| Pink Berries and Black Flag

Well, if it is any consolation, the old Dunkin' Donuts location at the intersection of PCH and Aviation is becoming a Pink Berry. I was down in LA for a few days and drove by it. I was saddened by the fact that the once great DD that supplied so many Bonus Cups to the likes of the Descendents and Black Flag is becoming a store called Pink Berry.

For what does this consolation anecdote serve? I don't know. Maybe you can find peace in the expansion of PB while battling the anger at 4 star hotel accommodations and silly parachuting-into-limo plane rides.

| fucked up

So my brothers friend arranges a hotel and a pickup for me in Zhuhai. The plane is scheduled to arrive at 9:30 but fuckin doesn't anticipate the immigration and the fact it takes at least 30 minutes to pass through immigration of Macau and then into China. That's 1 hour at least after plane lands. So she schedules the hotel pickup at 9:30. The hotel driver leaves after waiting for 45 min... who would blame them?
Either she's a fucking idiot or she just didn't know it takes that long to get from macau to china. If it's the latter it's a little more understandable but still a fucking moron because with a little effort she coulda realized it. Am i expected to parachute out the plane and into the car exactly at 9:30... fuck

Then the hotel accomodations suck dick. The hotel overbooks and lets go of my room so sticks me with a shit for fuck room that's really tiny for a 4 star hotel. The rug is covered with fucking stains, who the fuck knows what stains it is but i have to wear slippers.

I'm actually pretty fucking pissed about the whole thing.

Rice to Richez...

That's a hilarious name... reminds of the magic card ashes to ashes... or something.

Hey rudester, give me your friggin number biatch.. ur the only one i know that might still be up at 1 am.

So yeah, there is a lot of negative hype on the yogurt, saying that it's not really yogurt since it's frozen, but i don't know, I'll still have to do some research on that. But the implosion is probably cuz everyone started copycatting, and when you do that some are bound to close down. Pberry still has around 33 locations and it's still expanding. The powders are quite common, i think the deal is to be the first and not the 2nd 3rd or 50th to open around the block.

Mentioning penguins, fuck! i actualy remember that from somewhere.

I think Jon's in Costa Rica for the week on a vacation - I took his ass to the airport.. maybe "costa rica" was just a codename for his true destination... (insert joke destination here.)

Yeah Johnny, I'm no king of market research or anything, but when I was working downtown last year I worked with this old lady that's a food con-a-saurus and she knew the history of pink berry and where that style originated and all that shit. Pretty interesting. But just as an example I could see the short while I was down there, Pink B opened: big line of people for over priced yogurt. Just like the old days with Penguins (remember that shit!?) Then right nearby another spot opened (different name, same shit) then a few others popped up. And THEN (and this is in the space of a little over a year) some of those places were already closing down! I think it was just like EXPLOSION and fizzled out, at least in my area. ALSO, I remember when it was getting popular here a bunch of news channels starting running stories on how unhealthy that shit was lol. Propaganda! But I think that hurt business. I dunno. I don't know what the scene in PI is like, but I'm sure if you opened up one of those places it'd do well enough, I assume.

Speaking of random franchises: Last year when I was in New York there was this RANDOM spot in Little Italy called Rice to Riches (haha) that was a friggen RICE PUDDING place all bright and obnoxious like a P-Barrys. I think it was the only one but it totally felt like a franchise and it was a trip. And tasty as hell, but you KNOW that shit ain't good for you. But SOOOO friggen tasty. And they had a lot of people there. Here's the website: Rice 2 Richez - If you guys are ever in NY you GOTTA try it. Friggen delicious. But since it doesn't even seem the LEAST bit healthy, I don't see it blowing up like here in Cali.

Pretty funny,

i just dialed jon's number and i got a "woah.... click"

That's probably an old number. I realized I odn't have anyones working number except for Aaron...
So... send me some updated numbers dudes, so i can call u in the middle of the night when i'm drunk and share some love.


Johnny

Oh yeah? what do u mean by burned itself in the process... do u mean no one goes to pberry anymore? or the craze died down? but it's not unexpected the craze wouldn't die down... there were 3000 people a day at one of those shops... you can't maintain that forever. However that doesn't mean business isn't still trendy or people stopped eating frozen yogurt.

Anyway, I like your feedback rude! If you can elaborate on it, I'd appreciate it as research. All I know is these places are still pretty trendy and that Pberry just got bought up by Starbucks. Anyone else?>

| Eric: America's God of War

Everyone knows how much Eric LOVES war and war games, so I totally thought of him this weekend. I watched a fuck-ton of documentaries on World War Deuce.

First series was on Aww-switch (I can't spell it or be bothered looking up the proper spelling.)It was interesting and pretty messed up. The whole history of the facility and it's purposes before becoming the infamous death camp.
Crazy shit man.

