Boys and their toys. Last Sunday Maroubra Beach was alive. Subcultures of men of all ages, in the zone, doing the thing be it surfing, fishing, RC gliding or RC crawling. #FINDYOURZEN
Tie Dye top and NIRVANA painted large on my guitar.
Massive thanks to a mate of mine from High School Chris Martin, for sending me the full 1992 Sydney Boys High Yearbook. What a trip! I say some telling things in retrospect… especially love going through what everyone left in the book, it’s epic!
Nickname: Noodle, Gooz’n Look’n….. the list goes on.
Ambitions: To direct the new ultimate erotica, “In bed with Ms Arnett” movie.
Dream Date: Ms Arnett, Suze Demarchi of the Baby Animals
Most Vivid Memory: Ms Arnett, shitting in my nappies when I was very young, pissing in my mum’s face when I was very, very young, vomiting 15 times in one night on Mount Steel, jumping for joy when Outterside left, suiciding when Stratford took his place.
Whom do you most admire?: Ms Arnett, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, The Black Crows, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, Wendy James of Transvision Vamp.
Greatest Achievements: Ms Arnett?! You know the time that somebody bombed the school?, yeah, that was me. You know the time that somebody blew up Outerside’s car?, yeah, that was me. You know the time when somebody threw shit all over Bordignon’s face?, yeah, that was me. You know the time when somebody set fire to the non-flammable million dollar poor excuse for an assembly curtain?, yeah that was me………
Quotes: “Well believe you me I’ve got nothing up my sleeve except a heart and a chip on my shoulder, yes I’m young and don’t like getting older.”
It was raining hard last night and we were starving. It was 7pm so we decided to order something to eat. We loaded up Uber Eats and it was a blackout. There wasn’t one single restaurant open for delivery. WOW… so Uber doesn’t deliver food when it’s pissing down rain? Good to know! We then loaded up Deliveroo. There were only around 12 restaurants to choose from and all of them suggested long waits of 45min+.
It’s times like this, when you’re starving and there’s no good food delivery available, that you think of ordering a pizza.
Domino’s or Pizza Hut?
Anyone who’s been to Italy and had a real pizza KNOWS that Domino’s and Pizza Hut pizzas DO NOT look anything like the OG; thin crust, minimum topping of only a little bit of cheese and a veggie or two, sometimes a meat. It was the Americans who made the pizza what it is today; bigger, thicker and overloaded with cheese and toppings.
Pizza Hut opened up in Australia in 1970, Domino’s a fair bit later in 1983. I was born in 1975, Sydney Australia and never heard of Domino’s until my teenage years. McDonalds in Kingsford today was once where Pizza Hut was, in fact both McDonalds and Pizza Hut shared the same location for many years. For my family it was mostly McDonalds by day and Pizza Hut at night. McDonalds already felt like fast food chain with it’s slippery plastic booths and hard tiled floor. Pizza Hut felt much more like a restaurant with mood lighting, carpet and table cloths.
We debated for a minute. We knew Domino’s would be fast. 20 minutes flat and it would be at our door, piping hot. We then reminisced about how Pizza Hut was more about restaurants than fast delivery. We remembered having good times in Pizza Hut restaurants as children, the salad bar, the gingerbread men, and we also remembered the extremely deep-dish pan they brought out to the table when ordering a deep pan pizza.
We decided to go old school and order Pizza Hut. In a new browser window we google searched “Pizza Hut” and this is what came up:
Surely this shouldn’t be allowed? We searched for ‘Pizza Hut’ and the first result, a paid advertisement, is Domino’s and the 2nd advert underneath it is Pizza Hut. How on earth is this acceptable? There’s just something SO wrong about this that it hurts to think about it.
We accidentally clicked on a Domino’s link 3 times when we were trying to find discount coupons for Pizza Hut (we only found Domino’s coupons but failed to easily find any Pizza Hut coupons), in the end we decided to leave the coupons out of it and just go check out the Pizza Hut website.
