Houston, We Have Uh Oh

What a long strange trip it’s been… not really.

So I’ve been gone yet here the whole time, I’ve been updating the sites in ways most wouldn’t notice (blog rolls, cleaning tags, removing spam, etc) yet not posting anything new. I’ve gathered content and tried to post but fallen short everytime, mostly due to the fact that half the relevant shit I would post I throw up on Twitter and/or Facebook so odds are anyone that reads this crap already has seen me post about it in some form or another already. Twittering everything I do (bowel movements, waking, sleeping, eating, etc) is so goddamn easy it almost makes blogging irrelevant, almost makes me want to move to a Tumblr where shortform posts are king. Turns out that even Tumblr requires some work, work that even in the Big Black sense of “Do work son!” I don’t want to even fucking bother with. So here I am, long winded already and nothing relevant to even speak of, ugh.

To keep you entertained I’m going to go ahead and point out some of the links on the side (via the blogroll) that you should probably read since I lack severely in the whole ‘new content’ department.

8380 Laboratories - The fools @ 8380 Labs have been putting VW related shirts on my back for the better part of 5 years now and probably will on into the next century or something like that. Design master flex Ethan has updated the site to being more than just a forum link and even blogs semi-regularly about stuff unrelated to the actual brand (mostly), Ethan’s a cool cat and owes me a tattoo design, tell him Brandon sent you if you buy a shirt.

Kyu Ball Designs - Kyu Ball Designs is home to O’ahu based tattoo artist Ronnie Yamada. I met Ronnie via his wife Denise who used to work at Apple and later again through my tattoo artist Jenn Hardin at 808 Tattoo in Kaneohe, Hawaii. Ronnie has never tattooed me personally but I have watched him work up close (while getting work done myself) and seen what he can do, he blogs often and includes his personal work and that of others that are a part of the 808 Tattoo ohana. If you need Japanese themed tattoo ideas or inspiration, Ronnie is the man for sure, he also excels in various other tattoo forms as well too but is pretty fucking awesome when it comes to the JDM stuff!

Shoyu Burner - Shoyu Burner aka K3V1N, my long lost filipino brother who blogs about life and uhh… life. Kev is a close friend from the Kailua/Kaneohe Mk3 crew of old on O’ahu, when hes not rocking a traitorous xB hes also a fixie nerd as well. Was supposed to link Kev a long time ago but I kinda forgot, go read now!

Hm, for some reason I thought I had added more links, I sure as hell know I removed a few (and as I was writing this removed a few more) so wtf am I going to entertain you with now? Ah! Recycled content, again with the whole thing about me updating my life ridiculously with Twitter most’ve you have probably seen all of this but wtf lets throw some Flickr stuff up here for good measure.

I’ve been pretty lax with the whole photo thing, haven’t been doing much hiding behind a lens for awhile, turns out that there was a sweet ass aircooled VW show in May that I attended while The Ambassador was visiting myself in Oregon which put me behind a lens and a massive chub almost immediately! Click and be amazed!

 
After my aircooled stint I kind of got the ‘bug’ so to speak, also having Mk3 guru’s The Ambassador and K3V1N here for a visit to egg me on I finally bit the bullet and dressed the bunny up.

 
Coilovers, polished wheels and motor mounts oh my! It took almost a year, and those two idiots brow-beating me, but I finally did it with the help of Futrell Autowerks! The bunny has more in store with some factory textured skirts arriving on Friday and the possibility of a GTI lower rear valence in the following weeks as well, I’m excited again. Haven’t been this excited since the day Jeff, Jason and myself installed my euro radiator support in my Mk3 (Jay, Kevin and Troy helped drink the beer), it’s great to look at my Rabbit and get immedia-stoked on it.

Speaking of instantaneous stokage, I bought two new computers this year… Two?! CRAZY! As always I did my usual two’ish year upgrade and got the latest and greatest 24″ iMac which aside from being black and aluminum is just a fancier version of my old 24″. The real deal of the two purchases is about 9″ long, 2″ wide and is sadly made by Dell fear not for it is a hacked Dell, a Hackintosh if you will.

