Hey Graham in case you're reading the comments can I just tell you what a relief it is to hear someone acknowledge the way the Escapist treated Gamergate. It seems like a lot of people are very willing to sweep that under the rug when looking back on it. I remember the weird outrage around the three ps3s video, as it was either the first or second LRR video I stumbled upon. I had an intense debate with a friend at the time who was convinced that it was not a joke, somehow.
"We didn't sell as many [Loading Ready Live] shirts as we thought we would." Dollars to donuts if you made another print run of those starburst shirts you'd sell every single one of them.
Talking about the escapist at the end there: wow does history run in cycles. Of course no one would have seen this week's news when you recorded this 😂
@@jayrks yea one of the comments on Linus Tech Tips ch gamelinked some one asked what other ecsapets show they rembered and i said all the lrr stuff plus some more
I mean, technically the two iterations of the escapist fell prey to different things - in the first case, it was a global economic meltdown causing the company's investors suddenly not having money to support the site, while in the second it was a parent company callously disregarding the actual value the site has and treating it as a raw resource. In the former, management got desperate and kept asking for help from their creators ("IOU this month's pay...along with last month's. But things will turn around soon - I swear!") but eventually couldn't hold everything together, while in the latter, management actually *resisted* the douchbaggery they were being told to do, and eventually quit...and due to being GOOD management, staff and contractor loyalty meant that everyone quit WITH them. Kind of a happier ending of the good people abandoning a ship being sent to the scrap yard, versus well-meaning people failing to stop the ship from sinking, despite their furious baling.
I appreciate all the financial talk. It's one of those things that doesn't get talked about enough. I also enjoy the talk about the complexities of making this a business and people deciding that they need more stability and choosing a different path. That's really interesting to hear.
One thing that's run through my head with this podcast is how similar LRR was to Roosterteeth in several ways. Pioneers in internet content with a long history through many phases of the internet, many times being pioneers that others found great success with. It’s just that RT got massively popular while LRR was modestly popular And while LRR never got the level of popularly Roosterteeth did, it's somewhat a blessing in disguise: LRR is a group of people who are friends still, with amicable departures and new faces always joining. Roosterteeth is kinda a shell due to acquisitions, failed media ventures, and members disgraced because of terrible behavior.
@@loadingreadyrunPot Lid and Skull, by the way, were last seen playing a small death metal show in Cleveland. They have not yet released their first album, much to the disappointment of those in attendance of said show.
I've always been curious about the details regarding Jeremy and Matt's departure from Loading Ready Run. This cleared a lot of stuff up, and this episode was genuinely awesome seeing the guys chat about the early days.
Oh man this episode really hit in the feels there at the end. LRR has always been such a *huge* inspiration to me, and its helpful to understand the struggle & dedication it took to make it happen. Its incredible to me that even in the midst of hard times y'all valued & mainted your friendships, and spent effort giving back to charity. Graham makes it sound simple now, but I feel like I can also imagine the highs and lows as they happened. I also deeply appreciate the windows into your lives that you share. As a fan since 2014, I've definitely seen y'all grow over time, but getting the deep lore is so fascinating. Your experience has been so different than my own, and I find that hearing about it - for lack of better words - teaches me about life, how to be a person, and how to think about the branching possibilities. So cheers, and here's to 20 more!
(LRR also has also instilled a sense of humor / desire to do comedy within me, which is sometimes awkward as a grad student, but I think it's great and becomes relevant in unexpected places!)
Also glad you highlighted "Son of a Bitch." That dropped right as i was adjusting to having roommates and thats what got me to watch everything thereafter
I've loved every episode so far but I really love this one - you guys have always been pretty candid about lrr and the reality of trying to do this all as your job and this too felt so honest in a way I guess I haven't heard from many online creative folk (although I don't watch all that many haha). I think a lot of modern content really glosses over how hard this all is (and was!) to do as work, and how you can work hard and make really good stuff and that's still sometimes not enough. It's good to see y'all killing it in the ways you do now ofc, just - yeah. Felt very relatable. :) Loving this whole podcast.
