Fundraiser: What’s So Scary about Climate Change?

There’s a sort of inevitability that’s common to all horror. When watching Jason or the xenomorph, you’re already certain people will die. The real question is who, when, and how. Sometimes its fairly obvious, for instance that lone person in the vent is a goner, in which case the focus is more on how everyone else copes with the loss. Other times, the death comes out of nowhere; Annie Phillips steps into a car on a sunny day and chats up the driver, only to have her throat graphically slit a few minutes later.

This is a lot like climate change. The basic physics has been known since the 1890’s, so there’s no debate over whether it’s happening (unless you’re the Mayor, of course). The focus is on who, when, and how. Desert regions will get hotter, but maybe plants will also get more poisonous? Tinkering with an entire planet will inevitably lead to unforeseen or odd circumstances, most of which will be unwelcome.

So Abe Drayton has joined with PZ Myers, Joshua Johnson, and a sacrificial lamb (me!) to discuss the spooky side of climate change. It’ll be premiering in 45 minutes over on my YouTube channel. It’s just one of many things we’re doing to help pay off our legal bills, so if you have some spare candy please consider donating it to us or Skepticon.

Fundraiser Update: Crypts Were Necrodanced!

Gaaaah, I wanted to have a post up just before I did my game stream, but I was too time crunched. You can still watch the stream here, though! It was a blast to play, though unfortunately I couldn’t do much colour commentary; forcing you to move on the beat meant I was constantly focused on nailing that beat while thinking a few steps ahead. Ah well, we got to see a cutscene, and other than a malfunctioning split timer there were no technical glitches.

I’ve also got a funding update! FtB’s Paypal account now sits at $2,109.93, which I’m quite happy with. For the second month in a row, you’ve opened your wallets up to help us pay off these legal fees, and I’m again eternally grateful. Don’t forgot Skepticon has their own Paypal, too, for their own slice of the fees.

This fundraiser does have me dancing, though. One reason why I was so late to type up this post was that I was participating in the quiz show. After I punch “publish,” I’ve got to finish editing the Climate Change panel and post it to my YouTube channel; I’m aiming for 6PM MDT, which is ambitious but doable. And after all that, I’ve still got the slight problem that Monster Prom crashes on my computer. As mentioned, I have backup plans, but this fundraiser will still consume almost all of my day.

Hey, it’s a small price to pay if it helps with our and Skepticon’s legal fees.

Fundraiser Update: Only Minor Explosions So Far

It doesn’t always show, but there’s a lot of prep work for these fundraisers. I’ve got a half dozen illustrations to create, a scene to render, and a video file to edit, most of which has to be finished before Saturday. I’m also finding Steam games are finicky; Crypt of the Necrodancer disables my secondary monitors if I try to run it fullscreen, and only properly recognized my controller once. It still works with a controller, mind you, but the digital pad is disabled. Monster Prom fails to load at all! I’m guessing it does something funky when initializing OpenGL, but without proper debugging symbols I can’t say much. I have both a plan and a backup plan for Monster Prom, so it should still be a go.

Last I heard, we were up to $1,629.34 in donations towards FtB. That’s a few days old, but my general impression is that we’re not pulling in as much as we did last month. There’s no shame in that, times are tough and this fundraiser is a marathon. If you’d like to boost those numbers, your two choices are FtB’s PayPal or Skepticon’s Paypal. The GoFundMe is still down, and at this point I doubt it’ll come back up.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hard drive to reinstall.