Stuff you learned at this year's PAX that will prove invaluable for next year
Bionic ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRM
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Some of these will be opinionated, reflecting what I think I should do to make my next PAX awesome for me personally. It does not reflect what I think everyone else should do.
-Possibly consider skipping Paul and Storm and JoCo in favour of smaller acts like Metroid Metal. I mean, the heavy hitters are great and all but they basically have played the same set for three straight years at PAX. I think it's time for something different.
-See more panels. I really feel like I didn't get enough memorable experiences from the few panels that I saw at PAX this year. Next year my schedule will be primarily panels.
-I should freeze some water bottles before I take them to PAX so I can have refreshing, icy cold water to drink.
-Minimize the amount you carry around with you. You're going to be on your feet all day and you need to be comfortable. This means that if I'm only going to play Tetris in lines, I should pack only my GBASP and not bother bringing my ipod or a DS. It also means that if the console freeplay room is offering hori sticks for use at the fighting game station, then I should get over myself and just use those instead of carrying around my hulking TE fightstick all three years of PAX.
-Possibly consider skipping Paul and Storm and JoCo in favour of smaller acts like Metroid Metal. I mean, the heavy hitters are great and all but they basically have played the same set for three straight years at PAX. I think it's time for something different.
-See more panels. I really feel like I didn't get enough memorable experiences from the few panels that I saw at PAX this year. Next year my schedule will be primarily panels.
-I should freeze some water bottles before I take them to PAX so I can have refreshing, icy cold water to drink.
-Minimize the amount you carry around with you. You're going to be on your feet all day and you need to be comfortable. This means that if I'm only going to play Tetris in lines, I should pack only my GBASP and not bother bringing my ipod or a DS. It also means that if the console freeplay room is offering hori sticks for use at the fighting game station, then I should get over myself and just use those instead of carrying around my hulking TE fightstick all three years of PAX.
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*Do better hotel research, and not get an expensive one where I have to walk a mile through some pretty sketch places at night to get back. I will be shelling out for a better, closer hotel next year
*Smaller panels can be just as fun as large ones
*Get gel shoe inserts
The Sheraton is awesome, mostly due to it's proximity.
I also saw a lot of people eating really crappy, greasy, evil food. If you're going to be gogogo for three days, walking, running, screaming, standing, playing games, everything that IS PAX, you need to be taking in some moderately healthy food to keep you at peak performance the whole weekend. Wonder why you're tired or slowing down? It was probably the pizza and burgers. On that note, I highly recommend the Juicy Cafe upstairs in the convention center, Subway, or the various restaurants around that carry salads. Yes, it's boring, but you'll be much happier for it in the end.
There's a subway not two blocks from the center, no line ups. And then: There are cheap and good eats other than Subway. (not sharing where, though muhahahhaha. It was really awesome to get $6-10 taco platters that were delicious and no line ups not 2 blocks from the center).
Cliff Bars are $1 each. Much healthier than Subway.
Tiny camping stool was the best thing I've ever brought to PAX, second only to my cell phone. I saw a couple full sized lawn chairs O_o which would be overkill. But tiny camping stool FTW.
I plan to chart the swag intake vs. age for subsequent years. A decent curve should be ready by ... oh ... 2020.
2) There's a sandwich place called Potbelly's on 4th & Pike that's terrific and if there is a line it moves at a good pace. They know what they are doing and the food is excellent.
3) A pair of comfy shoes with insoles are a must.
4) A fold-up director's chair is totally worth it.
5) Make regular runs back to the hotel to drop off swag and regroup.
6) Eat a solid breakfast to start the day off, Dragonfish across from the Grand Hyatt is absolutely awesome. The manager's name is TC Nuckles and he knows how to run the place.
7) Bring a kindle or other device to pass the time in line.
Don't judge people's food choices. You are not the food police.
I hereby issue everyone who has ever or will ever attend PAX a license to eat tasty food.
+++BRONYS BEFORE BROS!+++
2) Don't do so much activity or stay up so late the night before that you end up falling asleep at PAX! I literally saw a dude in the Classic FreePlay room sleeping while playing an SNES game or something. He eventually woke up and left. The last place I'd want to fall asleep at is PAX seeing as how it only happens twice a year.
Before PAX, I had never heard of a game called "Warsow", but for some strange reason I signed up for a Warsow tournament on Saturday. Turns out, I really liked it, and was also quite good at it. I almost got into the final 1v1 round. Point is, try new games! You never know what you might end up liking!
Erm, I didn't say I was? I'm giving advice. If you eat crappy food all weekend, you will FEEL crappy. And who the hell wants to drag their feet around PAX not having the best time possible? I eat terrible bad but when I am exerting myself or expending a lot of energy, I eat as good as is possible. Salads, fruits/veggies, foods with complex carbs and yes, even some juices with sugar (because I have a hard time keeping my blood sugar up). Grease has no nutritional value and will not add to your experience if you're eating it all day. Dinner? Yes. But breakfast shouldn't be a donut, and lunch shouldn't be Sbarros.