The second series I watched was called "War of the Century" and was aboutthe Eastern Front - Germans vs. Russians. THAT shit was insane. Assholes on both sides and who got fucked the most? The civilians of course, from all sides too. Jeez. They were talking about the "partisans" - like the russian gorilla fighters
and those dudes were pretty fucked up even against their own people. And then german reprisals. ALL bad. And what was nuts about both this documentary series was they'd have interviews with officers and soldiers and MOST of them were just "meh, yeah I shot kids." Like, not a whole lot of remorse. Like one dude was talking about a bunch of enemy soldats who surrendered and how they shot them up while the dudes were crouching on the ground.

Also, lots of footage I hadn't seen before. FUCK, war is bad. But how civilians really bare the brunt of all this bullshit, totally made me think of A Song of Ice and Fire. OH YEAH.

JAH-KNEE: I dunno dude. The trend for those Korean yogurt spots was a real quick flare down here - burned itself out pretty quick. I think we had Pink Berry and one called Red Mango or some shit, and they got SUPER popular and then tried to expand and I think
they got burned in the process.

| Y+

After some crazy ideas pitched onto this blog for my friends to read, this is my latest. I'm seriously considering looking into starting a soft surve frozen yogert shop.

Would love to hear any advise, comments, flurries etc.

It's a craze in the US, but still rather new here. So in a different part of the universe, the wheel is still being invented. I'm betting this wheel will be just as big of a hit.

So far I've gotten a business plan, location, and store concept all laid out. I'm talking to a few relatives for financing. I was thinking about documenting this whole process just for kicks. I wanted to create a viral marketing plan to launch this just like all the hype with the other yogurt shops.


Intelligent thots?

| N+

Trailer

I met with Jon and Janice for a drink while they had a stopover in Los Ang-a-leez tonight (they're on their way to Costa Rica) and we were shootin' the shit and I mentioned N+ for X-Box Live Arcade and he'd never heard of it!?! Shit is rad. It's an update of the computer game N which is free for mac and pc.

It's a great game! Puzzle/action thingy sorta like Lode Runner if you guys remember that one. This you only have two buttons - jump and suicide (and believe me, you'll fucking use that suicide button, dammit.) And you run around the maps trying to get to the end of them. Great description, huh?

Go here for N for free: The Way of the Ninja or if you got a console, check out the demo/trial for N+. It's a really solid update. Very smooth, addictive, goddamn frustrating, and generally cool. It's cheap to buy or go for the pc version for free, basically the same.

I thought everyone knew about this game, I was all shocked! So, just sharing.

| Space Hulk, GW, Teardown, and You

Teardown.se Space Hulk Game 6 Feet Under

Well, it looks like GW may have thought differently about the little side project these two Swedes put together. Apparently the d/l numbers have risen so high, that GW took notice and now probably see that their IS a market for Space Hulk and they need to squash competitors in that same space.

That being said, I wouldn't doubt it was their intention all along to allow the little guys take all the time they needed for dev and use their little program to gauge the interest in their IP. Now that interest has been proven, bye-bye little guy, and now GW will sit on the IP until they feel like developing it for the DS.

| Mad props

I really think it is cool that some many people are sharing their D&D memories and its impact on their lives. A great tribute to the genre built by Gygax.

jr0n: No truer words have ever been said than, "Roll four six-siders, drop the lowest. I can't even imagine how many thousands of times I've done that in my life."

D>M>

Gygax, rolling 20's in the house of Pelor.

| He will be critically missed.

(Ok, last quote I have to steal on the guy. It's a good one though!)

That's the crazy thing, like what I'm seeing all over the internet with what people are thanking Gary Gygax for: the lasting friendships that were created over D&D. Isn't that a trip!? I guess when you're young and playing RPGs you just BOND with the people you're around. There's definitely a weird sense of comfort that you gain with people in your gaming group (at least when we were kids.) I'm SO glad that I thought it was "cool" to play RPGs. My first exposure to D&D was this crazy public-access-ish show on hobbies that had this nasty neck-beard giving tips on painting D&D miniatures and explaining D&D (it was totally 1st edition.) I remember I was blown away and SO wanted to try it out. It would be a few years (quite a few in fact) before I ever got to play in a group, but man, what a lasting impression it left.

Here's a cool comic about his passing.
Comic
And it's funny, on the news tonight there was some story about WISCONSIN and they were talking to locals about "this tragic loss" and it was about some fucking football player retiring lol. For a SECOND I thought it was about GG. Oh well.

| Heart condition? Wow, I always thought it’d be owlbears that got him.

(Also stolen.)

I heard about this through the nerd grapevine at work; someone I don't really work with, but with whom I had previously discussed D&D 4th ed in the carpool sought me out and told me.

Bummer.

My literacy-pushing uncle was bitterly disappointed when I used a B. Dalton gift certificate to buy the red box basic D&D set when I was in 4th grade. I was really into Zork, and Fighting Fantasy books so I thought this would be right up my alley. I tried reading through the set and just had no idea what the hell was going on. I lost the books.

