Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
15 Sacrifice. Home or Away? (This will be the last one. I’m tired of this. Aren’t you?) One thing about sacrifice for your project isn’t the fact that you’re so busy, you won’t get to do the fun stuff. That’s a given. You won’t get to see movies, bands, eat dinner, eat desserts, and generally fuck around. No, it’s established that there’s no time for that. But something else might happen. You won’t take good care of yourself and your own “shit.” Here’s an example. Right now, the plumbing at my house is fucked. The pipeline that takes all water to the city sewage system is broken. The broken section of pipe is actually located under my neighbor’s driveway. Way back in the 30s, my house lot was huge and the surrounding area was farmland. So when the plots were chopped up many years later, it wasn’t done carefully. So now, I have to ask my neighbor if it’s ok for us to jack hammer her concrete driveway and get that pipe fixed. It’ll be two days of broken concrete and one day of smelling sewage and many thousands of my dollars. It’s not the money which in the end, is going to be a lot, but it’s the time to get this done. Last week, at gr/eats we had a disaster. Overnight, the water heater broke. We walked in, and there was water coming out. Luckily restaurants have drains built in the ground (you need this to get an “A” rating), so the water had somewhere to go. So dilemma… fix the house or fix the business. Guess which won? All you have to know is that I still can’t take a shit at my house right now, and no female can take a piss unless they want to drip dry. However, gr/eats has a new water heater and that means clean dishes, cleaner hands, and happy food for our customers. Sometimes, the sacrifice is worth doing.
Continue reading
15 Sacrifice. Home or Away? (This will be the last one. I'm tired of this. Aren't you?)
One thing about sacrifice for your project isn't the fact that you're so busy, you won't get to do the fun stuff. That's a given. You won't get to see movies, bands, eat dinner, eat desserts, and generally fuck around. No, it's established that there's no time for that. But something else might happen. You won't...
Continue reading
One thing about sacrifice for your project isn't the fact that you're so busy, you won't get to do the fun stuff. That's a given. You won't get to see movies, bands, eat dinner, eat desserts, and generally fuck around. No, it's established that there's no time for that. But something else might happen. You won't...
Part 14 of this mess. 14. “World domination” This sounds ridiculous in this context, but I’ve heard some people say this phrase, so I’ll down step it an infinite amount just so it makes some sense. (at least to me) People have said you’re “taking over the world.” It’s of course overstated, but in the end, it may actually make some sense in the right context. This is the new GRSF. We moved to 618 Shrader. Right next door. Back in the day, junior high, high school, and even in my Japanese school, then to UCLA, I felt like an outsider. I’m Asian American and a regular dude, but for some reason, I didn’t fit into either categories. I felt like I was friends with the outcasts. I have no idea why while walking down Bruin walk, which is the central main drag on the UCLA campus Asian American groups would pass out flyers to Asian American kids. I could clearly see them, passing them to a guy, then a girl, then when I walked up, no flyer. The hand holding the paper went back in. This happened a lot. Did I have a sign on me saying, No? Was it because I didn’t wear the right clothes or had the sidewall haircut? When I did get a flyer, I remember the person asking, “who did I know?” I told them some random names, my parents, my dog, nothing worked. What he wanted to hear were “popular” kids names. The guys who ran the frats, the lowered car clubs, or threw the big parties. I didn’t know them. I took some of that energy when Giant Robot got started and eventually that was the many reasons why we got started. Overtime, we found that there was a lot of folks with these same experiences. So in effect, it’s nice to think that we were able to create an outlet for people “like us.” The main lesson I can cite here is that although World Domination is a Hitlerian word, it’s what happened with GR in a microcosm. The World ends up being the world we created. Domination, not sure how that works, but I suppose it can mean, we’re good at the niche world we’re in. There was no audience for GR, so we created one, there were no stores like GR so we made that too, and so forth. Now, years later, there’s more than one magazine with similar interests, there’s more than one store that’s something like ours, and so forth. Although taking credit feels selfish, although I’m sure many would try and take it anyway, it’s fun to see what we created expanding, even when it’s not ours. This includes artists who grow thanks to some of our help, writers who get bigger gigs (is that possible?), and people who are making better for themselves thanks to an article we wrote or even an article written about us.
Continue reading