Hopes and streams

Merry Monday!

I trust folks had a good weekend.

We certainly had an excellent time on the GameBlast20 charity stream. Thanks to your amazing generosity, we smashed through the £400 donation target we set, to raise a total of £1146 for SpecialEffect! Viewers on the day will have seen us scrambling to come up with new milestones and challenges on the fly as y'all continued to support the excellent aim of helping more folks with physical disabilities into experiencing the wonderful opportunities gaming can bring for themselves.

And thanks to everyone who has tuned in so far to watch Mike and I kick off the RQ Streams project - it has been really wonderful getting to introduce folks to new games and to interact with the community in this new manner. I'm pleased to say that we've been given the go ahead to expand the project, step up the number of shows we do and experiment with the sorts of things we bring you. Hopefully, you'll be on board with what we're trying to do and we can see what works, what doesn't. Feedback, of course, will be much appreciated.

So, here's what you will be seeing:
- new Wednesday show helmed by me, running 4.30 - 7.30pm GMT;
- the Saturday show will be helmed by Mike, with regular returns to both of us hosting, depending on the game.
- an ad hoc Sunday stream - "Sandbox Sunday" (between 1 - 5pm GMT, though not necessarily for that whole time), either solo or dual-hosted, depending on what we want to try.

Sandbox Sunday will be our 'experimental swing slot', and we've got a bunch of ideas that we want to try, ranging from poetry reading/writing to challenge games to AMAs to board games or cooking streams. Some of these will be a bit of a challenge, but we look forward to seeing what we can do with this slot - and hope you'll support us in these uncharted waters.

We'll actually be kicking off Sandbox Sunday this week with a challenge! As part of the GameBlast20 stretch goals, Mike agreed that if we reached £1000, he would submit to showcasing his knowledge (or, rather, lack thereof) of geography. And we realised that we could do better than just a hasty set of questions at the end, so we've decided to make a show of it - join us this Sunday at 2pm GMT for 'Trivial Mike-suit!' with Quizmaster Anil setting the gauntlet.

Now, to address the elephant in the room - folks may be wondering where the promised 'State of the Towers' address is; as it's almost the end of February and I had said we'd post in January.

The truth of the matter is that, for operational reasons, I cannot at present release it - at least, not in a way that would be useful. There is a lot going on behind the scenes at Rusty Towers at the moment, and I don't want to give you inaccurate information about a situation that is presently in flux. As soon as I can say something more concrete about our plans, I will, but I'm now not going to set a time frame on that until I can be sure of one.

As for why I haven't said anything up to now - well, chalk that up to optimism. I've been hopeful throughout this period that things would have advanced to the point where I could release it. I know this not the most satisfactory of answers, but I can assure you that plans to change the way we do things here on Patreon, and in the wider sphere, are underway. But they may take longer than folks find ideal to come to fruition - part of the drawback when this is not the primary work for the majority of our staff, I'm afraid.

Onto other things, the Rusty Fears 3: Fearsome writing competition has now closed - and I must say you've really been inspired and prolific this year, which is fantastic to see. Our final tally is 198 entries! It's gonna be a tremendously fantastic task to whittle this down to just 2 winning pieces. Stay tuned for the results of that! 

And, here's what you can expect from us this week (all shows release at 4pm UK time, unless otherwise stated):  

Tue 25th February
RQG148 - Jumble Sale! (Patreon)

Wed 26th February
RQ Streams #6 - Anil plays... LEGO Batman 2 (4.30pm GMT)
RQG148 - Jumble Sale! (Public)

Thu 27th February
STL037 - Tedium and Touching Gestures (Patreon)

Fri 28th February
Rusty Knights/Nobles Bonus - TMA S4 Q&A More Answers! Part 1
STL037 - Tedium and Touching Gestures (Public)

Sat 29th February
RQ Streams #7 - Mike & Anil play... Cultist Simulator (3pm GMT)

Sun 1st March
RQ Streams #8 - Trivial Mike-suit: Geography Edition (2pm GMT) 

Have a great week all!

Anil
Community Manager