Making and playing games are great hobbies. On terms of global importance, though, these things are pretty small.

This week four important individuals became backers of Justin Nichol's Fantasy Portrait Marathon:

• Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons
• Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons
• Lawrence Lessig, founding board member of Creative Commons and former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and president of the Free Software Foundation

I'm thrilled that their portraits will appear as NPCs in Flare. In return, I support these important organizations and I hope you will as well.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an organization that creates art content licenses which allow creators to give various permissions to users. These licenses are a valuable part of our remix, mash-up, and sampling culture.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fights for user rights the world over. They focus on issues like internet free speech, privacy, and fair use.

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) promotes computer user freedoms through licenses that grant and protect freedoms, free software development, and campaigns against DRM and software patents.

I'll be honest here -- OGA accepts Paypal because it's relatively cheap and a lot of people use it.  We withdraw our Paypal money every month so as to prevent massive losses if they happen to arbitrarily decide to freeze our account, as they have been known to do in the past.  It's one of those annoying practical decisions that you have to make when you run a community website -- risk dealing with Paypal, or lose out on a lot of donation money.  As things stand, OGA will continue to accept money by Paypal until few enough people use it that it makes sense to stop.

All that being said, there are plenty of people out there who would prefer not to deal with Paypal at all, and we're now providing an alternative for these folks: Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a P2P virtual currency that can be exchanged from person to person without going through any kind of central authority.  You can exchange Bitcoins either by running your own P2P bitcoin client, or going through a site such as mybitcoin.com, which takes care of that for you.  You can read more about it on their site -- they explain it far better than I can. 

If you want to donate Bitcoins to OGA, you can go through money of the many exchange sites and purchase some with various payment methods and then send them to OGA.  At the moment, Bitcoins are currently exchanging for 20 to 23 cents apiece.

If you're an artist and you'd prefer to accept Bitcoins as payment for a commission, we'll be happy to accomodate you.

As a final note, I should point out that we're offering Bitcoins as a donation option.  OGA will, for the forseeable future, continue to accept Paypal.  If you'd prefer to avoid dealing with Paypal and don't want to use Bitcoins, we can arrange other donation methods, such as money order or bank transfers.

Reminder: OGA is currently taking donation money to pay for for this commission, which will be released by the artists when we reach our goal of $220.