I’ll have part 2 of the California vacation posts up soon, by end of Saturday at the latest. I may even be able to start talking about my own site and side projects that will be coming up in very quick order. Although really, it’ll just be me announcing a site url at most.
Well, I’m officially back in Iowa, which is a sad thing to me. I have come back with a story though, a story about my travels, cause I know you all want to hear it. I expect this to be no more than 3 parts long, and in the end I may even reveal something deeply personal. What is it I may reveal? Well… that’d spoil the surprise.
Lets begin this tale with how it should begin, with myself on the road. That is right everyone, I drove to San Diego, CA from central Iowa. This trip is roughly 1,800 miles long, give or take 50 miles depending on your route. I have flown to San Diego before, and it was a traumatizing experience. Seriously, it was bad enough I was tempted to pretend to board my plane back home from San Diego, after saying farewell to my friend, then get a cab to the nearest Amtrak. I have an excuse though for not flying this time around though (besides it being scary), I wanted to see the country first hand, and I did.
If I could describe the country in one word, I would first have to section off different places of the USA. I found some parts interesting, others fascinating, and a few just down right boring. I did very little viewing of my surroundings on the trip to San Diego though. My thoughts during the drive to San Diego were focused purely on getting to San Diego. I had no idea how well my car would handle those bumps on the Earth called mountains. By the way, the car handled them fine. I also had to remind myself it would be in bad taste to stop in the middle of the road as I came upon my first ever mountain view of a forest (with a mountain backdrop).
This was the scenery we hear about in stories and see in movies. It was amazing, and I could have never seen it from a plane… okay, I could have seen it from a plane, but it is all about view point here people. This view was well beyond the 20 hour mark of my drive, and I could have cared less about most things, but this was enough to wake me up and have me take notice. This scene alone was enough to make the drive worthwhile. Coming from Iowa, I don’t get to see much in the area of interesting land formations, unless you count “cut flat by a glacier” as being fascinating. It was later during my trip when I came to realize that for most of Iowa, you can see till the Earth curves. Yeah, Iowa is flat.
In the end, I don’t know how long I actually spent driving to get to my destination in San Diego, I just know how long it took overall, which was too long. It had been 4.3 years (almost to the day) since my last visit to the area, and I was shaking with excitement. For those of you that don’t know, shaking with excitement is very similar to shaking with exhaustion. Unfortunately, my mood was fairly low at this point. I had brought some Iowa sweet corn 1,800 miles as a gift to my close friend, and keeper for the duration of my stay, but it was confiscated upon entering California. I know most of you would tell me “just tell them you don’t have anything”, except I wasn’t given a chance to, I was just told to open up. That’s right, my first thoughts upon entering the land were those about not being able to do something special in return for everything my keeper was about to do for me…. for a week.
I figured my mood would stay low, even after seeing my keeper. I was wrong. Seeing my friend Elizabeth, who I shall call CK for California keeper here on out, lifted my mood immensely. To me, even though I knew it had been 4.3 years since I last saw CK, it felt like it hadn’t been more than a few days, because we were able to jab and poke fun at the other without the slightest bit of hesitation. My nervous hold backs from my first trip were completely gone.
I was introduced to a few new things within moments of arriving in San Diego. The first was a burger joint called In-N-Out, some of you may know of it. My first trip there was okay at best, but I can tell you right now that it was immensely better the 2nd time around, and I feel I may have been too tired to evaluate it and take it in. The other thing was the show series “World’s Dumbest”, I came to find out I like this show. The night was spent mostly with these two things while BS’ing with CK, about the best way for me to spend my first night in San Diego I think.
After a few hours of hanging, I was delivered back to my hotel, where I was to take care not to injure myself or upset the locals. This was not hard, for I instantly went to bed. I had come to find out exactly how hard I could push my body in regards to driving. I hadn’t gotten this little sleep since I was a teenage boy, hyped up on Mt. Dew with no reason to wake up early. I did have a reason to be up early though, Comic-Con was the very next day, and I was excited.
This will end part 1 of my California trip post. In summary? I pushed myself hard to get to San Diego, possibly too hard. The one truly special thing I could do for someone who does too much for me was corn-napped at the edge of California. Beds are extra soft when you are tired.
Even though I have been out of California for almost a week now, I still feel a panging of pain when I think of the area I stayed in.
Have fun kids.
-Jason-
Tomorrow night I will begin my journey across 1/2 of the United States, to gather with my fellow geeks and geekettes for comicon. If anyone is planning on being there, let me know, we’ll hook up. Not like… hook up in a sexy way or meat hook way, but in a coffee or food way. I guess if you are the right kind of person, the first two might be options as well.
