Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (01:04)
Jonathan Rucker, thank you for joining me on make games drink coffee

So you sent me probably the least helpful questionnaire out of anybody and you put, so for example, what inspired you to love video games? You put my mom and I was like, is he messing with me? But I

Rucker (01:13)
you

No, no, no,

I’m not messing with you. My mom is the entire reason why I love video games. When I was five, we got an NES and we got the NES because she wanted to play Mario and Zelda. So, and then on top of that, she wanted to get a game for the kids. So what she got was Mega Man. So my entire playing games in childhood is entirely because my mom wanted to play Mario and Zelda and then Final Fantasy. And then it just kept that.

We stayed at a Nintendo household because until the PlayStation, which is when we switched, all of the Final Fantasy games were on Nintendo platforms. yeah, no, that was not me messing with you. That’s actually legitimate. The only reason I’m so into video games is because my mom wanted to play Mario and Zelda.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:15)
That is awesome. experience, like with my parents, you know, my mom like plays solitaire on her phone now, but before that, you know, I’ve asked my dad and it’s like, I played pong once. And so I had to go to my friend’s houses to play video games for a really long time.

Rucker (02:32)
You know, my- and then, because my mom started playing video games, my dad was kinda like, well, we have this computer that we got because we needed a computer for other things. And then he started playing Flight Sims and stuff, so… Yeah, eventually I was- I had access to PC games like Doom, started playing MMOs in high school. But, yeah. No, legitimately. My mom is the reason I like video games.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:44)
nice.

That’s great.

I think the really funny part about that story is that your mom got the kids Mega Man, which is like the notoriously difficult game out of all of those. Did she at some point go, I messed up. You guys should be playing the other ones.

Rucker (03:10)
yeah, when she tried to help beat a level at some point. can’t remember. I know like, I beat Battletoads and Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden as a kid, but those games took a long time for, you know, six-year-old me to beat.

Aaron Nemoyten (03:27)
So you wrote in the question, how did you get started in the industry? Your answer was by accident and, you would not be the first person I’ve talked to that kind of fell into it by accident. And for me to some degree it was by accident as well. So can you talk about how that happened?

Rucker (03:32)
Yes.

Anything?

yeah, my college professor knew a producer at the first company I worked for WayForward and they needed an engineer, not an engineer, they needed someone to do level design who, because of the way the tooling worked on this, these particular titles knew C because most of the level design was done in C arrays. yeah.

The plug-and-play TV is the wild west of old game dev. A lot of corners were cut because there were no corners. Right? Like this was, you want to talk low-end hardware, this was hardware trying to pretend it being an SNES, but was designed to be plugged into the RCA jacks at the back of a television in a hotel and then never played again. So yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:34)
Okay, so you’ve worked on all kinds of weird little devices that aren’t mainstream. Can you talk about that? That’s actually really interesting.

Rucker (04:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I’ve worked on a lot of plug and play TV games, four of them, I think it was in total. And those are almost entirely, I don’t even know if the company still exists anymore, but the company was called Sun Plus out of China, and they produced a lot of micro devices. The best way can describe it is you remember all those old Tiger electronics toys? They made the more modern 2000s and later versions of those. So they’d plug into a TV and then

Aaron Nemoyten (05:01)
Yep.

Rucker (05:10)
everything would be fine. These have pretty much died out entirely these days. Both, honestly, mostly because of the Nintendo DS. Like the Nintendo DS just took over that space entirely. I on a lot of DS games too. And then I worked on quite a few LeapFrog titles for the LeapFrog edutainment platforms.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:31)
So I saw on your LinkedIn that you had worked on Nintendo DS engine programming. And I’m kind of wondering, most people now, when they think of a game engine, they think of the main game engines that we can use as indie game developers. So Unreal, Unity, Godot, maybe some other things, some JavaScript game engines. But that assumes engine plus tools or editor.

Rucker (05:36)
Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:57)
and it’s a complete experience that’s built so that you can just like open it up and make a game. I imagine that what you worked on in Nintendo DS was very different from what most people think of as a game engine. So can you talk about what it’s like to work on a Nintendo DS game engine? Like what are the needs for the team and what do you bring from project to project?