I’m very happy to see Jer and Matt on screen. It’s unfortunate that they needed to leave, but it’s great to hear that their respective paths worked out
I've been following you guys for 11 years, found you through Friday Nights but have always loved your sketches and other content. If this series is showing me anything, it's that you have an absolutely enormous, hilarious back-catalogue for me to enjoy. Mad props to you all for being so dedicated to your craft since 2000, it's insanely impressive.
Great episode, Thankyou Jer and Matt for all your contributions over the years. ‘From rewatch with love’ is one of my favourites and I’d love some guest appearances on dice friends Jer.
I think it's beautiful that you folks can have such frank and open conversations about your careers and life trajectories and trust us, your audience, to share in it. All of you, present and past members of LRR alike, truly deserve all of the success you've found and more.
I really appreciate these videos. About 4 years ago (when I started playing Magic) I discovered LRR and loved you guys since. And learning about your history and how everything began is really interessting and just lets me adore you guys even more
I know podcasts will be talked about later, but it was weird to not hear any mention of the start of the LRRcast. I didn't find LRR until the Escapist days, but at that point the back catalogue of content was small enough that I could go through the entire thing in a summer, including the LRRcast. Hearing all of the behind the scenes stuff and getting to know more about the crew is what made me a lifelong fan.
It is incredible to me how - and I mean this in the nicest way possible - the four of you today look exactly how I'd imagine an artist's rendition of your older selves to look if the artist was working off of the ancient video footage you've shown us
It was only through this series that I realized how long Adam has been involved. For some reason, I thought he came in around DB8. He just sort-of appeared in The Panalysts, and nobody thought it was strange or addressed it anywhere, so I didn't think about it.
This is the era I became a fan! The first video I saw, and I have no idea how I came across it was How to Talk Like a Pirate, which was incredible and I immediately wanted to see everything else you had done, which lead me to find the LRR website. I remember watching the backlog of every video posted there, and then checked the website weekly (or more) for YEARS after to see the new videos.
I'm fairly certain that 3 PS3's is my jumping on point for LRR. I've been watching you guys pretty much regularly ever since. So glad you're still around making me laugh.
These two are a delight, and it was really cool to hear them talk about these experiences. This is a really cool series and im excited for the next one
As someone who started watching around the start of Unskippable this was such a bittersweet episode. I'm glad to hear both Matt and Jer are happy in the career paths they've taken and I recognize it was a necessary choice, but still a small part of me wonders what could have been.
I didn't realise you guys were on Blip! I was I think one of the very few people who actually browsed Blip directly back when it was a going concern, which is how I first discovered Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) back when he still did videos with a cardboard box puppet-yes, this was even before the wooden Foldy model, it was that long ago-and maybe it's because I was more focused on media reviews and what would later become the video essay phenomenon, but somehow I never stumbled on your stuff, and that's kind of wild to me. I think I saw a few of the sketches on TH-cam back in the day, but I wasn't properly introduced to your work until my partner at the time showed me the "spider faucet" episode of Watch+Play and I was immediately enchanted.
I have Wiggins on Twitch. It's funny because I don't usually catch him live, but he's one of THREE PEOPLE twitch feels to tag after everyone who's on my list that's active. So it'll be everyone who's live, then either wiggins or one of the other two. And he shows up FREQUENTLY in my suggestions, even though he's not live. I guess Twitch really thinks I need to watch his content.
Oh man, I think next episode or two is where I found you guys. But I remember watching these sketches. But there were gaps in the "lore" I knew I missed. Like the short bus. And it was so comfortingly nostalgic to see Jer and Matt again. And to just listen to you guys chatting about stuff. And listening to both talk about moving on to better opportunities while I am actively job hunting to do the same.