But if you want to feel like crap, do w/e you want.
Chillax.
I ignored my own advice and let some of my swag/raffle obsessed friends dictate my schedule. "No we can't go to lunch there's a Minecraft raffle at 1:00!" Wait, yes *I* can go to lunch, I don't play Minecraft and didn't enter their raffle. My friends experienced "Hungry Bitch" and I regret the way Friday mid-day turned out because of it. I knew better and finally walked away and went to the Merch booth on my own.
When one friend woke up with a sore throat Saturday and said he was going to sleep in and ride the bus later instead of carpool, I freaked out and hastily took a vitamin on an empty stomach. Almost hurled and ruined my entire day. Eat food, then take vitamin! Turns out friend wasn't sick, just fatigued.
Don't wear SuperFeet insoles for longer than an hour for the first time on day 1 of PAX. I had to walk around in sock feet in BYOC that night because my feet were in serious pain and my arches still feel bruised. Oops.
Thing that I did well this year:
Since I was in BYOC I packed hiking snacks and kept a stash at my station. Not chips/pop/candy/bag of sugar. I had Luna/Cliff Bars, Shot Bloks, canned chicken/tuna salad cracker kits, vitamin water and regular waters (some frozen). I don't like to fill a bottle at fountains after PAX09 (lesson learned hard) but since I'm local I make sure to buy a case of water and bring 2L a day. Subsequent fills were made at restaurants when they brought ice water to the table the first glass went into my Camelbak. I also kept a pocket full of vitamin C drops in my bag of holding. Anytime the dry air was getting to me, especially in the Expo I would eat a vitamin C drop.
The big thing to remember about PAX, especially us who work desk jobs all day, is that it's an endurance event. You are on your feet and walking 16hrs/day, your body needs fuel. If you don't want to miss a minute of PAX pack non-perishables that are high in nutrition, protein, carbs, vitamins. Stay hydrated. I have a tiny bladder but rarely took bathroom breaks even though I was constantly downing water, I was surprised how much I drank to keep hydrated this year.
Amazingly enough, I still don't have con crud this year!
Not a judgement on the people that do eat that stuff all the time (I'm a culprit myself, since my job doesn't afford me the ability to cook nearly as often as I'd like), but a recommendation based on experience.
This needs to be emphasized. My lunch/breakfast came from the Juicy Cafe, great tasting food that gives you quite a nice energy boost. It's worth a couple extra bucks over horrid fast food that will just drag you down and eventually ruin your PAX experience.
Oh, and extra socks. Start the day off wearing older socks you don't mind throwing away, and throw an extra pair into your bag. Midday take 5 minutes to change socks, and just toss the old ones if you don't want to put dirty socks back in your bag.
YOUR. FEET. WILL. THANK. YOU.
-Italo Calvino
I don't know if needs to be emphasized. Every morning, as is tradition from past PAX, we have a mondo burrito for breakfast at 10. Around 4-5-6pm we either got light lunch/dinner at McDonald's (Saturday) or went to the Johnny Rockets style burger diner (Friday) in the mall behind gameworks. Also on Saturday a couple of us ate at the pizza place downstairs after some drinking and late evening Magic. Mind you, we also drink NOS out of our Camelbaks during the day. We felt great, except those of us who were hung over one morning. Thats a different story though.
It is all about knowing yourself.
1. The queue room was ok fun for 2 hours on Fri, but i really enjoyed Sat/Sun showing up at 10:15 and walking in casually.
2. Don't over plan. Before my trip i was reading all the forum posts and taking everyones advice. Trying to prepare for too many things. In the end, the things that mattered most were comfy shoes, bring water/snacks, and something to do in line.
3. Picking 1 thing to do each day was good. Then just go with the flow. Scheduling too much didn't work for me.
4. Learn from Hitchhiker's Guide. Bring a towel. I just brought one of the hand towels from my hotel. Was nice to wipe off my face and neck every now and again.
5. Relax! Take 5-10 minute breaks a couple times a day. Go sit by a wall out of the way and just relax. Worked wonders for me.
If you're okay with that kind of diet, then more power to you I guess. I think the point people are trying to emphasize here is don't poorly feed yourself just to save a couple of bucks. Your health is the priority first and foremost. I don't want to fuel the fire over this conversation, but there's a reason why athletes have very meticulous diets. I ate like shit Friday and I paid for it out the nose during the walk home. Thank god for grocery stores with delis being open around midnight.
Another mention for Juicy Cafe. Seriously, I live in a hippie town and I'm surprised we don't have something like this. It's a vegetarian/vegan's paradise, and still is good for carnivores/omnivores. I ate at this place Saturday, Sunday and Monday just because I was so surprised how good it was, and how filling $12-$15 worth of food was.
