Sometimes (but not often) the internet is a force for good. Most days it just makes you read a bunch of shit that makes you angry or upset, but sometimes an extremely huge sum of money is raised for a charity by a YouTuber playing one very long game of Donkey Kong 64.
[jwplayer gvkTjsCy]
Today, Harry Brewis (who publishes video essays on YouTube under the name Hbomberguy), concluded a marathon 57-hour streamed playthrough of the game which ultimately raised over $476,000 in donations for Mermaids, a UK charity that provides support for gender non-conforming children and their families.
The stream was set up in part because of Graham Linehan, formerly of IT Crowd and Father Ted fame, who now spends all day, every day on Twitter railing against trans people because, well, I guess you have to do something to fill in the time. Lovely man that he is, Linehan had lobbied to have funding from the UK’s National Lottery diverted away from the charity, and subsequently spent the whole weekend melting down as the stream drew in an amazing number of donations.
Brewis told P.TV that, thanks to the way Twitch and its subscriptions work, money raised from the stream is still coming in, and that ideally ongoing money from subscriptions would go into a rolling fund for trans people who need immediate help getting out of a bad situation. At time of writing, the donation total is sitting at $USD341,396, which is just bonkers.
The stream had a number of prominent visitors, including US Democrat senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actress and author Mara Wilson, and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Not a bad line-up, hey.
Live streaming Donkey Kong with freshman congresswoman @AOC who surprised her on Twitch today with “trans rights are civil rights are human rights” which was this gamers message https://t.co/yjccZOtkoC
— Pirate Party Weekly🏴☠️ (@PiratePartyINT) January 21, 2019
According to Brewis, basically all of this came as a huge surprise: “I anticipated NONE of this and that is probably what prevented me from being nervous. It was completely wild and it’s a good reminder that every good person is a person and there are a lot of good people out there who just need a bit of support or backing and can do great things.”
Absolute legend.