Was so cool to find one of Robert Evans' early podcasts (A Life Well Wasted) did an episode on Desert Bus and I immediately became the Leo Dicaprio pointing meme.
LadyHosk sent me one of those WiiPlay shirts when I was pregnant to wear as a maternity shirt - I passed it along to my local Buy Nothing group afterwards so now it's just... out there somewhere near me 😂😂 So yeah, the Hosks are still trying to rid themselves of those shirts (or at least were in 2021!)
It's crazy seeing Jer and Matt after all these years. You don't really notice the people who you see every day change over time. But then you see these someone you haven't seen in 10 years and you're like "woah, time really did pass"
Pretty sure he will be. If you look at the announcement of the sub-a-thon, there's a brief clip of him in the studio for a podcast. (At least, I assume it's him. Looks like him.)
Seeing Matt with a full-on beard just feels weird. It looks good on him, but it's like seeing your high school friend's little brother suddenly being a man 15 years later. Jer meanwhile looks exactly the way he would if he got an anime-styled timeskip.
I wish I knew if i could put gifs in a youtube comment. It would have been the Kevin Hart meme where the lady holds Kevin Hart like a child to protect him from another random guy. Because when Matt was like "idk what I bring to the table" I got so mad at Matt. Like how dare you say anything bad about....yourself. You are perfect in every way. I was so sad when you had to leave. Its funny. As soon as you guys left, I dropped The Escapist. They should have paid you more.
I think a good question for every one who ever worked on/with LRR. Did they choose the LLRR life or did the LRR life choose them? I know the pot lid life choose Wiggins, but what about the others?
The gas tank on the U-Haul I rented to get from Anchorage, AK to Salem, OR down the ALCAN highway had the exact same "feature." Bloody thing took 5 times longer than a normal tank would have. Depress pump switch - back splash - pump clicks off. I finally figured out how to fill it by just cracking open the valve for a continuous trickle of fuel. I didn't have the extra handicap of a broken gas gauge, so I never ran it dry. The U-Haul people in Anchorage did not emphasize that I was supposed to take a detour south outside of Anchorage to the check-up/maintenance station prior to driving on the actual ALCAN. I didn't have a spare tire or a jack, because I was a cheap ass 27-year-old who didn't like the daily charge pricing for either. When I arrived at the U-Haul end of the ALCAN station near Victoria BC, the desk people cursed the Anchorage operators for not Plainly Insisting that I take the Necessary detour to the pre-check station. I had never had a driver's license prior to that trip, and only had about a month or so driving experience, after having taken a driver's safety course. I also got my boss to teach me how to drive a stick in his brand-new Subaru because the truck had one.
As someone who did band in Middle School, High School, and College, and as someone who LOVES their chosen instrument, Yeah, practice can be hard, and they'd like it if you did practice. I'd love to go back to the 80's with a pair of steel toed boots to make a point to my younger self. (Kids, learn from my example and practice/do your homework. Don't be like me.)
"Throughout most of our history we didn't really stop our upload schedule for Desert Bus" - Paul, in a video literally released during desert bus
Most things inevitably change. Luckily, some things are basically the same.
i was wondering why i missed this upload...
Hey Graham in case you're reading the comments can I just tell you what a relief it is to hear someone acknowledge the way the Escapist treated Gamergate. It seems like a lot of people are very willing to sweep that under the rug when looking back on it.
I remember the weird outrage around the three ps3s video, as it was either the first or second LRR video I stumbled upon. I had an intense debate with a friend at the time who was convinced that it was not a joke, somehow.
Yeah, naw, it was bad. They actively encouraged a lot of shit, under that management.
The tidbit that every full-time LRR employee has the same salary is a really neat tidbit. Love the way you guys run your company.
I love the deep lore about Jer originally being Graham's nerd-rival.
“And Yahtzee put some pressure on them”, little did anyone know that Yahtzee hadn’t even begun to put pressure one them!
