The Road Trip Part 5. The Portland Strikes Back

Never before have I felt more
like Food Network

So my trip to Portland has been pretty exciting so far. I woke up that morning, got a call from a friend inviting me to hang out that evening and go to some hippie street fair. I was all "Sure." and since I had a whole day to kill, I decided to check out a few places my sister recommend. First up, as usual: LUNCH.

I went to this neat little place called Meat Cheese Bread, which served exactly what it says on the tin. I got a locally made not-coke and a french onion soup with my delicious sandwich. Overall this was probably the most satisfying meal of the trip so far.

You can't see it, but over to the right there's an actual physical newspaper which I perused so I could feel retro, and I saw an article about Last Thursday. What do you know? The article talked about how the City was worried that a profoundly Portland-y event might become commercialized or somesuch. Anyway, interest thoroughly piqued.



After that I wandered around town a little before heading off to the world-famous Powell's Books!

Still has books? I'm good.

Wait, whoops. Turns out that I went to the wrong Powell's books. There's more than one apparently. This one was a somewhat smaller establishment but pretty cool regardless. Powell's Books on Hawthorne. With the "On Hawthorne" in italics so you know it's emphasized. As though the sign is saying it with extra emphasis to clarify that you're dumb and should quit just going to the first location that showed up on Google Maps.

Still, what the hell. I went in and picked up a few little things. Most notably this pretty damn cool book. Also for clarity I also purchased the Serenity: Official Visual Companion which had the shooting script for the Big Damn Movie. As well as this charming and beautifully illustrated book. I'll talk about those later probably. 


So after hanging out at the bookstore for a bit I grabbed a coffee and headed over to my friend Kyle's place. He apparently hadn't gotten off of work yet, so I hung out with his housemates. We ended up just playing Mario Kart. I got my ass kicked handily in several rounds before someone suggested we play Smash Bros.

I managed to redeem my prowess with my Falco skillz. Which was comforting. It was around this time that Kyle showed up. We drank a few beers and he then informed me that he had forgotten that he had made plans to catch dinner with a lady. Gentleman that I am I did not want to intrude, and so he went off and I played more videogames and caught an episode of The Walking Dead with his super-cool housemates.

Pictured: Awesomeness

Anyway Kyle sent me a text to meet up with him at a bar called The Alleyway on Alberta. So I went, I had to park a couple of blocks away, and even that wasn't easy. There were a lot of goddamn cars.

Oh and 8-foot tall hippie children.

I swear, the random encounter table is getting kind of weird these days.

Anyway we wandered around Last Thursday, which was basically an impromptu convention festival thigny. Street vendors hawking wares, jugglers, musicians, there was this one vaudeville thing too!

Or maybe Epic Meal Time

Conveniently on the same street though, was this neat little place my sister recommended: Pine State Biscuits Wherein I got a biscuit with bacon, cheese, egg, and fried chicken, with a cradle of cheese fries and a locally brewed beer on the side.

If lunch was the most satisfying, this may have been the most transcendentally empowering and decadent.

The rest of the evening was spent recovering from this meal.

I regret nothing.


~Ying Out.

The Road Trip Part 4. Land of Ports

Pictured: Everything
being great.

So I made it to Portland after a long and somewhat uneventful drive. It turns out that the trip between Eureka and Portland is exactly long enough to listen to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Audiobook): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction in it's entirety. Which was convenient. Highly recommended.

I managed to spend my first night couch-crashing at my friend Mel's house. I know her from The Internet. She was very cool and she had two extremely friendly cats. I had settled down to fall asleep when one of them literally leapt on top of me and made himself comfortable. It wasn't so bad until he started doing that thing from that cartoon with the bulldog. I had to put on a sweater so the claws didn't get through. Once that was settled, everything was great.

BREAKFAST OF
CHAMPIONS.

The next morning was pretty fun. Mel took me to a little local diner-y place where I ate a rather nice breakfast. But after seeing their 7 foot tall rotating jewel case filled with Pie I decided "what the hell" and got a slice of strawberry pie for breakfast. It was delicious. I hung out with Mel and another Internet buddy named Rhiannon.

I realize that there's a lot of links in this text. Hrm. I should probably slow down.



Anyway we had a good day of hanging out, drawing, and eating sushi off of a little model-train. Then later on I was informed that there was one place, above all others, that I needed to go in Portland.

That place was called Ground Kontrol. I seemed to have lucked out, as it happens, that the last wednesday of the month is free-to-play night, where all the machines are free and you just pay a five-dollar entrance fee. Also (like everywhere else in Portland apparently) they have liquor.

So I went in and got my wrist stamped, immediately assaulted by neon-retro-joy. The upper floor was all pinball machines and a few crazy old games. The kinds of things that used dials instead of buttons and had the kind of brutality that you never see in today's games.




