A co-worker of mine from EPS made a terrific discovery at the Price Chopper here in Vernon:

Mello Yello is basically Coke’s version of Mountain Dew introduced in the 70’s, but you tend to only find this stuff in the midwest and the south mostly, like many “regional” drinks it never caught on in many other regions though you occasionally find some. I have never found it up here in all 11 years I have lived in Connecticut, I’ve always been told there was some to be found at some random gas station around but since most people up here know not of it’s awesome, they often confuse it with Vault and several other similar drinks. Mello Yello was one of my favorite drinks because I associated it to the many Saturdays we used to spend with my father at his office he worked in in Centerville, OH. He used to take us with him where we would often get McDonalds and sit in the break room and eat and watch VH1’s Top Ten Countdown as music was and still is pretty much Karyn’s life. 1996’s list was mostly Mariah Carrey, Hootie and the Blowfish, Deep Blue Something, and oldschool rappers. When we weren’t doing that we were running around to people’s offices and using the intercom feature on the phones to call each other, or any number of other strange things we could come up with. I even vaguely remember playing with all of his die-cast cars he used to keep on his desk on the floor. As computers were still Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 then and the internet was pretty much still in it’s creation, I did go online a few times but I couldn’t do much with it. It was also pretty cool to sit in a server room when servers were still the size of a fridge or oven and monitors were of the green WYSIWYG variety. Only a few years later when we got to Connecticut and I used to go over to Open Solutions a lot where he worked, it was Windows NT and 2000, servers got a lot smaller, and there was more internet to be had. It’s funny actually, the internet has only been around for about 13-14 years in it’s modern form and it really didn’t pick up and take off until right after I graduated, essentially the time broadband reached out to more places. Sites like Myspace and Facebook changed how we communicate and share and even now I am typing this because blogging and writing journals online have changed how we archive our lives. I can look back at old LJ entries and I usually facepalm wondering why I wrote that at the time, but I am bound to look at this in another five years and wonder what I was thinking of then. It’s also worth nothing that this entire wall of text came from an 11 dollar purchase of two cases of Mello Yello.

Fuck yeah!

In Vidya-related news, specifically Borderlands, I tried my hand at the secret end boss, Crawmerax, however I was kinda cheap and used the solo-glitch to do it, which actually is probably more of a pain in the ass than it is to get a party together and do it. There is a spot on the zone that you can crotch in that sends him and the spawns into this weird loop where he just goes up and down the entire time you stand there. The catch is, however, the moment you step away from that spot, they resume normal functions and you get creamed. So you have to do everything from that one spot, and while you can take out 5 of his 6 spots from the front, you almost have no access to his back spot you have to take out. I tried a few different things, grenades with Transfusion (partially worked) and seeing if I could make a break for it, but I got creamed. Finally in reading about it on borderlands.wikia, I noticed several people mention either a gun that has ricochet bullets, or the Leviathan, a rocket launcher that shoots rockets in a falling-arc, not straight. Problem was, I sold mine I got from the quest long ago because I don’t tend to use rocket launchers in the game often. The Rakk Hive (aka vagina monster) was the only thing that could drop one besides the quest, so I went to kill it. No drop. Kill it again. No drop. After about probably the sixth or seventh (I think I lost count after four honestly) I managed to snag one. Well, long story short, it worked, I defeated Craw solo, but it took several deaths to get the glitch set up, and when that was successful, it took fucking FOREVER to kill him with the Levi, finding a firing arc that was hitting was time-consuming. The loot was worth it though, no Pearls however, did find a few new guns and a shield though. I want to do Craw with more people, but the one time I did it with a random online party, the dude fucking D/C’d before we could get to a save point and it didn’t save anything I picked up. I need a group of people I know, or online kids that aren’t shitheads.

I’m still debating picking up HL2 while it’s on Steam sale, my Borderlands kick is starting to fade and I need something new to latch on to for awhile. Trying to stay away from WoW, though the looming Cataclysm is tempting. I should hook my PS2 up and play some old games, maybe even finish Disgaea (yeah right). I still want to buy a PS3 but I’m sort of waiting for GT5 and a MUST HAVE game to buy it. I also need to get a Wii again so I can play Pangya, NSMB:Wii, and MK:Wii. Maybe even finish Galaxy.

PS: RC Cola.