A Busy Week With Tony Hawk

It was a busy week last week!! I traveled to Los Angeles, the city of nightmares to play the big skateboarding game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. For a handful of days I got to hangout with friends, chat with some of my all-time favorite skaters like Rodney Mullen and Bam Margera, and even got to see some sick performances from Danny Brown, Lupe Fiasco, and the Adolescents.

LA isn’t my favorite place in the world, but I find myself there more often than not. However, I had so much this time around and not only got to experiecne a company like Activision blow tons of money on some fancy ass event (that was catered by Taco Bell lmao) but I also had one of the strangest dining experiences of my life.

THPS 3+ 4 is good shit. The soundtrack rips, I talked to some of the design leads, you can see my coverage below.

Table of Contents

• The Dining Experience

• Tony Hawk

• Manscaped

• Pax East 2025

• GIANTBOMB IS BACK

• Share this and Subscribe.

• Ok That’s it.

The Dining Experience

Ok, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to fit all of this in one newsletter but a bunch of us from the event went out to dinner at Concerto in LA. It’s a Korean/Italian fusion restaurant in Koreatown. It was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had in a restaurant.

We walk in with a group of 11 (we have a reservation) and the waiter had set the table for 15. When we arrive he asks if we’re waiting for more people, we tell him no we are all here and he looks us dead in the eyes and goes “Oh, ok I guess.” looking disappointed in us for not having four more friends.

He then gives us three menus for 11 people, we all look around understanding that no more menus are coming. Are we in a recession? Are we helping the environment by not printing more menus? I’m not really sure, but all of us buddy up to look at a menu that is filled with words that don’t go together like “Bulgogi Pasta.”

Eventually the man comes back, asking if we’re ready to order. We are not. It’s been thirty seconds since the three menus hit the table. Someone suggests we order drinks first and the waiter sternly states “No you will order food first” and we all go cold. I am an adult at a dining establishment, but I feel like I was just reprimanded like a child in elementary school. I nod up and down and quickly glance over at the “Shanghai Crab Pasta.” I order it and the waiter hits me back with “That is very spicy,” again feeling like I am in trouble. I wonder if I should order something else, something that would please this man. He later tells us he thinks “we could handle it”

There’s a bunch of other strange things that happened during this experience, but by far the most memorable is when the waiter brings out our entrees and shakes an entire lobster in front of me going “ooooo it’s alive” before slamming down the lobster spaghetti in front of me. He then goes to the other side of the table and proceeds to take another whole lobster and go “ooooo it’s alive” and slams down the next one. Now I think it’s incredibly brave to do the same bit twice in front of a group of people back to back, especially when the two orders you just put down are also wrong, but we were both so taken aback by the bit that we didn’t even complain. We just ate it.

There' was also a moment where the waited swirled drinks around our heads, accidently dropped a glass of ice on someone, and then got upset when all I ordered to drink was a Diet Coke. It was the strangest experience I’ve had in a while, but one that I think bonded that group of people together forever. As we were leaving, we saw our waiter making multiple cocktails at the bar, and we had the realization he might be the only person who works at this establishment.

Tony Hawk

I met Tony Hawk! It was cool! Here’s a photo!

I also got to be part of what I think might have been the first ever media press event mosh pit? I’m not sure. But I did walk into the center of the pit and dump my beer over my head while the Adolescents played Amoeba and it was one of the most punk things I’ve ever done.

There was also a weird collaboration with Frosted Flakes and other bizarre moments.

I met some good people, drank some good drinks, and watched Bam Margera walk around asking people who he is unlocked in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 to which I had to tell him I have no fucking idea.

Manscaped

I’m not sponsored by Manscaped, by my friend Shawn did a video for them like 5 years ago that I was just made aware of and I told him I’d put it in the newsletter this week so here you go.

I’ve never seen a Kiwi shaved until now.

Pax East 2025

For some reason I also decided to fly from LA straight to LA this weekend for Pax East 2025. It was your usual Pax. Saw friends, did Karaoke, and had a damn good time walking to floor with my buds. It’s a time of the year I treasure dearly and I’m already so sad it’s over. Here’s a bunch never before seen photos from Pax. (and some ones you’ve seen before)

GIANTBOMB IS BACK

If you remember last week, I wrote a pretty long post about what Giantbomb means to me. What it means to be in media in the year 2025, and what a group of people are capable of when they aren’t being stifled by a company.

Well, at Pax East the former members of Giantbomb announced that they have purchased the website back from the company, and it will continue to live on. Independently.

It instills so much hope in this space to see a good ending to something for once. I’m so excited for my friends to have the creative freedom to continue on the thing they have been doing, without being in the clutches of the company that tried to sink it.

Giantbomb has had a lot of owners over the years, but now they own it themselves, and that’s fucking cool.

Share this and Subscribe.

We’re all trying to create out here and I think it’s important to share work that means something to you. So if this newsletter has brightened your day, made you chuckle, or given you some sort of hope, I please ask that you share the subscribe link with someone. A friend, a family member, someone random on the street. I’ve posted it below, and I want to build this thing together. I want to reach more people with fun stories, funny moments, and talk about shit going on with folks who sometimes need a little pick me up in their inbox as the world falls apart around us.

Ok That’s it.

See y’all next week.