Post-Christmas 1998 we had a camcorder. Now before we had this camcorder Marty and I may have already been throwing around sitcom ideas, as dummies in their early 20s do. Now we could film our own content. And as fate would have it, I had a computer that you could plug the camcorder into and strip the images from. So “Dad’s” camcorder sort of became the kid’s camcorder rather quickly. Somewhere early into 1999 then, the two of us decided we’d make a home movie, a new take on the 007 genre with Brock Johnson, superspy.

How serious was this, not too bad, we did have a copy of Adobe Premier to edit with and for a few months we filmed a fair amount of footage. Sadly tapping over some footage we didn’t like with new footage, but hey we didn’t have enough money to keep buying tapes. I also think some footage was saved directly to the computer and is now lost to computer recycling without asking me if I wanted to recycle it! But a few hours remain, and of that there is quite a bit of history, maybe not world history, but history. In 2021 I edited it down to a rough 12-minute cut of the random footage, here it goes:

The opening is just a silly production card for Sarlacc Software. Already I have delved a bit into the story of what Sarlacc Software was, I figured years later if I was going to cut what footage we did, it would have to be a Sarlacc production. It’s unfortunate that Sarlacc is probably owned by Disney these days, it was a solid name and worked for my generation as a funny software/studio company name. The short clip is just the Star Wars: Special Edition scene of Boba Fett falling into the Sarlacc pit accompanied by the “Wilhelm” scream, a well-known sound easter age from the Saga. So no real history there just a throwback for the sake of fun.

Alright now we intro the cut, this initial footage was all part of one shoot, that wasn’t really for the Brock Johnson film. Instead, this is footage from a trip to Rico’s pizza, probably on a Saturday or Friday night in Spring of 1999. This will be used a lot in the video, besides this scene where Marty and Justin are discussing what songs Justin can play on the guitar. There will be footage of us waiting for the pizza while trapsing through longs next door, and some footage at home eating the pizza.

Why did we do this? No idea, at the point of filming this, we were just filming a lot of things and that night Marty wanted Rico’s Pizza. Since Marty paid, I have to assume Mom and Dad were home as well, so this was truly just a random shoot. A lot of the footage that is saved and not recorded over from this time will be random since the fall of the project was not seen coming.

                In the background though I did work Prince’s Party like its 1999 in for the Sometime in 1999 titling, then Marty will mention Flagpole Sitter, which the music will transition to for the opening credits of the video.

Now we have the opening credits. The first bit of footage has Marty in a suit, this was specific 12-inch Johnson footage. It was a rainy Friday afternoon, Marty arrived from his week at the academy, suited up and we drove to the senior high school, and he ran around being like James Bond, or in our case Brock Johnson. Since we really had no dialog for these scenes, almost all the footage is running around in the high school’s new library. The weird part is I don’t remember Marty having his car for very long, but since we later shot footage from the car this had to be during that time period as well. Which is something that is baffling since I know it wasn’t the Impala from the Reno trip. That will remain a mystery.

After that we transition to footage acquired at the “Death Star” or what I think is the Humanities building at UCD. Well, most of it, I think there is a reel of me walking through freeborn hall. But the winding stairwell, the elevators and the run up the stairs to fight are all at this Death Star building on campus. This is another location we will come back to I think, because from the day this building came to be, kids played at this building. It’s a long history, during its construction in 1994, the same weekend I got the mohawk and upset mother so, Jake and I met up with Alyssa and Mike G. and had a good romp around the construction site that night, the building was almost done, had functional restrooms, but some areas were still being built, so it was just teenagers where they shouldn’t be.

Later on, this would be the location of other incidents, most notably during high school of two big events, one it was the starting location of events that cumulated into Karl driving his truck through central park as they chased some younger kids on their bikes. Also, the Death Star was where we had the cap guns that one night that led to Karl and Marty getting pulled over at gunpoint later in the night. Which in a way was the catalyst for a week or two later when Karl spent the night in juvenile hall.  Obviously here Marty and I are, older, and were still using the site.

The intro then has a half second shot inside the old Supercuts downtown where Marty got a haircut, and we, yup filmed that trip. Then we get to another prominent outside filming location which is Holmes Junior High. We filmed a lot of action footage and some bad nonsense dialog there. Most of what is featured is the fight between Marty and Justin, but there is some shots of the “dialog” and Marty and Justin running towards the camera. This is all the same shoot, so yes, we were there until it was dark and kept going.

                Holmes being so close to the house was always a much used location for playing basketball and football and general hanging around. Back in our younger days when returning to the junior high at night Marty was known to carve in his BBS warez group initials into doors and lockers for everyone to see. I wonder how many years the school district though there was some gang of kids calling themselves DGz, instead of realizing it was just Marty.

Now we have what amounts to the rough-cut introduction to the whatever footage we shot around the house. This scene is of Marty playing a FF4 tune on the piano. The piece he is playing is called Mystic Mysidia. I will fade his playing of the song into an actual audio file of the song for the background of the upcoming footage.

It was weird that we grew up with the two pianos in the house, always there. This one, the K. Kawaii was Mom’s grand piano and thus I think all the times we hear live piano in the video it comes from the big boy. But Mom’s other baby grand piano was a Yamaha. That one was around since before I was born and in some ways is what I imagine as the quintessential look of what a piano is. Over the years the studio and prior to that living room, would sport those two gran pianos, a harpsichord, an upright piano that Mom gave to Steve and Jill and of course later in time a PC with a specialized piano keyboard for students to do more exercises on.

The K. Kawaii in this case will feature throughout the video clips since we filmed a lot of footage that wasn’t deleted on it.

Now we enter footage from around the world, or Davis. The first section is a walkthrough of Steve’s Pizza downtown and comes from the same trip Marty took to the Supercuts. I featured this footage not only because its one long cut going through an established place in downtown, but because using Steve’s Pizza as a shortcut while downtown wasn’t an uncommon behavior.

One of the more telling parts of this whole filming quest, was other than one day we did all of the location shooting on foot. As in we walked downtown then filmed walking around downtown. This was a definite byproduct of getting the license suspended in 1996. Since I wasn’t driving and just biking to school in town before I dropped out to do the web sites full time, I hadn’t looked into a car to get around. Since I know was just working from home there wasn’t much need and so getting to the bottom of the suspended non existent license was still looming.

The Mysidia song continues, and we are met with the footage from the Longs Drugs store around the corner from the L street house. This was all while waiting for the some pizza at the nearby Rico’s Pizza. I think I filmed the entire time, so there is a ton of footage. Pictured above was a long interaction of looking at the 007 diecast cars and a funny interaction about selling the upside down packaged car on eBay. This may be like mere weeks before Dad got big into selling diecast cars on eBay oddly enough. In fact, he may have been dabbling already, but I know it wasn’t until the preliminary Star Wars Episode One toys started coming out that he started going on the toy runs with me all the time.

Also in there is some use of the “shaky” footage which was an effect the camera had on it, Justin plays a bit of hide and seek, and for outsiders it’s time to wonder if this footage matches up with the downtown footage. It doesn’t, Marty just happened to wear that same track suit a lot, and Justin’s and my own look almost had no variants in attire either. As most men, we are starting the stage where we grow into our uniforms that we will stick too most of our lives. But this night was completely separate from that day. Different tapes even.

