Category Archives: Written Articles

I guess I should finish this shit up, or something.

This sentence only exists because I want the word “penis” to appear on the front page of the site.

I am many things. Dashing. Hilarious. Always right. Probably manic. And, I’m told, possibly retarded – all wrapped within an oft-questioned sexuality and facade of glorious courage. What I am not, and never have been, is an interviewer. It’s never really been on the list of things I’ve wanted to do with my life. I want to meet awesome famous people, but I have no questions. Everything I want to know about them I can either already find on the Internet or they don’t wish to divulge.

What I suppose I’m getting at is the fact that all of my questions for Metroid Metal were written around six in the morning (granted, so are these journals, but at the time I was getting to bed around five in the morning, rather than the current 7 or 8 or 9 or the occasional two-hour power nap around noon. This didn’t bother me. It’s an interview. We’ll be sitting in a room, and we can be awkward and weird and spend more time getting reactions than answers.

Well, that was not exactly how this works out. Okay, so it’s less of an organized sit-down one-on-one as much as it’s a find the person and hope they have time to talk to you… thing. That’s fine, CK’s got it all control, maybe. And hey, we’re still doing these interviews as a team, so I’ll have time to look down and pick a good question that should go next, and we can riff off of each other and make this entertaining.

Oh, but now I’m on my own.

Ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck. Okay. Now I’m terrified.

We either had to get there by 2 or 4, and suddenly I can’t remember which. I think I wrote 4 the other day, but I wrote 2 in the original journal, so it was one of those and it doesn’t really matter. Why are you fretting over this so much? Get a job.

We very nearly miss it. We’re already late, and N1NJ4 absolutely has to stop at McDonald’s first. So shit. I guess we’re stopping at McDonald’s.

We get to the convention and go wait in the sitting area for Jon St. John to show up. Ten or fifteen minutes go by, and it occurs to me to peek in the window to see what’s going on in the room next to us. And what do I see, but Jon St. John! There’s a voice acting panel going on inside (Voice-a-Palooza) and we need to be there.

Accompanying Mr. St. John is Wes Johnson, Matthew Mercer (he’s EVERYWHERE), and um. Well, the guy with the glasses. But not THAT Guy with the Glasses. Anyways, we sit in the back, I climb upon a stack of chairs, and dig for a camera just in case. The panel’s pretty entertaining. I’ve been considering trying to get into voice acting, so I paid full attention. At the end, however, it got really good.

The four guys got together and, using suggestions from the audience, put together a scene they would (voice) act out for us then and there. JSJ was Blanche Devareux, a smoker from North Carolina. Matt Mercer was a… gay Scottish gnome, I believe. But those last two mostly seemed to converge into something vaguely Leprechauny. Wes Johnson was the narrator and shopkeeper (the shopkeeper being my favorite voice, somehow), and the fourth guy was Woody Allen.

Now, that IS quite a motley crew.

So CK and I got in to see JewWario. We opted to stand in the back of the room because we’re cool like that. They could only let so many people into the room, however, as the Fire Marshall is a douche. Zhu Zhu and Perry didn’t make it in.

Because there is an exactly-calculated one-man difference between everybody getting out safely and everybody burning alive with no hope.

JewWario was actually really interesting. Once they got things rolling, he talked at length about how to get your consoles to play import games. The DS plays them natively no matter what region it is. The PS2 needs a top-loader installed. And other such tips. About halfway through the panel, I get a text from N1NJ4 saying “Smells awesome in there”. I look around, and he’s standing inside the room, on the other side of the doorway from me, laughing. When I looked back minutes later, he was gone.

JewWario took some questions. One in particular caught my interest. At first, it was about Takahashi’s Challenge, but then he corrected himself to Takeshi’s Challenge. And I remember thinking, “Takeshi? Surely he can’t mean Beat Takeshi. Is there a Takeshi’s Castle game?” Finally, the panel wrapped up and we waited at the back of the room for Lotus Prince. I got bored and wandered off to see where that fantastic music was coming from. Turns out, we were next door to the JamSpace. I watched a band play a little Mega Man music and went back to get the guys to join me, but they were all busy with blah.

