T w e n t y S i d e d

Here is my appearance on Desert Bus from yesterday:

I was a bit more flippant with answers than I’d normally be, but this was very much a fast-paced affair and I didn’t want to slow things down. The questions about D&D were interesting. Too interesting. The answers required more thought than I could have given them at the moment, and I was shy of anything that required a lengthy reply. Remember that
I was talking into a phone which was going to a cell phone which was feeding into an open mic which was then broadcast over Ustream. I could barely hear James and Paul. (They were easy to hear on the live feed, but that was on a five-second delay.) So I tried to stick to simple questions and keep it moving.

The unnamed technology behind Desert Bus is a remarkable apparatus. Pieced together from web cams, old videogame systems, their video production equipment, numerous computers, monitors, laptops, and a half dozen bits of free (to use) software. They have their live feed. Another feed of the game being played. They have a burgeoning chat room fed to a huge monitor so that the driver can read it. They have the website for announcements and links, and email for side conversations. Telephones for interviews. There’s they Paypal donation system, and then all the scrips that they use to hook into that and display running totals on the website and on the live feed. Then they have some kind of crazy organization system to keep track of the challenges, auctions, and prizes.

Everyone is so impressed with how much money they raise, but I’m impressed they’re able to get the system working at all. Heck, I’m impressed they can even go for ten minutes without throwing a breaker.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.