Now we leave the commercial version of the Mysidia song and go back to Marty and Justin at the pianos. This is different footage of him playing the same song, this time with Justin on the guitar. The other comes from another tape where we happened to film a little bit of piano footage. This one on the other hand is later that night from the Rico’s Pizza footage. After eating I was being a lazy bear and just filmed them playing in the studio. Years later it made neat transitions for an old home video cut. This time Marty will start off trying to play the same song, but will get off topic with it and Justin will follow, after using this as a transition it will meld into other video clips.

But it does show how much FF4 stuck around. This is 1999, now some eight years since the game came out, and there have been four newer titles, but now on multiple pieces of footage we have Marty playing the same song from the older game.

The next bit of footage is one straight cut, even the split second of me sitting at the computer, which is obviously from some footage we taped over. Like I said too bad we didn’t have the money to just keep buying tapes or I’d have a lot of footage. Anyway, this shot brings up the mystery of when Marty had a car and when certain things happened. This scene is literally just me filming out the window as the world goes by on the way home. In the unedited footage you can hear that Marty is upset we missed a shot from the car already and that he needs to change out of the suit. All this culminates into knowing this was a Friday and probably right when he arrived home from the Police Academy, since the footage from the high school still has some kids on campus. It also accounts for the mysterious bike in the front yard of the house which must have been a student taking lessons from Mom at the time.

Marty’s parking job gives us all a good look at Dad’s bushes during the height of their existence in the front yard. Also, this was when Mom was driving the Music Lady (the Mercury Tracer) and Dad had his pickup. Funny, me being cheap would eventually have both cars as my own as hand me downs in the years that follow. The music lady most notably. Both cars would make trips to Comic Con and eventually we’d trade in both to get Mom her little red Toyota Yaris, which was her last car. It’s also pretty funny to see the broken basketball hoop was still up at this time, it was broken for years (I think we collapsed it around 1994), and I didn’t realize how long it stayed attached to the house (the video is from 1999).

Suddenly we jump to some easter footage, although it’s just Marty sitting in my room playing Goldeneye. As a kid we did most everything at the L street house, so it wasn’t until I was older that I realized it takes a while to feel comfortable at someone else’s home. Even more so on holiday to get bored with tormenting Krystle and Meghan enough to go back to the room, kick back in the recliner and start up some Goldeneye on your own. Of course, at this point deep into 1999, I think Marty has spent every weekend at the house.

 It’s weird in retrospect to think about how much both he and Chris M. spent time in the house like it was their own. I don’t know that’s probably something they can expand on in great detail. But it is one of the reasons I was sad to see my folks sell the L street house and leave for Texas, the L street house was just a home to a lot more people than just the census residents and will be missed for a long time to come.

The current picture is also great fun for me because it is such a slice of time shot, I see the free Xena: Warrior Princess poster that was sent to me for hosting a Xena webpage on the DCN site back in like 97 or 98. I think it was the first real form of payment I ever got for anything web related, since the Xena page was really more of an exercise in figuring out what one could do with a webpage. But I got it up and running and looking spiffy enough to be sent a poster in appreciation. Yup this was the start of media crossing into the internet, and no one knew what to do, rewarding people for louting your show seems to me still one of the better ideas.

Next to the poster you can see the piles of VHS tapes I worked with. This was a product of the video capturing I was doing back then. It wasn’t something a lot of people were doing at the time, and still images from current episodes of popular TV shows were, oddly enough, things people wanted. Also, luckily timed, VHS tapes were dirt cheap now, so I could record tons of TV and then snatch pictures of the tapes. We had two VCRs in the house too, so I won’t confirm nor deny, but maybe I sold a few seasons of some of the shows to rabid fans over the years. A supplier of box sets before DVDs would come and supply that need for them.

Anyway, that quick shot is followed by some footage of a hailstorm that must have hit that year. Which once again shows off the current driveway of my future rides along with the unusual look of hail piled on the valley floor in California.

Then we get a hard music transition to the footage of me, Justin, and Marty walking downtown for Marty’s haircut. There is another call out to play some GWAR, I don’t remember how the GWAR request joke became a thing, but its traceable back to the earliest websites I was making on DCN where we had a link up to a picture of GWAR.

I say I don’t remember but a part of my brain thinks the GWAR jokes came from Marty and his passive aggressive nature with Jake. Jake although gone still hung over the house with him and I think bring up GWAR as the messiest metal music Marty could think of helped satisfy a need. It is a weird pick though since Jake will always be associated with Cannibal Corpse. Maybe we had just recently seen some GWAR video and Marty got inspired.

 Now we start to get a montage of footage from that stroll downtown, including good old Davis kid jaywalking. Along with other sites, which could almost be called classic Davis.

Then we get met with this scene. Being creepers, in this case Justin and Marty, and being an enabler, in this case me, Marty started to pose as though he was a UCD student doing a student news reel on an attempt to repeal helmet laws in town, or maybe the State, if I recall correctly. What they were actually doing was using that cover to film girls. For this cut though I took out Marty’s setup question, which was about the helmet law and inject a line Marty said at Rico’s Pizza to an older gentleman who was asking us what we were filming that night.  This line is, “Brock Johnson, superspy.” Which I don’t think was the working title, just what Marty said since the gentlemen was getting way to familiar with us, as far as striking up a long conversation with strangers.

Then I cut to the young blonde lady saying something to likes of, “It’s your right if you want to die.” Which makes for a much better on the street interview. Once we close away from that shot, we get a quick bullying clip at the Death Star building on campus. Marty, always one to point out the nerdier behavior that was a foot found a group of gamers either heading home or setting up something and called out to them. Then after that we are back in the studio.

Then quickly we cut back to easter. Earlier I had Marty in my room playing Goldeneye, but for a while that day Marty and I just filmed easter. This was after all part of the point of the camcorder, to film family events. We had Christmas that year prior, this was going to be the next holiday video. Little did we know Justin was weeks away from dropping a VHS tape on the LCD screen and the whole camcorder breaking. Then of course taking it back to Good Guys and being told the warranty doesn’t cover, well anything. It would have been interesting to have had more time with the camcorder, however with the cost of hi8 and reluctance to just buy a bunch of tapes at the time we might have lost even more than the variety we gained. Maybe, if the camera would have lasted for years, that sheer time with it would  have won out over tapping over older video.

A lot of the footage that stays from that day is Krystle avoiding the camera as though it would her turn her skin to pudding if she looked directly at it, or a period of time dedicated to Marty trying to get Meghan to throw a fit over Tomb Raider. Of course, Meghan is playing Tomb Raider 2, so that ties nicely into the Christmas the camera came from. However, Marty’s attempts are strange since she is playing the game she wants, so why would she throw a tantrum? Another thing to remember the famous Meghan blow up over Tomb Raider was for the original, which was getting close to three years old by this time, which changes Meghan’s age quite a bit from pre-teen to teen. But in families it’s hard to outlive overly dramatic events and Meghan will always have the Tomb Raider blow up on her resume.

