Craft-A-Long Update
June 9th, 2010

Posted by Jeremy

Hello Craft-Alongers!

We’ve had a tidal wave of emails from people with crafting plans, and I’m pleased to announce that there will be many many many lots of truly wonderful items up for auction this year. They may melt your brain with awesomeness.

As of now, however, we can no longer accept certain crafts, due to having quite a few items in these categories already. Said categories are:

– hats / toques / beanies (Unless it’s really truly cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die an absolutely incredible idea that no one has ever done before… in which case email[email protected] with your proposal.)

– paintings / portraits / sketches / figurines of the LRR crew. Art portraying characters from various LRR videos is still ok, but we’ve had several proposals for LRR portraits already. While we understand that looking at us makes people laugh, we believe there’s a limit to how many people will want to hang our pictures on their bedroom wall. And to how many bedroom walls we want to be hung on, actually…

Also, a quick reminder that if you want to make something, that’s great, we want to auction what you want to make. However we probably only want one of whatever you are making. Scarcity of an item will drive up its value, thus bringing in higher donations for the children. And we want to leave plenty of room for other people to donate their crafts as well.

There is still plenty of space for your crafty creativity, so if you have great ideas, keep those emails coming!

~Tally

Desert Bus Craft-Along 2010
May 14th, 2010

Posted by Matt

Calling all craftsy, artistic and creatively inclined people: the Desert Bus 2010 Craft-Along is here! Desert Bus 2010 starts November 19, 2010, and it’s time to start preparing.

That’s right, in this blog post you’ll find Craft-Along guidelines, contact information and even an instructional video from the Desert Bus cat-girls themselves. Can you handle it?

 Here is how you can participate, in three easy steps!

 1) Make your craft.  Please email [email protected] to let us know what you’re making though.  If you have any questions or concerns about what to make, the appropriateness of a particular craft or idea, or anything else you wish to discuss with us, we’d be happy to discuss it with you.  We’ll also provide you the address you can send your craft to when it’s done!

 2) Ship your craft in recursive packaging. We want to minimize the time we have to spend packaging and shipping prizes, in order to maximize the time we can spend on camera during Desert Bus, entertaining you with silly songs and crazy dances. To this end, we ask that you double wrap your stuff before shipping it to us. For example, put your craft in an unaddressed, unsealed envelope. Then put that envelope into a larger envelope on which you will write our address and your return address. Then ship it. Or, put your craft in a box that has plenty of blank space for us to write on, then wrap the box up in paper and write our address on that. This way, all we have to do is remove the outer layer of packaging, address the inner packaging to the auction winner and ship it. Then we can get right back to the business of making you laugh at our outrageous antics.

 3) Once you have shipped your item, go home and send us another email. In this email please include: 

  • Your full name (If you would like your craft to be credited to a nickname or forum name instead, please notify us of this in your email.)
  • Your full mailing address
  • What your item is
  • If you have one, the url for your website, Etsy store, Deviant Art page, or anywhere else you post photos and examples of your work. We will include this link on www.desertbus.org so that people can see more of your amazing work. 

Send this email to [email protected]

DEADLINE: Your Craft-Along item must be received by us no later than NOVEMBER 1, 2010 in order to be included in the Craft-Along. We strongly recommend that you mail your item several weeks ahead of time, in case of delays or general post office screw-ups. Stuff happens. 

Points of Interest:

The Craft-Along will function a little bit differently this year. All but a few Craft-Along items (selected by intensive review and several committees – which really means selected by the illustrious Rosco P. Jangles IV, possessor of Canard Knowledge) will be displayed in silent online auctions over the course of Desert Bus. 

All Craft-Along items, along with all other Desert Bus prizes and auction items, will appear on www.desertbus.org a couple weeks before the start of Desert Bus, for your perusal and to build drooling anticipation.

With Gratitude:

We’d like to say a special thank you to all the wonderful LoadingReadyRun fans and forumites who, entirely of their own volition, began the wonderful Craft-Along tradition last year. You guys are awesome! We absolutely cannot wait to see what amazing arts and crafts you will come up with this year!

That’s everything – now go get crafting!

I’m Sale-ing away~
May 3rd, 2010

Posted by Matt

Have you ever tried to instruct someone on the finer technical points of speaking pirate, but simply didn’t have an appropriate visual guide on hand? Or perhaps you’ve been yearning for more diverse and esoteric mini games on your Wii, but just couldn’t find the right way to let Nintendo know? Maybe you have a long coach ride ahead, and just haven’t figured out what to wear? Well, my friends, today is your lucky day!

For a limited time, and only while supplies last, the LoadingReadyRun Store will be offering these three great shirts for just $12! That’s almost half off! For the whole shirt!

