<–Me at 14. My grandparents dressed me up in a kimono they bought in Japan.

—-

October 11, 1994, I wrote myself an entry in my journal sealed “To be opened at 30.” Today, on my 32nd birthday, I finally remembered to open it. Here’s what my 14-year-old self predicted of my future, followed by my response to her.

Hello, Maria. Now you are at least 30. That means it is 2010 or later.

I got the Idea for this letter from Northern Exposure yesterday. I think it’s a good Idea, so I stole it.

30 huh. That means I’ve still not lived half of my life. I hope I still hate it when people say “Time sure flys.” It doesn’t fly, it creeps. Actually, maybe it only creeps to me because I spend so much time waiting for my time to come. Either that’s happened by the time I read this again, or it never will. Either I’m married, or I have a bussiness. Either I maintained my 120lbs or I exploded. Either I’m happy, or I’m miserable. The following is what I want to happen.

I finished Highschool. Angela, Ann and I split up there. We tried to stay in touch, and I even went to Ann’s wedding, but Angela went of to Europe and I lost track of them both before I graduated from college.

I attended a Jr. College of the church. If I didn’t meet my hubby there, I went on to BYU to become an engineer. I received good grades and met my husband, a return missionary, in my senior year. It was love at first sight. I took on a job near SLC soon after graduating. After my husband and I had decided where to live and how to get our money, we are married and move to the designated place. It will be a small city, no larger than Sheridan, where we will be able to raise our 3-7 children without too much worry. The youngest is not born yet, but at least 2 are. I spend my time raising them, cooking sometimes, and working at church callings.

Now for the family. Mom lived in the Sheridan home for a while until I was situated. Then she turned the whole house into a huge fabric shop. Downstairs is where she sells things, upstairs is piles of material that she will “get to someday.” People often shop there because she doesn’t charge much and she gives great advice. She’s quite active, judging by her sister and mother’s longevity. She took many courses at night in college and can now say “Children are such tyrants” in 17 different languages.

Dad and Trudy putted around until Dad had a heart attack at 58. He isn’t nearly as active now.

Gramma lived just a few more years. In fact, the last I saw her was at my graduation. Trudy was taking care of her. She got her wish and was never put in a rest home. Grampa lived to 90. He was quite active until about a month before he died. Then he had a stroke suddenly and went very quickly.

Jared was married soon after he got out of college to a nice girl who spoils him terribly. Their first child, James, was just given the priesthood. The total equals 5 bouncing children for Mom to call grandkids from his division. He’s living in a suburb on the West coast where he surveys land.

Aaron never got married, but just sort of roamed around the country doing various jobs. Then one day he discovered how to make cleaner that repels dirt and made millions.

Now I must leave me, for, unlike you, I have seminary in the morning.

–Maria Chantrill

—–

Hi Maria,

I never forgot about this letter, but it took me two years to open it. Somehow the time never seemed right. That’s something you’ll learn as you grow up: time does eventually go by more quickly, but that doesn’t mean you have to be in a rush.

It amuses me that you say this is what you want to happen, like you’re outlining your castles in the sky. Why so practical? Why not foresee years studying in Europe, or a stint as a singer, or a writer, even a failed one? Are you now, at 14, already so practical, so unwilling to be wrong, so afraid of looking foolish?

I remember you now, as you are, in that tiny town you describe as a “small city.” You don’t know it, but you’re incredibly lonely. You have two good friends for most of your young life. TWO! So few people and so few ways to reach out, you will begin to think you will can only be happy when alone.

No wonder you write so long of your family, people whom you rarely see, who even now don’t live with you. I won’t spoil it for you, but your family members will surprise, delight, and disappoint you. There are painful things there, and there is joy. But this is the way of family.

Your vision of me is entirely based on the view you have of the adults you see in your religious interactions. These are the families who seem to be happy, but I have to tell you, there are a lot more ways of living your life than the Mormons let you see. You don’t get along with your fellow Mormons now, and you never will. You will find it a complete relief to leave the culture of guilt, judgment, and small-mindedness they represent.

In their place there will be friendship. There will be the support of a kind, honest, and ribald man, whom you love dearly. There will be games and puzzles and music. And there will be alcohol. (Don’t be afraid! You CAN drink without becoming an alcoholic.)