Hell, I still remember Justin and Krystle’s alternate Nirvana lyrics when from when I was in junior high.  I think I told Justin about this later in life and he just doesn’t remember his initial thoughts on the Smells Like Teen Spirit’s lyrics. I’ll give a hint, one line was, “Come let’s play now at the playground”. They were in elementary school at the time, it makes sense in a world perspective kind of way. Justin of course would grow up to idolize the band, so his kid bop version probably got sent to the shredder on his internal hard drive.

This easter also probably features some of the earliest footage of Michael, whom was just born.  Mom, Dad, Steve, Jill, Bob, and Julie are all on the dining room during the easter footage wooing over the little baby. The easter footage is also devoid of Justin who if I recall correctly had run himself afoul of the law and was in a weird state of limbo with Steve this weekend. His issue would carry on for a time and is why Justin features in a lot of the camera footage along with being the destroyer of the camcorder, because he was having to hide out at Grandma’s house while Steve settled down his anger.

Now I think we really fall into the random cuts from all sorts of different things I found in the footage. I really tried to get the best cross sample of all that was on there possible.

This includes some skateboardery, Karl working at Tower records, me walking through Longs Drugs, from I think the Rico’s Pizza footage again. This means Rico’s Pizza was post easter, since we can see some peeps in a clearance cart on the way in along with Justin being present here after the easter debacle. Then the long cut of JF focused in on Goldeneye. I held this transition because its JF, his attempts at being off camera were so silly, that Marty one night just turned on the camcorder near the tv and let it run without JF knowing for the entirety of the tape. So, one tape, whenever we paused filming would have a frame or two of this, and of course the last few minutes of the tape are nothing but this shot. We zoom in on JF just because he deserves it for being JF.

Those shots though are another good look into the hold Goldeneye had for a time on multiplayer gaming in the house. It was the successor on the consoles in a weird way to Street Fighter II. Sure, some of the PC games had multiplayer which we have delved into, but Marty and JF prior to 98/97 had been die hard on the SNES fighting games, or in the arcades, which after all is where we met JF. Now this one game on a console we wouldn’t have cared about otherwise took hours of our time.

The unbroken footage at the end, more than some other Goldeneye footage I have gets into the vocabulary a bit that went along with the game. We had a set of rules in the game we liked to play with that causes for some colorful language. If I recall we always played one shot kills and usually picked the weapon set that featured the proximity mines, causing the most cowardice of gameplay since one wrong move would spell instant death to the foolish.

So, the filming of random girls as a creepy guy has been around forever, it’s not new to cell phones. I think this was the start of it that day. This is what led to asking about the “attempt to repeal bike helmets”. What is particular to this frame is though, was while Marty was getting the haircut, there is a movie theater across the street and somehow we ended up inside the theater with the video camera. I’ll tell you what my mood is at this point, bored. While not in this video, there is a funny section of Justin going over the coming soon posters, they were 10 Things I Hate About You, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Both films that have stuck around, also two film I went to the theater to see with Hien. Go figure. We will come back to the camcorder footage for now though:

Back to the Rico’s Pizza night footage. Eventually we get back from Rico’s and ate the pizza. Oddly we don’t have a lot of decent pictures from this side of the kitchen table that Justin got of me and Marty. Also, oddly we decided to use the kitchen table instead of going into the dining room. There on the hutch sit Mom’s array of cookbooks and of course the glass doors that years later one Jim Russell would hit with Karl’s white chocolate Kit Kat bar.

You can’t make it out to well in this picture but the pizza we ordered that night was some sort of meat extravaganza. In the footage Marty is rattling of some rant, which I think was some sort of inside joke at the time, and I replied with “Hey man, how’s it going?” which was also an inside joke at the time. However, the origins of that statement have escaped me, maybe I’ll remember one of these days and update this, or however reads this eons later will have a mystery to uncover. But boy do I remember that we though that line was funny as hell.

The next bit of footage lets us get to see the inside of Tower Records in Davis for a bit. Inside we get a decent look at how extensive the magazine section was before the internet got a grasp on everyone. Like I said by now I make a bit of a living off the internet, but it’s still not a known commodity and payment for doing so is odd, including sometimes getting a poster in the mail. Then we get to the above picture, which is when those two realize I walked down from the kitchen table and the last of the meat pizza we had been enjoying. To film them as they tried to figure out a way to jam to the Mysdia song. Earlier we saw some footage from the other side of the studio, well that was filmed later once they knew I was laying there on the dining table filming them. Before then everything was a covert operation, so the conversation they have about what to play, no hamming it up for the camera.

I don’t know if I thought centering a “jam session” around an old FF4 song was nerdy and I needed to catch them in the act, or if by this time the need for more and more footage of whatever was the driving force behind the filming, in the end, decades later for a short home video cut it was genius.

Then we shuffle back to being outside of Rico’s Pizza again while waiting for the pie, some bowling at the UCD Memorial Union (which connects to Lower Freeborn Hall and KDVS), and filming at the movie theater. It’s not until a badly lit shot of Marty do we get to something new. This is from about a ten minute reel of what is basically low impact at home wrestling.

This part is Marty getting announced, as Martin Caprigleon, and then his opponent is “The Medium” which is just Justin sitting on the couch, currently unamused. It actually takes a few minutes of attacking for Justin to get up, then it’s just me and Marty taking turns trying to body slam medium in the living room without causing such a disturbance as to wake anyone up. The interesting thing about some of this low light, low-res footage, is once you erase some of the details in Marty’s face, he can start to look a lot like Chris M.

Anyway, the footage is probably only funny to the three of us that were there and I think was just so Marty could mess with Justin. Without Chris M. around anymore to make up names for Marty always needed someone to be at the low end of the totem pole. Hien also got some of this, but to be fair one of his nicknames was the fault of UCD. Where they look his name, threw it out and called him Haly.

Confirmation it’s the 90s, and that we were at DHS on a Friday, since there were people there, which wouldn’t be the case on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Overalls might make a comeback. But they do symbolize exactly when we were. Which is a good thing, while the family footage probably features the same thing, I have solid memories of them at those times and who they are, it’s not until you get random footage out in the wilds that the brain must remember the clothes and the times. Quite reflective.

Then we go back to Holmes, the junior high school. Like I said we filmed until it got dark and then kept going. A lot of this footage is similar to the stuff from the intro of the footage, barring some weird tactical spying Marty is doing of the MPR, where some sort of event or rehearsal was going on that night.

 The music Marty and Justin have been playing in the background from the piano studio footage also starts to take a turn, which will eventually leads into Marty starting another FF4 song that I will use for the ending transition. There is still some other footage to go though, but drawing back to the odd importance that FF4 was able to hold over our minds for years in the 90s needs to get getting pointed out.

The footage in the shot was of a long interaction Marty and Justin had, where they did some “acting”. Marty as always was pretending to be some form of law enforcement and had stopped Justin, an innocent skater in front of a school portable. Don’t fret the details, I guess. Anyway, after a long time of Marty trying to assert dominance, Justin, whose character seems to be a smart ass, I guess, challenges Marty’s authority (I think that South Park episode was out by early 1999) and a melee ensues, Justin using the skateboard as a weapon to end his detainment. This isn’t terribly different than how our fake pull overs in front of the L street house played out a couple years prior with Marty. He would go through the dialog then someone would challenge, and fake violence would be the course.