This week has just been full of good news about Yahtzee's irl character as a human (as distinct from the persona of the videos), hasn't it?
@@SgtDax In the internet world of frequently finding out horrible things about people, isn't it nice when you get to hear how good someone is?
Shoutout to Kathleen and her many flights in all of this
"We didn't sell as many [Loading Ready Live] shirts as we thought we would."
Dollars to donuts if you made another print run of those starburst shirts you'd sell every single one of them.
Hearing Matt describing he felt he didn't have to skills to do LRR full time was heart breaking. Really happy the road he choose worked out!
Talking about the escapist at the end there: wow does history run in cycles. Of course no one would have seen this week's news when you recorded this 😂
I'm glad I saw this comment because I had not heard the news yet...
@@jayrks yea one of the comments on Linus Tech Tips ch gamelinked some one asked what other ecsapets show they rembered and i said all the lrr stuff plus some more
Oh, I'll just wait for Checkpoint this week to....ah Bus!
I mean, technically the two iterations of the escapist fell prey to different things - in the first case, it was a global economic meltdown causing the company's investors suddenly not having money to support the site, while in the second it was a parent company callously disregarding the actual value the site has and treating it as a raw resource.
In the former, management got desperate and kept asking for help from their creators ("IOU this month's pay...along with last month's. But things will turn around soon - I swear!") but eventually couldn't hold everything together, while in the latter, management actually *resisted* the douchbaggery they were being told to do, and eventually quit...and due to being GOOD management, staff and contractor loyalty meant that everyone quit WITH them.
Kind of a happier ending of the good people abandoning a ship being sent to the scrap yard, versus well-meaning people failing to stop the ship from sinking, despite their furious baling.
I appreciate all the financial talk. It's one of those things that doesn't get talked about enough. I also enjoy the talk about the complexities of making this a business and people deciding that they need more stability and choosing a different path. That's really interesting to hear.
The timing of that last helmet shot with the music was *chefkiss*
I scrolled a lot to find someone else who appreciated that enough to comment 😆
One thing that's run through my head with this podcast is how similar LRR was to Roosterteeth in several ways. Pioneers in internet content with a long history through many phases of the internet, many times being pioneers that others found great success with. It’s just that RT got massively popular while LRR was modestly popular
And while LRR never got the level of popularly Roosterteeth did, it's somewhat a blessing in disguise: LRR is a group of people who are friends still, with amicable departures and new faces always joining. Roosterteeth is kinda a shell due to acquisitions, failed media ventures, and members disgraced because of terrible behavior.
It's nice to see matt and jer. I started watching around the time they stopped doing lrr but realy loved them as lrr personalities
The klang of the pot lid is comedy gold.
I see bill, I feel sad. Then I hear stories about him, and I laugh and feel better. Thanks, loadingreadyrun!
That clang from the Viking helmet isn’t foley?
Nope, that’s just pot lid and skull
@@loadingreadyrunPot Lid and Skull, by the way, were last seen playing a small death metal show in Cleveland. They have not yet released their first album, much to the disappointment of those in attendance of said show.
@@loadingreadyrun Pot, Lid, and Skull are my Shark, Shark, Shark, and Remora tribute law firm.
Matt: I can act. Ish.
🤣🤣🤣
I've always been curious about the details regarding Jeremy and Matt's departure from Loading Ready Run. This cleared a lot of stuff up, and this episode was genuinely awesome seeing the guys chat about the early days.
It's crazy how much footage you guys have from back then. Glad you guys thought to!
Oh man this episode really hit in the feels there at the end.
LRR has always been such a *huge* inspiration to me, and its helpful to understand the struggle & dedication it took to make it happen. Its incredible to me that even in the midst of hard times y'all valued & mainted your friendships, and spent effort giving back to charity. Graham makes it sound simple now, but I feel like I can also imagine the highs and lows as they happened.
