This whole site is about me, Brenden Johnson.
You may be saying "That sounds really boring", and you may be right. But the only way to tell is to read along for a while.
Mainly I write about the minutia of my daily life. Every once in a while I'll point out something that I find interesting or spout my opinion of some subject. I try to put a slightly humorous spin on events and observations and sometimes that even works. I tend to write about food a lot. I happen to enjoy eating good food. I also happen to be a very picky eater. For example, the name of this site is the way I like to eat tortilla chips. This philsophy extends to pretty much everything else I eat as well. I'm a simple man with simple pleasures.
I won't bore you with a huge biography, I'll just do the basics. I was born and raised in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, a state in the Upper Midwest region of the United States. I've lived there for all but 7 years of my life. Those 7 were: 3 years of my youth in Seattle, Washington; 1 year of high school in Stuttgart, Germany; and 3 years after college in Bozeman, Montana.
I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Computer Engineering, which I have not put to any use. Right after I graduated I moved to Montana to become a ski bum and then a surveyor. Presently I'm working for Anderson Millwork, a custom cabinet shop my father bought in early 2005. I do all sorts of little jobs for the business, but mainly I'm on the computer trying to get our systems up to date and running smoothly.
Okay, enough about me, what's with the name of the site? It's simple really, I like to eat my chips plain. Nothing on them, straight out of the bag. That's just the way it is. No salsa, no cheese, no low-fat french onion dip, no nothing. Just tortillas, or cheetos, or potato chips or fritos or whatever.
I also really like vanilla ice cream (to the surprise of people when I pick it over chocolate or strawberry for a malt for example) and I don't like things with nuts in them (ice cream, brownies, etc). For example, I had butter pecan ice cream once and wow--the ice cream was good, except for the nuts. I had to eat all of the pecans first so I could enjoy uninterrupted tasty ice cream.
That explains what it means, but how did I come up with the name. The story behind that is a bit more involved...
When I first moved to Montana I was living with Brian in a very small apartment. It had one bedroom and I pretty much lived in the kitchen. We both had our computers up and networked. Brian and and his best friend Keith loved the game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. A fun game to be sure, but the thing with Shogo is that it isn't that great of a game, even when it was released. It came out in 1998, and when you compare it to games of today (or even the time of this story) it doesn't even come close.
The unique thing about the game is that you fight while in giant robots. Who doesn't like giant robots? Plus, the whole game has an anime feel to it, which we all liked. Anyway, so it was 2002 and Brian and Keith played their game from 1998 all the time. One day Brian was out and about and Keith was going online to play and thought I should join in. Let's get a couple things out in the open:
1. I like playing games.
2. I don't play games as much as I used to.
3. I never played games *that* much. (well, maybe I did)
4. I never played many FPS games, my time was spent with RPGs or Civilization or SimCity.
5. When I do play FPS games, it is in single player mode. It is easier to kill computer opponents while trying over and over, than it is to kill humans who have played the game tons more than me.
So I went online knowing that I would be fodder for anyone else playing and I'd probably end up with a negative score from accidentally killing myself more than getting off a lucky shot on someone else. No matter, anyone can play; no matter how bad. The only thing I needed was a cool online moniker.
Hmmmmm.
Hmmmmm.
Hmmmmm.
Nothing was coming to me. Keith had a cool name of some street (I believe) he saw in Europe: Turfdraagster. I don't remember Brian's name. All the "cool" (or should I say "1337") people had names. What was mine to be? I certainly wasn't going to go for a known character name from a book or game. That's too cheesy. I wasn't going to have "dragon" or "death" or any of a million other "hardcore" words in the name.
What was a man to do? I spent a ton of time online, but I didn't have an identity there. I wasn't a part of any community or anything like that. I just surfed and lurked.
Wait! What had I eaten for a snack just that night? Something that most people wouldn't have. Something that says something almost unique about me? Something that would sound a little funny and maybe slightly clever if used as a name?
I had had chips for a snack. Plain chips. No salsa, no cheese, nothing to dip in. They were Just Plain Chips. And that was my name.
So there you have it. I said I needed to come up with a cool online moniker to play. I guess that mission was never accomplished. But I had a unique name, and that works, too.
Thanks for stopping by my site and please feel free to comment on any post when you feel the urge, or just drop me an email at justplainchips@gmail.com.
Brenden
