Tonight we break $1.5 million in lifetime donations.

Let’s do this.

Fan Eric Tortora Pato sent us some super-cool fan art that’s just too awesome not to share.

First up we have this hip-hop style portrait of Tally’s R2D2 cosplay. As a competitive b-boy (retired, so don’t ask me to demonstrate it) I especially appreciate this.

As well as this picture of guest Mikey Neumann and his fabulous cache of prizes.

Now, onto Tally’s art contest from earlier this evening. Tally has weighed in on the R2D2-meets-monster art and we have some winners!

Mike Antrim won first prize for this excellent illustration

Daniel Zeder claimed runner-up honours for this colourful creation.

The rest of the entries can be seen after the cut. Nice work everybody! (more…)

It happened again.

We again are reminded that glory and shame are but different parts of the same elephant. In a brief moment of psychic ecstasy, our driver lost control of the bus long enough for it to crash a second time in the same shift.

Could this have been brought on by the soaraway success of our two Mikey Neumann auctions, which went to Omega_Aggron and mugenity for $6,412.63 and $3,015 respectively, for a grand total of $9,427.63? It seems likely.

Mike Mearls will be calling into Desert Bus on November 19 at 9:00pm PST.

Mike Mearls is the Senior Manager for D&D Research and Design at Wizards of the Coast. He has worked on the Castle Ravenloft board game along with a number of supplements for the D&D RPG.

Rumour has it that he may also be calling in from his personal D&D game so there may be another surprise guest or two…

If you have a question for Mike, you can post it below in the comments.

Fire up your motivator unit as it’s time for an R2D2 themed art contest, courtesy of Tally.

The challenge is to draw R2D2 crashing into a monster. That’s all there is to it. It’s pretty open ended so let your imagination run wild.

One interesting thing about this contest is that there are two prizes up for grabs. The winner gets a Special Edition Limbo prize pack, while the runner-up receives a Murder in Baldur’s Gate adventure pack.

Get those entries in because the deadline is 6:30! Good luck pilot!

200,000

TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND

Scott Kurtz’s PVP auction has propelled us into the rarefied air of the 200-thousand dollar range. From this altitude, you can see the peaks of Desert Bus 1 through 4.

And ever onward do we bus!

Desert Bus is excited to welcome back Mikey Neumann on Tuesday, November 19th at 6:00pm PST.

Mikey Neumann is a creative director at Gearbox Software and the creator and star of the web series Anthony Saves the World. He is also the voice actor of Scooter in the Borderlands series.

Mikey has worked in the video game industry since he was nineteen when he began a contract doing quality assurance testing with Gearbox’s Playstation 2 port of Half-Life. He was soon hired on as full time staff. He has worked on Brothers in Arms, Borderlands, and Borderlands 2.

When not creating and voicing phenomenal video games Mikey keeps busy with personal projects. He’s on Twitter a lot. He’s also the author of The Returners series, an online serial publication and appears on the Chainsawsuit Podcast with Kris Straub.

Have a question for Mikey? Leave it in the comments below.

Live Auction!

Scott Kurtz’s PVP prize pack, which includes a cache of treasures including a PVP Laser Cell and an authentic, pencil and paper sketch of a PVP Strip from 2002 — all of which will be personalized by Scott Kurtz himself — will be up for auction at 4pm, which is about 10 minutes from now.

Silent Auctions!

Ending in 2 hours (at 6pm)

“Something went wrong with the Pixelator” granny square afghan

Duskball Necklace

Douglas Coupland books lot

Ending in 6 hours (at 10pm)

Gentleman’s Steampunk vest

Fairy Wings – costume piece

Quip Pro Quo word pack – help determine game aspects!

Daoism instructs us that everything contains its opposite, and in every triumph is a kernel of failure. Thus is it always, as we recently learned here at Desert Bus for Hope.

It began when we auctioned off the Pinny Arcade pin set for a palindromic $5,005 to rkcr, which was not only our highest auction total of this year, but also enabled the Bid for Power achievement by breaking the $5,000 threshold.

But at that very moment came a stern lesson in the oneness of all things as a driver — who we will not mortify by citing here any further than may be necessary — lost control of the vehicle long enough to induce our first crash of DB7, and thus earn the ignoble Don’t Stop Me Now! achievement. (All we will say is: if you lend a car to a friend and they cause an accident, it is your premiums that will suffer, and not theirs.)

Nevertheless, some perspective is in order. At this point last year we had already nine crashes. Let us then recall the words of Laozi:

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

I think the connection to Desert Bus speaks for itself.

I think that we have all learned something important about friendship this shift:

We have honoured our fallen with our Ode to the Fallen – Creeper Edition

We recreated famous gifs
(bonus internet points if you can match them up to their original counter parts)

Alex got us to $175,000 OMG!!! Tally saw us tick over $185,000!

Even more after the break 😀

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