DFW Winter Storm Aid

I have returned to streaming, but not for Extra Life–at least not this week. This week (actually start back on Saturday, February 20) I am focusing on raising money to help fellow Texans affected by the recent winter storm.

I got extremely lucky. I was able to go to my parents’ place, who had power, and we had no pipes burst in the house. In fact, we were able to save all of our fridge and freezer food with a combination of using my parents’ fridge and burying our food in the snow. Many, many Texans weren’t and aren’t as lucky.

Many had to throw their groceries out, which is a huge issue for the 1 in 7 Texans that are already food insecure. Thanks to busted pipes and, in some cases, busted water mains, many Texans are struggling just to find water. Some Texans are looking for shelter because they can’t get into their homes due to water damage and plumbers looking at record backlogs.

Insurance won’t cover all of this. Federal aid will take far too long. Texans need help now.

Personally, I am focusing on two local DFW organizations that are helping: The Feed the People Dallas Mutual Aid Fund and The North Texas Food Bank. If you are interested in helping people on a statewide scale, I would direct you to the fundraisers of M.J. Hegar, former candidate for U.S. Senator, who is splitting donations to food banks across the state, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, who is splitting donations to food banks, mutual aid, and homeless-focused organizations.

As there is no clean way to track donations to these organizations like in Extra Life, I am doing something different with my stream. On Twitch, you earn channel points just for watching. Over time, you can spend these on the channel you earn them on. With that in mind, I’ve decided that for every 1,000 points spent on my channel, I will donate $1.

On Saturday, we used that method to add $39 to my planned donation of $50. If we hit over $50, I will match whatever ends up in the channel donation pool, plus front the $22 dollars of revenue that I have setting in my account as well.

This means that you can help raise money by just watching me on Twitch and spreading the word. The goal is to get people in the channel and raise awareness for these various funds that need help (I have chat commands of !donate, !texas, !food, and !water set up to help this).

I am playing Satisfactory, a game focused on resource and power management (and at times, fighting through overloading the power grid you build). Stream times will be Monday (today!) and Wednesday at 9 PM CST and go a little past midnight each stream.

If you donate and want to brag, just shoot me a tweet over @ndtex or DM me on Instagram @ndtex as well with a picture of your receipt. I will make my donation at the conclusion of my Wednesday stream to both organizations and we will see just how much good we managed to do in a quick time!

Thank you in advance for helping Texans in need!

2020 Halo Milestone Drinks…AND SPICE

This week is the Extra Life marathon extravaganza and that means it’s time to incite your donations to my Extra Life campaign with promises of terrible drinks. Much like every year, I’ve themed the drinks based on the game I will play and this year that is Halo.

However, considering that raising $11,306.35 will make me dye my hair like Guy Fieri, we are gonna spice things up. I’ll be having my own drive into Flavor Town by doing a bit of Hot Ones (which Guy was on). The drinks occur when we hit monetary milestones and the spicy wings will hit based upon the number of unique donors during the marathon.

The (Terrible) Booze

$9,915: Plasma Grenade

This drink will be a reverse bomb (here’s an example). Unlike the rest of the drinks, I didn’t have a “base” drink to make awful. I just thought: blue, fizzy, BOOM.

  • Shot:
    • Hypnotic
    • Top layer of Absinthe
    • Flipped upside down, resting on bottom of a whiskey tumbler.
  • Sprite poured over the shot glass.
  • Pull shot glass, consume

$10,669: The Needler

This will be a different type of reverse bomb. Instead of pulling the shot glass, consuming the drink will slowly leak the shot, resulting in multiple instances of delayed pain. This drink is loosely based of a, I kid you not on this name, Purple Starfucker (scroll down to #12).

  • Shot:
    • Blue Curaçao
    • Top Layer of Everclear
    • Drops of Hot Sauce
    • Flipped upside down, resting on bottom of a pint glass
  • Pint glass of Big Red
  • Ideally, as I drink, the shot leaks into the mixer, creating a purple stream, complete with delayed hot sauce bursts.

$10,700.67: The Flood

Based on the Zombie Shot, except mixed like I have a death wish.

  • Mixed in Shaker:
    • 1 oz Dark Rum
    • 1 oz White Rum
    • 1 oz Brandy (flavored if I can find it)
    • 2 oz Mt. Dew (because that’s like pineapple & passion fruit combined…right?)
  • Pour in shot glass, top with 151, splash of Grenadine, light on fire, regret decisions

$11,306.35: Activate Halo

Based off of Adios Motherfucker, which is all too aptly named.

