Been a while since I wrote one of these…I wish I was doing it under happier circumstances.
On Wednesday, March 5th, we lost one of the original pillars of the SomeAwesome community. Lisa Olson, known by most folks here as AmzDeoris, had been in the hospital for a couple of months fighting an infection from a back injury. While we were originally given a hopeful diagnosis, things took a sudden and precipitous turn for the worse, and in just a short time she was taken from us.
Amz was a singular force of nature for this group. Not only was she our beloved captain for the yearly Extra Life charity event (an event I certainly would not have found the strength to do every year were she not pushing me to do so), she was a cherished friend who always had our back and did everything she could to make sure that this community was keeping up, going all the way back to our origin days with Gaming Mommies.
She is a foundational chapter in the story that is SomeAwesome, and she will be greatly missed.
GoFundMe Fundraiser – Earth Day 4/22
Amz loved our Earth Day events, she was a staunch advocate of recycling and nature in general, so we thought it would be an appropriate day to honor her with a gaming marathon that will run from 11am EDT (Amz always preferred that we start our gaming marathons at a time she could join over on the west coast) to 11pm. We will play six games, all titles that she regularly played with us. Some of these games will have worlds uploaded that she actually played on, and we will visit the homes that she built with us on these maps.
Here are the games and times that we will be playing:
- Don’t Starve Together – 11am to 1pm EDT
- Raft – 1pm to 3pm EDT
- ARK: Survival Evolved – 3pm to 5pm EDT
- Valheim – 5pm to 7pm EDT
- 7 Days to Die – 7pm to 9pm EDT
- Among Us – 9pm to 11pm EDT
I know what you’re saying: where’s Minecraft? Don’t worry, we’re dedicating an entire game night to that. See the next section, but I wanted to feature this one first because it comes with an important side note.
Because of Amz’s long stay in the hospital, she accrued a lot of medical debt, not to mention the costs that go with burying a loved one. So on this Earth Day, we will be directing people to the GoFundme page for her husband Jeff and family, in an effort to mitigate the costs associated with her passing.
We hope that you can contribute to this fundraiser, but even if you can’t, we will be updating the GoFundMe page with some words from those who knew and loved her. So if you’d like to include a couple of sentences about a memory of Amz or what she meant to you, you can add them as a comment below or you can send me or Tonya a DM on Facebook or Discord letting us know what you’d like to have added. We appreciate anything you can do.
Minecraft Monday – April 21st
The day before our fundraiser marathon, we will be doing a livestream on Twitch of our old Nunu map, where we will be visiting builds old and new, including the AmzDeoris Memorial, built adjacent to the Jackson Memorial (another beloved player who was taken from us too soon many years ago). We will be starting around 8pm EDT and we hope you can join us in the Discord voice channel as well as on the server. If you’d like to play with us that evening, make sure you set up your Minecraft launcher with an installation that uses Java version 1.12.2 and the server address is nu.smaws.me
Further to that, we will be restoring the private Facebook group back to Some Awesome Minecraft, and we hope to continue honoring Amz with a semi-weekly Minecraft stream on the Nunu server, which we will eventually attempt to update to the current version 1.21.5
On a Personal Note
Amz really was the best of us. I look back at a decade of good times, but I also see a lot of mistakes that we made with the community, or letting grudges get in the way of playing games with those who meant so much to us, or just the occasional burning out that caused a lot of friction within SomeAwesome. All the while, Amz never let that bring her down. She was the glue between so many of the people in this group, and I hope that we can do her proud in the future. I know she’ll be looking down on us, ready to give us the pep talk we need to persevere. I’m not typically an emotional guy, but I will really miss all the things she did to make this group the fantastic bundle of nerds it is.
Again, please leave a comment below if you’d like to include a few words on her fundraising page, or feel free to reach out directly. Thank you for anything you can contribute.
