Wow. Just wow. For those of you who don’t know I spent friday saturday and sunday not sleeping because I was at the biggest videogame convention in North America. Being both a sometimes gamer and more increasingly a devotee and participant in the webcomics community I have wanted to attend this convention when it was at or around 3,000 people at the Bellvue convention center. It has now moved to the largest convention center in Washington and this year sold out a week before opening to over 70,000 people. This was probably one of the more incredible experiences I have ever had. Even though I don’t play a lot of videogames all the demos and free beta keys floating around the huge (and incredibly loud) exhibition hall was an awesome experience in the sensory overload department. There were raffles and free t-shirts everywhere, I personally am leaving with about 6 more shirts than I came with and one of my associates who hit the swag circuit a little harder was up about 15 garments total. Both he and I also won some computer cases from the nvidia booth for filling out a survey so it was a pretty good convention on the free swag front. I made several hundred dollars worth of purchases from artists and persons whose work I admire greatly including but not limited to Kris Straub, MC Frontalot, and newly discovered artists performing like Anamanaguchi and Metroid Metal. Additionally I bought an awesome Maw plushie, and some sweet PAX branded razor earbuds (I had no working headphones at the time) as well as all of the currently extant Scott Pilgrim books. So that was consumerism and the convention floor but like I said I only play videogames sometimes so really the most exciting part about this entire weekend was getting to meet the people from the internet who have inspired me to do the things that I do. It sounds strange but it’s really amazing to see these people you’ve heard so much about through their blogs and ustreams and twitters and whatnot and see them in person and shake their hand. It was an incredible experince to be able to shake hands with all of the major cartoonists who inspired me to draw cartoons and make webcomics all in the same place. By some insane fortuitous circumstance Bill Amend of Foxtrot, Kris Straub, Scott Kurtz, and of course both Mike and Jerry of the eponymous Penny Arcade. To meet all these inspirational people in one weekend at one event was simply indescribable. Additonally to be able to meet Johnathan Coulton who is responsible for me wanting to learn the guitar and MC Frontalot who at one point inspired me to write several nerdcore raps in my spare time. Additionally there were panels with all of these individuals which were really interesting and intriguing looks into their origins and processes which were incredibly helpful to me as a creator. Then there were the concerts. We only ended up going to the friday night one and I had to miss JoCo saturday night because I rocked out so hard on friday. But oh was it worth it, Anamaniguchi and Metroid Metal played some absolutely insane and awesome music and me and my buddies took full advantage of the opportunity to rock our socks off. Sadly enough hardly anyone else there did but we rocked so hard I’m pretty sure we’re going to be all over the PAX09 dvd, At least we got up on the big screen a lot. However unfortunately due to said energetic appreciation of the prevalent tunes, and being at the convention for at that point over 20 hours ended up having to leave partway through the frontalot set and also not go to the saturday night concert for fear of serious and permanent physical damage. I am not joking, it was scary there for a few moments, but only because there was so much fun it hurt. The one thing i didn’t get to do much of was participate in any of the freeplay areas, either console, handheld, pc, or board games which is something i would really like to do more of next year. It’s really difficult to sum up PAX in even a huge wall of text like this but It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, and getting to meet and talk to the creators I admire and look up to was an incredibly rewarding experience. I totally look forward to doing it next year, I’ll leave you free to talk or ask questions in the comments. I’m super beat so there’s a filler comic which I think those of you with an appreciation for fine toilet humor will understand. Which, based on our recent run of jokes, I hope is most of you. Thanks again for reading, and I hope everyone had half as awesome a labor day weekend as I did.

-nic

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.