I have found out my phone can actually log into the site and use the full functionality of the dashboard we use for posting, I was unsure if I could actually do that, I can. What this means is that after a long day of fun in San Diego, I can attempt to make a post. The chances of me being successful will be low though. I may just be tired and pass out immediately in my bed. If I don’t get around to doing that, you can always follow my adventures via twitter. I assure you, things will be going on twitter. a lot.
Once I return, then I’ll actually start the posting schedule I planned. At first I was going to toss one or two out before now, but it turns out that getting ready for vacation takes some planning… and I hate planning. Which means my brain has smoked and seized up numerous times. I was able to fully pack last night. Everything is in my luggage. By doing this, I have learned a few things I have almost zero casual clothes, and I have to buy underwear to make it through my trip.
It seems about 80% of my clothing is work clothing, and I don’t have a lot of clothing in general. Seems I will be making one last purchase on my way out of state. But hey, brand new undies for vacation isn’t so bad, right?
Yeah, okay, so this is a super quick post to let everyone know we’re alive. Seriously, we didn’t just pay server fees for nothing here just a few weeks ago.
Life has been busy. I’ve been doing some re-arranging in life, in about every way someone can, and Matt is figuring out how to be a dad. Hopefully we’ve both got this figured out for the most part, if not, then there is a child in danger and I might start eating nothing but eggs or something. I officially plan on starting to do 2 posts every week starting around the 6th of July. These posts will more than likely go up on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Sadly, I will almost immediately be taking a week and a half long break from these posts for comicon. Meaning the 2nd half of July will have little to no posts, unless I can find an easy way to do them, that isn’t my phone.
As far as the audio podcasts go, I am hoping to have more info on that sometime after the holidays when things slow down for myself and I would assume Matt as well.
The main reason of this post, besides pointing out that we aren’t dead? To point out that we have one very dedicated and awesome fan, you’ll see him in the comments, goes by Benensky. A little while ago Keith Baker was looking for some input on his site about what people would like to see. Benensky being a dear soul name dropped us to Keith in the comments of that post.
Firstly, Matt and myself are huge Eberron nerds. It is easily our favorite campaign settings, and I know that I myself would be honored if Keith took up Benensky’s idea about coming onto the show and pumping something out with us. Whether this be something small, or he be a full fledged co/guest host for entire podcasts, or even maybe a side podcast. I won’t speak for Matt, but I’m sure he’d like it too.
Sooooooo Keith, or anyone really, you can e-mail me here or find me on twitter if you have any thoughts or ideas on this topic… or any topic.
Seriously, if you guys want something steady in the posts I’ll be doing let me know. That way it’ll be better than “last Monday I tripped on a stick and hit my head on an emu”.
Have fun kids! (and Keith)
I’m also bad at a large list of other things as well! I’m a multi-faceted item of failure for sure. Now now, before you all get “don’t be so hard on yourself”, look at it this way, I have facets, I’m a friggin gem. I kid though, except for the part where I tell you I suck at writing titles.
I’ve decided to scrap the next podcast due to audio quality, and with things right now, i am not 100% sure when I’ll be able to get together with Matt in order to work out the issues we had with recording last time. For every issue I seem to clean off my plate, I seem to get at least one more added on. Thankfully that hasn’t been holding us back, yet, just life in general has. I promise you, I’ll try to work in some here in the next week or so for us to get together and work it out.
In the meantime, if there is anything you’d like to hear on a quick bonus episode, let me know, or if you would like to see me try to team up with another podcaster for a quickie, I’ll do my best.
But, I’d rather not leave you all with nothing, so I’ll say this.
Today, there will be a man in my mouth. Not just any man mind you, but a man who makes art, and has skillful hands. Yes ladies and gentleman, I am going to the dentist, the first time in a long time. I have decided that since I have dental insurance, I shall use it. If any of you follow me on twitter, I’m sure you’ll see something about the trip. I will say I got worked into their schedule in a stupid fast way. I was expecting at least a week wait, nope, less than 24 hours. I called at 3:10pm and got told to be there at 10:30am the next day.
So yeah, this will be interesting, especially since I don’t get up till 1-1:30pm on a standard day, let alone being somewhere at 10:30am.
Have fun kids!
Welcome everyone to the in the works on being new with our audio Episode! In episode 31 we discuss and talk about some of the new things you’ll find in the PHB3. Is this episode late? Most definitely! Would I warn you that with our new setup, that we aren’t use to, we occasionally get robot voices? YES! So please, don’t write us about it. I know about it, which means Matt will know about it, which means we’re going to fix it. Mostly because I friggin refuse to edit that much again for another podcast. Plus I don’t want the voice over robot voice stuff we had this time around. We will get it fixed, I just don’t know when.
