This weekend Austin is playing host to DreamHack, an event that is best described as a gaming festival. It features esports, art, music, cosplay, tabletop, arcade, indies, panels, vendors...all your convention staples, but all at the same time. It's three straight days (really, it runs through the night) of tournaments, networking, demos, and shenanigans, and all around a fabulous event to attend if you have the chance. It has long had a presence in Europe and only recently made its way to the likes of the US and Canada. Despite living here for the event last year I was unable to attend (Day 5 was still in production), but this year is a different story.

Not only will I be in attendance, but someone lost their mind and decided having me on their panel would be a good idea!

That's right, if you're going to be at DreamHack Austin this year, you can catch me on the How To Podcast For Streaming panel. Sunday at 3pm we'll be podcast about podcasting, because we're super meta like that. The fine folks of Constantly Calibrating have invited me to join the panel, and have a few others over the course of the weekend as well! You can keep up on what they're doing over the course of the event on their Twitter.

I'll be around most of the rest of the weekend, so if you're at the event give me a holler! I'd love to say hi and chat about what you've got going on!

If you have a computer, tablet, or smartphone and aren't aware of Humble Bundle you are seriously missing out. I've been using them for a few years as a source of games and software, and they also carry mobile applications as well as books (digitally, of course). They often offer all of these things for prices much lower than where you find them on Steam or elsewhere, but still as legitimate licenses that pay the developers/publishers. Items are bundled together (hence the name), and you can get a whole suite of things for less than the regular price of a single item typically. Don't want everything in the bundle? Give the unwanted keys to a friend!

To sweeten the pot, Humble Bundle is also a "pay what you want" service. You can get bundles for as low as a dollar, but are welcome to (and encouraged!) pay beyond that in order to give the creators a little more cushion in their pockets. When you purchase a bundle, you're able to select exactly how the money you're paying is split between devs/publishers, HB, and a charity! It's right below the Order Summary box (some people don't scroll far enough and miss it), and you can get as granular as you want with it. It's kind of an awesome system, and is how I've been able to expand my game and software libraries as much as I have on the limited budget I need to stick to. Bundles are always changing, providing all kinds of new opportunities to pick up stuff. I've got email alerts set for certain types of products and get notified any time a new one pops up that fits the criteria.

So now that I've talked your ear off about that, I want to share that Humble Bundle started a partner program, and I am a part of it!  What does that mean? It means that if you click that handy dandy Humble Partner button on the right (bonus: bookmark it for later use!), anything you buy from HB during that session will have me added to that payment split as well! You still get good stuff, and I get a little bump to help keep me doing what I'm doing. You'll also be supporting a charity I love, Austin Pets Alive! They're a great rescue local to me and I'm super happy to be able to help them out as well.

Short version: if you buy anything digital, you should be looking at Humble Bundle first to get better deals, and if you use my partner link you get extra internet cool points.

Crohn's disease sucks and chances are you probably know someone affected by it. It would be really cool if the world could become a place where worrying about whether your intestines are going to destroy themselves every time you eat was a thing of the past because we figured out how to actually cure it instead of just taking a bunch of pills and hoping it's enough to calm it down for dinner. MrWartburg put together a crackerjack team of cool kids (not sure how I weaseled my way into the group, nobody tell them I'm a nerd pls) to do a fundraising stream on Saturday May 19 towards that goal. There's some bitchin' prizes being raffled off to boot. You can read more and donate here.

I'll be streaming on my channel from 3pm to 6pm Central that day, and hosting the other participants during their blocks. I'll be streaming Monster Prom (doing dumb voices of course), and doing squats for every dollar donated during the block (because I hate myself).  Every $5 you donate is a raffle ticket that you can use to enter the drawing for some really cool woodburnings made by MrWartburg himself, just make sure you put a note in the message field for your donation for which drawing you want to enter. You can also split your entry to multiple prizes! For example, a $20 donation could be towards 1 entry for the TARDIS and 3 entries for the Pokemon set. Just make sure you get those donations in sometime between now and the finale of the stream, as Maddy will be doing the raffle drawings live to wrap things up! Have any questions? The info on the donation page itself should just about cover it, but let me know if you've got any leftover after checking that out!