We're Playing Games for National Bailout This Week

For the third year in a row, the staff and community of Waypoint (plus many of our friends at Motherboard and elsewhere) are hosting Save Point, a marathon stream for a cause relating to our shared goal of building a more inclusive and just society. This year, the team is raising funds on behalf of National Bailout, a Black-led and Black-centered collective of abolitionist organizers, lawyers, and activists, that focuses on freeing Black moms and caregivers from pretrial detention and building a community based movement to end mass criminalization. We're excited to be doing this once again, as part of what's become something of a fall tradition following successful fundraisers for the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project and for the Trans Lifeline.

Of course, All Hell Broke Loose since the last time we did one of these. We're in the middle of a plague time when we are physically forbidden from cramming into the tiny studio spaces we were able to use for Save Point before. Millions of people are out of work and those of us who are lucky to still have jobs that we can do safely are often anxious about what the future holds. To top it off, and very much to the point of this marathon, we daily witness rampant police misconduct and violence that have amply proven the point of critics and abolitionists.

All of that changes what Save Point can and should look like, and so we're doing it a little differently this year. Because everyone is remoting in from their homes, we're trying to encourage a slightly healthier approach than we have in the past by shutting down the streams during "graveyard shift" hours. We'll probably be wrapping up sometime after 10 PM Eastern each night, and resuming at 8 AM.

Since that cuts down on "uptime" we'll also be extending Save Point a couple extra days. We'll be going from 12 noon Eastern on Wednesday September 16 through the evening of Sunday September 20. We're also going to intermingle the community streams and the staff streams, again so that people can take decent breaks.

Will this be the template moving forward? Too early to say! This is an experiment under singular (we hope) circumstances. But we hope you will enjoy the show on Waypoint's Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/waypoint) starting on Wednesday.