So has my time come, as you suggest it must have by 30? Well, I feel like there are dreams here still to be lived. But I’ve loved and been loved. And that’s really all your dreams, there in that small world, amount to.

Now go to sleep. You’ve got seminary in the morning, and I’m getting up to run in the wee hours long before dawn.

We’ve both got places to go.

–Maria Fisher

Every gaming PC I have owned since college, basically every PC I’ve ever owned really, I have built myself. There’s something undeniably nerdy about building your own machine from components. Aside from the hours spent checking specs and reviews, being buried up to your elbows in a PC’s internals is just a fantastically good time.  The PC I currently use for gaming and dev at home is about 3 years old. It’s had some upgrades, but it’s definitely getting a bit old and having some issues with new games. It’s an Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, an NVIDIA GTX 460, and NVIDIA GTX 280 (performing Physix co-processing mostly), about 2TB of HD, all in a full tower enclosure. It plays Skyrim on high settings, but not with high res texture packs and the like. I’ve also had some challenge with Direct X 11 games on the 460 being at all performant.

My company gives out bonuses once a year, and we just passed bonus time. Since bonuses were quite generous this year, I decided to splurge and build a really, really nice gaming PC for myself. I did a bit of research, found the things I wanted and put in one big Newegg order. Everything showed up in three boxes, and I put it all together a few days ago. I decided to do this photo essay style.

So this will be the story of getting all of this:

into this:

About that case above: it is huge. There is a cavernous amount of space inside this thing, which is good. I have a lot of big things to get into the case. I took some photos after pulling it out of the box. I knew it was big, but it surprised me with it’s overall mass, and the size of the fans. The case fans in the photos are 230mm fans, that should give you an idea of size. There are a lot of holes and a lot of space behind the motherboard try for routing power and other cables, so for the first time I may have a not-too-messy PC.

The motherboard is a Z68 based design with everything necessary to support Ivy Bridge and PCIe 3.0 when those are out later this year. For now it has a Sandy Bridge i7 2700k cpu in it, there plenty of legs in the 2700k and there will he some overclocking in its future.

First things first, before getting it all in the case I installed the CPU and CPU cooler. There was a very large backplate for the CPU cooler which I managed to not get any photos of. You can see that this is a huge CPU cooler. It’s nearly running passively when not under load and keeping the CPU down to only about 2° above the motherboard temperature. I have a bit of an issue with the actual connector for the cooler–it holds the cooler securely, but allows it to twist a small amount. I’m not sure that I’m totally comfortable with the amount of twisting it allows.

Oh yeah and look at that port shield.

Alright, let’s get that motherboard in there.

And, first problem, the cooler’s backplate does not precisely fit in the hole that is cut for it in the case’s motherboard tray. It also is a little taller than the offset screws on which the motherboard sits. The case bows out a bit due to this, but it seems to be ok.

Next the power supply goes in. This is a ridiculously nice power supply. It’s able to handle loads that I will probably not throw at it, but I want to know it’s there. It also has a 5 1/2 inch bay insert that allows you to control case and power supply fan speeds from the front panel. Neato!

Second possible problem, the RAM is really, really close to the cooler, I’m not sure the fan will fit back on without impacting the RAM stick closest to the CPU.

Thankfully, after some wiggling and nudging, the fan fits over the whole cooler without touching the RAM, but it’s damn close.

Next up, hard drive install! You can’t see much in the photos, but there are 2 1.5 TB HDD in the two lower slots and a 120 GB SSD in the upper slot. I have space for another SSD and a few more HDDs if I ever feel like I need them.

Now all the 5 1/2 drive bay items, DVD burner and the fan controller from the PSU. Nothing too exciting, though you can also see the two USB 3.0 front panel connector that came on the case.

Last step was to get the video cards in, hook up all the cables and take a picture of the finished deal.

Overall I’ve been pretty happy with it. It’s overclocked gorgeously, and still has a lot more headroom than I expected.

For those interested in the actual items that went into the pc, expand out the box below.

Turns out all that running and healthy eating has paid off I guess. When I bought that shirt, I almost couldn’t wear it, the cut was too tight and it wasn’t comfortable, now it’s a little loose and one of my favorite shirts to wear on the weekends. Good motivation I guess.

Back on to part 2! These are the best 4 things about PAX.