I went up to the bar and checked a little plastic menu. I saw something that looked fascinating and ordered it with a White Russian because I am manly like that.

I regret nothing.

This is what I got.

It's a Nutella and Banana Sandwich with melted marshmallows on toasted sourdough.

So anyway, Videogames.

I spent some time playing your standard classics: Gauntlet (Warrior), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Gambit/Venom/Warmachine) and a little bit of Simpsons (Homer) and Turtles in Time (Donatello, duh.) But no matter where I went I always ended up coming back to this damn thing:

Fig A. distilled arcade euphoria.

FOUR PLAYER PAC-MAN BATTLE ROYALE.

Oh my god this is the best arcade game ever, we played for like two hours and the machine has little cup-holders for beer. 

I have decided that if I am ever a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist I want this thing in every room.

Also the bathrooms were cool and Tron-designed on the inside, but I found myself more impressed with this.


Anyway that was pretty awesome. But we're just getting started.

The Road Trip Part 3. Animals and Archimedes

As seen on TV

So I rolled into Eureka at a pretty reasonable time. The town was alright. I was hoping it'd be full of geniuses and wacky hijinks but it turns out the actual Eureka is pretty normal. There's a coastline nearby and some pretty neat woods. But all in all, Eureka turned out to just be the largest Californian city north of San Francisco.

I guess I was just really expecting a bunch of nerds or something.

This seems so safe.

Oh, wait. There we go.


North Coast Role Playing. A store that looked like something between a dive-bar and a regular bar. Well, far be it from me to not give it a shot. I get to ramp up my grass-roots indie-gamer-cred. Oldschool!

Anyway, I went inside and it was actually pretty sweet. (Look! text-links!)

The place actually specialized in tabletop RPGs rather than the Tabletop section being secondary to comics/board-games/card-games.

Not Pictured: My dignity.

BE WARNED. I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT NERDY RPG STUFF NOW. I will not begrudge you if you just move on to the non-threatening image of a cheeseburger where I see an Emu. 

I managed to find some pretty sweet stuff while I was there, too. I decided that I was going to pick up a few non-standard RPG systems that I don't often see in stores.


I picked up a copy of Burning Wheel, which is the base system that the Mouse Guard RPG uses. Basically it's a system where the Roleplaying aspect of the game is emphasized over the tactics elements. You can probably find a few interesting articles about that, but I think the most telling is the PA Report article about Mouse Guard here.

The other game I picked up was PARANOIA, an RPG system that's a little on the weirder side. Basically it's a black-humor distopia game where players gleefully attempt to sabotage and execute their friends in order to please Friend Computer. It's sort of the RPG equivalent of Mau with more disintegrations.

Also, as per my tradition, I grabbed a set of dice. I always make it a point to buy a set whenever I go to a new gaming/comic store. So yeah. That happened.

I'm not kidding about
the Nascar

I spent the night just outside of Eureka and grabbed pizza with a friend from the internet.

I hit the road later, and eventually ran into a cool little diner off the edge of the road. Seems like the thing to do when you're on a road-trip, right? Go to diners with truckers where people watch Nascar? is that culturally insensitive? We'll find out next time I get my ass kicked. This felt pretty Americana.

Yep.

Then I went outside and there was an Emu.

I didn't ask.



ONWARD! TO PORTLAND!

~Jon Ying

The Road Trip Part 2. Exeunt San Francisco

It's a bird! It's a plane!

Alright, Blog Post deux. Let's see what we've got.

I made my exit from San Francisco, but before I left I made sure to eat something.

I went to this little place called El Farolito Taqueria on Mission, where I got a delicious Carne Asada Super Taco. It was quite good and also they had Fanta in those cool glass bottles which is something I approve of.

Not pictured: Me dribbling
chocolate all over myself
because apparently I'm
6 years old. 

Next I went to this neat little BiRite Creamery for dessert. They let me sample a bunch of weirdass flavors including brown sugar. I ended up settling on Dark Chocolate because I was in that kind of mood. I wandered around San Francisco for another hour or so. They have a lot of really steep hills all over the place which makes driving feel remarkably precarious.

Next time I'll definitely stick tot he cable cars.

Like bullseyeing Womp Rats
back home

 Then I drove through a tree.  Which was kind of cool. You could see the little scrape-marks on the inside of the trunk where other, fatter cars didn't fold in their windows. I sort of wonder about families who try this thing on their Generic American Road Trips and end up scraping a bunch of paint off of their Humvee's sides. I can just see my dad going. "LET'S DO IT."

and then listening to a slow, mirthful *screeeaaaape*

Tree Lunch

I had gotten a sandwich from the little town before who recommended that I move on to greater civilization rather than stick around. I've seen enough horror movies not to disregard their advice and promptly drove the next hour to a proper town.