Which means we may or may not be on a slight break, I am not sure. If the audio on the next podcast isn’t too bad as far as being able to match them up and etc, I will edit it and put it out. If not, then I’m going to scrap it and we’ll work out the kinds sooner rather than later in our recording process. What that means is I’ll do my best to post entertaining blog posts until then, and maybe do the occasional skype bonus episode with other podcasters. I don’t know, but I will try to keep you all entertained.
Anyway, enjoy our overview of the PHB3!
Questions? Comments? You can e-mail the show here. If you want to speak to one of us directly both myself (Jason) and Matt have e-mails as well, how handy. We are both also on twitter: Matt & Jason.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Yeah, I might have it sitting on my hard drive starring at me, but I figure I might as well torture you all and make you wait till a standard issue release day for the podcast to go live. I’m a jerk like that. It also didn’t help that a storm rolled through here the other night and I was unable to work on the podcast due to the lights flickering a lot and scaring me. I’d rather not lose all that work due to one stray lightning bolt.
Okay, I am close to having Episode 31 – PHB3 ready for all of you. And in fact, I’m only 1/3 of the way done with it but the reason I say I am close is because I started with Matt’s audio first. He talks softly, I talk like an angry dinosaur, so I sometimes carried over better on his microphone than he did somehow. I have no idea. My own audio stream is much more obvious on the who is talking part. With a little tweaking to the sensitivity of our microphones, I will be able to edit faster, and things will sound even better on the podcast itself.
I am going to strive to get the next podcast out on time, meaning 2 weeks from today.
I would expect Episode 31 here Wednesday morning, because right now, I don’t exactly have a lot of things lined up to do on Tuesday. That means editing time.
I have also been asked a few times if Matt and myself will be at Gencon. While I will not answer that here, yet, I can say there is at least one gigantic convention I am going to. I will be attending Comicon in San Diego this year. I will be in the San Diego area for an entire week, so feel free to contact me if you are going to comicon as well or just live in the area.
Have fun kids!
Alright kids, remember how I said we got new equipment and how awesome it would be? Yeah, apparently it will be awesome for everyone but me. With the 2 podcasts we have in the can for all of you, the amount of time it’ll take me to edit will easily be about 4 times what it normally is. Once we get use to things and are able to tweak it a bit more, it’ll remain a huge pain, hooray! Which means I am going to have to learn how to tweak a few things, and fast.
While there is no podcast for you today, there should be one by the end of the week. I spent the last 2 dedicated editing nights to trying to find a technique to make it so I could edit like normal, failing both times. I thought I was close, but then 5 minutes in Matt started sounding like a robot, which I was honestly tempted to keep.
Hey everyone!
Okay, cheerfulness done. Matt and myself had planned on recording in time to have a podcast up yesterday but well, guess who forgot the microphone. If you guessed Matt, you’re wrong, it was me. There is a downside and an upside to this. The obvious downside was there wasn’t a podcast for you all yesterday, the upside? I was able to order us another microphone so now we can get back to the old school way of each of us having a microphone each.
The benefit to that is we’ll sound much better, obviously. While we didn’t have pop filters for the upcoming episode, we have created some and we’ll be using them for the following one, which would be Episode 32. For the upcoming episode where we didn’t have pop filters we just stayed far enough back that it wasn’t an audio issue, but it did mean we had to speak up a bit more than usual, not a big thing. I plan on having Episode 31 out Monday the 21st. I could wait for Tuesday though, that way you have something to go along with your Avatar DVD. Also, a warning, once I edit down Episode 31, I expect it to be very close to an hour and a half long. In that episode we cover the Player’s Handbook 3.
While I don’t want to tell you what our verdict on the book as a whole is, nor whether or not we suggest you go buy it or not. It would almost be a breach of protocol if I said whether you should buy it or not buy it.I mean, if you like things like races and classes, such as githzerai and psionics, you’ll be biased. Me? I’m not a fan of the githzerai, but I might be fond of humans with bull heads.
We talk a lot between ourselves, not on the show so much, about our insatiable love for Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books. Well, they are making a pen and paper rpg based around this little set of books and guess what, if you go to their site and pre-order, you get an almost complete copy of the book in pdf form right friggin now. You will also get a PDF of the books when they are 100% done as well on top of your meaty paper based copies as well.
I know what you’re saying, “but they are so expensive”. You’re right, they are, and especially so when you consider the fact they are built off of a free game system. In the end, I look at it this way, I am paying for both real physical copies and the pdf copies along with supporting an author and the guys who spent god knows how long creating those books. Plus, you know, early access to the books, which means you could start playing whenever you want.
Anyway, I’ve talked enough as it is.
Have fun kids!