Eventually, we’re standing outside the room, and JewWario comes out with the Psychotaku. LP gets a picture with the two of them, and then I get one with the three of them. We hang out and talk for a bit, and then they must be on their way. I really like JewWario, and fully intend to check out his stuff, now. I’ve never seen anyone look so genuinely and completely interested in and pleased to be talking with his fans. He’s a really nice guy and, adding that to his interesting and informative panel, suddenly commands my respect.

While we’re here, I take another look at the sign by the JamSpace, and I realize… while I was in JewWario’s panel… I MISSED BRENTALFLOSS!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

On Friday, we showed up to MAGFest and wandered past the severely diminished registration line (by daily comparison). N1NJ4 immediately points out to me that he just saw brentalfloss go down the escalator. I book it like there’s no tomorrow, then have a leisurely ride down as I see him walking out of sight. Now, my first thought is, “Wow, holy shit, he’s got a pretty big head.” My second thought was, “Ah, he looks like he’s with his girlfriend and CK said everybody’s gonna contact him about interviews and he’s got everything under control.” So I didn’t jump off the side of the escalator and knock down thirty people and then hump brentalfloss’ leg, like I was considering.

And then we never saw him again.

Let that be a lesson to you: I do not make good decisions. Jumping, knocking, and humping is the proper procedure for any and all brentalfloss encounters in the future. Make a note of it.

This really double-sucks because he and Metroid Metal were the two people/groups thereof that I had wanted to see and interview during my time there the most. I bought both of their CDs ahead of time in case they didn’t have any on-hand for me to buy and get signed.

So I’m out some cash, too, I guess.

So the area directly underneath registration is the Dealer’s… uh, Room. I guess. I mean, it’s in a room. It’s not outside, so I’m assuming that’s true. I’m not an expert on the dichotomy of rooms and not rooms, but you could also call it an area or a general… sort of… dealery… zone.

…Place.

We walk around the Dealer’s Coordinates for a bit, checking out all the shirts and artwork they’ve got for sale. One guy’s got some crazy Link artwork going on, and a bunch of other stuff I’ve completely forgotten, which is a shame, because it was rather amazing. You really should have seen it. Every time I get near the Game Room side of the place, I hear sweet Mega Man music cranked out of this one TV that people are stopping by to get their asses kicked on (I assume they got their asses kicked because Jesus, Capcom, why can’t you make one single goddamn game that I’m good at?). It’s a decent collection of dealer stands. Look out, more Otakon comparisons coming your way!

Otakon has about nine billion merchants. And there are only ever, like, three that I’m interested in. Two of those are because they’re selling manga and I need the next volume of Trigun Maximum. And the other one is usually a place with a cool action figure or shirt I like. MAGFest has like ten. And they’ve all got something interesting and if I had more money, I would be broke.

Anyhoo, as I mentioned this was next to the Game Room. Which is three rooms. Well, one of those rooms is also the same room that is the Dealer’s Room, so, well, let’s just not get into that right now.

All this geography is giving me middle school flashbacks.

A-ha! I knew if I mentioned posting this entry the next night, it wouldn’t happen. Sorry ’bout that, lads, I instead used that time to write up a detailed list of site improvement suggestions. So I was still being productive! Who are you to say that I wasn’t? HM? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Punk. Go back to your Naruto.

After you read this, I mean.

So, it’s time to see who’s ready to turn in their food. Nobody can remember who was first, so CK volunteers us. I cringe. First is not the way to go. Especially with those golden 4’s on the line. Everybody’s going to hold onto those, no matter how good we are. And they’ll only remember everything they taste after as better. This is how physics works.

Granted, I found out later that only one 4 was given out (and no 0’s), but still. It wasn’t given out to us. That’s the important part to remember.

So we had switched up our entrée and appetizer. We decided ahead of time that the breakfast item would work much better if it was served first, with the noodle muck following that, and the dessert+drink bringing up the rear. CK takes the newly appointed appetizer to the front and sets it down in front of the judges. They handed him a mic to tell them and the audience what it was and what it was made of. He ran down the ingredients, and ended his speech with, “I like to call it… breakfast.” Saying that last part like sort of a verbal shrug, implying that the name was obvious.