What a mess. The Pizza Hut website has been optimised for your phone, problem is we were viewing it on a browser, on a large monitor with browser set to full screen. Content loaded in a thin strip in the centre (obviously designed for phones), but adding things to the cart and confirming steps forced us to hunt for the “next” buttons, which loaded all the way in the extremities of the screen.
We then realised there was no pizza tracking, and that it would take 45 minutes or more. Is Pizza Hut trying to NOT be competitive?!
Domino’s dominance now made total sense. Choosing between Pizza Hut and Domino’s seems to be more about the ease of ordering and speed of delivery vs actual quality of the pizza itself.
On checkout we noticed an option to pay by cash! Hey! The galloping ‘481 11 11’ jingle came to mind! We figure that opting to pay cash might suggest we were going to tip, and maybe that would get the pizza to us faster?
The 481 11 11 jingle in the video above killed it pre-internet, when phones were how you ordered pizzas.
Pizza Hut delivered in around 45 minutes. We still gave the driver a $5 tip (that Chinese red packet money came in handy!) and for that the driver was extremely grateful.
The pizzas were as expected. One bite of the Supreme and that capsicum just took us back. The deep pan wasn’t anywhere near as deep as it was back in the 90’s, but it still had that oily olive oil base that had been fried on the pan for that crunchy crust. If a pizza is all about the crust, then we think Pizza Hut wins, hands down.
In the end we tried to weigh up the difference between going for something more from the heart (in this case Pizza Hut), or going for convenience (Domino’s). But in reality it cost us more to go old school, and it took way longer to arrive.
It’s obvious that Domino’s success is based on tech and delivery. Where Pizza Hut invested in eat-in restaurants, Domino’s invested into a killer, easy to use online ordering and tracking system which gathered a lot more franchisees, which in turn allowed them to radically expand their network, thus allowing them to offer ultra-quick delivery of 20-minutes.
So in conclusion, There’s no doubt that Domino’s Pizza would have been cheaper, gotten to us faster and it would have been hotter too. There’s something to be said about how both Pizza Hut and Domino’s pizza base and crust, when not so hot, tastes like cardboard. We’d argue that Pizza Hut wins on the crust, but it’s not by a large margin.
After filling our bellies we came to a somewhat sad conclusion that the ‘feels’ didn’t quite outweigh the logic. We went old school for the romance, but the ordering system was a little clunky, not knowing exactly how long the delivery was going to take made us a little nervous, and in the end, the long wait and not so hot pizzas kinda tarnished the whole experience of wanting to support the alternative.
In conclusion, we’re on the fence and we’ll most likely be on the fence for quite some time when it comes to choosing between these 2 giants of fast food pizza delivery.
We’re sure though that most of you guys already have a preference between the 2 giants. We assume more of you would be ordering Domino’s due to their superior online ordering system and fast delivery, but what if Pizza Hut was to catch up and also implement a great ordering system and fast delivery? Would Pizza Hut once again reign supreme?
More proof that it pays to invest into your own platforms than others. With thousands of my photographs flagged NSFW I figure it’s best to simply tear my photography tumblr down, but that’s been far from simple as removing the thousands of images hasn’t been easy. The tumblr mass editor only let me manually select and delete 100 images at a time. It’s taken me just under 1.5hrs to delete all my images dating back to 2014.
The ZEN Tumblr is all broken too. Many images of motorcycles and art have been flagged and there’s no easy way for us to delete all these flagged posts as lots of them are reblogs (we didn’t upload the original image). We’ve found a theme that allows us to embed our Soundcloud Playlist without either spitting out the code, or making the playlist restart every time you want to load more images. It’s a hack, but hey, hacking has always been the way forward, right?!
Gary Vaynerchuk (it’s no wonder they call him Gary Vee) is an entrepreneurial/motivational speaker type which many have suggested I check out. I tend to smell what I like and don’t like quicker than most, my physical gut is weak from IBS but my “gut gut” (which I use to trust my feelings and instincts over logic) is the real dealio and the gut that gets put to the test more often than the other these days.
