Sanctuary Crew Gaming

As part of the initial preparation work for updating our website’s entire backend again, we’ve added Google Analytics to the site. For those unfamiliar with Google Analytics, it pulls some useful information from what your browser tells our web server– useful information like your screen resolution. Absolutely nothing personally identifiable is recorded, nor would we have any use for such.

It would be greatly appreciated if those of you using NoScript on Firefox or NotScripts on Google Chrome would allow us access to that information, at least for a short time.

There was a slight issue with the site earlier today. It has been resolved with the help of Justin.TV staff.

During the summer, my mom emailed a link to a blog telling the story of a brave boy named James Camden Sikes. He was diagnosed earlier this year with a rhabdoid tumor. This is an extremely aggressive brain tumor. The blog is written by both Jamesie’s mother and father and it has touched the hearts of many.

This, I realized, is why we do what we do. It’s for stories like this that remind us of why we do what we do for Extra Life. Jamesie was treated at Children’s Miracle Network here in Dallas, Texas. This is a hospital that has also saved my life when I was little. They are amazing people, and one of the Children’s Miracle Network hospitals.

I shared the story of Jamesie with the rest of the Sanctuary Crew, and they had the same sentiments that I felt. It’s a powerful and heartbreaking story. This little boy lived too short of a life, and it’s something that doesn’t need to happen. The stories of children like Jamesie will help provide awareness to the pain that families experience because of this terrible disease.

We decided, unanimously, to dedicate our stream for Extra Life in memory of James Camden Sikes. We will be helping remind people of why we fight, and who we fight for. We fight for the children who can’t fight. We fight for the parents who put every moment of their lives into their child’s illness. We will play our games for 24 hours, and some of us are a little old to be able to do the all-nighters now, but our suffering is nothing compared to what they experience.

This is what Extra Life is all about.

To read the blog, please check out the following link:
Jamesie Beats the Tumor

To donate to Extra Life:
Sanctuary Crew Team Page

Wow. It’s been awhile. So I’ll make a quick post about Extra Life this year. We will be running another charity auction. This time, I want to thank the amazing staff at XSEEDGames. Earlier this year, I sent them a copy of Half Minute Hero and I have it, autographed by its wonderful translator and editor.

Jessica Chavez has also been amazing to send a pair of oni figures, an XSEED Games t-shirt, and a poster card for Trails in the Sky with the autographs of the XSEED staff.

These will all be split into two auctions.

Auction #1 will include the t-shirt, the Trails in the Sky poster, and one of the Oni figure.
Auction #2 will include Half-Minute Hero and the other Oni figure.

I will have both of these auctions starting at $20. 100% of the proceeds will be going to Extra Life. In fact, the method of payment will be through a donation of the winning amount to Extra Life. Once you have done so, forward the email returned to you from the Children’s Miracle Network to me, and I will toss the goods into the mail!

Easy as that!

When I was working on things today for our campaign, I came to realize that there are issues with international donations on our DIY campaign page. I spoke with someone at the IRC earlier today and was told that this is a known issue, and that sometimes some people outside of the US have issues making donations.

These are the workaround steps that I received, however, if you are having these problems:

1) Go back to the main webpage, http://www.rescue.org/
2) Click on ‘Donate now.’
3) On the donation page, follow the link on: Donors living outside the U.S. and Canada, please click here.
4) Make your donation on this page.
5) On the page after the donation is complete, there will be the contact information for a man named Mike. You will be able to call him or email him. (email preferably in this case, as you’re out of the country, I’m sure.)
6) Email Mike to tell him that you are donating for the campaign by helpjapan ‘at’ sanctuarycrew ‘dot’ com. Or link them to our donation page.
7) The donation will then be added to our campaign manually by the web team.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you. D:

Fight for Japan!

Come watch the Sanctuary Crew as we put down our lives, pick up our controllers, and wear out our thumbs– all coming together to help Japan recover from the terrible disaster that struck them on March 11th.

We will fight crime syndicates, evil library organizations, great evil overlords, alien invasions, conspirators, and who knows what else! All we ask for you to do is donate at least $10 during our marathon from 3/18/2011 to 3/20/2011. We’ll then be leaving the donations link up for a month afterwards.