And now some new footage. I haven’t been able to figure out the point of the footage Marty and I did this night that features the above picture. It was another one of those, well just turn the camera on and go nights. Counting money, showing his ID, we went outside so Marty could use the blender and not wake anyone up, since its past midnight, which is something I show off to everyone in the raw footage. It’s interesting to note that by 1999 Mom had moved her quilt with the medieval musicians out of the living room. I think it’s now in the piano studio, but I don’t think I have an angle on the wall it would be on. But I thought it was in the living room for the entire sum of the 90s. Good to see this footage brings to light more information about the past.

Obviously, the above picture is just of Marty swinging a whiffle ball bat. The whiffle ball bat being an odd prop that stayed around the house for years. We haven’t had any big whiffle games since the eighth grade, which is at this point in time around seven years in the past, but the bats remain. We see Marty with the same bat in the Christmas footage from 1998 a few months before this. This was the bat if I recall correctly that Steve was using to try and hit wadded up wrapping paper during that Christmas, to the horror of Mom and how close his swings were to our Aunt Dorothy.

And then we have soup. Those bowls and Campbell’s Chunky soup were a house staple. But it’s not just chunky soup mind you, no it is soup, with shredded cheese, hot sauce and crackers. It’s a damn meal. At this point on the hot sauce trail, that is going to be Tabasco or Crystal sauce going in the soup, but as the years go on that Tabasco sauce is going to be like adding water to the soup compared to the later versions of house chunky soup and the hot sauces we use. But while Ramen seems to get so much hype over the years as kids go to meals in the house, busting open the chunky soup, putting it in the microwave for 3 ½ minutes then adding cheese, crackers, and hot sauce was just as much a staple as those nummy nummy tapeworms of ramen noodles..

After some dramatic music and Marty slow walking a fall through the front room we are met with this small sequence. While boring to most, super interesting to me. So, this was taken probably late January of 1999. I’m pretty sure this was older footage I had just shot around my room, and going up and down the block, that I made when testing things on the camara not long after Christmas. I wrote about that Utah trip in 1997, where I got back into trying to collect all the little plastic Star Wars men. By 1999 I was still doing so, I would buy ones I didn’t have and would carefully pin them to the wall as I got them. Well, there they are hanging in rows behind the computer monitor. Not long after the “preview” waves of the new Star Wars movie will start coming out, and then the new movie itself, and that wall will start getting red backed cards to go with the green and orange that you see before you, actually all the orange ones might be to the other side of the television.

After those little plastic guys, the footage itself is meant to be me seeing how well the camera could record the video the computer monitor. Like I said, little did we understand how much resolution would change in the next ten years. All this is to show a post on one thread on the Katie-holmes.com message forums. This is at least real time footage of the forums on the site which were vibrantly healthy at the time, with the banner ads going full steam and then we see the click of a link to load the next post to see how well it played out on the camcorder. You can’t really read a thing, so, not well.

The monitor itself is adorned with a Pressure Point sticker. One of the things I did when delving into the web design world was throw up websites for my friend’s bands. Silvara’s would be an age long dance and was due in a few months for a major redesign spurned on by Jim joining the band. Pressure Point was a punk band that Mike G., of KDVS fame, was in. The sticker was something I scanned into the computer to make the banner for their sight and then just added to the monitor for good times.

Now we cycle back to the UCD campus, what building we are in is something I may research at some point, but that is all beside the point. The stairwells, the hallways, these were part of some idea Marty had for me being followed for the actual Brock Johnson movie. Honestly a lot of the “scenery” shots we took I didn’t add to this little rough cut in favor of more slice of life footage, but this was intended to be some actual 12 inch Johnson. Or at least “test” footage. So, for a good long time I just walked up and down stairs, back and forth through hallways and in and outdoors all over UCD. I think mixed in here is a ½ second of Joe T. outside of the movie theater, kids had jobs what can I say.

Now we start to close out the edit, this shot was of some Saturday morning when Marty was “testing” out his “funk” background music, just before the snapshot. This is more “slice of life” stuff. As I said, during this time Marty would come in Friday and stay the weekend, I may have mentioned that by now. I also think Mom and Dad would volunteer at the Oakland Mormon temple, either every Saturday or every other Saturday.  Thus, a lot of filming was done Saturday after getting up around noon and making lunchfast, sometimes out of Chunky soup. Obviously, some days were just less focused and probably centered around a lot of video games and internet use. But Saturday “mornings” felt a lot like the video footage we have of it, a nice careless world.

Anyway, so then we get Marty transition as I said into a different FF4 song, and I just used that to cut to the end, since there really is no ending point to random footage of a non-existent movie. For a close I used the footage of Justin and Marty walking away from Rico’s Pizza after picking up that night’s dinner. The sound is edited out since as we left, this was when some older man engaged Marty in a conversation about what and why we were filming, which is where I got the “Brock Johnson superspy” quote from. Then I just fade into some credits with more recent pictures of the boys. All in all, a fun little thing to cut up and hopefully keep around. Jogs a fair number of memories.

There is a point in one of the videos where my nephew is filming a girl in one of the local theaters, that he found attractive. During this he closes in on a poster for a soon to be released film in the next month, Star Wars Episode One The Phantom Menace.  We know this because I’ve no mentioned it a few times. Well that’s interesting because I don’t relate the way my life changed post that films release to being that close to the same time that Marty and I running around trying to make 12 inch Johnson the movie. But there it was, in just a few weeks from that zoom in I would meet Jen and work on yeeting myself the hell out of Davis to be with her. Maybe that’s a silly way to say it, but if that April you would have told 21-year-old me that next year I’d be old hand of the city of San Diego, I wouldn’t have been able to understand how I would get there from Davis in the first place. Anyway it’s time for TPM to become a reality.

 

Below is the current cut of the edits:

The Phantom Menace:

Silvara

While all the 12 inch Johnson footage is fun it also is the last look into a window of time. For a swath of time in 1998 though 1999 those weekends, were just that. With the breaking of the camcorder the Bond spoof, the tv pilot, all these ideas died with them.

The Website forums became a lot more work than pleasure, now with increased traffic, Marty was the one posting more for fun on them. Gone was the times we would go to campus and post in tandem on forums for giggles. Now we had trolls and ad impressions to keep moving, and tons of differing opinions.

So let us saunter back in time to Karl and his band. We’ve touched on this. Originally nameless, Morbid Thoughts would eventually get a title, Silvara, and in 1997 I worked with Karl and Nik to get Silvara online, so we might as well catch up with them, since Silvara’s story gets bigger now.

 

The Ballad of Silvara.  Karl’s band from junior high never really went away. Always there looming in the background like some untamed beast. In 1997 when the great internet awakening happened, I told the guys, which now where Karl, Nik, Nate and a new drummer named James they should get a website online. Nik ended up taking the lead on that and for the next couple years, and we had the site hosted on http://www.tripod.com/~njanos .

image 39 Nike with his Silvara folder at the L street house Christmas Eveish 1998

 

The webpage stayed pretty simple during that time. There was a point when I got contacted about sending out a demo for them to an independent filmmaker, and I recall working on getting them Real Audio streaming so they could post some songs online. But it wasn’t much by modern standards.

It wasn’t until 1999 that things moved forward with Silvara and their website. While I was doing my thing, I missed some changes to the band that happened from 98 to 99. Most notably Nik and Nate would become cast aways for Jim and Brendan. Jim who I had gone to school with back in the 80s reconnected in May of 1999 when we got in a big discussion about the new Star Wars film that had just come out.