4. The PDX PAX quest.

Technically I completed two quests at PAX this year. The first one required you to find and scan QR codes and scored us a sweet keychain. But the scavenger hunt I want to talk about required several tasks, including getting pictures taken with 10 cosplayers. Here are the 10 cosplayers I ended up posing by to win my big old PDX PAX button. With the exclusion of Surly Link, they all seemed to really enjoy being photographed.

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There were other challenges to the quest, and you can see the photos I took to complete them on my Google Plus stream.

3. Bandland Hackey Sack.

We were tired. PAX was almost over. We’d already purchased Joco’s new CD, said hi to Paul and Storm, MC Frontalot and Brandon Patton. We were basically just meeting up one last time to say goodbye. Then this happened.

It went on like this for well over an hour. Mostly we stood around and watched. Occasionally one of us would stand stock still while the sack landed on our feet, an equal part fear and excitement galvanizing us to the spot. Some of the athletic types joined in. We decided that the day-long w00tstock could well be 20 hours of hackey sack by the stars, then a 4-hour show. We’d still be entertained.

2. Seeing John Roderick.

Once PAX was over, band land cleared out. The hackey was sacked. Everyone said goodbye. There were hugs-a-plenty. We were just leaving, one of the last groups, when there, coming up the escalators, was John Roderick.

After the impression John Roderick left on me on the Joco Cruise, I had imagined what I would be like if I saw John Roderick at PAX. I liked to believe I’d be cool and collected, but I know myself, and I knew that what I’d do was exactly what I did: Put on a goofy grin, make a b-line, and say, in a shaky voice “Mr. Roderick, I’m a sea monkey. Can I have a hug?”

I got a hug. Taylor took a picture where I made a dumb face. It was awesome.

1. Being with friends.

A few months ago the Doubleclicks did a cover of “I’m going to go back there some day.” The line that I heard for the first time on that listen was “There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.” This is how I felt on the first Joco Cruise. And for the first time, it was how I felt at PAX. It was great to speak to some of the people I’ve only known through Twitter. It was neat to see a mingling of my PDX and Sea Monkey friends. It was fantastic just to play games, and chat, and joke.

I’m going to go back there someday.

“Did Dad call you?”

“Yeah, I let it go to voicemail, I was about to call him back”

“You need to call him right now”

“Ok”

….

“He has congestive heart failure, he had a massive heart attack over the weekend”

….

Suddenly I am five years old, sitting on the couch at my paternal grandparents’ house. We are waiting for my dad to wake up or get over his hangover, one of the two. We are here for the usual weekend visit that my dad resents and we don’t look forward to. At the time none of this makes any sense or is at all evident to me. Grandma and Grandpa sit in their chairs, staring down at us. They will have these same chairs for as long as I will make these visits.

“Your dad is…” starts my grandmother, a slightly severe looking old woman with a poof of wig-like hair that I will later learn is in fact three different wigs based on how she is feeling that day.

“Sleeping late” finishes my grandfather. He is also slightly stern looking, wearing only an undershirt and slacks. He has a very noticeable beer belly. Without it he would seem an athletic man. Years of drinking and chewing tobacco have taken their toll on his teeth, and I can see his crowns. He looks at us over thick glasses. “Have you eaten yet?”

My brother is only 4 and sits next to me under the strange triptych of copper ducks over the couch in the living room. We both shake our heads. We have been dropped off fairly early in the day, and Mom hasn’t cooked yet. This is part of the lean times for us; Mom is in college, Dad is doing god knows what, but not paying the child support. The child support will come in only sporadically the rest of my childhood, and when a state begins to garnish his wages, he will move. Currently he lives in my grandparents’ basement.

Grandpa gets out of his chair with an audible grunt. He spits the last of the chewing tobacco into an old stained brass spittoon that sits next to his chair. He walks into the small kitchen and makes a noise like an army rousing for breakfast. Within 20 minutes I am eating a breakfast I will never forget. A full American breakfast made by its true master, thick-cut peppered bacon before hipsters would make sure it was available in every store, eggs over easy fried in the bacon grease to a perfect consistency, hash browns fried in the remains of both bacon and eggs. The portions are far more than two children of our age should even be able to think about finishing. We eat every crumb. Grandpa sits back down in his chair and watches TV with Grandma.

