No Shave November Fundraiser

One of the beautiful things about the AZSnakePit and our community is that I have next to zero idea how old most people are. Or what walk of life they choose to live. Are you a twenty-something like me (for about a year at least)? Are you retired? Do you play video games or rant and rave against children/grandkids wasting their lives in front of EVEN MORE SCREENS?!

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions for most of you. And I don’t ever need to unless you see fit to let me know. I’m certainly not going to judge you for whatever the answers may be (as I hope you won’t judge me either).

But one thing I know for certain about this community is how open and genuinely caring we are as a group. Sure we have spats in the comment section (we’re all passionate after all). Far more often than spats though are comments about Nik’s BBQ successes, or well wishes for Gzimm in his recent medical emergency. These are just two examples from a plethora I might have highlighted.

I’m now going to ask you to dip into that shared communal respect. Not for myself, but to help fight cancer (with a little impetus selfishly applied). Bear with me, there’s a short story before the request!

I live in Columbus, Ohio. While I live near my only brother, I moved here for work and family in 2018, abandoning my previous home of Central Missouri, where I went to college. It’s also where two of my absolute best friends live. Two other best friends live in Chicago, IL and Fayetteville, AR. We don’t get to see each other in person often (read ever) as you can imagine. So during COVID, we all obtained Xboxes and now play together at least weekly. More realistically we play Xbox together 2-5 times every week. I know more about their lives than my own family at times. They were life savers during the lockdown and we have pretty much zero secrets from each other. When you can play/talk that often, it truly is like having your best friends in your living room with you.

Our current game of choice is Fortnite because Mr. Arkansas liked it in April 2021. The game is so massive it lets you voice chat with your party regardless of system (a not super common perk in a video game). We all learned to love the game; it’s a blast to play and we don’t have to take it (or ourselves) seriously at all to sometimes stumble into a victory!

So we came up with a donation game to play during No Shave November, which is all about raising awareness and money to help fight cancer. Specifically men’s cancer, but we aren’t limiting the scope of potential donations! The rules of Fortnite are irrelevant unless you plan to play yourself, but I hope if you choose to go that route you’ve at least got some understanding of how a Battle Royale works in a video game! The rules of our donation game are simple: choose a small amount of money for each place Spencer gets and agree to donate it to a good cause!

In my case, I have chosen $.25 (one US Quarter Dollar) for my place upon knock down in each game. I will play as many games as I want some night the weekend of December 2-4, 2022 and keep track of how many players remain when I get knocked down each time. Then I will multiply that sum by $.25 and donate the total to cancer research!

My hope is that you will either play yourself or agree to match my donation with one of your own. Even our small amounts can help make the difference in some researcher’s, a victim’s, or a family’s lives. We’re never going to know exactly what good comes from our actions, but we’ll know we tried!

Link to our team page: https://no-shave.org/team/we-play-fortnite-4-cancer/