Jim mentioned he was now in Silvara for Nate’s old position and would like to modify the information on their website. So later on that summer Jim showed up to do so, got distracted by Tomb Raider III, and started coming over every night. Eventually he began learning some html and working on their site, so all good. It seemed like for a small period of time there that Silvara re-awoke. We would have tape and photos from actual shows they would play in the Sacramento area. A few years down the road they would release a demo on, on CD! But for a lone while after Brendan left the band things seemed to slow down. They would still have a show from time to time, and would even after I end these stories here, but the heyday seemed to feel like the early 00s for Karl and his Silvara Rock, er Metal Band.

 

Final Fantasy VIII

September 9th, 1999. The day Final Fantasy VIII would come out. At this point, a little more than three months into shifting my focus to Star Wars websites and talking with Jen, the next major release of a media entity was staring me down. In the two year wake for Final Fantasy VII and the enormous amounts of fun I had playing that game release weekend with Chris, the anticipation for this installment was maybe not on par with The Phantom Menace, but was a close second.

Thanks to the increase of importance on the internet in everyone’s eyes over the last couple years there was some prerelease hype to be built up too. But as the date approached I had two major issues. One the habit of talking to Jen over ICQ required being pasted to my PC all day long for long but slow moving instant message conversations, and the PSX I got for graduation was having it’s issues loading games.

During Easter of 1999 during some of the video footage we have for the day we can hear Meghan comment on the long load time for a game, which I refer to as “several years old”, Tomb Raider II, taking forever to load. It would suck if a game I had been anticipating all year came home with me on the day of release and the PSX failed to load it.

The solution was obvious. On September 9th, I would have to also purchase a new PSX. So with Jen warned that to speak to me would require running up long distance charges on her phone, being as in 1999 we all still had to use land lines and the concept of free long distance calling was still about a year away from the masses, I got up and with dad as the driver for this adventure, went to Toys R’ Us at the Arden Fair Mall and purchase the game along with a new PSX, which now came with Dual Shock controllers.

Now I am completely redoing this section from my main write up, while searching for visual aids i found THIS LINK convering the Sega Dreamcast release. Now that might seem like a weird link to add here. But while I cared not and even mocked the Dreamcast at the time, it was set to be released on September 9th, 1999. So oddly enough we hit up the TRU video game section the morning they released the new Sega system to buy a PSX. We were also the only people there if I recall, I actually remember seeing all the Dreamcasts. Now I had my reasons for not caring about Sega, but I do distinctly remember feeling pretty smart when there was no rush at a major retailer in Sacramento for the soon to be failed system. But it did add to the overall day. As you can see at that pages coverage of the Dreamcast release the Babbages still has a setup for the FF8 release as well.

Of course, since it was Dad and I on the trip to get FF8, before I got home and could hook up the new system and play the new game, we did hit up the hot wheel isles for Dad and the Star Wars sections for toys. For whatever reason I relate the figure Gasgano with this trip, I don’t know if it was hard to find at the time and we bought one, or if I just happened to pick one up to open up for some display I was setting up, but I am pretty sure he tagged along on the way home.

Then began the Final Fantasying. September 9th was a Thursday. So, starting that afternoon I hooked up the new PSX in the front room on what was at the time the nicer TV, moved one of the gray chairs directly in front of the box about six feet back and began my time as Squal and his companions as they started their SEED tests.

Being that I set my own work schedule in these days, I just allowed the websites to run themselves and played late into the night. I don’t remember when fatigue kicked in, but eventually I had to save my progress and then wake up Friday afternoon and continue. Now this isn’t a history of the plot of FF8 so I will find a link here or embed a video that covers the game itself if anyone is interested. But Saturday I don’t remember if I had beaten the game or not, but I was probably pushing too because I was on a timetable. Because there is another part of this story I have left out. And that was that the NFL football season started on Sunday.

Off the loss last year, well it technically was in 1999, but off the heartbreaking 20-18 loss to the Atlanta Falcons the season before in the Divisional round of the playoffs. Where the seemingly unbeatable 49ers lost Garrison Hearst to a gruesome leg/foot break and then couldn’t quite comeback to move on in the playoffs against the eventual NFC super bowl representative. There was a lot of hope the Niners could get the holes filled and make another Super Bowl run this year.

So, the Jacksonville Jaguars and mom’s cinnamon rolls were on the schedule for at 1pm, so the hope was to stop time compression and save the world from Sorceress Ultimecia by kickoff. I didn’t quite make it, I do remember having to save somewhere in the Sorceress’s castle late Saturday night / early Sunday morning.

Now I don’t want to point fingers, but one of the reasons I could slightly off schedule for that self-made five day weekend was that Jen, taking my threat as serious, started running up her long distance bill and called more than once during that four day period to ask about my game progress on other things. I think it was at this point that if either of us hadn’t realized what was coming between us, that the veil had been lifted.

So, indulging in my need for beautiful young ladies. I allowed my gaming to slow down and by kickoff I was slightly short of my goal. Oh well I had pastries and the Niners, what could wrong.

So, the game ended up being a gut shot. I didn’t know at the time what was about to unfold for the season, next week they would win and the assumption is we just pulled another 1997 season and all would go well. Even though the game went poorly I was able to get back to FFVIII and save the world from time compression, which is probably a big thing to do when you’re upset that the Niners just stumbled out of the gates.

Beating the game wasn’t the end of the game though. This was not a one and done kind of thing, I didn’t just drop that kind of money to burn out after four days. Thus, I would use the internet to begin to find what I had missed the first time through along with downloading the mp3s from the soundtrack. To date the FF series had always made its way musically into my/our world, hell Marty was still playing FFIV songs on the piano, and by 99 that game was near 8 years old.

The intro to the game would become one of the tracks I played a lot. Embarrassingly playing it while messing around with the Darth Maul lightsaber’s Dad brought home from D.I. was a weird fun thing to do between upload and downloads and other wait times on the computers. During Christmas when all the electronics were hooked up in dining room that may have been a side fidget.

Final Fantasy VIII itself will continue being a title with some history moving into 2000 as well. It’s spark with running up Jen’s long distance phone bill wouldn’t be its only influence on that relationship, allowing the title to get a stronger emotional tie to my personal life than just a good game. But that is a story for another year.

Age of Empires II

Eventually Age of Empires II (AoE2) would release and fill that same space. AoE2, which came out in 1999, would then lead to one of the only times I’ve seen someone physically hit another person over a video game. Jim and Brendan got into the game shortly after I got it. I then quickly got banned from playing with them because instead of focusing on town structure, I would just farm as fast I could, build a barracks and then start sending warriors into their villages to lay waste to their endeavors.

It sounds like what is called a rush strategy, but really, they were both so civic minded in the game they just made themselves vulnerable to early game aggression. This would be something I would find normal with friends as time went on. The Star Wars version of AoE2, Star Wars: Battlegrounds and then Age of Mythology, the first 3D foray into the AoE world, would follow the same pattern. Friends would want to play it. They’d go civic minded early, and I would beat them down with pointy sticks, I would get banned from competitive play in my own house.