My “gut gut” says that Gary V is in the same basket as that orange book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”, a book which is in high rotation atm, written by some famous blogger who’s not famous enough to be mentioned by name over his book title. “Don’t knock it until you read it Justin” — Fuck I hate it when people say that. I swear I’d be broke from buying all the crap people suggest I buy, but hey, I tried to buy the book. I read the marketing jargon on the front and back, saw how huge the type size was inside and just couldn’t bring myself to be another statistic. I ended up having a mate send me the audio book for it and hey… I get it, the guy speaks like I do (I assume because he’s my age or thereabouts) though he’s saying shit I already know… and I just couldn’t make it past the first chapter.
Then there’s vlogger Casey Neistat, known for overproduced film techniques like mounting your camera on something (like a railing, a bench in the park etc.) and record yourself waking by or entering a building. I hate that fake shit and hate it that most if not all vloggers do what Casey says. They say jump and you say how high.
OK so back to Gary Vee. Turns out he was born in 1975, same year as me! I like him already (bias is a great thing!). That makes Gary 44yrs old this year and man props to him for hustling as hard as he currently is. It can’t be easy to keep that energy level up 24/7 at this age.
His professional background is similar to mine. I was a graphic designer for the most part, but I too ended up in digital marketing and social media as Gary has. Where he’s radically different to me is that his net worth is $160 million and he’s married and has kids.
I watched one of his more recent talks. His intro to the stage was, as expected, damn cringy; Loud music, smoke machines and an overly excited host who’s dress was louder than her microphone, which was 10 times louder than Gary’s microphone!
The entire talk was aimed at getting the audience to value, then harness the power of social media advertising on Instagram and Facebook. At the end of his talk he did a Q&A session where one young guy asks a stupid question which Gary absolutely shot down. I always was that guy that put his hand up in school to ask a stupid question, and I too was shot down and made fun of for asking, so as fucking stupid as the guy that asked the question was I’m not sure he deserved to be singled out so savagely.
What’s interesting is the video linked above starts with the dumb question, which was along the lines of asking if there was anything else out there in marketing apart from Facebook and Instagram, to which Gary tore the guy another hole (as his entire talk was to inspire people to advertise through Instagram and Facebook). Hey I love tearing people another hole too, but I’m not sure I would have cut the burn out from the Q&A, then paste it at the very front of the video for bonus points.
But just listening to how Gary tears this guy another hole makes me relate. He’s blunt, I like that. I’m like that. He doesn’t really care for you, but he’s willing to give you all the secrets, the tools and it’s your choice whether you want to use them, or not, and that frustration of ‘kids’ not taking action on the energy and insight given is something I share big time. Gary suggests that the only way he feels AOK with sharing his secrets (being that you must advertise on Facebook and Instagram in order to be successful today) is because 90% of the audience won’t do what he says anyways. That’s a HUGE factor you that you just can’t ignore. It’s real, and I feel it’s the honest truth about our youth. It’s so beautiful I wish I said it.
Another thing Gary nails on the head is that everyone in the audience that was in their 40’s has an advantage in that we knew what life was before the internet. We lived full lives. This thought kinda blows my mind. I already knew I had an advantage for being there from the start of the internet. I know I was one of the first web designers in the country and I most likely made more money than most creatives in their 20s during the dot com boom.
“Advantages we have in todays business world is that we have context of what the world looked like pre-internet. We lived a full childhood pre-internet. We lived life. This allows us to context what was possible, and how much it cost pre-internet and what’s possible, and how much it cost post-internet.”
The last thing I took away from watching this one talk of Gary’s is that he strongly believes in doing everything for his audience. He doesn’t believe in creating content that he personally wants to see, he believes you have to put your audience first and post what you think they want to see.
Gotta say… I TOTALLY disagree with this crap!
Sure, whilst Gary Vee has 20yr olds sucking his dick in all his Q&A’s, with nearly every person that gets on the mic saying they love him (to which he responds “I love you too!”), OR they demand a hug or selfie with the man on stage, to which he also happily complies, I highly doubt that Gary truly appreciates his fans as much as they do him.
