I'm happy to announce that I will be personally donating $1,000 USD plus an additional amount during the
AGDQ 2017 TAS block on behalf of the team that helped me with TASBot projects over the past several months and on behalf of the site itself. This amount is roughly what is left over after direct expenses and taxes from an award I will be receiving "soon" from presenting at
GeekPwn and winning the
Geek Thinking award, with a substantial thanks to total, fuzyll, p4plus2, micro500, ownasaurus, and others who were involved in creating
the payload. This is a great achievement that brought international attention to TASVideos and the TASBot aspects and I could not be more proud of the team behind this achievement.
Having said that, I have had some very heavy expenses in the last few months. Since
last time I have represented TASVideos in my capacity as Ambassador in one form or another at
TWiT,
SGDQ 2016,
SVLUG,
DEF CON,
NBLUG,
GeekPwn,
SF Bay Area ACM, and
NBLUG again. Two of the events (SVLUG and ACM) required long drives and three of the events (SGDQ 2016, DEF CON 24, and GeekPwn 2016) required air travel and hotel stays. SGDQ and DEF CON involved heavy investments in the
TASLink board, cables, visualization controllers, games, adapters, a Saleae logic analyzer, video capture devices, cameras, and consoles. I have covered all of these expenses out of my own pocket and I will not be asking for any reimbursement or financial assistance for them. However, some bills are already hitting for AGDQ 2017 and I figured it couldn't hurt to at least share where I'm at there. I am currently projecting the following expenses for asassyknitter and I for
our involvement at AGDQ 2017:
Equipment / games purchases (projected): $130
AGDQ 2017 fee: $50
Airfare: $932
Accommodations: $545
Dining out / groceries (projected): $350
Total (projected): $2,007 - let's just call this $2k for simplicity
Some quick notes: Hardware costs specific to AGDQ 2017 include the Nintendo Classic I purchased and shipped to micro500, getting and shipping a copy of DKC2 to me, doing the same thing only with a version 1.0 DKC2, buying a copy of Loz:aLttP from a local collector, a PSoC devkit I hope to use as part of a prize, and (projected) an NES Classic controller to test with. Registration is free for runners for AGDQ 2017 so we're only paying for asassyknitter's registration. Airfare is only calculated for asassyknitter and I although we're bringing the kids as well this year so in reality this is only half the total expense we are paying. Accommodations are cheaper than last year because we're staying fewer days at the hotel itself and we will personally pay for two nights we're spending away from the marathon to spend time with family that happens to be nearby this year. Food costs are moderately high because I've definitely learned my lesson that it is not a good idea to eat the cheapest food you can find right before a presentation in front of ~200,000 people.
We have fully prepared as best we could to personally cover all of these projected costs as well; however, if you feel led to help offset our costs I will accept donations with much thanks via
Bitcoin at 1CknXDyb5jTG1Nw1hs437r6fnz7npBSEfA (consider getting a free
coinbase.com wallet) or through
this PayPal donation link. As before, I can offer donors their choice of any games on
this freshly updated games list which includes new Wii U games and other goodies and we will pass on at least 10% of any donations we receive to PCF during AGDQ 2017 on top of the $1k I committed above. After the event I'll provide a full post-mortem to provide transparency of costs (the
AGDQ 2016 post-mortem is here). Donations in the order received include:
- $10 anonymously: thanks for the start!
- $100 with a request to remain anonymous: I appreciate the generosity and the kind note - you know who you are.
- $10 from boct1584 who claimed Dustforce DX. You, sir, have good taste.
- $50 came in from someone who watched a Twitch stream and got involved. It's awesome to have the support.
- $100 from Fog, who claimed Grim Fandango Remastered. I still have one more copy of that left.
- $500 from a past generous supporter who knows who they are. Thanks again for everything!
Thank you again to all who have supported my wife and I in the past and thanks for the continued support!