Anyway, after I got blackballed from AoE2, Jim and Brendan would start a two day long game of, “don’t attack me and I won’t attack you until we have everything built up proper”. The second night they were playing they were both getting to the point where populations and armies were at their biggest and baddest sizes. Then Jim, pulled what could only be referred toas “a Jim”. The game holds an alternate win condition, that of building a World Wonder and having it stand for X amount of time in game.

So naturally before they declared aggression time, Jim built one of these, and Brendan was forced to quickly break the peace treaty and try to penetrate a night and a half of base building to destroy Jim’s wonder before it ended their game. It didn’t work. And so, for the first time in my life, at the ages of 21, Brendan came into my room where Jim was on my computer laughing and punched him.

There would be a second punching over a game incident that would come a couple years later, also Brendan, but was over the game The Bouncer, which was one of the more played launch titles of any system I have ever dealt with. It also fit into the multiplayer makes games more fun genre and was really our steppingstone for console multiplayer from Goldeneye to Halo. The nice part being The Bouncer, being a fighter, had no split screen, which hindered some of the fun of the FPS console games. Of course we will get to these titles in time and find out why Brendan can’t keep his cool.

So in late 1998 we got dad a camcorder for Christmas. Marty and I took to doing things on the camcorder instantly. I will keep mentioning that at length in tuns of sections. While going through tapes I noticed something interesting, well one, we were testing what we could do on the camera, and two as I think nerds would do we messed around with “stop motion” and Star Wars figures.

The initial clip I found as one I did in my room by myself, It’s not good or particularly entertaining it was just me messing around with the camera:

Next, from the same day possibly, is really not stop motion, just me playing with the zoom and a stormtrooper figure. I think the big deal was playing the mp3 in the background to see how it was to have a little plastic star with a soundtrack going. As it’s probably January of 1999 at this point it’s one of the Sephiroth themes from Final Fantasy VII. Also not really interesting, but part of the progression of using the camera and Star Wars toys to make little video clips:

So now a little time down the road, Marty is over on one of his weekend stays which were the norm from 1998 through almost half of 1990. I don’t know what the setup conversation was for filming the Star Wars toys, but it seems we decided to do some sort of meld of live action shots of figures along with stop motion. This was either for random fun or more let’s see what the camera could do at close up with all these Star Wars toys we have as resources. There are two of these video clips, but they were both shot on the same night, late while everyone else was asleep:

Next we have a couple short videos of flybys of the old ERTL Star Wars ship models. I enjoy the fact that I think in our hubris, Marty and I figure if we just learned Adobe Premiere we could cut out the backgrounds as needed. While chroma keying (green screen/blue screen) was getting pretty common place at the time, taking the whole background out was our own technical jump in concept that we had no clue how to do. Anyway, I was pretty proud of these things so I filmed them. Boba Fett’s Slave I, I did a really long series of takes on, more so, so I could admire my few years old paint job.

Above: pictures of the old ERTL model boxes and a picture i would online of an old Testors store display

I think it does require a mention that the old ERTL models weren’t given guides, and you just hand painted them with good old Testor’s model paint that maybe one would get from the local Long’s Drug Store. Even though we had the internet, YouTube tutorials were not yet a thing so I just hand painted the thing with the colors I bought at the store, so I was pretty proud of all the little ideas and details I came up with at the time. With hindsight I can see I just thought of things that we be standard thought these days, and I did literally just assemble the thing then hand paint it with a paint brush they sold at the Testors display, so meh:

In April of 1999 while hooked up to the VCR in my bedroom Justin will knock over a pile of VHS tapes (which I used heavily for video captures on my websites) that hit directly on the LCD screen of the camcorder destroying the screen in the process. This would lead to a series of events that would give us a non-mobile camcorder for the rest of days. In retrospect this is a HUGE disappointment because the amount of time and footage Marty and I were putting on the thing would have given us all in the family a great time of recorded history.

But life serves us what it serves us and to use the camera from then on it had to be hooked up through my PC. As the new Star Wars movie would come into life and things would transition from Marty being over at the house all the time, I would start spending more late nights with Jim and Brendan. This time in the fall of 1999 had a lot of silly nights, but where this is all leading to what was a resurrection of stop motion with the Star Wars toys.

On the far side of my television my new invigoration into toy collecting since May had me setup a cardboard cantina diorama Hasbro had released for the Star Wars toy line, which was filled with Star Wars men. Late one night Brendan started manipulating a couple of the biker/swoop troopers that had some silly bowlegged stances so they could ride their given vehicles. As this progressed Jim had me fire up the camera and the video capture on the PC for it and the two meticulously animated a few poses with the plastic men until they were making sweet love once I edited the stills together in an animated gif.

Being in our very early 20s this was hilarious to us, and so we continued making gif’s until we finished with four in total. Since by this point in my life I was well into working and designing websites on the internet I quickly threw the four images online. We had another comedy induced discussion of putting a porno soundtrack on the website, to which we realized it was considerably more accurate to use the Star Wars cantina theme as the porno beat. Once we downloaded and loaded the midi, we realized that for one short moment our immaturity had hit a moment of genius. Thus, for the next five years or so the simple little website pornowars.com was born. I think in like 2005 or so I let the domain name and site falter, maybe it was longer, but anyway here are those classic gifs which were luckily saved to a backup CD I made during that era.

That was the culmination of a year’s worth of stop motion on the camcorder. From moving them around slowly near the computer monitor to Max Rebo having his way with Sny Snootles. I would later do some more work in 2000 with some figures in San Diego, which I may ADD HERE. But this was really the pinnacle for dad’s camcorder’s stop motion career.

The creation of the other images after the scouts was pretty fun. Brendan spent a lot of time enjoying the idea of Han and Chewbacca having a sensitive moment. While revealing in the idea of what the two men would do alone on Millennium Falcon together when traveling through hyperspace, Jim sat on the head of my bed actively reposing my Bossk action figure on a Commtech chip. Once we decided the sensitive moment with Han and his Wookie was complete Jim unveiled what he had been working on. a Jawa giving a “Bossk job”.

By then we were rambunctiously laughing at our own immaturity and so as a group we worked on the last scene with Max and Sny. It surprisingly was a lot of work to make the little Jawa’s cheer on the couple. Including the use of Commtech chips again to make one of the little hooded aliens jump for joy in the background. Of course, all of this carefully being placed on my episode one mouse pad on one of the kitchen table tools I had stolen to use as a mouse pad holder in my bedroom. For reference Max and Sny are the very same ones from Christmas 1984.

Above: a packaged E1 Amidala mouse pad, i have no memory of how i ended up with the thing, that being said i looked up the creation date of the gifs. 1/14/2000. So now we have some added information, one technically this falls in 2000, but since i think i will start that section on Feburary with George and Jen, we will stay here with the 90s, second the mouse pad was probably a Christmas present from someone. Next is a picture off the interent of the Commtech reader and some of the chips that came out that year with the new Star Wars figure toys.

Christmas 1999 was setup to be different. As 1999 grew old Marty’s involvement in the L street house devolved into him spending most of his time hanging out with Justin. From talking to Justin as an adult this is it’s own complicated story, but after he completed the police academy I can remember him doing two local interviews but somehow ending up getting a job supervising detention at the High School. Not necessarily a bad job just not where I thought he was going.