Thanks to some of the wonderful geniuses over at My Dell Mini forums the process is pretty straight forward and very rewarding. Its a wonderful twitter, email, IM, forum browsing machine and is pretty damn capable of more (door stop, cake cutter, book shelf bookend, etc.) Sadly the poor beast has been discontinued by Dell, short lived but definitely adored by the e-masses as one of the most easily hacked netbooks on the market. So long as it boots (faster than my 24″ I might add, yay SSD) I will run this thing into the ground!

If you’ve managed to stick with me this far not much else to do but close the post out, categorize it and throw in some tags for good measure… but wait, I’m still not done yet! Summer is upon us, concerts, VW outings, drinking and more will ensue for sure, will I blog about any of those? No, fuck that, that’s work. Yeah I’m done, thanks for reading.

FYI, tonight’s blog fueled by

Bkosty says laterrrr

I’ve updated the blog to support Gravatar now, if you haven’t noticed my ugly mug is plastered at the beginning of each post, which in turn now means that you can have your ugly mug plastered next to my comments when you register a personal icon @ Gravatar!

Make sure you use the same email address to assign to your Gravatar that you use to comment on the blog, I’m counting on all five of my readers to do this!

8380 years later I have a new blog post, I also have a new bad ass jacket and a rather unorganized slathering of icon sets on my dock, desktop and throughout my file system.

First things first, BAD ASSERY. So I was at the Woodburn Company Stores shopping with my visiting compadres Derrick and Rob from the lands of Seattle and L.A. Upon entry into the Adidas company store first things first, I spocked a most beauuuuutiful halfer cashier, she was at least 25/75 haole korean/jap, not sure, or maybe just a very haole looking’ish asian, who knows, she was hot. Spocking aside we strolled leisurely through the various clothing wears Adidas had to offer and were approached about five times by the three employees working the floor since we were the only patrons in the whole store within the first ten minutes or so. After shooing away the assistant manager for the fourth time Derrick and I happened upon a powder blue colored rack… officially licensed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Adidas jackets were staring at us hardcore and beckoned us forth! Woooooah, KAJ jackets with a logo of him doing his infamous long legged kick in Game of Death (Bruce Lee) patterned on the front, and a chinese dragon enveloping a basketball w/ Jabbar’s # (33) on the back, Derrick and myself knew we had to own it! To our dismay they were only sized in S, L, XL, as well the jackets were made rather large and elongated due to Jabbar’s extreme size which made the S like a medium and the L like an XL. At this point Derrick knew he was out as he would’ve worked best in a medium, I probably would’ve myself however I figured “When will I ever see this jacket again?!” so I went ahead and bought the very puffy, very large sized jacket anyways. Despite being a tad hefty the jacket is super warm and has a nice liner on the inside, probably wont rock it outside of winter, but this jacket is so awesome on its own its worth writing entirely too much about!

Jackets and all not much else to really report on other than that I’ve been on an icon kick lately and have somehow ended up with an extreme mish-mash of various icon sets strewn about my OS.

Pictured in the dock and on the desktop you’ll see icon sets from Jonas Rask, and various artists at The Icon Factory. I honestly don’t have much to write about this other than to say that if you are anything like me and dig some beautiful looking icons you would do well to visit both sites and have a look around, all the icons are free to use on personal systems and can be installed without a need for any special apps (on Mac and PC). It turns out though if you want something to make the new icon transition easier I would whole heartedly recommend having a gander at Candy Bar by the lovely folks at the The Icon Factory, Candy Bar makes drag and drop system replacement icon sets by the Icon Factory install within a few clicks or you can use it to set up and change individual items easily as well.

Continuing with the whole icon craze in a design sense, good e-friend, VW enthusiast, professional beardist and designer Ethan@8380labs has opened up 8380labs.com for business. Odds are if you know me IRL you’ve seen me wearing Volkswagen related shirts daily, odds are if you don’t know me IRL and have seen a picture of me at some point you’ve also probably only seen me in VW related shirts, thanks to Ethan and partner in crime Dustin (The Juniors). I’ve successfully been wearing and outgrowing (I used to be a Medium) 8380 labs since 2k4 and will continue (not outgrowing) 8380 labs on into the year 2029 and beyond. Whether you like VWs or have an eye for design do me a favor and show some love to my boys over at 8380labs.com and The Juniors!

Everyone’s (mine) favorite adventure, indie, electric, rock, whatever duo is coming back to Portland, Ratatat! Crystal Ballroom @ 9pm, woo, I’m so excited I already ordered my ticket! This will be my first time at the Crystal Ballroom so I’m super stoked to check the place out finally.

