Impulse Decision

Headin' north to the Oregon tonight. Wish us luck. Gonna go see all the dicks I used to run with in the Northwest. We'll be back on the 2nd or something. Happy New Year to a handful of people out there.

Work Hazards

Ping Pong Fever: Hazardous to one's health and one's lunch budget.

Are you the sporting type? Are the dicks at Snowboarder magazine the sporting types? I'd answer no. Wait, with Ping Pong I'd have to answer, Yeah, we're a bunch of taunting, competitive, macho, dirty animals. Even with our "excruciating" work schedule, we find time to play massive amounts of pong in the warehouse.

Shit has been getting ugly down on that pong table. Bets are being made. Rose owed me the equivalent of a aluminum briefcase and I lost the balance to him in pong. Fuck him. Bridges, a dirty, video-gaming hooligan from Vermont ruffled my feathers real good today. Listen up:

We play hard with a special clause: I bet him he won't break ten points in a game to 21. Well, he's improving with each awkward backhand and serve. That 10 point peak seems easier for him these days. Things were getting real ugly today. At one point I was playing him for the balance of 40 lunches. Double or nothing jackass-edness. What was at stake?; It means I'd have to buy him lunch for the next forty lunch missions if he hit ten points in our match. Fuck that. He's a gambling man and doesn't know when to back down and I finally beat him to snub the lunch balance. Phew. He could have walked away with his January lunch budget coming out of my empty pockets. Dirty bastards.

Back To Work

Another day, another dollar. Back in the office today. Slow going. Tidying up the endtrails of our last issuse, prepping the projects for the Vegas onslaught and playin' unsportsmanlike games of pong with various office dicks. Good living.

Christmas Wrap Up

Christmas day is almost over. Couple more hours of "glee." Well, sorta.

Being away from home was just another sad chapter in this California experience. Our second bummed holdiaze. Being removed from the family units just fucks everything up. No motivation, cynicism towards the holidaze and general depression. Our time off was spent relaxing. That's it. Meals were simple and lonely. Some tube. Some video games. Some email. Some Net-surfing. Some guitar, which is way out of tune.

We tried to get tickets home this year too. Due to the shakeup in the airline industry, tickets were expensive and scarce for some reason when we'd shop around. Last year I swore I would be home for the holidaze. Look at us. Out here in our little cocoon. Pathetic. Just wish I was home hanging with the family. In the snow.

Hopefully next year this drama won't be an issue cuz we all know how quick that jaunt from Minneapolis back to Traverse City is. Fingers are crossed.

Dad's Gingerbones were amazing, as always, even if they were burnt all too hell.

O'Rourke: O'Mazing

I've got the new Jim O'Rourke on the player. Amazing. Wanna blow yer mind? Check out JO'R's discography: The Jim O'Rourke Discography. Endless. Quite a list of accomplishments for the guy.

It's nice to be out of the office for a couple days. Now that the ranch is updated with stellar computin' facilities, I try to hang in there 9-to-5, and no later. My days of being camped out after hours in the trenches are over. Now I bring my work drama home with me. Melissa loves the fact that I stay up all hours of the night peckin' at these keys. I think the new productivity is having an effect on her sleeping patterns. She takes her sleep seriously. She usually enjoys a good 15 or so hours a night.

We finished up our cycle at the mag. Done. 7 mags down since April. I'm proud and excited and happy with our accomplishments. I get emotional when I look back at the volume. 4 meatballs put the thing together, out of a common desire for snowboarding. We grew up with this stuff and now we're giving back to the kids. I read the mag growing up. To be on this end is an honor. 4 meatballs. How about that? And the best part is the voice the mag has. Honest and true. Sure, we miss out on things here and there but I'll make this claim now and forever: The content that make it on those pages come from good sources, with good intentions, created by good people. No blowjobs, no promises, no pandering... just coverage of the best fuckers in snowboarding. Many thanks go out to the dudes for a good editorial season. We worked well together and the proof is in the pages. Thanks and inspiring awe go out to our contributors, photo and literary. Thanks people. We will continue on our pursuits. The kids dig the stuff and that is what counts. Expect good things for next season too.

Now we've got some time to compile good stuff for the next cycle. Chief has a pile of projects for me. The rest of the fuckers will be off on glorious missions, covering the sport. I'll be back in the trenches fightin' the good fight on the identity front. We've got promo items to build, media kit deliberation, tradeshow prep and other tasks. This is the fun part. The dudes are gone and I have the joint to myself.

Extra special thanks to Chief for believing in us. Buuuuuuuddddy.

A new XBox has been the talk of the DDC Factory Floor for some time now. The mag sponsored the snowboarding game "Amped" and that got me hooked. We have our logos spread around the game in different sections. Pretty exciting stuff. Bridges has hooked up up with different titles to check out. Thumbs are sore and a competitive fervor haunts the couch area. I beat the tar out of Melissa tonight in some hockey game action. 5 for me, 0 for her. She is pissed and will play harder next time. Watch yer back.

Chad Smith pushes off today. He's headin' north to Bend for some holidaze frolick. I'd love to join him but realize I'd make it maybe a day in Bend and freak out. Not that California is any better, but damn, I've had my fill of that place. Best of luck to Chad in his great journey. What an adventure. I envy him cuz he's headin' back to the Midwest in the end.