  • 1 oz vodka
  • .5 oz rum (gonna make it 151)
  • .5 oz Everclear (because I don’t want to buy gin)
  • 1 oz tequila blanco
  • 1 oz Blue Curaço
  • 2 oz Sweet & Sour Mix
  • 1 oz Sprite
  • Poured in glass, consumed with regret

The Spice

Reminder, this is for amount of unique donors. Grab a bunch of a friends and toss in a dollar. Sauces are added to a Frank’s base and each wing will get an extra dab.

Hot SauceScoville RatingNumber of Donors
Shiracha2,20010
Chipotle3,40020
Tabasco3,75030
Habenaro9,00040
Habenaro XXXSpicy11,60050
Da Bomb135,60060
Devil’s Lightning1,000,000+70
First FourMaybe this won’t be too bad80
Last FourSend help90
ALLMay God have mercy on me100

Extra Life 2020 Milestones: Honoring Muffet

Even before I made the decision to merge sports with my Extra Life marathon, I ended up putting sports in my campaign milestones, AKA the marks in which I drink something awful (but that’s another post…). That decision was made when living Notre Dame legend, Muffet McGraw, surprisingly retired as the women’s basketball head coach.

Muffet was and still is so much more than a basketball coach. Beyond the typical molding of young athletes, she was always vocal about equality and social justice. Need a good summary of what she’s about? Here you go:

https://twitter.com/MuffetMcGraw/status/1313477676582174725

In thanks to everything that Muffet did at Notre Dame, I went through her career to dig up some milestones for this year’s campaign, while mixing in a couple fund raising marks of my own.

We’ve hit most of these, but we aren’t done yet!

Milestones

Obtained

$669 – Marks $20,000 raised all time

$2,000 – Goal to hit for the 1-Up Open

$2,697.67 – Represents Muffet’s 26 NCAA Tourney appearances, 9 Final Fours, 7 Championship Games, and 67 NCAA Tourney wins

$3,321 – Represents Muffet’s 33 Seasons coached, 2 National Championships, and 1 Hall of Fame Career

$4,101 – The date of Muffet’s first national title: 4/1/01

$4,900 – In honor of Muffet being the 4th fastest coach to reach 900 career wins

$5,545 – The final score of Muffet’s 500th win: 55-45 over Michigan

$6,158 – The score of Muffet’s second National Championship: 61-58 over Mississippi State in 2018

$6,866 – The score of Muffet’s first National Championship: 68-66 over Purdue

$7,720 – Muffet’s winning percentage at ND: .7720

$8,482.51 – Muffet’s win-loss record at ND: 848-251

$9,276 – The score of Muffet’s first win during her first sellout: 92-76 over UCONN

Left to Go

$9,915 – Muffet’s win-loss record against the ACC: 99-15

$10,669 – $30,000 Raised All-Time

$10,700.67 – Last year’s total raised

$11,306.35 – Represents Muffet’s 11 30-win seasons and 6 35-win seasons (This is the Guy Fieri dye-job payoff)

Stretch Goal

$14,866 – Muffet’s 14 regular season conference titles, including 8 in a row which also included 6 straight ACC titles–that leaves 6 other non-consecutive titles. (Oh, and I’ll wax my chest again if we get this far)

Donate!

So now it’s up to you to help me reach my goals and help fight cancer in honor of Aven. Get your tax-deductible donation into my campaign right now!

There are four milestones left, one stretch goal, meaning that there is five awful drinks ready to go. As far as what those drinks are…tune in next week!

November 7: Extra Life Game Day 2020

It’s been some time since I’ve written anything in here. Typically I lay out plans for my marathon stream, post the awful drinks that I will consume, and generally keep things more up to date.

I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but things are slightly crazy right now.

The good news is that I took advantage of These Trying Times and done quite a bit of streaming and fundraising already. My campaign has already raised $9,670 of my $11,306.35 goal, surpassing twelve (!) milestones, resulting in a mix of awful drinks and really spicy food consumed.

I’ll talk more about the milestones in another post as there is a reason for the strange numbers this year. However, I’m here to talk about the main event, which from the title, you can see is November 7 this year.

Typically, I’ve avoided the national Game Day and done my marathon in December. This was to avoid conflicts with college football which a large part of my audience, and myself, is rather in to.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in These Trying Times it’s that trying to plan things out so neatly is a fool’s errand. Sure, November 7 might just have the biggest Notre Dame game of the year, if not the biggest game of the year against Clemson. It also might not happen. It could end up happening in December. It could happen in 2021.

So instead of dodging the date and the games, I’m going to try to lean into it as best I can. ND/Clemson is scheduled to kick off at 6:30 PM in God’s time zone (central time), so I will start at 6:00 PM regardless if football happens or not.

