#oneaday, Day 68: #PAX East, Day 1

Wow, what a rush! Day one of PAX East is already over and it’s been awesome so far.

Early part of the day was spent meeting, greeting and showering off our respective journeys. Chris “RocGaude” Whittington and I made it into the show just after Wil Wheaton’s keynote speech, which is a shame because the buzz on Twitter made it sound rather inspirational. Still, immediately after that was Gabe and Tycho’s Q&A session, which was seven degrees of pure-grade awesomeness. I’d never actually seen them in person before but their banter was hilarious and they have huge amounts of stage presence, wit and talent. I can see why they’ve become the huge successes they have.

Later, we tried to get in to a panel about the current state of storytelling in interactive fiction, hosted by, among others, Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin and Emily Short. Sadly we were just too late for that one, but we did manage to attend the first screening of GET LAMP, an extremely well put together documentary about the rise, fall and rise again of interactive fiction. The filmmaker had managed to interview a huge number of luminaries of the genre, including Don “Adventure” Woods and Steve “Infocom” Meretzky, both of whom were in attendance along with Plotkin and several others from IF’s past for a post-movie Q&A session.

We also spent a bit of time with the BitMob crowd at the puntastic “Pour House” where the beer was flowing freely and, by the sound of his tweets, Jeff Grubb is absolutely wasted. Holla. I won a T-shirt too. Awesomesauce!

Tomorrow should be a busy day. Hitting the show floor to scoop some stories for my new gigs at Kombo and Daily Joypad, then later am getting the chance to catch up with my brother. Hopefully, then, later in the evening, the Squadron of Shame will be recording something awesome from PAX to share with you all.

Anyway, it’s 1:15am EST right now and I should probably go to bed. Suffice to say that so far PAX is proving to be everything I hoped it would be. I wish there were more in the way of nerd superconventions like this in the UK. I had to cheer when Gabe and Tycho said their next aim for PAX is to do EuroPAX. That would be awesome.

Anyway. Good night!