When he did come over he started spending a lot of time on one of the phone lines and less online or just having fun. This was of course will coupled with the increase time Jim would spend at the house filling the fun quotient and the time I would start spending with Jen on ICQ or the phone as well.

Famously during the first courscantcity.net Star Wars fan get togethers that took place in southern California to visit the “Myth of the Magic”(?). Marty showed up at the house like normal to stay the weekend only to have my mother explain I wasn’t there. Somehow he had missed the notices that I was leaving for the weekend.

Now I don’t say this to bag on Marty, just to give context to the fact that as we run into the holidays it became the first time in years we didn’t have either Chris or Marty or both being a daily influence on the festivities. Now, I my memory is hazy years later, but I do believe Marty came to the house for Christmas, but it was odd this year and would be the last time we would have either over during the holidays. In retrospect this was pretty sad, at the time it just seemed to be where life was going.

Prior to the day itself, Jim and Brendan were playing games out in the Christmas setup in the dining room. It was at this time the random insult “waazniatch” was first thrown out randomly. I uttered the phrase while on the computer at the dining table in reference to something I think Brendan said at the time and the phrase took off from there, being later modified into its shorter form “waaz”, or other ones like “chalupniacth”.

My interactions with Jen, which had taken off since September and Final Fantasy VIII, decided to get me a gift that year. It was a copy of one of her favorite games, Seven Kingdoms II. Excited I went to install it on my system out in the dining room to learn it so I could play online with her and it wouldn’t run.

So the solution was the solution we always used back then, Fry’s Electronics. Christmas Eve Dad and I drove out there and I used a small sum of money and bought my first ever PC in a box. Blueberry was a complete tower that came pre-assembled that met the specs to play the game. It wasn’t a spec heavy system like I was getting into, it was a cheap but updated enough system to run the game, which is all that mattered.

Blueberry would stay in my life longer than any other computer and is in fact still as the time I write this in a state of getting worked on. The rest of that Christmas ended up being as not memorable as years past or the new style that were coming down the road.

Above: Some clonetroppers ontop of Blueberry in 2002. Jen and Me at the Star Wars tour in downtown LA.

The tour wasnt in L.A.

So let me do a update on this “Myth of the Magic” item. One it was called the “Magic of the Myth”. For the base information I have its article on Wookiepedia: Link Here

As we can see there, “The San Diego Museum of Art September 25, 1999 through January 2, 2000”, Now September 25th is an interesting date for this, and there are two reasons, one I swear we went earlier in the year, and two I thought it was in downtown L.A. So, the exhibit being in S.D. make sense but there is some part of this trip I am missing. So, let’s try and rehash this story.

In the section about CoruscantCity.Net, I mention there is a point where people in the Star Wars site I was visiting go from usernames to real names. Hopefully I don’t edit that out some day, because this trip is that event and it correlates well. Because after June 19th and what I swear is before September 9th, this trip is planned, and my ride from Northern California to Southern California is a man named Junby, whom I mentioned I can’t even recall his online name anymore.

I honestly do not recall how we met up, he lived in the San Jose area, and I was in Davis without a car. So, I either got a ride to San Jose then hitched a ride with him or he was willing to draw the wrong way for an hour to pick me up. Here is the thing, me and Junby did a few car trips together. One of them, which I feel was the first one, there was some issue he was having coming back up one of the highways on his way home that delayed him over an hour.

I honest to God think then he picked me up somewhere in the Bay area then, but how I got there and waited is just gone, so maybe I am wrong, maybe he got delayed getting home, then had to drive to Davis to get me, then drive all the way to San Diego. Now I should clean up the first part of this story, but it is good to see how to mind works things out. This trip was to San Diego I think only. I think the Downtown L.A. Star Wars fashion thing came later, possibly attached to the Disneyland trip, but since we did so many trips so close together it’s hard to discern one from the other. So, I also don’t think this trip involved Junby’s cousin, or watching Blade Runner at his place, which is the only memory I have of his place.

I’ve always assumed this trip too, as I stated happened during the summer. But if wookiepedia is right it happened in like October, which the more I think about it does seem right. And so is why this isn’t in the CC.net area of the website. Prior to this trip Jen and I had only ever ICQ’ed and talked on the phone, so along with meeting these other nerds, this was a way for two carless twenty year olds to meet up in person safely. Which we both admitted to each other later was part of the plan. Whose plan it was that started this silly idea of driving up and down the state, I don’t recall, but to our ends it meshed well.

Now I mentioned earlier the funny side note was that Marty still showed up for the weekend stay. Considering the amount of planning this took to pull off it really does highlight the change in times that was going on, I honestly thought Marty had bailed on things before late fall of 1999, but he must not have, this makes me wonder why I can’t remember what thanksgiving 1999 was like. But back to the main story. I feel pretty confident that Junby and I probably drove down and then stayed with Rick, another mentioned Star Wars nerd, in L.A. the night before going to L.A. it makes sense for one, Rick also would have needed a ride, and it breaks up the drive. So, let’s dive into this. This of course wouldn’t have been my first random trip to L.A. with someone online. Back in 1998 with people wanting me to try and desperately deliver some mail in person to a fan mail address for the Katie Holmes website, another online guy was willing to drive from Davis all the way to L.A. and try to make a connection for the website.

This itself is a long story of people wanting to get the “fan list” we had started on the website to be integrated with the “fan club”. But no one could get any non-official response from the fan club, so this plan was hatched to send me as a representative to the club and try to get the online stuff linked with the old real world stuff. Something in today’s world that isn’t even something, but back then these companies that did “fan clubs” didn’t give a thought to the online community.

Now that trip was strange. I stayed in Rowland Heights, and we tracked down the address to be nothing more than a P.O. Box in Burbank run by some faceless fan mail collection company. I know that online that took any idea that there was a “fan club” of any official sort and threw it away, so oddly if there was some Katie Holmes IRL fan club doing things back in the late 90s they were completely doing things on an island.

That trip though to me is more memorable for the California Café, getting an undercooked steak and then almost dying in a mall bathroom. This trip would hopefully end differently. It may have started off with a bang though. I’m pretty sure this was the drive down i-5 with Junby where a suicidal bird flew smack dab into his windshield, freaking us out. Along with that I think the first night when we stayed in L.A. there was a insignificant earthquake that was brought up by the non-Californian posters that knew about our trip online.

But this Star Wars exhibit was the centerpiece of the trip, so whatever the itinerary was we were headed there. Jen of course lived in San Diego, which is why I think she had a lot to do with pushing for this adventure beyond what I mentioned previously. The exhibit was at Balboa Park, which is where the Zoo is as well for those not in the know. That of course too is where my memory picks back up.

Balboa Park is going to come in and out my life again and again, but this is the first stop ever. And being that I was around new people I felt the need to be running at 100 percent during this outing. So, I got picked for some street performance of Magic which seemed to entertain the other nerds. Then of course there is the exhibit. For some reason I only have a couple pictures from the event itself. The above picture with Jabba the Hutt, who by this point in my life I was very vocal about being the end goal of a successful life. Then a couple of Jen and one of her friend Min Run, who had come along as Jen’s chauffeur. Honestly Min-Ru probably had an account on the site before then, but this was her introduction to everyone, and boy was it one.