Rucker (06:18)
Yeah, so I mean, it’s honestly not that much of a… The bigger problem is just the separation. So your tools are a completely separate system from the engine. Your engine is going to be its own thing, your tools, you’re not… Because you’re not releasing the games on PC ever, obviously. You don’t have a tool set built into the engine that sits as a wrapper for an editor. So all of your editing tools are separate. In our case, a lot of our editing tools were just 3D Studio Max plugins.

for 3D, but then for 2D, obviously, 2D is a far more complicated problem because the DS was not a fully 3D platform. One of your screens could have 3D. One of the other screens was still using old school 2D where it was tile based. Everything had to be cut art and you need actual tools to export that sort of pipeline properly. So we obviously had our own tools for that.

Aaron Nemoyten (06:47)
wow.

Do ever think, how do I formulate this question? Do you ever think, boy, the game industry is really frustrating. I have all these skills I could use outside of it and probably make more money and be more stable. Maybe I’ll just do that instead.

Rucker (07:27)
Yes, frequently. But there’s something wrong with me because I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:29)
you

Fair enough.

so you listed in your unusual skills or hobbies, self-hosting. What do you mean by that? Is that as in web hosting or servers or what’s going on there?

Rucker (07:41)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Self hosted services, so like I run my own media servers. I run my own Foundry VTT server for everything. So I’ve got my own small Proxmox and Docker cluster. Run all of my stuff. Yeah, yeah, my hobbies.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:04)
So your hobby,

I mean, one of your hobbies is just more work stuff, but you’re just doing it for yourself.

Rucker (08:09)
Yeah, one of my hobbies is more work stuff that I’m doing it for myself that I don’t do for work because I’m not a backend server engineer. So I don’t, I don’t actually do any of this stuff for work though. Technically it does mean that I’m more qualified to talk to the people who do it at work, right? Like I can, I can hold a basic conversation. I understand how hypervisors work, all that stuff.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:15)
Got it, okay.

Rucker (08:33)
It’s come up occasionally, like when I had to do build system work. But for the most part, no, it’s just, I run my own media server for being able to host my own media for myself. actually, and this isn’t even a lie or a joke, all legally owned. Like it’s all, I’m too lazy to go steal shit. If I want to watch something on Netflix, I just log into Netflix. Too lazy.

lazy to do it the illegal way.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:04)
are you like buying Blu-rays and then ripping them and putting them on your own server just for yourself?

Rucker (09:08)
Yeah,

most of it’s music, right? Like I still buy CDs. Like I don’t have a Spotify account. I buy CDs and then I have my big collection of CDs in the closet behind me and I’ll pull the CD, put it on my media server so I can listen to it on Jellyfin at work. Yeah, Foundry VTT is the big one. Anytime a video game comes out that my friend group wants to play, I’ll usually be the one hosting it.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:10)
my god.

Rucker (09:38)
So my big obsession with my media server is both having enough power to do what I want while having it be as low energy as possible. So mine is it idles at… I’d have to double check the numbers entirely, but I believe the last time I checked it, it idled at 47 watts and peaked at 300 when I was hammering it completely because it’s like a…

bunch of low power devices, power as much as much as possible to can. But then…

Aaron Nemoyten (10:10)
So can

you put that in context? what are the average numbers for like a gaming PC, for example? Okay.

Rucker (10:15)
hundreds. Right, like you

like you got your thousand watt power supply on idle, you’re going to be pulling like 200 watts.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:22)
So I asked, what’s a contrarian opinion? And you said modern cube is the best cube. What the hell are you talking about?

Rucker (10:28)
Yeah, so that was a bit of a troll answer, but no Magic the Gathering. So Magic the Gathering Cube is one of the formats of limited that you play, which limited is short for limited card pool. And what you do is you do a draft out of a collection of cards that you’ve curated as like a custom draft set. And then you play it and on MTGO Magic the Gathering online.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:30)
Okay.

Hmm.

Rucker (10:57)
most of the formats are the most popular formats are formats based around different legalities so vintage, legacy, modern, standard and the most common opinion is that vintage cube is the best cube and my attempt to piss off the entire audience who plays Magic the Gathering is to say they are wrong objectively and modern cube is the best cube thank you very much

Aaron Nemoyten (11:24)
You

All right, fair enough.

