For geeks and gaming fans, this is a man who needs no introduction, but that’s never stopped us. Jonathan Coulton is a songwriter who combines sincere musical and comedic talent. When he first quit his job to be a musician, he started “Thing a Week,” in which he wrote a new song every week for a year (a difficult pursuit to which LoadingReadyRun is obviously sympathetic).

His most famous song came at the end of the original Portal, “Still Alive.” If you’ve gone this long without hearing “Still Alive,” then you somehow avoided playing Portal for some unfathomable reason.

Coulton returned to pen “Want You Gone” for Portal 2, and has most recently released his eight album Artificial Heart. But there’s nothing artificial about the heart he’s put into the two awesome gift packs full of music and other goodies he’s donated to Desert Bus this year!

You can find Coulton’s totally unoriginally named website at www.jonathancoulton.com or you could find an important video from him and his friends Paul and Storm here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTO5yiN1b-I

At 6:30 PM well be recieving a call from Hugo Award winning author and president of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, John Scalzi. Best known for his novel Old Man’s War, John has written fiction, non-fiction, short stories and novels alike.  He also maintains his blog Whatever, at Scalzi.com, where he has been writing on a variety of subjects since 1998.

If you have any questions for John, Please post them in the comment section below!

Chances are quite good that if you’re the least bit interested in anything related to Desert Bus, you’ve bought something from ThinkGeek (or at least thought REALLY hard about it). Perhaps the most accurately named business in history, they’re an online business that sells specialty geek items. More than once, products they’ve released as April Fool’s Day jokes have actually been produced, including the Tauntaun sleeping bag. ThinkGeek was nice enough to send us one for the children, along with a ton of other cool stuff.

If you see us give away something you now desperately want, it’s probably still available at www.ThinkGeek.com.

The auction for that magnificent Majora’s Mask bag just put us over $50,000! It was so great, I accidentally posted this update too early! Fifty grand before the first shift ends! That’s almost inconceivable! it’s so great, we got this great art from the irreplaceable Ash Vickers:

We also got this great fanart of the currently VERY tired Kroze:

And a fellow named Adam built this ipmressive sculpture!

And then there’s this!

Well the $13.37 donation challenge has just blown the doors off $45,000 limit in about five minutes. This is amazing! I almost don’t want to post this in case the $50K milestone is only minutes away! Great job! Remember, you can donate $13.37 to get a chance at winning a Japanese Foil Innistrad set!

Longtime fan Lyinginbedmon couldn’t make it to Desert Bus this year, but he’s done the next best thing: he’s constructed a monument to our torment within the world of Minecraft.

You can check out the LRR Minecraft server at www.LRRcraft.com or on twitter at www.twitter.com/lrrcraft.

Our internet has gone kapoolie, but we’re still here, bussing away. The chat is running and so is the buscam. We’ll get the driver cam online as soon as we can!

Shamus Young is a software engineer, writer, and friend of LoadingReadyRun. You may know him from his blog Twenty-Sided, from his webcomic Stolen Pixels, or from his numerous columns and articles over on The Escapist. You may also know him from his gaming commentary webseries Spoiler Warning, (the title of which I contend he shamelessly stole from one of the ill-fated pilots LRR recorded but never actually released.)

Shamus will be calling in at 4:00PM Pacific time, so make sure to tune in!

FanGamer creates gamer swag of almost every imaginable variety: hats, mugs, posters, pins, DVDs and the all-important T-shirt. The true measure of a proud gamer can be found in his gaming-related T-shirt collection, and none would be complete without one of their awesome and well-made T-shirts. Just ask Graham Stark, famed comedian from LoadingReadyRun.com! He owns a few, and we love him.

FanGamer have really pulled out all the stops this year – designing the 2011 Special Edition Desert Bus t-shirt and embarking on an epic journey to try and settle the eternal question – is it faster to drive from Tuscon to Las Vegas, or should you actually try to take the Desert Bus?

Fangamer are in the delightful habit of sending us so much stuff, we can’t believe they have anything left in their warehouse but  empty boxes and that one guy who sleeps down there because it’s quiet. We thank FanGamer for their generosity and hope it hasn’t driven them to financial ruin. If it hasn’t, go ahead and check them out at www.fangamer.net.

I said I’g get you the rest of the entries, and by cracky, I meant it!

You can get all in the grill of the first set RIGHT HERE.