A year later in 5th grade I used another gift certificate to buy the red box again and this time I was able to figure it out. I recruited Nathan and Paul, fellow fantasy geeks courtesy of the Bard's Tale series, and we were off and running. Most of our adventures were moronic journeys through poorly thought out cave systems. There were always a lot of 10x10 rooms with one-way doors. Over the next couple years our group expanded and contracted to include at various times Matt, Dan, Brandon, Jordan... I vaguely knew your crowd (through Eric and Alex) played but honestly you guys were scary-looking fuckers and I stayed the hell away as much as possible.

Not that we ever, ever got anywhere beyond the first five levels, but it was so much fun looking through the Companion and Master level sets (15th-25th and 26th-36th level, respectively) and drooling over the treasure, spells, and arcane rules sets. I spent an entire sleepover at Dan's house one night rolling up treasure troves from ancient dragon hoards.

Playing D&D appealed to my both my sense of storytelling and my obsessive interest in studying anything that wasn't in a school book. By the time junior high rolled around D&D was a big part of my life. When my family went to Australia for half a year in 7th grade I spent a lot of my free time doodling out epic campaign ideas in graph paper journals. Of course none of these went anywhere when I got back, but at least it kept me from going out and enjoying the Australia sunshine.

I basically met everyone in the Action Team through D&D or related activities. In the summer after 8th grade 2nd edition AD&D came out, and Paul and I sensed it was time to put away our childish Basic D&D books. We were men now and men played AD&D, dammit.
In 9th grade the old group was mostly gone except for Paul and Jordan. It was time for fresh blood and Paul was a pretty good recruiter. He pulled in Rude through their pedophiliac English teacher's class, and recruited Ja-el to play a ninja whose first action was to commit flaming seppukku, permanently scarring my ranger. In 10th grade I started going to cons with most of the rest of you bastards from the Action Team and suddenly there were a wealth of players and lots of people willing to run games. And through my first or second year of college we played a lot of D&D, especially me, Mike and JP in the dorms.

Roll four six-siders, drop the lowest. I can't even imagine how many thousands of times I've done that in my life.

At Mattel I met a few more role-players. Mattel bought a company that had bought a company that was developing an, inevitably shitty game based on these weird new 3rd ed rules that were coming. Bob, one of our lead testers summoned the geekiest of us (Denis, Laurie, Mark, Peter, Jay, and I am surely forgetting others) to a dim office and asked us if we'd be interested in reading over the new rules to prep for the shitty game shortly coming into test. Would we be interested? Hell yes, we'd be interested. I signed an NDA and remember reading a brass tack bound printout of the 3rd ed rules in Eric's good old bedroom on Elm, where few women may have set foot, but where certainly many dice were rolled.

Then some of us went to GenCon in 2000 for the big release, still my only GenCon. Playing the new game just felt so fresh and fun. It was obviously superior to the old editions in so many ways. It didn't have the texture of nostalgia but it was a great rule set. It really felt designed.

I honestly have barely played D&D since that last campaign we played, but man, I can still remember almost every detail of that campaign. That fight against the kobolds, where everybody went down except Rudy, and it all came down to a crossbow shot to kill the kobold running for the door beyond which an entire unaware tribe waited, was honestly one of the most tense and fun things I've been through in any game.

Damn, now I want to draw up a dungeon.

I could go on.

| Boo...

This is how I found out...

My Boss: Huh. I guess the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons died.
Me: Whoa?! Gary Gygax dies?!
My Boss: Uhh... Yeah that's what the article says.

Damn. The first thing to pop in my head: "It's a... *the sound of rolling dice* Pleasure to meet you!"

My first memories of the D&D fantasy world begin with Dungeon. I owned the game as a pretty young kid. 1st or 2nd grade and I didn't know how to play it for a while. Regardless, the cards were awesome and the dungeon full of adventure, heroism and mystery. I would pour over the game relentlessly and create my own fantasy stories before I knew how to play. Once I did know how to play I would play by myself for hours.

My first true D&D books, bought at the old B Dalton, were the purple cover basic set and wayyyyy beyond my comprehension skills in 2nd grade. I think Megan Steven's brother had a hand in this and Dungeon for that matter. He was a good bit older and into D&D. He had all these minis and a wooden labyrinth he had built that drew me right in.

O rugs helped introduced me to the real deal in 3rd grade. We went over some weird older kid's house only once, but that was more than enough. He had all these well worn character sheets with fantastic high level characters and he ran a little mini adventure for us. I was so in over my head. He didn't really explain the whole concept of an RPG and at first I was lost, but very quickly enchanted.

The sad thing is, that I really didn't get any consistent D&D experience until I was a Sophomore in High School. O rugs and I had interest but no one to game with that had working knowledge. Rich deliberately isolated us from the convention group for a long time, but eventually busted in during High School. Purely by accident O rugs and I came over while Elzar was over. From there it was all a natural series of progressive steps immersing into the realm as a whole. Unfortunately, by then the group had played the hell out of D&D and was moving on to other systems. By far the longest single campaign I played in was the El Segundo era.

I still very much miss D&D. It has the feel of that comfortable old chair in your favorite cozy room occasionally remembered from the salad days of childhood.

D>M>