Rucker (11:28)
And

I can go into the reasons why I feel that way, but it is very specific about Magic the Gathering, and I wasn’t sure if you were a Magic the Gathering player or even wanted to go into Magic the Gathering.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:40)
mean, the podcast is supposed to be accessible enough to lay people. So I think that might be a little esoteric. Yeah.

Rucker (11:47)
This is not going to be accessible enough for delay people. I will have to go into

a 45 minute explanation of how curving out works in order to explain why.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:58)
That is its own episode of possibly a different podcast.

So you also mentioned 3D printing is something you’re interested in. You actually wouldn’t be the first podcast guest to mention that as one of your interests, but I’m curious, what are you into there? What do you like to make?

Rucker (12:12)
Yeah, so I predominantly do 3D printing as a

repair and maintenance thing. Now I do print a whole bunch of other things. I printed my paint solution for Warhammer that’s currently on my wall. I printed organizers and other things, but for the most part, it’s like, when a part of my chair broke off the arm, I 3D printed a replacement.

But yeah, for the most part I use it to support my other hobbies and to fix and keep things working more than anything else.

Aaron Nemoyten (12:47)
so the way that we know each other is through the games industry gathering group or gig. And one of the things that’s come up there a bunch when talking is food. Yes. Often we end up talking about Mexican food.

Rucker (12:59)
Yes.

Yes, I cook a lot of Mexican food. I’m a big fan of making beans.

Aaron Nemoyten (13:10)
You

Rucker (13:11)
Yeah, I try to find every new way to make beans. Charro is my current obsession, which is a Texas approach, though I don’t use the hot dogs generally associated. I’m not a big fan of hot dogs in my food. But I’m a big fan.

Aaron Nemoyten (13:26)
So not a fan

of Filipino spaghetti.

Rucker (13:30)
I don’t mind Filipino spaghetti when it doesn’t have the hot dogs. And to be clear, it’s not that I don’t like hot dogs, it’s just that I like my hot dogs to be a hot dog and not an ingredient in other things. Yeah, I know it’s like a very mildly spicy form of beans usually made with a mixture of chorizo, bacon, and hot dogs, and I just swap out the hot dogs for pork shoulder. And a lot of times, gets…

Aaron Nemoyten (13:34)
Fair. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sounds

good.

Rucker (13:57)
Yeah,

a lot of times you can use a side dish, but I’ll just eat that with rice as the main dish. Right? Because it’s got beans, beans, onions, peppers, but not a lot of spicy peppers, just a small amount of jalapeno. It’s really not spicy for a Mexican dish. It’s very mild. And then, I’ll just eat that with rice.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:03)
Do you have opinions on Northern California or Bay Area Mexican versus Southern California versus Texas versus being an actual Mexico?

Rucker (15:15)
I mean, they’re all good, right? It’s because it’s different regional dialects. I think a lot of people get confused about Tex-Mex, right? Because they hear Tex-Mex and they’re like, oh, that’s not real Mexican food. I will remind people that Texas was part of Mexico until the mid 1800s. And Tex-Mex as a cuisine was like a stable form of cuisine prior to that date, right? Like Tex-Mex exists prior to…

Texas being an independent state, followed by Texas being part of the US. That is a regional cuisine that long predates that. So it’s real Mexican food for that northern Tejas region. then California, yeah, California is the weird one, right? Because California is where you get a lot more into the…

It’s a lot more… I don’t want to say fusion-y, but that’s kind of the way I’d go with it. It’s a lot more like… regional food based around what’s available and what’s popular, right? Like you think about the California burrito and what is it? It’s a burrito with french fries and guacamole. Right? Like that. Yeah, and that’s a San Diego thing. That’s as far south as you can go practically. And then you start thinking about…

Aaron Nemoyten (16:25)
Yes, and that’s a San Diego thing.

Rucker (16:36)
right like Los Angeles and it’s a lot of tacos. Northern California has lot of the fish Baja recipes. I mean I think it depends on what you want and where you are. You can always find a good taco in any of those locations.

Aaron Nemoyten (16:49)
mean, it’s so funny that like the street taco, I think is basically the same everywhere where it’s tortilla, meat, cilantro, diced onion, and then whatever salsa they feel like making.

Rucker (17:02)
Yeah, pretty much. And then it’s just gonna depend on like, where you are is what kind of meat you’re going to get or if they have vegan vegetarian options, right? Because tacos de papa is a really, really popular taco, which is just the potato taco, fried potato taco. It’s huge all over California. Yeah, you should try and find it. It’s really good. It’s like a, it’s so it’s crispy shell because they put…

Aaron Nemoyten (17:20)
never had that.