One of the judges made a joke about giving him a 1 for, um. Whatever category the name fell under. And it became clear pretty quick that the name WAS important. It was either originality, or presentation. I think. So the judges begin to sample it, first asking for utensils, but then deciding that it’s finger food and picking it up. They certainly seemed to enjoy it. Well, Mr. Kikuta didn’t seem so pleased, if memory serves me right. But the others thought it came out well. Something to be proud of. Either Brandon or Brendon asked again what the name was, and I immediately turned to CK and said, “Don’t say ‘Breakfast.'”

In actuality, we had come up with a name for it earlier while we were still preparing everything. But for the life of us, we just couldn’t remember what the hell that name was. So he told them “One-Shot Breakfast.”

Now we get to the meat and potatoes of this story. Or well, the bacon and noodles. Whatever. Bacon’s meat. I’m sure something we used may have had some potato in it. You don’t know.

We had a plan going into this. Don’t take us for unprepared loons. Of course, plan or not, unprepared loons are exactly what N1NJ4 and I wound up being. We had planned out the entrée and the dessert, while agreeing that whatever the secret ingredients turned out to be, they would probably screw absolutely everything up. CK, of course, was not caught offguard. He set straight to work on his entrée which started off as something that I cannot tell you the name of because I’ve been trying to figure it out for like twenty goddamn minutes and I feel like my head might pop like a zit. And not in the hilarious Animal House way. a sort of Monte Cristo.

So anyways, both CK and my dad had had this idea to make a thing by some name Monte Cristo, and that’s what we started with. And then I decided we should combine the milk and the instant coffee together and soak it into the toast because when you do that with cocoa it’s delicious. So what the idea became was this: He’d cook the toast and soak it in the coffee mix (or vice versa, I was never all that clear on the process), then cook the eggs on top of that and top the whole thing with bacon.

Meanwhile, our idea for the appetizer basically boiled down to doing something involving the Tostitos. Since I usually come up with the crazy things I make at home on the fly (and they tend to wind up pretty good), I figured, oh what the hell.

So the Gamer Iron Chef kicks off and CK goes to work on the toast and I’m left standing there without a clue in the world as to what to do. CK instructed me and N1NJ4 to make the dessert drink awhile (no slash, as it was both), but in the interests of keeping it cold, I decided to hold off on that for awhile. So I sort of stood there looking around trying to figure out something. Anything. I started just getting food and beginning projects with no intentions yet of using any of them. I dumped the box of macaroni into a bowl, and then never used it or even touched it again for the rest of the competition.

Why, hello there fellow Space Monkeys and also our loyal fan! I’m here to expose the truths behind all those LIES apparent in CK’s recent filthy “journalism”.

Where to begin?

I began Thursday by donning my Hoagie costume (a.k.a. my regular clothes, only specifically wearing the same t-shirt Hoagie wears, along with a blue cap). We get to the Hilton where it’s being held and I make N1NJ4 keep on going (oh, it’s N1NJ4, myself, and CK – I feel I should point that out) until we spot a Giant. Get out, and scope the place out. The entrance is not out front. It is back around the side and hidden and not marked because FUCK customers.

We had a plan. We needed ice cream. We run off and grab three single-serving containers of vanilla Ben & Jerry’s and head off looking for delicious bacon! We grab some yellow American cheese and some Oscar Meyer microwaveable bacon. Head back and pick up a bag of ice to keep all this cold, even though those two lunatics are trying to convince me ice cream will stay cold out in the trunk. Trunk be damned! We’re getting this ice, and ain’t no man or woman of this Earth gonna convince me otherwise.

So we pay and get ourselves to the convention. N1NJ4 turns off the road onto the roof of the parking garage which is physical insanity, something I would expect of, say, an Elder God. We park and get our gear and head in and spend the next hour in line. We made some pretty decent progress by the end of that hour. We got from one end of a hallway to another. Unfortunately, that was still only about half the distance of the line.