News

This month DadLAN hosted another huge event in 10 locations across Australia: Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Central Coast NSW, Fraser Coast QLD, Bundaberg, Wollongong, Canberra.

Next month we are booting up: Hobart & Gold Coast (and maybe more!)

Thank you to our sponsors!

We continue to be humbled by the extraordinary support our sponsors provide; from catering to venue hire, to equipment, and more. Thank you from all of us – you are helping us grow and flourish in our goal to improve mental health and support for Dads across the country.

We also have a raft of big news and announcements:

Statistics

At its core DadLAN cares deeply about data both in the wider mental health space and making sure to capture good and actionable data from events so that we know what is working and what isn’t. We have established a new internal research team and we are delighted to be able to collate these key statistics so far:

DadLAN Pushup Challenge

DadLAN MaxHealth

Each quarter DadLAN will run a competition for each subnet to encourage its participants to do the health thing they know they should do, but don’t. After all, you can’t have mental health without physical health.

This quarter we are focusing on Skin Checks. The subnet with the highest percentage of Dads who complete a skin check this quarter will get a trophy and a mystery box.

We encourage each subnet to engage in light competition and social pressure in order to win 🙂

 Merchandise

We now have hoodies available to buy in our shop – perfect for winter!

June saw well over 140 DadLAN participants from nearly every corner of Australia join us for our biggest event ever! We even had several new Subnets (that’s what we call our local chapters of DadLAN) come online for the first time!

You can now find a DadLAN group in:

• Brisbane
• Sydney
• Adelaide
• Perth
• Melbourne
• Central Coast NSW
• Fraser Coast QLD
• Bundaberg
• Woolongong
• Canberra
• Tasmania

Thanks to our sponsors

Quotes

DadLAN has provided a supportive and inclusive space both in person and online that I didn’t even realise was missing.

DadLAN has given me a community again

Great initiative and helps blokes go into places well beyond gaming, things that we think we can’t ask mates because it’s not what men do.

Networking stats

We have an amazing team of volunteers who work on our networking/Wireguard infrastructure.

Hi Everyone

It’s been a week since DadLAN May, and what an afternoon! Games were played, lunch was eaten, friendships were solidified, and lives were discussed.

And with nearly 60 attendees across 5 locations plus remote players, we are getting dangerously close to maxing out the biggest maps in a number of games!

What the attendees said

DadLAN has provided a supportive and inclusive space both in person and online that I didn’t even realise was missing.

DadLAN has given me a community again

Great initiative and helps blokes go into places well beyond gaming, things that we think we can’t asks mates because its not what men do.

Thanks

A huge thank you as always goes out to our supporters for the month:

Catering

• Domino’s Pizza Hervey Bay
• Fraser Coast Artisan Pasta Bar
• Guzman y Gomez Mexican Kitchen

Venues

• ItsBroken Digital
• City of Sydney
• Hervey Bay Neighbourhood Centre
• Nunawading Community Centre
• The Mawson Centre

The People

It takes a decent number of people, both on the day, and throughout the month to make DadLAN happen, and a huge thank you goes out to every one of you.

DadLAN June

DadLAN June is coming! Lock June 16th into your calendars and keep your eyes peeled for tickets which will be available soon. Also keep an eye out for the new subnets which will officially be coming (or returning) online!

On Sunday, DadLAN held our biggest event to date with 5 simultaneous in-person LANs alongside a remote contingent.

This was our smoothest event to date – local game, nationwide game, food and catching up with friends!
Big thank you to everyone who could make it, either on person or remotely, good to see so many of you in-game and IRL.

It takes a surprising number of people to make events like this happen, so thank you to everyone who contributes to the ongoing running of DadLAN, and to those who make these events possible.
Big thank you also goes to our partners and sponsors:

• WorkVentures
• City of Sydney
• ItsBroken Digital
• Fraser Coast Artisan Pasta Bar
• Domino’s Hervey Bay

What a weekend!

This month was another great success, with the individual subnet games followed by a whole LAN game working a treat!

Big thanks go out to our partner WorkVentures for helping provide hardware and expertise!

Lastly, lock it in Dads – DadLAN April will be on April 14th! Ticket links coming soon in the Discord!

DadLAN is a group dedicated to the mental health and wellbeing of dads (and non-dads) across Australia.

We are a community of over 1000 members in our Discord and run monthly in-person gaming meetups.
Although our in-person events revolve around gaming, our Discord doesn’t with topics as varied as Dad and child health, internet safety, music, tv/movies and coding.

If this feels like a community that you could fit into, please join us on our Discord

Just over a week ago, DadLAN hosted our biggest event to date, hosting approx 50 dads across 3 cities (plus 12 remote players)!

The event was a huge success with minimal lag and technical issues, and plenty of time to play and socialise. Huge thanks goes out to our sponsors helping with both venues and food – WORKSHOP BY POMT – Sydney venue, ItsBroken Digital – Brisbane venue, Scoops and Candy – Brisbane catering.

Tickets are now available for our March events when we will be having Perth (and hopefully Adelaide) join Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for the first time! Speaking of Sydney, do you know of any good venues that would suit our requirements? We are open to suggestions as POMT are unable to host us every month.

Since then, we have hit 1000 Discord members, which is huge! The amount of support the dads are giving each other (not to mention the number of Dad jokes) is truly inspiring.

Did you know we have volunteer roles open? We are looking for an “Operations Bureaucrat” of sorts – venue procurement, government grant applications, sponsorships and the like. All the details are in Discord

If you know of any other dads who would be interested, not just in the gaming, but the general Dad community? Invite them to our Discord

Last Sunday (21/1) we witnessed another highly successful in-person DadLAN at the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre.

Everyone started with a game of Quake 3 before splitting off to play some UT2K4 and OpenRA (Red Alert 2).

It was a great afternoon of pizza, fragging and dad chat. Looking forward to seeing what Melbourne and Brisbane can manage when they come online next month!

As always, join in the chat and help organise on the Discord

DadLAN December was a huge success.

Highlights

• 18 in-person, with 6 remote via DadWAN (including New Zealand!)
• Amazing venue thanks to WORKSHOP | BY POMT – flexible seating, superb internet, and awesome AV integration all around us
• DadWAN – our Wireguard solution – worked flawlessly. David Pirogov even wrote a Wireguard management solution and Discord bot to facilitate self-service config provisioning
• We had 12 laptops and a gigabit switch donated to support this DadLAN and future subnets
• There are over 200 in our Discord channel now (Facebook ads really work!)
• There’s some some great wide-ranging topics being discussed in the Discord, from nerd talk, to dad talk, to music, etc

Coming up:

• Central Coast is spinning up in January
• Melbourne is spinning up in Feburary

DadLAN is a social mental health initiative to bring together Dads to play games and chat. If you have a facility to host us, please reach out.

Join us at https://dadlan.au and see you at the January event!

We hosted our first DadLAN (https://dadlan.au) event on Sunday – a social men’s mental health initiative to bring together Dads in-person and play old school games in a LAN. Kind of like a Men’s Shed for nerds.

Highlights

• There were 9 of us, a great turnout for a first time event
• There is always one person who is great at all games (not me), and now we know who to target next time
• There was some some light Dad chat, and more on the Discord
• We did some troubleshooting, including upgrading the LAN connection with a spare router Toby Vervaart brought in a suitcase full of random equipment
• It was a great, easy-going and fun atmosphere

We’re planning on making this a monthly event, so stay tuned for November’s date by joining the Discord server and if you’d like to run your own local one, we can help set that up with you.