IS SEEING? BELIEVING?

 Then I saw this weirdass place. I almost passed it by with barely a raised eyebrow and then I thought: "Hey, I'm on a Road-Trip, what else am I gonna do if not stop at ridiculous roadside attractions with too many question marks???" 

Turns out It was closed though so I couldn't get to experience the mysterious majesty of Confusion Hill. I don't know if Seeing is Believing, but I'm pretty sure not-seeing is a pretty good starter for non-believing. The rest of the place looked like some kind of elaborate trap set up by the Riddler, so I ended up continuing on.

This is a cat.

Then I saw a cat.




Next stop: the biggest city north of San Francisco. A little town called Eureka!

~Jon Ying Out.

The Road Trip Part 1. En Medias Res

Freeway Lunch.

So, long story short: I'm on a road trip.

Well, I guess that's not really the whole story, hell, it's not even a story really. It's more of a statement of fact with a story behind it. But yeah, I'm on a road trip now. Off into the wild known.

Anyway, I had initially thought about creating a whole 'nother blog that I can ramble on about my grand adventures but I came to the, somewhat disconcerting, realization that I already had a number of completely serviceable blogs that I've abandoned over the years. Hell, I don't even know how long ago it was that I posted on this one.

Actually, this is the internet, let me check...

...

Holy crap, the last time I posted something on this blog was almost exactly one year ago. That's bonkers.

Oh man, and I liked that idea. Urban Fantasy CSI meets Harry Potter... I should probably pick that up again eventually.

Anyway, I've actually been on a road-trip for a few days already, showcasing my natural punctuality in informing people about things, so I guess I'll lay it out here. And in keeping with the descending nature of blog posts, I'm gonna do it Memento style,

Mom and Dad, that was a movie reference and it means I'm doing it "in reverse chronological order," or "Backwards."

THE RECAP


I'm currently sitting in a hotel near San Francisco Airport with a busted heating unit and a bunch of wind and airplanes fighting eachother outside. It's really cold out here in San Francisco despite the summer, and there's probably a completely reasonable meteorological explanation for why that is but I'm not googling that right now. Instead I am going to finish reading this Dresden Files book and take a nice hot shower before waking up and getting my complimentary breakfast.

There were no fewer than three
Trendy Repurposed Abandoned
Movie Theaters on that street.

I spent the day doing nothing in particular, wandering around San Francisco, I took one of those Cable-Cars mostly to say that I did and I ended up just crossing the street and taking another one right back the way I came since I had no idea where I was going. I walked up and down Mission Street a fair ways, pawing through a bunch of pawn shops and thrift stores looking for nothing in particular. After seeing a bunch of random brick-a-brack I eventually came away with a Harmonica which I have named Santiago.

The photobomb guy was also cool.

---

The day before was mostly characterized by driving for six or seven hours on freeways, almost running out of gas due to truly fantastic planning skills and then going to see my friends at a bar. Turns out it was Ladies Night at the bar and that is only about half as exciting as it sounds because I was in San Francisco and they really mean Ladies Night. Suffice to say there was a lot of flannel in attendance.

Which was, incidentally a whole mess of fun. I met a pair of really fascinating students at Berkeley, and had an interesting discussion about luminescent mice and virology. Plus, I got to watch my friend-and-former-suitemate-in-MacCracken Catherine get her game on a bunch of lovely young ladies and I would be remiss if I did not admire her skills. In fact, I could, with little hyperbole, describe my feelings as "awe."

My other two, less distracted, companions were Sarah and Ben. Sarah I had only known very briefly in school (Most of it characterized by a very trendy discussion of how Chuck Palahniuk is pretty cool for making Fight Club.) and I was glad to have an opportunity to have a more substantial interaction with her.

Not Freeway Lunch.

Ben meanwhile was a philosophy student in my year who I had somehow managed to never meet. (Bubble colleges be damned) and it turns out I really missed out on that score. He's pretty damn cool. The conversation can mostly be characterized by how exactly the Robot Apocalypse will happen.

---

So yeah, all in all I've been on the road for three days and I think I'm doing pretty good. I'm gonna go finish this Dresden Files book now, I'll hit the road tomorrow and update in the very near future.

~Jon Ying out.

New story concept about Urban Fantasy cops fighting Neo-Luddite wizards... As if I didn't have enough.

Dungeons and Dragons pt. 1

Above is a few portraits for a D&D game I'm gonna be running soon. It's been a while since I've drawn straight-fantasy. I kind of enjoyed it.

The characters are a Drow Storm Sorceress, a Warforged Swordmage, and a Gnome Artificer.

The setting is a sort of post-apocalypse renaissance adventure campaign with sky pirates. So yeah.