate for kids) to us so we can give them away to you.

Thanks to everyone at Child’s Play for making what we do possible. Kristen, Jamie and Robert will be here on Sunday to answer your questions and drive the bus, so be sure to tune in then!

If you’re wondering what kind of company Dracogen Strategic Investments is and why they’d be supporting a charity gaming marathon, it’s probably because you don’t know about the man behind the company, Steve Dengler.

The co-founder of currency conversion website XE.com (currently the 300th most popular website in the world), Steve isn’t just an incredibly successful entrepreneur, he’s also a noted Angel Investor, philanthropist, comic strip character and geek. This year Steve has raided his own personal stash of incredible memorabilia to put together some of the most impressive lots we’ve ever offered. We were so amazed by how much time and effort Steve had gone through to put together these lots, we thought we’d let him fill you in on the process in his own words:

Desert Bus: This is a really generous donation and we’re so floored to have a collection of this magnitude. How difficult was it to pull together? 

Steve: Quite difficult. No single task was particularly difficult, but overall, it was a real challenge. Many of the titles came from my own collection, but I also purchased a number from eBay and Amazon. If you’re floored by the donation, that makes me very happy. But I’m floored by all the people that helped me pull it together, like Tim Schafer, Ken Levine, Chris Avellone, Sean Becker, Tom Hall, John Romero, Jeff Lewis, Felicia Day, and so many others. They all have my sincere gratitude.

I want to give back. I love doing it through business, and I love doing it through charity. I find it immensely personally satisfying. So you could say I’m doing it for selfish reasons.

Desert Bus: Wait, I just re-read my introduction. You’re the Steve in the webcomic MegaCynics? That comic is hilarious! How many of your escapades in the comic are true to life? Do you really get up to all that wacky stuff?

My sister Ash and I started MegaCynics together in April. Dracogen provided the financing and I provided my business experience to help get it going. Most events in the comic have at their core a kernel of truth. And certainly the dynamic you see playing out in the comics is 100% true. Some events really did happen almost exactly as shown. And sometimes something happens in the comic that becomes a personal joke, and then we do it in real life just for fun. Ash and I are having a blast with it.

Steve will be visiting Desert Bus for our kick off weekend, and will be helping us auction off some of the sweet, sweet prizes he’s donated.

It’s a little over 2 hours until we start bussing, we’ve already surpassed last year’s starting total, and things are getting crazy around the Moonbase.

Remember that this year to bid on a live or silent auction you must register for a donor account.

Go forth, and DONATE!

Before we officially start this year’s marathon, the entire organizing committee would like to extend an official thanks to our organizing partner The Escapist.

Once again we are working with the Escapist to promote Desert Bus and bring it to an even bigger audience. The team at Escapist HQ have been working tirelessly to help us this year, creating a special mini-site, devoting advertising space to the event, sending us wonderful swag and helping us reach out to even more companies for sponsorship.

It was the generous support of The Escapist that helped propel us north of $200,000 last year so we’re thrilled to be working with them again this year.

Thank you,

The Desert Bus for Hope 2011 Organizing Committee

Get it? Lots of fun?

It’s often been said (mostly by us) that when your goal is to add value, you get your butt down to Ken “Value Added” Steacy’s place. With decades of aggregated work filling his garage, he’s always more than happy to pull some awesome stuff out of the archives. We help out the children, and Ken gets to reminisce on projects he hasn’t seen in ages. Everybody wins!

Here’s some of the stuff Ken has managed to pull from the vaults for us this year:

• Astro Boy Original Comic Pages – Guaranteed to have been made long before Nicolas Cage screwed everything up for Astro Boy.
• Some art for an unproduced set of Marvel trading cards.
• The original unused art for Space Above and Beyond Issue #1
• The art from “Krol Blade” from the WoW TCG.
• The sketch AND the finished art from a WoW TCG card.

• Eight signed Star Wars trading cards (and two giant cards), including Ken as R2-D2!
• Art from two Spider-Man kid’s books (with the book included!).
• An artist proof from a Spider-Man trading card.
• The original sketch from a Harry Potter trading card.
• What we’re calling The Ken Steacy Trading Card Set, simply because it’s got tons of miscellaneous cards Ken’s drawn, all of them signed.
• An Aurora Borealice megaset: The book, a print and a piece of original art, all signed by Joan Steacy.
• One completely unique print of a sketch of The Joker and Harley Quinn.
• Some rare uncut sheets of Marvel trading cards AND Marvel Masterpiece Trading Cards.

Personally, we hope Ken’s garage never runs out of cool stuff, and even at the rate he’s dispensing with the goods, it’s likely it never will.  You can check out Ken Steacy’s corner of the web at www.kenspubishing.com