Jen and Min-Ru both had a bad sense of direction. So, Min-Ru being thrust into guide of this trip through San Diego became endearingly comical. Culminating in the term “A Min-rU-turn” from her constant recorrects on the road. Added to this was that I eventually lived with Jen in the apartment she was in at this time, and I later recognized where they had been having navigational issues and found it extra humorous.

After the exhibit that day we eventually returned to Jen’s apartment, which would be my first introduction to the location. I also don’t remember much about there besides everyone sort of sitting around Jen’s room. This was before she got into FF8, so we didn’t watch her beat the game, that would come later. My guess is someone was probably on her computer, which she called JediBob, and was posting and reading off posts from the website.

I don’t remember anything about the trip back up to Davis, but this trip was going to play a pivotal role in the happenings of the next year. I didn’t know at the time, but another Star Wars nerd on the website, instead of coming on this group trip, planned a solo trip to visit Jen and San Diego the following week if I recall. Now considering Jen got me the Christmas present and the following year I don’t think this trip went as planned for him, and almost completely from Jen’s retelling was the difference in our attitudes. I was there to have fun and meet people, the other might have been more nefarious and sounds like he was a bit of a downer in his behavior. Always something to remember about attitude.

Coruscant City . Net:

This was a weird section to date. So i decided to put it at the end of the 90s. The paper being so integral to money in the house and so on, it does deserve it's own section here, but the story is built up since the 80s, oh well here goes:

The Newspaper. It’s time to cover something that by the time of starting this endeavor is an archaic delivery service. As we have covered in 1989 I started my first job sponsored by money outside of my parents or their friends, a Davis Enterprise Newspaper route. I cannot remember for the life of me what sparked me to get this job. I remember it being an independent decision, I.e. I almost want to say the enterprise came recruiting for kids to be carriers at school or it was mentioned as part of a class trip to see the inner workings of the local newspaper offices.

The latter option being a thing that happened back then. In this pre-internet dominate world daily news came from one source to most people and it was the local paper. So school field trips to the town headquarters for ingesting the worlds information were not abnormal. Sure we also had television news, but it was the morning, or in Davis’s case the afternoon paper that a lot of people relied on. Either way whether they came by looking or it was an addon to a field trip I somehow got on the list to work for the man. Thus the carrier career I mentioned earlier began, which bred into almost a good decade of house’s house extra income.

Now because of the routes or just as being normal people at the time, this meant we got both the local Davis paper at the house and then especially the Sacramento Bee, since Dad’s much larger morning routes were from the news branch from the near by state capitol.  These larger papers as I have gone over included many interesting Thanksgiving holidays through the 90s. but a morning Bee also somewhere became a non-work related norm.

The above picture is from Christmas morning 1998, taken on dad’s camcorder which was the crown jewel of gifts that year. The snapshot shows Marty reading the morning paper, presumably while we waited for everyone to arrive. Marty notably had a very full holiday at the L street house marked by the Wayback machine online still having his personal website from the time being archived on a Christmas Eve update for the night before. Which is something I hope the internet can sustain because it's quite incredible to me that the internet has an archive of specific work that we have a snapshot of happening.

Anyone what Marty is doing was not just a habit he had in the mornings. This was a daily thing for im assuming everyone, but I know for me as well. Let me get to it then. I went over the importance of football in my life. Oddly 9^th and 10^th grade I had a patchy watching schedule for the professional end. I was a teen, I was starting to not have to go to church, and even though I would sometimes sleep in and watch a game, especially in 9^th grade, me and the boys, which was Chris H. and company for a while there, would try and get say, band related things going on my free day.

So I got behind on my fandom. I got better though about it in 1994, which luckily was one of the best seasons to get back in the groove. I feel there is a strong argument that that year is still the birth of the modern football era nearing 30 years later. A biproduct of that was that without the internet to follow news on the games and players one had to read the paper. This began a morning routine that most typically included a PopTart and sitting down at the table, either kitchen or dinning room, and at the very least going through the sports section of the Sacramento Bee.

Scouring the paper itself wasn’t new at this point, the routine was. For years prior I used to always look at the Chicago Cubs box scores to see how my boys were performing. And of course as a kid the enterprise would print my local sporting event box scores and highlights once I got in the older leagues. But it was this time that slow rolling a pop tart, going through the sports section then chugging some milk was part of waking up. This of course would follow to others that got up in the morning, as the 90s grew older both Marty and Chris would have a lot of L street house mornings, and Marty especially would go over the morning paper that was spread over the table. In fact if it were missing in the morning or afternoon, depending on the time and time of wake up, its absence would cause a fever discussion on where the current edition was.

As the years would mature with this routine, and as computers beyond just the BBS and gaming realm would become more popular at the house, so would adding the back of the sports section’s Fry’s electronics add to the must read list.

Sales on computer components. Everyday price watching until the morning where you would see a RAM upgrade so reasonably priced one could call mother over and suggest that maybe a trip to Fry’s electronics was needed.  Now as luck would have it, the local Fry’s, which was in Sacramento, was conveniently located in the old Incredible Universe location. So not only was there history there but it just seamlessly made the whole endeavor fun. By this time, we had grown up with Oak Tree computers, which in the early 90s was around the corner from the L Street house, run by a classmate’s father and employed friends, giving us a world were upgrading components on the PC was considered a normal thing to just do. Oak Tree in fact was the beneficiary of my decision to suspended the idea of driving when I was turning 16 and instead get mom and dad to invest a grand into buying a whole Gigabyte hard drive from them. Which at the time was considered colossal amounts of storage, required a special hard drive controller card and was, 1,000 dollars.

So it was somewhat comical that by the late 90s, 98 perhaps as in the picture of Marty above, seeing cheap prices for larger faster drives in the Frys ad would get us motivated to upgrade storage on one of the many computers that know resided in the house.

See the prices for RAM, or what storage numbers are getting too, oh look OEM copies of windows 98 which are super cheap, we can upgrade one the computers! See when Jerry Rice is coming back from the knee injury and read this years drama of trying to win another Super Bowl in San Francisco. All while enjoying a pop tart and some milk. It was the only good part about waking up at that age.

Marty would peruse the political opinion section quite regularly which was amusing. Marty of course when doing this would more notably be getting up on a Saturday afternoon to do so. More often than not anyway. So instead of a pop tart and milk he would be doing chunky soup with hot sauce. Which was usually tabasco at the time, since it was Jim that escalated the hot part of the hot sauce in the house a few years later. This was great fun.

Marty, who has always been a little stubborn, greatly stepped up that part of his personality in relation to politics as were ending high school. My 1998 the usually more liberal opinions expressed in the editorials of the Sacramento Bee would cause him to have issue while he but crackers in his soup. It was always fun to watch him allow some of those to slowly grind away at this sense of being. Marty tended to not care for dissenting opinions. In an alternate reality he would have made a good Imperial officer for the Empire in Star Wars. So listening to him get bugged by someone else’s low brow opinion on a given subject matter was also a good time.       Then he would sometimes also look too the Fry’s ad.

There is something lost there, getting up and reading a LED screen isn’t as pleasant as dealing with the newspaper flat on the table and getting morning crumbs on it as you go. Sure the new way is more information that’s customizable, but its lost some of the coziness and escapism of the old way.