First of all, a few words to you Virgilio: I hope you aren't killing me for that, as I didn't ask for permission to do this but if I am in charge of this site and have the opportunity to help, I simply want to try it.
The needs of the Many - the needs of the one
So what is this all about? I will try to make things short and not to sound uber-dramatic, trying to stay close to the facts: About one and a half year ago, I got to know Virgilio Virzo, also known as Ozymandias81 in the community forums, a 35-year old Doomer, living in a small town called Latina a few miles away from Rome in the middle of Italy in Europe. He joined the Blade of Agony team as lead designer and technical advice when it came to models, programming and tedious things like sprite and texture editing. I mostly was and still am impressed by the dedication he spents and I am also a great fan of his kind and supporting nature, I would consider him to be one of my closes friends in the community.
farewell, little desktop
During the development of the first chapter of Blade of Agony, Virgilio somestimes really had hard times, struggling with his computer: Fatal crashes, loss of data and work, the system not booting, hardware failure and other things we modders and even the usual suspects get mad about. In the past few weeks, the situation tightened and Virgilio often disappeared or wasn't able to do anything on his computer because of these issues. I am pretty sure most of us would have tossed the damn thing out of their window and bought a new one before ending up in a sanatory.
Differences
Many of us are blessed with a good job, a satisfying income -- we simply could buy a new rig and continue working on our creative hobbies, staying in contact with people through social networks and all that stuff we are used to without thinking about the necessary money for too long. Other people don't - for whatever reasons there might be.
What can we do? What's the goal?
Being the head of one of the largest Doom pages around, I thought it is the right moment to gain a benefit from this position and start a small crowd-funding project to support one of the people from our community, in this case to be precise: Virgilio "Ozymandias81" Virzo. The plan is to collect donations to help Virgilio financing a new machine, giving something back, something, he isn't able to do on his own. In the best possible case, we will gather around $600 dollars which should be enough for a reasonable configuration.
Okay then, let's do it, but how?
All donations to the Realm667 in March, April and May will directly go into the crowd-funding for Virgilio's new computer - guaranteed! At the end of May, I will send the whole package to his brother's Paypal account an the two will organize the new hardware. So if you want to help, just click on the PayPal button at the right, login, do your donation and support one of our own lines, one of us Doomers.
And if you aren't sure if it is worth your donation: Consider that Virgilio is one of the lead developers of Blade of Agony. So it's not only Virgilio or the development team who benefits from your donations, it's also something the project itself benefits from.
Best regards,
Dan & the Realm667 team