I shall endure, again.

Friends and enemies of video games,

Amidst the present unpleasantness, myself and the good people at Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run are thrilled to come together for another festival of livestreaming goodness! Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run X will run from 17-19 April, and I'm going to be a part of the proceedings! Yes, again! No, you can't stop me! I'll be live on my Twitch channel during the event, clowning and debasing myself in the hopes that you will help me meet my own fundraising goal.

Rather than bore you to pieces with the hows and whys, I'm just going to start dumping right here with what I'll be doing!

Friday: Trucking for Solidarity

(Spoilers: Last year this is almost what I did to the exclusion of everything else)

Alex Navarro and I are both sick in a very specific way. We have that truck fever. I grew up going across the continental United States, from Wisconsin to central Texas, dozens of times. On 17 April at 9pm Pacific, I will sate my driving lust by playing some Euro Truck Simulator 2. My plan is to choose one at least 3,000 kilometer route, spanning the length of the existing map, and to do the entire route in a sitting. In doing so, I hope to shine one small light on the resilience of the truck drivers and freight workers who are keeping our stores stocked and economies functional in these trying times. And listen to the finest in Norwegian radio for several hours! La oss klappe litt for det NRK P1!

Saturday: Kusoge Carnival 2020

Actual esports are wild, right? I'm no v-athlete, but I am an overly ambitious person who likes to create flimsy structurs and watch them crumble! So why not do a double elimination tournament of eight infamous PlayStation 2 titles to determine which is truly the turd of the herd? Really, here's the bracket!

I'll even do you one better: there are ongoing talks for a halftime show! I'm not kidding! It should be a laugh! Hopefully!

Sunday: The Bouncer Centipede

I have never played The Bouncer, but I've wanted to for donkey's years. Turns out the game is cheap as hell, and quite short. How short? Short enough to throw down the following gauntlet: for every $100 I raise, I will play The Bouncer. I mean that I plan to literally play The Bouncer from start to finish, per every $100 I raise. How many times will I play The Bouncer? That, Rambo is up to you. But hopefully, enough that I'll get pretty fucking good at tearing through it quickly. Our goal is to raise money, isn't it?

Yes, as ever, the entire purpose of this is to fundraise on behalf of Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit organization that builds schools and sanitary equipment in Laos, Ghana, and Guatemala. We love Pencils of Promise because 100% of donations they receive go toward direct services, so you can donate in confidence that your money will be helping to give children access to quality education. We've set the very ambitious goal of $15,000 this year as a team, and I'd personally love to raise $555 of those dollars. If you'd like to help directly, here's a URL for you: https://fundraise.pencilsofpromise.org/fundraiser/2694190

And if you can't help directly, it would mean the world to us if you could share either that fundraising link or the link for our entire team: https://tiltify.com/+gbcerx-team/giantbombcerx

Let's do this!

Good luck!

All the best. It's occurred to me the only travelling I'm going to be doing for the next few months is within games. Go out and see the world ... of Europe-ish ... in a truck.

A tip for The Bouncer, at least if I remember from my childhood correctly:

Even if you're maining one character for the entire run, make sure to point XP into your teammates as well. They aren't very helpful if you focus solely on the character you prefer, but more importantly if you wind up playing multiple runs (like, say, the dozen or so I did as a kid) you'll want to switch up playstyles from time to time and the three characters are pretty different from each other and "fun" in their own way. This was the thing I thought set the run of The Bouncer on the site back a little, the boys started having a hard time when the rest of the team couldn't keep up their end of the bargain.

@sparky_buzzsaw Thank you! This year is going to be a lot less miserable and honestly soul crushing than last year's Very Bad Idea.

@shindig We live in truly interesting times. But as long as there's a way for me to haul a load of salt fish from Bergen to Kristiansand while listening to Depress and Wigwam, I'm happy as a clam.

@nodima I will take this under advisement! I'm already playing eight actual bad games for a dumb thing on Saturday, might as well make my life as comfortable as possible while I Bounce.