Every October
Thocctober
Everything the stream earns in October goes into a fund. Not donations — Simon's own income for the month, handed over. The community piles hardware in on top of it, and then it all goes back out again.
of his own money, over four years
pieces of hardware given away, worth about $24,846
keyboards built for people who had no idea
How do you enter?
You already are. You don't need to be a subscriber, or a follower, or anything at all. You just need to hang around and watch some streams.
Two kinds of year
Pool years
People donate hardware — kits, switches, keycaps, whole builds — and it gets handed out. In 2022 and 2024 that came to 147 separate items.
Build years
You nominate someone who deserves a keyboard, and the community builds it for them. Parts get donated, people volunteer to assemble it, and it arrives without warning. One-off builds have run past $600.
2023 — 8 builds. 2025 — 9 builds.
Who they were built for
Nobody nominates themselves. Every single one is someone putting a friend or a relative forward, writing a few hundred words about why that person deserves something nice, and then quietly organising a keyboard for them. This is the shape of it:
- ● A mother, from the person she raised
- ● A brother, and the best man at his wedding
- ● A coworker, a few years into a new country
- ● A friend from school, who thought the whole hobby was ridiculous
- ● A sibling who tries to see the good in everyone
- ● A boss who hired someone that everybody else passed over
- ● A friend of ten years, who is really more of a younger brother
- ● A friend from middle school, after the years pulled them apart
The nominations themselves are personal, and they belong to the people who wrote them — so they stay in the Discord where they were posted, not on this page.
The boards
Donated parts, assembled by volunteers, cased up and posted to someone who didn't know it was coming. In 2023 the builds were put together by Chad, Hugh, Bachoo and Prittyglue.
The part nobody planned: people kept winning things and immediately giving them away again. A Tofu65 handed straight to a mate — his first ever custom. Switches won and passed on to a friend. Deskmats re-gifted before they'd even shipped.
It happens every single year.
In the first round of 2022 alone, $4,722 of hardware went out the door.
