Minecraft SMP Returns, No Stream Tonight, and 5K & 10K Is Happening!

Ryan Ritter

29 Jan 2026 — 2 min read

Season Two kicks off with a building challenge. I’m so hosed.

Hey, heroes!

Lots of news to cover this week on the heels of a winter storm that still has my kids out of school this morning. Please pray for Mrs. Tex as I’m writing this on a Wednesday night waiting to board a plane for work and will be gone until Friday.

Since I’ll be out of state, there will be no stream on Thursday. Will I make up for this on Friday or Saturday? Nope!

That being said…

Extra Life Minecraft SMP Returns!

This Sunday, February 1 at 2:00 PM CST, the Minecraft SMP crew returns for season two of our hardcore server with a special preview episode featuring Guess the Build!

What’s Guess the Build? Imagine a game of telephone, but instead of whispering a phrase to your friend, you build it in Minecraft. Another person comes in, looks at your build, guesses at what the prompt is and we continue until we get to a final build that will likely look absolutely nothing like the original prompt.

Especially if I’m involved. I have zero confidence in my Minecraft building skills.

The actual Hardcore SMP madness will happen two weeks later on Sunday, February 15, which I am, of course, in doubt for thanks to work. Just starting off with a bang here.

We have a lot of new folks in the crew, new incentives, and plenty of really silly deaths to come!

Remember the 2024 Incentives?

Depending on how long you’ve been on my donor mailing list, you may or may not remember that in 2024, I decided to torture myself in saying I’d run a 5K and also a 10K at various donation levels.

Y’all hit that. I started training. And then our school district notified us that our kids’ school was on a list to close and I devoted my free time in fighting that unsuccessfully. Then I got a promotion at work (read: had so much more work and travel) in 2025.

Well, now I’m back on track and training. Not only that, I’ve signed up for the races and I’m not about to burn the registration money.

I run the 5K on Sunday, March 8 and the 10K on Sunday, April 12.

I’m brainstorming some extra incentives for each, especially since the 10K has an 80s theme. Other year-long incentive goals are in the works too. Also…potentially a birthday stream next week?

Stay tuned!

Come See How the Sausage Is Made

On Saturday, I fired up a stream to see if my GPU troubles were behind me. Thankfully, my new GPU, plus a couple tweaks got everything back to not crashing/lagging/blowing things up. With that major piece in place, I still have more on my list to take care

New Year, Same Goal

Firstly, if this is your first time receiving this newsletter, I can't thank you enough for you donation this past year (and if you were doing a monthly donation, go reset it!)! I've outgrown Extra Life's email tools, so run this myself to help

See You After Christmas

I want to thank everyone for a very incredible Game Day marathon. You helped raise just under $1,400 during the stream! Unfortunately (for me), I didn’t complete the game in the 24 hour time limit. I fell about one and a half dungeons short. I completed part of

For Those (Streams) That Come After (Game Day)

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