Desert Bus for Hope 9: The Joy of Desert Bus

That time of the year again. The ninth Desert Bus for Hope will start in six hours from when this was posted.


Or in a nutshell, a charity marathon where a bunch of people (mostly from the comedy group Loading Ready Run) play one of the worst/most boring games of all time while auctioning off unique (often geeky) items, singing, performing any challenges watchers give 'em and will have call-ins from people all 'round the world and so on. Good times and sleep-deprivation all around!

There's a schedule of guest call-ins and a constantly updating wiki page for the event.

You can find info about all the drivers (the people who'll do the actual driving of The Bus in eight hour shifts) over at The Drivers Page.

For what you might walk off with from the stream, have a look at the live auction items (These tend to go to several thousand dollars per item), silent auction items (which'll just be auctioned on the webpage, off-stream, tend to be sold for cheaper) and giveaway items which usually are randomly given away for people who donate an exact amount (or multiple thereof) during a certain time period or for drawing/writing challenges (very budget-friendly, but you'll need plenty of luck and/or talent).

If you are a fan of comics, you'll most likely want to check out the live auction list. Seriously.



Public behind the scenes info?! What's this madness!

I and some other member of the Video Strike Crew are collecting all sorts of data of the stream itself and everything that goes in the chat.

There are several people who capture snippets from the stream and post them as gifs, usually within 20 seconds of it happening on stream. They're all automatically collected over here (with thumbnails!): http://greywool.com/desertbus/9/gifs/

Mike Lunsford has been making a poster of each Desert Bus for Hope since the third one (I believe). This year is no different. Here's a tracker where you can follow the progress of this year's poster: http://greywool.com/desertbus/9/posters.php

Last but not least, here's a collection of all sorts of things, like

• 30 last gifs posted in the chat
• 30 last clips of the stream the VST has uploaded to youtube
• 30 last entries of the What happened and when? timeline, which logs EVERYTHING happening on the stream.

http://vst.ninja/live/latest_data.php

All sorts of other data collection can also be found at http://vst.ninja/, including ones from previous years.



Edit: Also, they are in a new space this year, including



We've also had threads over here of the previous years' DBfHs!

Desert Bus for Hope 8: The Year of the Crash
Desert Bus for Hope 007: Deserts are Forever
Desert Bus for Hope 6: Desert Bus 3 in America
Desert Bus for Hope 5: De5ertbus
Desert Bus for Hope 4: A New Hope

IT'S ON!

What happened to Daniel, and who was Daniel? I joined after they had explained, and chat just goes too quickly to read.

Why do you care so much about this event, J?

Guess you'd have to watch it to find out. And not just a five minute stint. Also, bein' a part of it (albeit not a large one) also helps.

It's amazing. I never had occasion to watch most of the thing, but I try to catch at least few hours every time. There's just something inexplicably beautiful about it.

For example, two guys hugging it out, getting stickytaped together for 15 mins while their butts are appreciated!



And the same on youtube!

Also, the intro to the stream was pretty damn good

J said:

Daniel Davis

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I think I recognise him from the few minutes I watched in past streams.

Oh wow. This man:



just did the best driving shift change entrance.

*sticky*

Let me know when it's totally over and I'll *unsticky*

Also might be cool if you had the links for the previous DB threads here in your OP.

Also also....

LeVar Burton

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Pharaoh Llandy said:

*sticky*

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Oh. That's why I had trouble finding it. Thanks!

Could grab the links to the previous years' topics, but not sure what they'd add. Pretty much the same blurb but with less info.

Edit: Oh yeah. The other threads do have more than just the OP. Shall add 'em soonly. Doned! Got a bit busy with uploading clips of DB to youtube and fixing various scripts.

Eeeeee! ^__^
This year they have a banner for each shift (as seen below). I made a clock showing how far we are into each.

DongDawn Guard, Alpha Flight, Night Watch and Zeta Shift


And (part of) the source code for the clock got read sultry-like on the stream :3

Hoooly ****. The Cards Against Humanity makers are doing a $14.99 giveaway for EVERY CAH card they've ever printed. Even never released ones. They're raffling away three sets of all the cards. AND however much they manage to raise, they will pay as much, doubling the income.

If you spot this within 25 minutes of me posting, you have a chance to get in on the chance.

It's over, raised a total of $27371.74. That doubled, $54743.48.

Driver graph going insane:


As of now, they've raised $3,081,314.06 total during all 9 Desert Bus for Hopes. Child's Play has raised around $30M during its lifetime. So, DBfH is about 10% of everything they've ever raised.

So the money goes to a charity that buys toys, games and consoles for children in some hospitals mostly in the US. This makes it a bit hard to relate to for a European with no kids.

I know what you mean. Whenever I see adverts on television asking for donations for kids in Africa for fresh drinking water and anti-malaria medicine, I'm like, "I don't really see how this is relevant to me, I am a working class English person with plenty of fresh drinking water and no mosquitoes", and similarly when we run charity events for the local Hospice at work, I secretly, deep down inside, think to myself "but I'm not dying in the terminal stages of cancer, how on earth can I possibly relate to these people and why should I give a couple of quid to ease their suffering and support their families when they're going to be dead by the end of the week anyway  o__O"

That's me, unless its funding for cure for cancer in my local hospital, I'm not interested.
The key words that you kind of referenced too are either "local" or "needy". Buying consoles for American kids is a bit removed from both. At least they should buy them PCs and not set them low standards so early in life.

'kay, it ended about 11 hours ago, have managed to add 3 hours to my 23.7 hours of sleep during the stream. Brane's almost functioning!

Anywho, the stream ended with a total of $677,183.00, beating last year with nearly $34k.
All the previous Desert Bus for Hopes combined, they've so far collected $3,112,629.15 for Child's Play.

You can find this highlight and many others at Poster Events Link Map

And the poster itself, at its (probably) final form:


AND if you want to find even more about what went on, head over to the Video Strike Team spreadsheet page!

Harkon Haakonson said:

Why do you care so much about this event, J?

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After thinking on this a bit, I kinda came up with an adequate enough comparison. Take a band you enjoy the heck out of and go to their live concert. Then try to explain to someone (in rational terms) who doesn't know the band why exactly it was so great.
Well, at least I don't think I could. It's more about the feeling you get while you're at it. Though this has more involvement from people watching AND it lasts for nearly a week. Also, it's damn great at reminding that this planet isn't entirely a ****hole.

MadVader said:

So the money goes to a charity that buys toys, games and consoles for children in some hospitals mostly in the US. This makes it a bit hard to relate to for a European with no kids.

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For me, it matters very little where the money goes, personally. I'm there for the people at the DB base, the offsite crew who works nonstop to log, capture and upload just about everything that happens on the stream and, of course, the Chat.

Another reason why someone might prefer donating to DB instead of a local hospital or similar is that your local doesn't usually give you a chance to win a Portal Gun signed by everyone who's worked on the Portal games if you toss 'em a fiver. :3