While I can’t co-stream the game on Twitch, I can deliver some real-time reactions. Granted, there will be a Twitch delay, but I think it will be fun. Perhaps we even use Discord to get a peanut gallery involved! Think of it as the Notre Dame Fan Feed that happened last year for Notre Dame vs. Boston College, but more insane and with more internet lag.

On the video game side, I will play as much as I can of the Halo series. I’m hoping to clear both Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 within the marathon. Obviously, if football happens that might be a bit rough, but it will be fun regardless.

The death tax will be in play as well as multiple donation incentives to make my gaming life hell. If the game happens, I will make sure to integrate it into the donation fun as well. Plus, to keep things interesting, we will have two types of milestones during game day proper:

  1. Amount Raised – Awful and Painful Halo-Themed Drinks
  2. Number of Donors – Hot Ones Style Wing Challenge

I am making sure to have a food/spicy oriented challenge because this year’s big payoff is taking me straight to Flavor Town! If we hit the $11,306.35 goal, I will get a complete Guy Fieri dye job. Actual flame shirt may or may not be included.

I’m very excited to take part in this next month and start building up the hype here with more announcements, including the specifics of the game day drinks & wing sauces!

Be sure you are following me on Twitch to get in on the fun and spread the word about my Extra Life campaign via word of mouth by directing folks to extralife.ndtex.com! Oh, and here’s a preview of what the payoff will look like thanks to Brendan who has much better photoshop skills than I.

Gamin’ 4 Aven Goal Hit a Month Early!

Thanks to a $900 (!!!) corporate match (check to see if your company does one, it’s a huge impact!), the Gamin’ 4 Aven campaign went from eclipsing $5,500 on Sunday thanks to the game week matching to crushing my initial $6,000 goal. As I write this, the campaign sits at $6,419 over a full month before my 24-hour marathon slated for December 13-14.

So what does this mean?

First, I have some work to do to increase the goal and start putting in stretch goals. There’s no way I’m stopping this train now!

Second, this has unlocked the next terrible drink, which will be all three terrible Triforce shots combined. This will be consumed on my next stream, slated for Friday, November 8 at 9pm CT on my Twitch channel.

Finally, this has also unlocked the chest waxing. This idea was floated by my lovely wife who turned my annual question of being a part of a stream into this truly evil idea. This will occur at the start of my 24-hour marathon on December 13 (tentative start time is 7pm CT).

I can’t thank y’all enough for how much of a success this year has been and am unbelievably excited for how much further we can push this. Keep spreading the word, keep the donations coming, and keep helping Oklahoma kids in the fight against pediatric cancer.

#ForTheKids #ForAven

Stream Schedule Update! Link’s Awakening Remake Begins Friday, September 20

It’s been a while since I sent out an update, but wanted to take the time to do so to highlight some upcoming streams and give an update on my Gamin’ 4 Aven Extra Life campaign.

Tonight, at around 9pm CT/10pm ET, I plan to conclude my first ever play-through of the NES classic, The Legend of Zelda, taking on Death Mountain and Ganon live on Twitch. During this run, we’ve raised $622.73 for the Children’s Hospital Foundation of Oklahoma City, bringing my total to $4,627.37 for the entire campaign! My death tax for the game is currently over $100 and that donation will be made tonight once Ganon falls.

However, I don’t want to bury the lede in this post. One of my favorite games, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening has been remade for the Switch and releases this Friday, September 20. Initially, I thought about doing this game during my marathon in December, but I simply can’t wait and want to keep this momentum going with this new release.

Also, after some tinkering around, I’ve slightly modified the donation incentives. As hilarious as it is for me to try and play blindfolded, it doesn’t really translate well when no one can tell me what’s going on. So, for the new $50 incentive, I will be wearing a pair of kaleidoscope glasses for 5 minutes, with a 1 minute bonus for every additional $10 over $50.

RIP, my eyes

I won’t be receiving these bad boys until tomorrow, so for tonight’s stream I will find some way to obscure my vision that isn’t a blindfold for any such donation.

A quick recap of all donation incentives (which help me die in game to add $1 to the death tax):

  • $5 – Oven mitts for 2 minutes
  • $10 – Oven mitts for 5 minutes
  • $25 – Play with inverted controller for 5 minutes
  • $50 – Play with kaleidoscope glasses for 5 minutes (1 minute bonus for every extra $10 over $50)

If you take my death tax into account, we are under $300 from hitting the $5,000 milestone. This not only means a horrible drink, but also a guarantee that 100% of all funds raised goes to the Blake Shelton Cancer Research Fund.

To recap: we’re going to take out Ganon, start our quest to wake the Wind Fish, and help kick cancer’s ass by hitting that $5,000 milestone!