You might be wondering if our years of internet fame have finally driven us crazy, and while that may be the case, I assure you, we’re totally serious about this price. With all the new shirts we’ve added to the store, we need to make some space in our stockroom, and that means it’s sale time!

If you’d like to purchase a Desert Bus Shirt, you can do so here.
X marks the spot, if you wish to lay down a few doubloons and acquire some pirate booty.
And you can pick up a WiiPlay shirt here, safe in the knowledge that your wallet will not be violated like the poor mii pictured.

I’d also like to remind you that preorders of our Muffin T-Shirt are still being taken, but there are only 15 days left! If you’ve been thinking of brightening this sad little fellow’s day by making him a part of your wardrobe, now’s the time to do it. You can place your order by following this link here. Remember, all pre-orders come with a complimentary “Awesome Muffin!” button (which I still can’t look out without giggling! SO HAPPY!)

Finally, don’t forget that season 2, 3, and 4 DVDs are now back in stock! These DVD sets feature all the core LRR videos from their respective seasons, complete with commentary tracks and a blooper reel that aren’t available online! Together, they account for 10 discs worth of content, and we packed those disks full!

Thanks everyone!

Geeks with Oregon Trail
December 20th, 2008

Posted by Jeremy

Hey folks, just a quick note that the guys over at Geeks With Issues are doing a 24-hour run of Oregon Trail TODAY that seems . . . vaguely familiar. It’s called the Battle Against Dysentery, and while their game is obviously way more interesting than ours, I’m giving them major props for supporting the kids and testing their gaming marathon muscle. Also, we here at LRR are NOT fans of dysentery.

Check out their webcast, and toss a few dollars their way if you can! If you were late to the Desert Bus party and really wanted to be involved, this could be your chance to contribute! They may even name a wagoneer after you :).

Desert Bus for Hope 2: Bus Harder
November 18th, 2008

Posted by Matt

Here we are. It’s mid November, and Deser Bus 2 is just on the horizon. I’d like to appologize for leaving the announcement so late this year. We encountered a number of complications over the last couple of months, and we weren’t able to finalize the details until last night. We’re scrambling a bit to pull things together, but rest assured, Desert bus is happening, and it’s going to be even better than last year.

First off, as you’ve probably seen in the announcement posts, it’s going to begin at 6:00PM on Friday November 28th. It’s Thanksgiving weekend for the yankees, I know, but hopefully you can find time to fit us in between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, or somewhere in between the pie and the requisite midnight turkey sandwich. At the very least, you’ll presumably be home with your families, rather than out at work, so may I suggest you take the opportunity to introduce them to LoadingReadyRun, and get them in on the Desert Bussing action?

The second thing to know is that we’ll be running from Victoria, BC again this year, although we have a location other than Bill and Morgan’s living room. If you live in Victoria, keep an eye out, I’m sure there will be opportunities presented to meet the team or prticipate in a more direct way than simply watching the feeds.

We’ve also finalized our roster of drivers for this year! Returning to the driver’s seat are James, Bill, and Morgan. I’d have thought that they’d learned their lesson last year, but I guess I was wrong. Paul has been dropped from the lineup this year so that he can direct his focus to the technical elements – the stream, recording elements of the event, lighting, audio, the chatroom, and so on. We’re hoping to have things go a little more smoothly in the technical area this year, and we think freeing Paul up to handle it was the right move. Replacing Paul in the lineup this year is our very own Jeremy Petter. I think he’s pretty excited about taking the wheel this year, so I hope you’ll all be out in force to support him as he drives his legs of the trip. Graham and Kathleen are taking the roles of official pit crew this year, they’ll be ever present at the driver’s sides, supporting them and the audience in whatever capacity they require. And if you haven’t figured it out already, I’ll be handling the communications. I’ll be your main point of contact whenever I’m around (which should be essentially all the time). I’ll be handling the blog, updates, running the twitter feed, and moderating the IRC channel. additionally, I’ll be frequently checking e-mail, and keeping you up to date on dollar totals, and special events. You’ll be able to contact me in a wide variety of ways over the course of event, and if you have any questions, or comments, feel free to direct them to [email protected], or [email protected] . I’ll be checking both regularly.

Paul will be launching the new, improved Desertbus.org in the next few days, so check the site periodically, and see if it’s up. We have a lot of plans for this year’s drive. Some of those plans we’ve finalized, others we’re still pulling together. I’ll be filling you in with more information as it becomes available, so make sure you’re following one of our many information streams, either the twitter, the announcement thread in the forum, the blog, or www.desertbus.org .

We’ll see you on the open road!

-Matt