Triviathon

Another blog post where Lou is late to the party, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn't mention this last weekend featured Triviathon, a 24-hour all-trivia-all-the-time event benefiting Relay for Life. The brainchild of trivia hosts Cully Andel and Triain Kandr, the idea was to run 24 hours of continuous in-world trivia to benefit charity. Of course, the best time to throw an event like that is on the weekend, and that means running up against a lot of popular Second Life trivia games like (ahem!) Lou's Clues. So Cully and Triain had a great idea—invite the hosts of those games to be part of Triviathon. Thus, on Saturday instead of setting up my little chair and cheat sheet at [MonoChrome], I rezzed into Trivy Isle and followed Trivia Grandmaster Thornton Writer up on stage in an effort to raise some money to fight cancer—a very worthy cause that, in one way or another, I'm sure impacts everyone RL and SL.

I didn't get any screenshots of my set—I was too busy trying to cram my questions into a one-hour time slot!—but Lette Ponnier managed to get a picture of me and "my little friend" the Victorian Mad Science Death Ray Mk II (made by Tali Rosca)—pummeling trivia fans with questions and excess protons. I was also randomly giving away some Jez's Oh's fabulously cute small avatars (available at [Oblique]!) and I didn't completely fall on my face or have massive script glitches, so I'm going to count the gig a raging success!

Although not all of SL's trivia hosts were represented, aside from myself the event featured a bunch of SL's best and brightest showrunners, including AnaMaria Quintessa, Triain and Cully, Chadd & Shale (I got to do Zoo Bar trivia again!), Josh and Circe, Nelly & Lotus, Maggie, Billy2Times, Devin, and even event host Hummingbird Forster took at turn at the stage, along with former Armada host Mako Kungfu and Chaos mistress Lette Ponnier.

I wasn't able to attend all 24 hours of the event, but I popped in whenever I could and five folks managed to hold out for the entire event for special prizes! I don't know how they did it, but Rain Ninetails, Lette Ponnier, Juke Badger, Devin Velinov, and FlutterBye Skytower where there for the whole darn thing—and they were reasonably coherent at the end. I tried to get a shot of the winners, but Second Life wasn't cooperating—not everybody rendered fully. Perhaps they hadn't been changing their pixels often enough.

Left to right: Juke Badger, Cully Andel, Devin Velinov,
Lette Ponnier, Rain Ninetails, and Flutterbye Skytower

The conservative goal of the Triviathon was to raise $20,000L—and I'm pleased to report that the event raised far more than that. Last I heard, the total donated to Relay for Life was $65,056L. Yes, that amounts to about $260 CAN, which isn't a terribly huge amount in the grand scheme, but for a trial run in an online community that's never tried to put together an event on this scale, I think it represents a solid success.

Plus, as part of the deal, Juke Badger's avatar got a haircut. That may not benefit cancer research, but, wow, it's sure a tremendous social good.

(If you need me, I'll be in some remote sim hiding from Juke.)