Rucker (17:27)
generally they will put the potato in the tortilla before frying the whole thing yeah so a lot of times it’s like a mashed potato as opposed to potato chunks sometimes it’ll be potato chunks usually it’s fluffy mashed potatoes without a ton of additions right like not it doesn’t have a ton of butter or milk or anything else added it’s just mashed potatoes seasoned put into a tortilla deep-fried the whole thing and then you served it and you put salsa on it and it’s

Aaron Nemoyten (17:32)
Whoa, okay.

great.

Rucker (17:57)
Yeah,

it’s one of the better vegetarian dishes you can give people, in my opinion. Actually vegan if you make it right.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:05)
Hmm. Yeah, so I, so I’m in Redwood city in the Bay Area and I found out recently and I probably could have just looked into this if I bothered to check, but, we have an, we have a neighborhood here that’s sort of a little Mexico. And what I didn’t realize was that there were so many people that migrated from a specific region of Mexico. It might’ve even been a specific city that

There might actually be more of them here now than there are there, but there are so many Mexican restaurants in Redwood City in a very small area. And yeah, we just have a crazy number of options. Somebody made a website where they ate at and ranked every single one of them. It’s like 35. And then there was a news story recently about how the current president of Mexico, when she was studying, she went to college at Stanford.

she would come to Redwood City to get the best Mexican food. And so I’m really proud to be here. I think it’s really cool, but we keep, you know, my wife’s grandmother was Mexican and so she grew up with a lot of like homemade Mexican food. She’s always trying to find something that sort of has a very particular flavor profile. And so we keep trying all these different restaurants looking for like,

who’s got the best asada tacos, who’s got the best chorizo breakfast burrito, like very specific things.

Rucker (19:33)
Yeah, for me, for me, it’s I mean, I live in Los Angeles, so it’s hard to describe how easy it is to find good Mexican food. One of my favorites out here, though, is probably Sonora town, which Sonora is a northern part of Mexico. so Sonora town does a lot of flour tortillas with imported flour from Sonora. And one of the best things you can get there is the crispy tripe tacos. They put everything over charcoal.

So, yeah, what you can get there is can get tripe grilled over charcoal until it gets crispy with green onion grilled over charcoal as like a little side thing and then your normal onion cilantro and salsa and it’s amazing. All on flour tortillas, which I generally prefer corn. Corn is my preferred, but just something about how Sonora Town’s tacos taste with the flour works as like, OK.

I’m down for the flour tortillas here.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:38)
That sounds amazing. I think I’ve only had tripe in the context of soup. I’ve had it in menudo and I’ve had it in pho. I don’t think I’ve ever had it as a filling in some other thing, although I’ve been to places where it was an option, but yeah, I guess I should try it because that sounds really good.

Rucker (20:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so I’m personally of the opinion that it’s bad when it’s rubbery and the way to make it not rubbery is to grill it hot until it gets crispy, right, or fry it, or put it in a soup, right? Because you chop it up small and you put it in a soup and it’s not super rubbery but more like rubbery in the context of like squid.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, which is fine.

Rucker (21:20)
It’s

got some spring and that’s But yeah, if you do any kind of like slow cooking or just like try to pan fry it, it just turns into like a rubber tire from a Lego set.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:37)
I do not think I’m brave enough to try to cook my own tripe, especially because my wife told me about her grandmother making menudo and from scratch, which would mean like, so for those of you who don’t know, tripe is the stomach lining of a cow. so you got to like, you buy a bunch of it and then you like dump it in a large thing like a bathtub and like bleach it to get all the whatever out of it.

So apparently her grandmother would do that and then make the menudo. So I’m like, okay, I’m happy to have other people do that for me.

Rucker (22:14)
If you buy it in a grocery store, don’t need to treat it quite that much. You can do it with just a baking soda soak. That’ll be enough. Clean it off real heavily. Just scrub it in some water with… cool water with baking soda. That’ll be enough. And then blanch it.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:32)
That’s still, I mean, look, I love trying different foods and I like trying to cook stuff, but I’m still like afraid to spend decent money on fish because I know it’s so easy to overcook. And I like, I’m afraid that I’ll spend $40 and then overcook it and then hate myself.