…

I never ate a meal or a dish prepared by my grandfather that was not amazing. As children my brother and I were picky eaters. We would come up with a thousand ways to not eat all kinds of food. It did not matter what was in, what it was called, or how it was prepared, if Grandpa made it, it was good. I ate oyster stuffing at his house when no power on earth could get me to eat seafood.

His rib barbecues were legendary, taking 3 days to prepare fully, and getting an invite was a great honor among non-family. When my brother was in braces and unable to eat ribs, Grandpa specifically made a boneless version just for him–no one else was allowed to even touch them. Most of the things I carry forward into my cooking this day I learned by watching him cook when I was young; the utter reverence he carried to cooking was phenomenal. I may not have learned everything about it from him, but I learned some very important basics. It’s because of him that I never skimp on my dishes, nor do I throw things together without thinking them through first.

…

“He has a living will that states he does not want to be kept alive medicinally or be resuscitated. “

…

I am six years old we are sitting at the car dealership while Dad works. The dealership is owned by my grandfather, “Chuck’s Used Cars.” We spend most of our days with Dad here, watching them try to sell the small selection of used cars Grandpa keeps in stock. He is constantly dealing in cars around town. From this shop I learn the used car dealers tricks. I learn all the inflections and tones they use. Even at a young age I can see when they have sold a car and when they are still working on the person, even if the buyer doesn’t know it yet. There is a smell associated with some autoshops that infiltrates the place; the smell of bad coffee, sugar cubes and vehicle lubricants. We are coated with the smell while there; this may partially be due to us stealing sugar cubes when we can from the shop area. We are scolded every time, and yet, hey free sugar. We play around in cars and learn to get out of the way when customers arrive. It is a great place to spend summers.

…

Due to the shop, Grandpa will have a rotating cast of cars, always large sedans of one type or another. It’s almost a habit to look at the car in the driveway before entering the house. Often there will be something for a day or two that he is holding for a friend. The most memorable was a classic fire engine red Chevy convertible from the late ‘50s. Don’t ask me for the year, I don’t do cars. Much of what I learned at that shop I apply to both shopping for cars (used car salesmen fear me) and daily life. I can read most people like I read those buyers. I learned a lot about treating people well, but not rolling over to please someone. Grandpa used to make it clear he would treat the customers right, but he didn’t suffer a lot of bullshit from them either. I didn’t realize how deeply seated that smell of the shop was until I went to a body shop to have an estimate done on my car recently. The instant I opened the door and the same smell hit me, I had to pause to look around for Grandpa again.

The dealership has been closed for years (almost 20 now), but I can still picture it in my head (in fact while writing this I looked up the location on Google earth. It’s still there, and has not changed aside from name). Grandpa sold the shop while I was still young, but he kept a private party auto-sales part-time job going on the side for years. Usually one or two cars at a time, snapping up deals and selling them cheaper to others. He had an uncanny ability to memorize the Kelly Blue Book very quickly when a new addition came out. He could also perform the entire depreciation math in his head. I’ve always been a quick study for memorization, and had a head for math. These have served me very well over the years, and can almost certainly be traced right back to him.

…

“They said there is nothing they can do at the hospital, and he is in hospice care…”

….

I am seven years old, we are working on the tree fort that has existed in the tree on the hill across from my grandparents’ house since my dad was a kid. The tree is big enough around that 5 of my cousins and I cannot put our arms around it. There is a board in the highest branches that apocryphally was put there by any of our fathers/mothers depending on who you ask. I will later find out it was actually my dad. There is a large collection of boards and nails on the ground, we each have a hammer. All of the supplies were pilfered from Grandpa’s well-stocked garage. Every tool you could ever need for a tree fort, or repairing any American car ever made. Could be found in the myriad coffee tins, toolboxes, and shelves of that garage. We raid it anytime we want to be outside working on the tree house. The only constant part of the tree house is a swing: a piece of plywood with a hole in it, through which passes a rope that loops over a tall hanging branch. We all take turns jumping out of the tree onto that swing and feel gravity fall away on either side of the arc. Given enough height, you will swing out far enough that you’re over a small gully and feel like you are miles over the ground. I am not brave enough to jump from the height necessary for this. Twice in 12 years that swing is cut down by some older jerks in the neighborhood. Twice my grandpa buys the necessary components to put it back up. At least one of these times he climb the tree himself and re-hangs the swing.