I believe that I’ve experienced enough of life and worked hard enough to say that I’m an individual, and that I’m worthy of curating and promoting what I believe to be good or not (as opposed to posting what I know the kids like already). Where Gary Vee is comfortable in serving his audience what he thinks they like, I find that way too easy and choose to take the path less traveled by.
With regards to ZEN, my last business partner has acknowledged that there’s a lot of my DNA in the company and that’s why moves have been made for me to buy his share out and take complete ownership of the brand.
Ultimately I’m trying to run a company as me, myself and I. Running a company as an individual doesn’t really come with any rule books, whether it pays out or not is yet to be seen but my “gut gut” says that so long as I stay true to myself I should be good.
Despite losing over 1,000 followers on Facebook we’ve had a lot of positive feedback and an increase in sales over the past month. Special thanks especially to all who sent replies to our automated shop email. You guys truly get it.
Massive apologies for being slow on sending out your orders. Right now orders are backing up. There has been an unexpected and sudden death in the family and at the same time ZEN Garage is also undergoing new ownership. Our stock has been relocated and we’re currently on the hunt for new pack and send staff.
To the haters and trolls. Ignore the haters they say, but we do what we like and see nothing wrong with acknowledging that you guys exist and that you’re not happy. Our motto; IT’S OK IF YOU DON’T GET IT isn’t meant to be said with anger. It’s said with understanding. We acknowledge your confusion. Trying to pigeon hole us as nothing more than a ‘car page’ must be damn frustrating for you guys, but truth is we’ve never been just a ‘car page’.
IE: We’re genuinely trying to say that if you don’t understand or like what we do, or why we do what we do, then it truly is AOK, but please don’t expect us to live to please you and to post what we think you might like as that’s truly an impossibility for us. If you’re looking to follow ‘car pages’ we can suggest a few of our local friends: THE-LOWDOWN.com | gripshiftslide.com | Street-Cover | Tuned. | Downshift | Sakura Status 桜 | Mighty Car Mods | AutoCult. Network
One of, if not the biggest reveals at E3 2017 was Anthem. Watch the gameplay reveal in the video above, ignore the fact that the game is being made by EA Games/Bioware, ignore the cheesy dialogue, look at that lush world. Quite impressive, right? When I saw this reveal in 2017 I called absolute bullshit. The scene in the hub where your character speaks to that random guy, come oooooonnnnn, that can’t be live?! It looked so pre-rendered to me, there was just no way the game was going to look that pretty live and too right, the game is out now and the downgrades are savage.
All the YouTube reviews that matter are strongly suggesting that right now, gamers DO NOT BUY THIS GAME as it’s an unfinished and unbalanced buggy mess. Whilst it might be safe to buy the game in a few months when they’ve sorted out a few teething issues, some things might not be able to be fixed at all such as the abundance of long loading screens (oh this is a deal breaker for me!), dead hub, a map that looks the same wherever you go, repetitive game structure, weak story and cheesy dialogue.
A comparison between the Anthem E3 2017 Gameplay Demo and the Public Demo (2019).
In reaction to E3 and downgrade culture I did a podcast in January 2018 outlining the importance of TRANSPARENCY, especially in relation to business. Sadly, the lack of transparency in the gaming industry is still just as rampant today as it was when I made this podcast despite the big guns on YouTube calling out the devs and firing shots this entire time.
The internet is smarter than you — Transparency and being an honest business will get you far.
Am I surprised about the downgrade? Not at all. Am I upset about it? Nope. Would things be different if I bought in on the hype and pre-ordered the game? Most likely. I’d say all those who pre-bought and are currently playing the game are already defending because they’ve already committed so much time into living with the bugs, the server disconnect and reconnect issues and sitting through loading screen after loading screen.
You’ve got to be in it to win it, but in this case I’m glad I went with my gut and made the choice to sit on the sidelines.