Someone’s gotta pick up the slack and help get Japan back on their feet so that they can get back to helping us in our fight! For great justice!

100% of our raised money will be going to the IRC- the International Rescue Committee, a charity that specializes in search and rescue and has created a set of campaigns just for the Japan earthquakes. They are rated with an A+ by the American Institute of Philanthropy, one of the 10 Gold Star Charities named by the Forbes Investment Guide, and the BBB WISE Giving Alliance notes that they meet all 20 standards.

They are a fantastic group with amazing people- .90 cents of every dollar they receive ends up going to their projects- and with our target of Japan, that means that .90 cents of each dollar donated will go entirely to Japan.

You will be able to donate to them directly- we do not see a dime of this money at all. Period. Japan needs as much of it as we can gather! You can find our campaign website here:
http://diy.rescue.org/sanctuarycrewgaming

The link to our site is, of course:
http://www.justin.tv/sanctuarycrew/

So donate, watch, cheer us on, have fun, and chat with us- we are here to show you just what Japan is capable of doing through their amazing history of video games (all games that we will be playing are Japanese in origin).

Regarding the Survival Grinding to powerlevel subweapons in Castlevania HD.

Firehawke: That and there’s a fundamental truth..
Firehawke: At L8, it takes so long to level that you’re better off letting one guy use the whole time.
Tristan: mm..
Tristan: such a boring part of the game ._. but the same can be said for all MMOs I guess
Firehawke: Your words are as empty as your soul. My spare time ill needs a savior such as you.

I will admit, I lol’d.

So. I’ve been fussing with the layout of the blog for all of our news updates, as promised. For now, the new theme is fantastic. Had some issues with the way it handled paragraph breaks, but a little tweaking in the source code managed to fix that.

I will probably create a header for it when I have access to my other tools. Once that’s complete, it should be up and running for good. :D

I’ve nabbed a plugin to allow any posts we make get sent straight to Twitter. This way you can keep up with anything we decide to say and do! Excellent! :D

Hello, all! Floofy here~

Updates to the Blog
I’m going to try to make some more visibility to our wordpress blog, and make it look nicer. As a result, I’ll be making some categories, a new layout, now that I’ve figured out how to hack this stuff, and will probably start trying to be more active on news posts for the crew. I have been posting on my own blog of late, but maybe I’ll start doing random-ness here. Maybe posts on some of my crazy exploits. I think I’ve got some of them from my recent Ys Complete streams.

Updates to Justin?
Justin.tv has just made some changes recently, and they are allowing us to change the titles of our channels (both one and two, that is), before we start streaming. And the streams will dump over to our twitter account. Just follow it, and you’ll know exactly what we’re playing, and when. That is, at least, if we remember to run /title before we start.

If it hasn’t been changed, please smack the streamer. You have the blessing of both myself and Firehawke.

I’m sure you have also noticed that the first channel has advertising and the second doesn’t. This is because we’ve been invited to join in on an opt-in program to try to offset some of our server costs by advertising. We’re trying our best to keep the ads relevant, but you know how that goes. Let us know if you’re having any problems with it, because we can step back if necessary.

Extra Life 2011
I can already hear it: But, Floofy! It’s only March!
Yeah, I know it’s only March, but that also means it’s seven months to Extra Life. Okay, so it’s over half a year still, but there are some big things happening with our involvement this year. I may be attempting to contact AnimeFest to run a ‘retro gaming tournament.’ This will include great games like Combat on the Atari… and… uh… other things. Obviously, I’ve not completed my planning yet.

Streaming
If you haven’t noticed, we’ve picked up on activity with our streaming. This is because Firehawke is back in action after power repairs, and I’ve got a lot less on my plate now that I’m done with school and real life has decided to stop dumping it’s crap all over me.

Vent Updated
We’ve changed over to a new Vent server. If you regularly connect to Vent because you can’t miss out on the things like as Sniff waxing poetics about stuff that’s clearly NSFW, then you may want to run over to our wiki to check out the new server information.

As with always, keep an eye out on our twitter, and most definitely on our Justin.tv channels- yes, both of them- since we’ve been streaming a lot more of late.