Okay, this is the last PAX strip I swear. I’ll have more after next year’s PAX East, but I promise that I won’t milk it as hard since I already spent a week doing strips about PAX this time.

With the exception of the last panel, this strip can apply to any convention I go to. Whenever I come back from a convention there’s a settling in period that usually takes a week at most. I come back home, plop the luggage on the floor, I don’t feel like cooking, I feel tired and unclean and generally don’t want to do anything. But after I put away the luggage, do the laundry, take out the trash, tidy up a bit, shower and make my first meal after the convention that usually is the sign that I’m pretty much back to normal.

Since I’m unemployed right now I managed to do this in record time, but it still took a few days to feel completely back on track.

I’m going to stop talking about PAX at some point I swear, just not until the end of this week.

I was thinking today that despite the minor jet lag, PAX is a very difficult convention to “recover” from. What I mean is that PAX is so much freakin’ fun, that my head just feels like it’s in the clouds for days after like it was some very potent drug that takes a very long time to wear off at which point I can resume my life as it is normally.

I think the other reason is that PAX is full of people who are living the life that they really want to be in whether it’s the Penny Arcade guys or the game developers you’re seeing on the show floor. Sure there could be weird office dramas at any of the companies, but by and large, these are people whose jobs the attendees aspire to and that idea is something that really stays with me after PAX is over. Like, I just gotta work hard to get towards that position instead of just taking whatever job I could easily get but not be satisfied at necessarily.

For those not in the know, The Game is this stupid meme where if you think at all about The Game then you’ve just lost the game. That’s it. It’s stupid. If signs haven’t been prohibited at that particular anime convention you can expect to see signs like the one in the linked article.

The wank/substantive question ratio at PAX panels is very low. So low in fact that when I go to them I don’t expect it or annoying people in the first row trying to talk to the panelists like they’re the only one in the room with them. At the Mega64 panel, Rocco thanked the first question asker for asking a technical question because most of the questions at their Anime Expo panel were more along the lines of my comic.

Truthfully, this comic isn’t entirely accurate to the spirit of PAX, because I think it’s more all inclusive than I’m making it look. If someone said something like this (as one girl did during the Penny Arcade Q&A) Jerry would just quickly acknowledge it and move on, but not in a “what the hell are you doing?” sort of way. From the few panels I’ve seen them conduct they’re very good at handling hecklers and annoying people that everyone seems to come out of it happy.

In general, I’d say 90-95% of questions at PAX panels are actual questions, and not a means for the asker to draw attention to themselves. If you cut out the panels with Mike & Jerry, then it’s more like 98%-99% because at the PA panels there are people who share stories about how they felt like they belonged when they first discovered PAX. Or there are stories about how Child’s Play affected them. But the difference being that those are more affirming stories than wanky ones I was used to hearing at anime cons.

Let it be known that one way that Odwalla wants you to know that their drinks are made from fresh ingredients with no preservatives is that they are classified “extremely perishable.”

At Pax Anna and I pretty much skimped on breakfast and lunch because there’s just so much to do there that we don’t want to miss a single moment. Mostly the lunch time was snacking on cashews and eating granola bars, and one day we had enough time to get some soup which we ate while waiting in line for a panel. Sunday morning we went to get a slightly more substantial breakfast which was when I got the orange juice.

Sorry for the late comic. Anna and I got back to JFK from PAX around 6:30 AM on Monday so by the time we got home we pretty much couldn’t do anything but nap. After that I made lunch and met some friends to watch the “West Indian American Day Parade” from a rooftop.

PAX was a total blast that went by in a blink of an eye. I’ll write a con report later on my blog. It’s almost like it was some awesome dream that I woke up from to find myself just in my apartment. Anyway, we bought a six pack of bottled water to get us through the convention and at this Walgreens this old Asian lady cashier asked us “would you like M&Ms with that?” I saw that there were M&Ms at the counter that looked like they were bargain bin or something, but it was a very odd thing to be asked.

Actually I might’ve mentioned doing this in an previous comic, but oh well.

By the time you read this I’ll be in Seattle attending PAX Prime! Anna and I had so much fun at PAX East that we decided to go to the main event in Seattle. There’re going to be a lot of new games there which were displayed at E3. I’m hoping to get my hands on a bunch of stuff like Dead Space 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Dance Central and I’m hoping they’ll have the Nintendo 3DS there. I’ve already had a friend request of a video of me playing Dance Central in the Kinect booth.

I’ve already marked up a schedule with what panels I want to attend. Some very generous soul made an Android app for Pax which is pretty awesome. Last PAX Anna was the only one of us with a smartphone, but this time we’re both geared up and ready to go!

My computer at home for some reason has major issues with DVD Studio Pro and Compressor right now. Since I was putting together my DVD reel I ended up using remote desktop to my old work computer (first informing my friend who still works there of course), uploading files to my FTP, downloading them to the computer, encoding/authoring, zipping it up and then downloading the files which I could then burn.

While I was doing this I was IMing another friend of mine proposing this infinite feedback loop scenario. He said he had tried it once and it caused his computer to crash. Still, a very amusing thought. He said something like “Ah the mind of the unemployed.” That’s when I pictured my comic character getting some kind of cabin fever where he spends all day thinking up random stuff like this.

Actually it was a little bit worse because I didn’t have my glasses on during this ordeal which mean all I could see was this big black blurry spot in my vision. Fortunately there aren’t any cracks that it could escape to so as I clumsily followed it around the bathroom lifting up the laundry basket and wastebasket it didn’t manage to escape. I wadded up a big thing of toilet paper only to realize that it might not have the crushing power that I needed to take it out.

To be continued!

Actually I haven’t seen the guy from this comic since that day, but it occurred to me today when I was buying some cold cuts that it’s very likely we’ll cross paths again which might be awkward. If I buy the “new food” then he might bug me about it. If I don’t buy it then he might still bug me about it. Really there’s no ideal situation here.

But this past week I’ve been very busy every day working on this!

Read the full post about it on my blog!