Oblig. link to concert/band info site, Mike Thrasher Presents: Ratatat. Spock Ratatat’s Myspace for more music, vids, merch, etc… Buy LP/3 as well as Classics and self-titled if you haven’t!

So I just got back from In n Out Burger in Sunnyvale, CA and I can hear myself getting fatter like the creaking frame of an old wood ship. There is nothing more fuckin tastier than an In n Out Burger… except maybe, MAYBE, a 5 Guys Burgers and Fries burger, its a toss up hardcore styles, but since 5 Guys is closer to me than an In n Out I think 5 Guys wins. I’m sure my stomach is going to thank me for digesting this before bed, likewise my ass, but hey, it was fucking worth it.

brb, doodoos.

As the title states my new kicks are the flyest of the fly for ultimate relaxation steez. What are they? Globe Castros!
Blurb from the site states:
Castro said it best: “women, rum…uh…revolution, repression, tyranny. That shit gets tiring. Sometimes a dictator just wants to kick back in some pimp slippers and take a few puffs.” These ultra comfortable shoes aren’t just for pimping and puffing through; they can be worn skating and have been designed and tested by our team to be comfortably in charge of every possible scenario imaginable.

After reading that if you aren’t sold yet heres a spock at my ugly mug and the goods.

After seeing those manly, relaxing, comfortable lookin shoes how could you not want to buy a pair?! Sadly the mix flannel/corduroy ones aren’t listed on Globes website anymore, you can however still pick them up at your local Journeys. While you’re there you should also snag some of the Journeys lowcut socks that hang out below your ankle to make it look like you’re almost not rockin any socks at all!

I honestly don’t have much else to write as I’m going to go form a comfortable dictatorship and rule from a laid back state while enforcing mad steez.

Friday 12.12 marked the second coming of the These Arms Are Snakescalypse at the Hawthorne. The Hawthorne is an ok venue, its level from the front all the way to the back so there aren’t very many good vantage points to scope the music. Also like most venues here its all ages but you can’t intertwine the yougins and the old folk so theres a nice giant barricade at the sound booth going back to where the drinkers have to hang out. So if you want to get your drink on its best to do that before, and after a band plays otherwise you’re just an idiot hanging out in the back.

Shot 4 videos, took 4 photos, verdict: maximum suck. 3/4 songs recorded are from the most recent album (see blog post New-Newness, Bitches, and Older-dom) I also managed to not pay attention to what I was recording and managed to re-record the track Lucifer that I recorded at the show in September! Doh… Good song though, actually sounds better live than it does on the album, however this time around the singer’s vocal effects stand was kinda broke so he couldn’t do all the fancy modification stuff *sad face*.

All in all the show as great, I missed the 1st and most of the 2nd band’s set. I did catch 2 songs from Narrows which is guitar player Ryan Frederiksen’s band from These Arms Are Snakes. Can’t say much from what I saw but I dig it, if I didn’t spend most of my cash on TAAS Eps and a shirt I probably would’ve picked up a Narrows album.

Semi-review over, onto flicks n vids-

As always you can check my YouTube channel here and my Flickr here.

Later cats and kittens!

So my buddy shawnis was here visiting this last week and we did many things ranging from drinking, eating, video games and even some golf here in Portland during his stay. Of all my favorite past times and even some new things we accomplished alot in 4 days of pure bro-age, however the amount of bro untapped was staggering towards the last day. So what did we do to rectify this???

We ate cheap fuckin steaks and saw some titties at the same time! You’ve got to be thinking to yourself “where the help did they manage to do that at?!?” and the answer is Acropolis. The owner of the Acropolis is also the owner of a cattle farm so he provides the meat super cheap! All in all $6 fed us a juicy ribeye, baked potato and garlic bread on top of that new castle was on tap!

Acrop wasn’t the cleanest nor were the girls the best but you’ll be damn sure the steaks, titties and new castle will bring me back again and again!

Gears of War midnight launch.

I love beer, especially dark beer.

Pictured below is an Oregon brewed terminator stout from mcmenamins pub. It was delicious, I wish I had more of it, I wish I had someone to enjoy it with. I need an Oregon drinking buddy since I’m sans two of the best in the business (drinking buddies Jeff and Kai) I’m accepting drinking buddy applications now!