Jim O'Rourke makes me want to move home. Good man from the Midwest. I get to wondering about Chicago a lot too. There are so many good bands from there. Maybe I should move there. Close to home, big city and the home of Shellac.

One more year of this and I'm gonna pull the plug. Enough is enough. Shit, I'm ready to go at any point. Just that I gotta get the finances in order before I can split. Real close.

Awe

Some days are so amazing. I'll feel like I can accomplish anything. They are few and far between, the logistics adding up to allow such productivity. It can also break down to an hourly rate. Tonight, I had a couple good hours of that sort of feeling. Wee hours. Chad was fast asleep manning the couch. Melissa was slothed out, starfishing the entire bed. A couple cats wandered around yawning. I had the entire Factory Floor to myself and got a bunch of stuff done. Felt good.

Give it up to my Mom and Dad. The immensity of the miles between us were softened tonight with the arrival of holidaze goods. Presents and decorations and munchies and good cheer. Thank you. You guys are amazing and we miss you to high heaven, or to the tops of the palm trees in our track-house/condo/apartment facility.

We had the most amazing Christmas mornings growing up. I miss those days.

I'm itchin' to see that Lord of the Rings movie. Gotta get my cloak and Gandalf staff dry-cleaned though for the waiting line festivities. No thanks. Not that serious about it all. I remember a couple summers back in Anchorage, checking out the Star Wars cronies in line. All of us meatballs checking out the throngs of frontier fans coming out in full force. Chewbacca suits and calculated scene reenactments galore. Back to the Lord of the Rings stuff: I remember Mom taking me to see the animated movie back in the day. It was scary.

We've got a couple more pages to go in our final issue of the winter cycle. Fuck, real excited to wrap it all up. Talked to Lanningham today a bit. He's a good kid, no matter what snowboarding publication he might be doing time with. Positive and excited.

Goodnight from the beach.

Two Chad Smith Sessions In One Year!

Chad Smith is in town. God damn, it's good to see him. Shaggy and bespeckled, he's out here on a retrieval mission for his little sister's automobile. She just finished up some time in LA with her boyfriend/classmate and they are heading back to Michigan. Chad flew out and is driving the rig back to the Midwest, taking the "long way" home through Oregon, the Southwest and wherever-the-hell-else he cruises through. He's luggin' a pile of camera gear with him, a portable Ansel Adams of sorts. No scenic vista or interesting composition is safe. We're enjoying meals out together, time around the ranch and today, I'm gonna drag him into the circus at work. Show him some frontline action in the war on snowboarding journalism.

Melissa Update: She's cold. Testimony: Secretly, in the middle of the dark, Southern Californian night, she silently awakens and climbs out of the sleeping quarters. I'm oblivious to the everything at this point: vulnerable, peaceful and dreaming. She tip-toes across the Factory Floor to the electronics mainframe. There she turns up the heat to ungodly levels, well past the "sauna" mode. She slithers back into her quilted cocoon, falls asleep then positions an elbow in my back soon after.

So I wake up, in a pool of sweat. And there she is, a little heating pad with a body temperature of around 140 degrees, absolutely content.

In California it is always hot. And you wanna know what? I'm fuckin' sick of being hot.

A Request To Our Readers

That's right. Get those updated addresses to us so we can send you a greeting of the holidaze variety. Last thing we need to be doing is sending off cards to dead addresses. Update us! Click the "contact" tab to the left a bit and bring us up to speed with yer coordinates. Card are ready. The list is long and mean, and we intend to get a card off to every entry in the DDC database. So get 'em to us real quick.

Enough of this chatter. We've got work to do. (+) Thanks.

Connected!

Holy high-speed!

Oh yeah, never one to chintz the family on the domestic front, I'm proud to announce the arrival of high-speed internet service at the ranch. The DDC factory Floor was hotwired late last night by an festive technician from COX Cable, Orange County. "Cable Internet," as they call it. Fast, fast, fast. I love it. The family loves it. 'Bout damn time. We're connected again. Watch yer back.

Very Busy

Some of the recent developments on the Draplindustries Factory Floor:

1. Tuning of the new rig. More USB hubs. New printer. Cordless, optical mouse. (Hmmph, is there any other choice? ) Enjoying the mountain of Mhz power on the desktop.
2. Mercury Rev was amazing. Grand. Smiling. The sound filled up the place.
3. Working on all the magazine projects.
4. Saw the BLOWER book. Pretty fucking rad.
5. Evan Hecox gallery shindig on friday. Up in the big LA at the BLK/MRKT space. A good time was had by all.
6. Caught "Ocean's Eleven" last night. Good stuff. A keeper.

Things are good. Busy and good.

Shimmering Apple / Shimmering Harmonics

Spent the better part of the weekend setting up the new rig. Man, the machine is amazing. Fast 'puting at 867Mhz. I boosted the RAM up past a gig's worth. Lots of allocation action going on keeping things screaming. The monitor was worth every damn penny. Good living on my new 'puter. I'm transferring everything off my old rig slowly, through Zip discs. It's been a walk down memory lane seeing all my old stuff. Now I have more than enough space to archive it properly.

Tonight we're going up to see Mercury Rev at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Gonna hang with Ben Oswald for the night. Excited to see the guy. Excited to see the band. Get the latest on Upstate New York's finest: www.mercuryrev.net