Rucker (22:51)
Yeah, luckily tripe is cheap. I do agree with you though, right? Like I generally not buying a lot of expensive fish for a similar reason because it’s so easy to screw up. I’ll buy cheap fish. I’m a big fan of cooking cod. And then otherwise, like a lot of what I do for fish is I buy cans of salmon and then turn that into salmon salad.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:53)
Good point. Yeah.

Mm, yeah.

That’s good, yeah, I’ve done that before.

Rucker (23:19)
I that over tuna salad. Not a big tuna person. I prefer salmon.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:23)
I think, so my take on tuna, and this is probably not a hot take, this is probably, I assume most people that have tried all these different things agree, I think raw tuna is the best tuna. And once you cook it, it gets way less interesting flavor-wise.

Rucker (23:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it gets less interesting, it gets a little blander. I’m not a big fan of cooked tuna. Salmon cooked is fine, right? Like salmon cooked tastes good. Better raw, but not so much better that I feel bad about cracking up a can of salmon to make a salmon salad.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:55)
Yeah, well, and smoked salmon is amazing.

Rucker (23:59)
Yes, smoked salmon is amazing.

a lot of the Alaskan fisheries that smoke salmon will sell online and the one that I used to go to closed down during the pandemic and I gotta find a new one but they sell whole canned fillets of salmon smoked salmon so not the kind of smoked salmon you’d use for bagel not the thinly sliced stuff but like a whole salmon fillet

shoved into a can that’s been smoked and then shoved into a can and it’s really good for making things like salmon salad.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:30)
That sounds good, I should try that.

Rucker (24:32)
Yeah, there’s a hundred different places in Alaska to do that.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:36)
had the salmon scramble or omelet or whatever at various local breakfast places and it’s always good, but I always feel like it could be better.

Rucker (24:46)
when I’m going out.

to eat and I’ll get breakfast, it’s usually gonna be corned beef hash, something with over easy eggs or poached eggs. Big Eggs Benedict fan if I’m gonna just really pile on calories in the form of butter.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:04)
Yeah, I actually have a crazy eggs Benedict story, is, you know, I try it occasionally. I’m not that big a fan of Hollandaise sauce. And also, I don’t understand the appeal of soggy English muffins. But we went to a restaurant once that was a little, it’s like a little mom and pop place

and I got the, I think I got the eggs Benedict and the hollandaise basically tasted like lemon juice. It was, it was unbelievably lemony. And I, I was like, this is like, we didn’t expect this. I did not expect it to taste like this. And I, I sent it back.

Rucker (25:37)
no.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:50)
And I am not a person that sends food back. I am a person that if it is of acceptable quality and like doesn’t taste awful and doesn’t have things in it that aren’t food, then I’m not going to say anything like I ordered it. I’m going to eat it. I’ll deal with it. It’s my fault for trying something new. But in this case, I was like, it’s just it just tastes like lemon. And the chef came out and lectured me about how it was real hollandaise. It was made from scratch.

and that real hollandaise has lemon juice in it and that I’m used to the hollandaise that restaurants are ordering from the restaurant supply companies and getting in a can and not making there. And my God, I’ve never felt more awkward in a restaurant and we have not been back.

Rucker (26:35)
Yeah, I can’t blame you. I mean, you know, the chef’s not entirely wrong. Hollidays does have lemon, but it shouldn’t taste like lemon. Just like mayonnaise has lemon, and it should not taste like lemon.

Aaron Nemoyten (26:47)
Yeah, I’ve never sent back a aioli because it tastes like lemon juice.

Rucker (26:52)
Yeah, no that, I’ve only ever had the chef come out to try and lecture me once. And I just stood up and left

Aaron Nemoyten (26:55)
You

Wait, what was that? What was your Chef Lecture story?

Rucker (27:03)
I mean very similar thing, right? Like I don’t like to send food back, I got something and it wasn’t even wanting to send it back. It was like I was fairly certain this wasn’t what I had ordered. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but to give you an example, it would be like if you ordered a club sandwich and it came out open-faced covered in gravy. Right? Like it…

Aaron Nemoyten (27:21)
Yeah, yeah, I’d be like,

that’s not what it’s supposed to be, right?