Next year I will definitely:
1) not forget small important things like a toothbrush and my klean kanteen. It was fine buying a bottle of Smartwater for $4 that lasted me all 3 days, but having to find out where the hell I'd get a toothbrush at 12:45AM Friday night was not an ideal situation.
2) scope out the entire place day 1, and only line up for things I really want to try instead of dicking around and walking in circles and wasting time
3) bring a smaller camera. As great as the photos on my digital SLR turned out, it's a huge liability and made my backpack that much more full
4) not wait until the last day to buy merchandise that I really want. While it sucked lugging around the Astro headphones, poster, notepad, and PAX2011 tee for part of Friday, I was sad that they ran out of the non-bugeye Castle Crasher figurines. So much for being hopeful that they would drop the price on Sunday to clear out stock and have less to take home.
5) pay way more attention to the indie booths and the stuff that was on the 6th floor. I didn't know where any of that stuff was until my travelling companion went to go find the Rooster Teeth booth. I missed out on a lot of awesome games like Skulls of the Shogun and Retro/Grade, as well as the Soundblaster booth. I'm really happy I got to meet compLexity gaming's Mike Ross and even got a round of Super Street Fighter 4 with him!
6) make friends in line! It makes the line go faster and who knows who you will meet. Also I will definitely attend my local pre-PAX meetup again. Met some really cool guys from my town and we kicked it Saturday night playing in the PC freeplay area. I also would not have known about the short 12v12 BF3 line in the PC freeplay had it not been for them and could have potentially spent hours lining up just to play the co-op demo on the 4th floor.
7) Be more decisive. 3 days isn't a very long time, and not being able to make up my mind on what to do is a waste of precious PAX time!
8) RELAX! On Friday I was so worried about what I would and wouldn't be able to see after finding out about the length of some of the lines I got a little annoyed. By the end of Saturday, I was a lot less high strung once I realized it was preventing me from having a much better time.
The power of a cooler of food cannot be overestimated. Keep it in your hotel room, at your desk at BYOC, or in your theater if you're an [E], and fill it up with premade meals and snacks that you can grab and take with you to eat in line. I spent an hour Thursday evening making up lunch packets for myself for all three days - shredded rotisserie chicken, homemade bread (with butter), a cheese stick, applesauce, soda, a cookie, and vitamins - with napkins, plastic silverware, and so on, and it was MAJOR kinds of awesome. I had a good solid meal waiting for me each day, that I knew what was in it, and that I could grab and take to eat in line while waiting for something and then throw everything away, and this made my weekend SO much better.
PAX Prime Attendee since 2006, BYOC Attendee 2008-2012, Buttoneer 2010-2014
https://www.pinnypals.com/pals/alegria
OMG i know. I'm a big guy and a few pounds over weight. The thing i found was that its not easy to find swag in XXL! So i only ended up getting like 2 shirts and they were still only XL. So i guess the positive side is that i now need to go to the gym just to wear my free shirts. Lol thanks PAX for the gym motivation!
Also... Put own buttons all over lanyard, and stash traded buttons elsewhere. It would have been much easier to give buttons away if I didn't have to root around in my bag for them.
No iPad. Only used it once, to check in on the forums, which I could have done on my phone.
Oh, and I think I'll take one of my non-PAX extra days as Monday after instead of Tuesday or Wednesday before. Having to check out on Sunday, then carry some of my stuff around all day was a pain. Plus having to leave for the airport and miss the last round of Omegathon, post-PAX button meet, etc for the third year in a row.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Also make sure you understand when it's time to go back to a hotel and empty out your swag bag - it gets kind of heavy carrying around a completely stuffed backpack for four hours.
Amen brother. I ate well all week so I could junk it out on that weekend. Food police are as annoying as preachy vegitarians or those pro/con-abortion people. Yeah - we've heard it all and we made our choice.
Oh sure, some of the larger folks could loose some weight - but you know what - they probably WERE with all that walking. Might be the first good exercise they got all year. So props to them.
- The Sheraton parlour rooms are no longer appropriate for a party of 150+ people.
- Plan a Sunday brunch meet-up to say goodbye to all the awesome people you met.
- Most events no longer need REALLY early line-up's, but a few should be moved to bigger venue's.
- Spend all of your "extra" time in/around the Expo hall, you never know who you might meet or what you might see.
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I think what the person was saying was basically, learn from Michael Scott's mistakes and don't eat fettuccine alfredo before you're going to be active for awhile; you'll end up throwing up what you ate... or just feeling kind of icky. ("Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race For The Cure" anyone?)
BUT more power to you if your stomach can handle it. I just know mine can't.
I say that as someone who rolls his eyes at the conventional wisdom that foods full of fat = unhealthy and instead thinks bread is generally worse.
