Blendverse is a blend of the random creative projects of three friends looking for a platform to share their often silly, sometimes serious thoughts and ideas.

Letter from the Editor:

Welcome to the next chapter of Blendverse. If you haven’t figured it out yet, we have no idea what we’re doing or where we’re going with this. We started with a website and now we’ve transitioned to electronic publications. Who knows what’s next? (When this was originally drafted, we were developing an e-mag which was never released – it turns out we were even more confused than I originally thought when writing this “Letter from the Editor.”)

What we do know, however, is that we have a ton of fun creating stuff together. It’s been a while since you last heard from us, and that’s because, well—work, life, responsibilities, and adulthood sort of got in the way of our silly, creative projects. We’re glad to be back. Before you continue onto the collection of “work” we have compiled, I’d like to explain why I find this project to be not only incredibly fun, but important.

The notion that we have immense fun creating stuff together comes as no surprise to me, since we’ve been having fun together since we were kids. We’ve, quite literally, grown up together. We tackled adolescence together, that awkward in-between stage from adolescence to adulthood…then, we acquired our higher education simultaneously. And while we all went to different schools, we always kept in touch (thanks in large part to video games, admittedly). These days we’ve found ourselves steeped in adulthood. It’s… an adjustment. Thankfully, we still have each other and Blendverse. It’s an outlet for Jesse (endearingly referred to as “Besse,” by Sandeep and I) to discuss some of his “observations” about people’s social media habits (the pieces included in this e-mag are only a sample of Jesse’s, let’s call them, “insights,” to social media trends). And then there’s Sandeep – the creative powerhouse of our trio. The things we have on the website and in this e-mag barely scratch the surface of what goes on in this guy’s head. There’s so much untapped hilarity and creativity in there, and I’m glad to be a part of one outlet for it.

Which brings me back to WHY I find this whole endeavor important. Earlier, I referred to us as “steeped in adulthood.” I describe it that way because growing up is one of those things that seeps its way into every part of your life and, before you know it, you’re submerged in it. The longer you simmer in it, the more accustomed to it you become, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make time for being silly every so often. Blendverse is my way to pull myself out of it for a short period of time in a (somewhat) productive manner. Plus, possibly making someone (or people, but I don’t want to be presumptuous) laugh is always a nice added bonus.

It feels like only yesterday that we were spending our summer vacation playing Counter Strike Source for hours on end, designing Team Blend t-shirts so we could represent our team publicly, playing manhunt in friends’ backyards, and wondering when we’d start growing armpit hair (OK fine, the last one only applies to me.. Jesse and Sandeep had beards at age 14).

Then one day, you wake up and you’ve gone from that 14 year old whose biggest worry is which lunch period you’ll be assigned to because you NEED to sit with your best friends, to being almost 27 and having to pay your own bills, make your own doctor appointments (this is a work-in-progress for me), and getting genuinely excited when you see a great deal for a set of decorative towels at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

It’s special for us to be able to find something that allows us to be “kids” again every so often. Yes, sometimes we do get serious and express ideas or opinions that are really important to us on Blendverse. But much more often, we create something like a highly dramatized story about the rise and fall of a criminal enterprise founded on counterfeiting Pokemon cards.

We have MANY more “unpublished” ideas/conversations, and I’m sure that a compelling argument could be made that this is the best case scenario for society. However, I hope you do enjoy the things that we have decided to share and will continue to share. If you don’t, that’s fine too, because we genuinely have a blast creating it.

GLHF

– James “DadVo” Mann