I also deeply appreciate the windows into your lives that you share. As a fan since 2014, I've definitely seen y'all grow over time, but getting the deep lore is so fascinating. Your experience has been so different than my own, and I find that hearing about it - for lack of better words - teaches me about life, how to be a person, and how to think about the branching possibilities. So cheers, and here's to 20 more!
(LRR also has also instilled a sense of humor / desire to do comedy within me, which is sometimes awkward as a grad student, but I think it's great and becomes relevant in unexpected places!)
Also glad you highlighted "Son of a Bitch." That dropped right as i was adjusting to having roommates and thats what got me to watch everything thereafter
I've loved every episode so far but I really love this one - you guys have always been pretty candid about lrr and the reality of trying to do this all as your job and this too felt so honest in a way I guess I haven't heard from many online creative folk (although I don't watch all that many haha). I think a lot of modern content really glosses over how hard this all is (and was!) to do as work, and how you can work hard and make really good stuff and that's still sometimes not enough. It's good to see y'all killing it in the ways you do now ofc, just - yeah. Felt very relatable. :) Loving this whole podcast.
I’m very happy to see Jer and Matt on screen. It’s unfortunate that they needed to leave, but it’s great to hear that their respective paths worked out
JER AND MATT, I'm so excited for this episode
I've been following you guys for 11 years, found you through Friday Nights but have always loved your sketches and other content. If this series is showing me anything, it's that you have an absolutely enormous, hilarious back-catalogue for me to enjoy. Mad props to you all for being so dedicated to your craft since 2000, it's insanely impressive.
"How to Talk Like a Pirate" was the first LRR video I ever saw. I think Aaron Williams linked to it from his blog.
The story of how Thomas Jane invents the crapshot.
XD, Love that Wiggins had to cue up his entire outro, to get there.
His style of talk show, then gaming, is quite a delight.
Talk starting at 29:25 caught my attention, since I'm watching this after having just watched the fantastic 2023 run of Desert Bus.
Talk Like a Pirate was my intro to LRR! I'm glad they touched on this in the video. :D
Great episode, Thankyou Jer and Matt for all your contributions over the years. ‘From rewatch with love’ is one of my favourites and I’d love some guest appearances on dice friends Jer.
I think it's beautiful that you folks can have such frank and open conversations about your careers and life trajectories and trust us, your audience, to share in it. All of you, present and past members of LRR alike, truly deserve all of the success you've found and more.
I really appreciate these videos.
About 4 years ago (when I started playing Magic) I discovered LRR and loved you guys since.
And learning about your history and how everything began is really interessting and just lets
me adore you guys even more
What an absolute delight to hear you chat with Jer and Matt, and learn more about how the two of them are doing. I am LOVING this series. ❤
getting very strong deja vu from the escapist story near the end. its almost like that exact same thing just happened.
I know podcasts will be talked about later, but it was weird to not hear any mention of the start of the LRRcast. I didn't find LRR until the Escapist days, but at that point the back catalogue of content was small enough that I could go through the entire thing in a summer, including the LRRcast. Hearing all of the behind the scenes stuff and getting to know more about the crew is what made me a lifelong fan.
I hope Jer and Matt can do some stuff with LRR again in the future. They’re great!
It is incredible to me how - and I mean this in the nicest way possible - the four of you today look exactly how I'd imagine an artist's rendition of your older selves to look if the artist was working off of the ancient video footage you've shown us
I relate to Matt Wiggins on a deeply spiritual level
Also, Graham playing the trombone… makes sense. I can see it
Ok, Griffiths, chef kiss of a move ending the credits with the pot lid.
It was only through this series that I realized how long Adam has been involved. For some reason, I thought he came in around DB8. He just sort-of appeared in The Panalysts, and nobody thought it was strange or addressed it anywhere, so I didn't think about it.
This is the era I became a fan! The first video I saw, and I have no idea how I came across it was How to Talk Like a Pirate, which was incredible and I immediately wanted to see everything else you had done, which lead me to find the LRR website. I remember watching the backlog of every video posted there, and then checked the website weekly (or more) for YEARS after to see the new videos.