Anyway, I've learned to not bother bringing board games. Aside from pre-pax and post-pax, it's not really necessary and I'm not generally extroverted enough to gather a whole group of strangers to try it out, and even then it's not necessary if I just play something someone else brought. Next year, I'm limiting myself to 1 game. Bringing too much stuff that I can't keep track of it all is probably also how I didn't realize I'd lost my camera on the PAX train till I was at the hotel.
Also, I can afford to bring fewer shirts still, since I can just use the shirts I get at PAX.
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
MH3U Monster Cheat Sheet / MH3U Veggie Elder Ticket Guide
-No one rolls with the *oid emulators in line. It's DS or forever alone.
-$2 flip flops are terrible for days of multi-mile walking. (Can't be helped; the costume must stay accurate! That gel insole idea sounds rad, but grafting them to flip flops might not jive well.)
-Clif Bars help, but pizza and sammiches still don't disappoint.
-Bring own bag. (I did that already, but the idea was reaffirmed this year.) Sony was solid '06-'09 on this front, but came up short for a second year in a row. (Halofest and a few other booths chipped in here and there, but bags were still short.)
-Watch the 'party' threads for nearby events. Free food at Gameworks (for at least one night) seems to be a solid bet year after year... early on it was Turbine; and in the last two years it has been Sega itself throwing the big party.
-Keeping the carried items to a minimum is a must; I was lugging two bags by the end of Friday.
-Balder dome, bigger medallion, a wig that's rockin a little harder now, and a Foreigner Belt! (Really take the Carl outfit to the next level. Kinda fights the previous point, but the costume must stay paramount!)
-That leads to my singular regret this year: Skipping the cosplay panel. (Must. Attend. Cosplay panel(s). Next. Year!)
Edit: The badge collection on my wall has six red badges after pinning this one up. I derped on the math.
"Fantasy football still counts as fantasy." -DnD Greg
The Hyatt is awesome. Having a minifridge for $5 means we kept lunch meat, buns and cheese in the hotel, and snuck back for 30 minute lunches each day (Win!) And it's close. And it has a soaker tub, which, even though I am a male, felt great on my aching legs and back sunday night.
Book hotel for Thurs-Monday. "How'd you screw this up?" You ask. We have a friend in Seattle, we were going to stay with him Sunday night (Hi @cybit), but we realized Friday we'd be in no mood to pack up Sunday morning. Luckily there were some hotel cancelations, and we got to stay an extra night (as the PAX rate even).
Messenger bags are wasted weight. The damnable things just have too much bulk that's wasted. The Halofest bags being handed out near the Megablock GuiltySpark however worked perfectly.
- Same deal with the panels. I usually just showed up once they were 10 minutes in, barely missed anything and didn't have to wait in line. Granted I avoided the big panels, which I wasn't really interested in.
- On the food thing: You're already walking a zillion miles today, and you'll have to make it through a massive line to get food at the convention center. Take the time to walk down to the Pike Place Market instead. Tons of choices, most of which are cheaper, healthier, and more delicious than anything you'll get at the convention center.
- Even though I'm a local, I really need to pay for a hotel room next year. It removes so much need for planning and worrying that I might get too tired and/or drunk to drive home.
Truth right here. I was iffy on bringing it, and wound up leaving it in my hotel room all weekend. It should've stayed home!
The [E] husband and I have done this for two years now - it is REALLY helpful, especially with him working weird shifts. I had to miss out on JoCo in 2009 because of his shifts (had to get home to care for the dogs!), and so we now board the dogs with friends and stay at the Hyatt. Worth. Every. Penny. I'm now wondering if we should check in on Thursday night...
PAX Prime Attendee since 2006, BYOC Attendee 2008-2012, Buttoneer 2010-2014
https://www.pinnypals.com/pals/alegria
After my 4th year carpooling I really started to wonder whether it was worth paying for a hotel when I live 9 miles away. Glad to hear you think it's worth the extra money! I'm near Northgate and after dropping three others off on the way north, the last mile or two driving alone at 2am are so scary while so exhausted! This year I did throw a toothbrush and contact supplies in a cosmetic bag in the trunk in case I had to couch surf and luckily was slightly more awake this time than in past years. Also considered cabbing it since a cab ride home would be about the same as the $26 parking at WSCC.
Metro SUCKS so hard...just pay for parking.
Don't get too inebriated at any point in time (really, this was only a problem on Sunday when I went to a couple of parties and had eaten only one small meal that day...stupid stupid stupid).
I learned that taking my time and seeing only what I was interested in was great but maybe I missed out on other cool things.
Split up with aforementioned 12 year old when he wants to be Notch's BFF and just hang out in the Mojang booth all day.
Yeah, I started to think about that too. Saturday and Sunday weren't SO bad, only 10 dollars a day, but friday was like 24 bucks.