Rucker (27:23)
Because whatever

I ordered came out open-faced covered in gravy and I’m just like, this is not, I don’t think this is what I ordered. And then the chef tried to come out and lecture me and I’m like, I am fairly certain that you are correct that I probably misread the menu and just assumed that when it said this very common type of sandwich as the lunch item, that it was just going to be a normal representation of that kind of sandwich. But I am not.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:44)
Yeah.

Rucker (27:52)
interested in a lecture about how you’re, you know, doing haute cuisine at this diner by making an open-faced version of… I think I’ve been in like a turkey club or something.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:59)
You

no, a turkey club has to be a double decker turkey bacon. there’s, yeah, you can’t mess with that.

Rucker (28:13)
Yeah,

it’s one of those things where, you know, if you named it something that wasn’t a turkey club, I’m sure I would have just not ordered it. Or if I was, I would have expected it. But yeah, just stood up and left.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:23)
Yeah. my gosh. Yeah. I actually,

my only two times where I sent something back were like, besides the one that I mentioned were because there was definitely something wrong. And one of them was that I ordered some, it was beans at a

It was beans at a New Orleans style restaurant and they were so salty and I like salt. I will eat almost anything that’s salty. And I was like, this is too much. I sent it back and the waitress came back out and said, thank you for telling us those were too salty. We messed up the entire batch and we had to throw it all out. And then the other time I found a piece of plastic in my salad.

Rucker (29:00)
no.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:09)
and it was the corner of some kind of restaurant supply bag that someone had tried to slice off diagonally. And I assume it just flew across the room and ended up in my food. So they gave me, they like gave me a new entree for free.

Rucker (29:24)
yeah, my only other food horror story was a place where I accidentally Somehow during expedite they had screwed up their expedite system and they were using push pins and a push pin fell in my food and Luckily I wasn’t hurt and luckily it wasn’t someone intentionally tried to do anything. It was literally just Whatever whatever mechanism they were using for expediting with clips

They didn’t have any clips or something had happened. I don’t know exactly what it was. And they had to emergency resort to push pins on a cork board that they pulled out. And yeah, it’s just like, this is why they don’t use push pins and cork boards in restaurants. Cause you know, you have that emergency thing and suddenly, you you think you’re safe because it’s on the expedite counter and it can’t get into the food, but you know, now it’s, you know, sitting between the two layers of someone’s quesadilla.

Aaron Nemoyten (30:16)
no!

Rucker (30:17)
because it had just managed to fall exactly right to just not be easily spotted. It looked like a piece of yellow tomato.

Aaron Nemoyten (30:26)
That’s okay. You’re lucky, I guess, that you didn’t really bite into it and, you know, actually hurt yourself. That would have been painful.

Rucker (30:33)
Yeah, I did not swallow a

pushpin. I luckily noticed it fast enough. It’s like, I got a pushpin in my They shut the kitchen down. Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of an emergency thing, is if a customer gets a pushpin in their food. They immediately shut the kitchen down and then tried to figure out how it happened and then went, shit, this is how it happened.

Aaron Nemoyten (30:41)
my God.

Rucker (30:56)
But yeah, no, my favorite restaurant story though is still, and I’m sad this place is gone, but it makes sense because the owners retired and went back home. This is years ago. But yeah, so when I was that way forward, there was a Korean place in Valencia that I used to go to all the time. And I went there so frequently, like once a week, that I just kind of became a regular. But I was the only regular who was ordering

spicy food Which makes sense because you know, Valencia is a suburb north of LA So, you know not a lot of spice tolerance in that particular area at the time Yeah, so I was always ordering things to be as spicy as they could make it and Grandma on the back kept trying to meet my my tolerance and eventually she’s like Really started like eventually got to the point where I would not order. I would just go in

Aaron Nemoyten (31:32)
Mm-hmm.

Rucker (31:54)
They set me down and then they bring food out that she made and then charge me for it. The normal lunch menu price because I’d been there so often and she liked cooking for someone who was not the normal clientele that she was used to who would actually eat the spicy food like Korean level spicy.

Aaron Nemoyten (32:17)
wow.

Rucker (32:19)
so so that was fun

Aaron Nemoyten (32:20)
Jonathan Rucker. Thank you so much for being a guest on make games, drink coffee.

Rucker (32:25)
It’s been great. Good talking to you.