I'm fairly certain that 3 PS3's is my jumping on point for LRR. I've been watching you guys pretty much regularly ever since. So glad you're still around making me laugh.
I have wondered for so long where the Dutch bit came from. Glad to have closure at last.
These two are a delight, and it was really cool to hear them talk about these experiences. This is a really cool series and im excited for the next one
As someone who started watching around the start of Unskippable this was such a bittersweet episode. I'm glad to hear both Matt and Jer are happy in the career paths they've taken and I recognize it was a necessary choice, but still a small part of me wonders what could have been.
Trying to one-up each other in Star Trek trivia is known as Memory Alpha Posturing.
I didn't realise you guys were on Blip! I was I think one of the very few people who actually browsed Blip directly back when it was a going concern, which is how I first discovered Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) back when he still did videos with a cardboard box puppet-yes, this was even before the wooden Foldy model, it was that long ago-and maybe it's because I was more focused on media reviews and what would later become the video essay phenomenon, but somehow I never stumbled on your stuff, and that's kind of wild to me. I think I saw a few of the sketches on TH-cam back in the day, but I wasn't properly introduced to your work until my partner at the time showed me the "spider faucet" episode of Watch+Play and I was immediately enchanted.
"This is not the Desert Bus podcast" implies the existence of a Desert Bus podcast (please)
We miss you both, Jer and Matt!
This must've been the time I started watching you all, though I have no idea how I found you. Good times!
Matt Wiggins is cool. Really, all you guys are cool. That old union job he had sounded awesome too.
I have Wiggins on Twitch. It's funny because I don't usually catch him live, but he's one of THREE PEOPLE twitch feels to tag after everyone who's on my list that's active. So it'll be everyone who's live, then either wiggins or one of the other two. And he shows up FREQUENTLY in my suggestions, even though he's not live. I guess Twitch really thinks I need to watch his content.
Gosh, I regularly visited the North Carolina Escapist offices right after the Defy acquisition. Surreal hearing about the time just before.
Oh man, I think next episode or two is where I found you guys. But I remember watching these sketches. But there were gaps in the "lore" I knew I missed. Like the short bus. And it was so comfortingly nostalgic to see Jer and Matt again. And to just listen to you guys chatting about stuff. And listening to both talk about moving on to better opportunities while I am actively job hunting to do the same.
That final clang killed me.
Awesome series. Great to get the history and the behind the scenes
31:20 "this is not the Desert Bus podcast" and yet you release it during Desert Bus, suspicious... 🤔
🤔🤔🤔
Was so cool to find one of Robert Evans' early podcasts (A Life Well Wasted) did an episode on Desert Bus and I immediately became the Leo Dicaprio pointing meme.
Cannot wait to see part 3. Been with you for a long time now.
I own one of those wii-play shirts, courtesy of lord Hosk.
It sits unused in my closet until I run out of ANY other clean clothes to wear.
Today I learned Matt retired his Matt_LRR handles and that kinda makes me sad. Even if he hasn’t been part of the channel in so long.
they aren't gone completely, but it was time
That ending hit was the most cheffy of kisses
OH MY GOD BABY JOHNNY! 35:29
I remember seeing Wes Borg on some early LRR thing, and thinking "wow, they know someone famous!"
LadyHosk sent me one of those WiiPlay shirts when I was pregnant to wear as a maternity shirt - I passed it along to my local Buy Nothing group afterwards so now it's just... out there somewhere near me 😂😂 So yeah, the Hosks are still trying to rid themselves of those shirts (or at least were in 2021!)
It's crazy seeing Jer and Matt after all these years. You don't really notice the people who you see every day change over time. But then you see these someone you haven't seen in 10 years and you're like "woah, time really did pass"
Desert Bus IS a bad idea, it just had the right people and community to go right.
I had the exact same recorder -> clarinet mentality as Jer, but I stuck with it through graduation.
I had the same Student Loan experience as Jer had... Except mine was the money coming as an inheritance from my grandfather.
awesome episode, really nice to see both Jer and Matt
2:00:00 I didn't think I'd see Justin McElroy once in this episode.
Jer and Matt!! Are they gonna figure out what Graham is talking about?!
Live for the live god! Studio for the studio throne!
49:09 echoes of "Kojima Repeating"
Oh my dad had a boat called the gweduc. That is a great internet handle.
The original Desert Bus
Jer & Matt! Time Walk is the best thing LRR ever created. It's. That. Good.
Hearing about the problems with Escapist here is kinda funny considering current events.
Speaking of Tim, I really hope Stockholm shows up as a future guest.
Pretty sure he will be. If you look at the announcement of the sub-a-thon, there's a brief clip of him in the studio for a podcast. (At least, I assume it's him. Looks like him.)
29:03 The Dutch, AGAIN
AGAIN!
This was so fun
Early LoadingReadyRun: A Comedy of Errors.
I’m happy to have an original run Thromborax shirt 😆
The stinger cracked me up
Seeing Matt with a full-on beard just feels weird. It looks good on him, but it's like seeing your high school friend's little brother suddenly being a man 15 years later. Jer meanwhile looks exactly the way he would if he got an anime-styled timeskip.
Life Goals: Look like your own anime timeskip.
So happy to see Jer and Matt again.
the pot lid ACTUALLY MADE THAT SOUND?!?!?
Really enjoying these
Love to Jer and Matt!
I wish I knew if i could put gifs in a youtube comment. It would have been the Kevin Hart meme where the lady holds Kevin Hart like a child to protect him from another random guy.
Because when Matt was like "idk what I bring to the table" I got so mad at Matt. Like how dare you say anything bad about....yourself. You are perfect in every way. I was so sad when you had to leave.
Its funny. As soon as you guys left, I dropped The Escapist. They should have paid you more.
Quite Ironic that this should come out around the launch of Second Wind, another creator splinter initiative from the current escapist
Back when I started to see you guys.
I think a good question for every one who ever worked on/with LRR.
Did they choose the LLRR life or did the LRR life choose them?
I know the pot lid life choose Wiggins, but what about the others?
Gonna be real, like Graham until my mid-20's I only wore khakis as well. Now it's jeans all the way
30k in around 2008 would be about 41k today. Which seems a pretty fair estimate.
The gas tank on the U-Haul I rented to get from Anchorage, AK to Salem, OR down the ALCAN highway had the exact same "feature." Bloody thing took 5 times longer than a normal tank would have.
Depress pump switch - back splash - pump clicks off. I finally figured out how to fill it by just cracking open the valve for a continuous trickle of fuel. I didn't have the extra handicap of a broken gas gauge, so I never ran it dry.
The U-Haul people in Anchorage did not emphasize that I was supposed to take a detour south outside of Anchorage to the check-up/maintenance station prior to driving on the actual ALCAN. I didn't have a spare tire or a jack, because I was a cheap ass 27-year-old who didn't like the daily charge pricing for either.
When I arrived at the U-Haul end of the ALCAN station near Victoria BC, the desk people cursed the Anchorage operators for not Plainly Insisting that I take the Necessary detour to the pre-check station.
I had never had a driver's license prior to that trip, and only had about a month or so driving experience, after having taken a driver's safety course. I also got my boss to teach me how to drive a stick in his brand-new Subaru because the truck had one.
Oh, that's how you say it.
May the blessings of the shark be upon us all
As someone who did band in Middle School, High School, and College, and as someone who LOVES their chosen instrument, Yeah, practice can be hard, and they'd like it if you did practice. I'd love to go back to the 80's with a pair of steel toed boots to make a point to my younger self. (Kids, learn from my example and practice/do your homework. Don't be like me.)