Seeing several grandchildren out the front window, he comes to the front door.

“Are you using my good hammers?” Somehow his voice carries across all the distance. The sternness coming through even at the distance, “If you leave them out there I’ll whoop ya!”. This is the constant threat at the grandparents’ house. Grandpa will whoop ya. It’s delivered in a stern tone to almost any possible irresponsibility. Grandma rolls her eyes every time and informs us he wouldn’t whoop anybody. Upon hearing this, Grandpa will look you in the eye and give you a wry little wink.

…

I’ve never seen a man make so puckish a face as Grandpa did in those moments. He was constantly looking at the grandkids and giving us a look that implied that he and we were in on some joke that no one else got. His eyes would brighten and you couldn’t help but smile back to let him know you understood. Even as he got older and had to have oxygen tanks and walk with a walker, that brightness and wink were still there, ready to undermine any serious thing said. The day I went to visit them and the senility had stolen those from him, my heart broke into a million pieces. The formerly puckish old man in the corner looked confused, and unsure of himself. His eyes changed to a dull confusion.

…

“It could be days, it could be weeks”

….

I am eight, we are home for the fourth of July. If we are home that means we get to go with Grandma and Grandpa out to “shostein’s place” for fireworks. It will be another 5 years before I realize Shostein is a person, specifically a long-time friend of my grandfather’s. He owns a small patch of land outside of city limits where we can light off any fireworks we damn well please. The adults sit back and eat peppered watermelon slices and watch the displays. Every year we light a small piece of Shostein’s property on fire accidently and spend a panicked few minutes putting out grass fires. I’m not sure how Grandpa convinces him to let us come back year after year, but I know they are very good friends.

….

“They don’t know exactly, but eventually…”

…

I am nine. There have always been baskets of pamphlets in the basement, but I have never really looked at them. While playing around downstairs we knock over a basket and look at the contents. AA? Alanon? What the hell do those mean? My grandparents ran the longest-running and largest AA and Alanon meetings in my hometown. From the 70s through the 90s they had a large collection of alcoholics and the family members of alcoholics in their house once a week. This seems strange, knowing that several of my aunts and uncles are heavy drinkers. One of my uncles even owns a bar. I recall that I have not seen any alcohol at any event in my grandparents’ house. Looking back from that day it all made sense.

…

My grandfather has been a recovering alcoholic for almost 40 years now. He has not had a drop of liquor since the 80s to my knowledge. I have met people in my hometown who tell me that either themselves or their parents are alive because of things my grandfather told them and taught them. As an adult I have some serious doubts about how the AA program actually presents itself, and its overall effectiveness. I do know, however, that it worked for him, and he made it work for others.

…

“… he’ll have a stroke or a heart attack that kills him”

…

I am 10, family dynamics are starting to make sense to me, and both sets of my grandparents and a lot of my aunts and uncles live in the same town. They take sides in the fight my mom and dad have over the various issues of raising us. We never really see any of this; they all care enough to keep it hidden around us. Things become very strange around Christmas though. My maternal great-grandmother has a Christmas Eve party every year. We are now old enough to attend. We have always spent Christmas Eve at our paternal grandparents’ house in the past, as that is when they open gifts. We come to an agreement to spend the early evening at the party, and then go to gift openings.

When we arrive to open gifts the arrangements are the same as they are every year. A small fake tree that has all of the decorations glued on sits on an end table, a massive pile of presents beneath. My grandparents have many children, 3 sons and 3 daughters, and have a large circle of friends. We enjoy watching them opening gifts and snacking on treats Grandpa has prepared as much as we enjoy opening our own gifts. Often it is only the four of us and a single aunt or uncle. We rarely see Dad at this event. On the years we come, they make sure my brother and I have a selection of gifts to open since we rarely receive anything from Dad on Christmas. Grandpa is a bit of a rogue even here–stuffing a box full of the socks Grandma insists he buy us and hiding small toys underneath them.

…

Family was always an important thing to me, which made talking about family on the paternal side very odd. My maternal grandfather has always been a genealogy nut. From him we know a lot about our ancestors. I know some thing about my paternal grandmother’s family: where they are from, names, and histories. Stories she tells let us know who she is and where she came from. I know almost nothing about my grandfather’s family. I don’t know if he had siblings, I don’t know where he grew up, I don’t even know his hereditary ancestry (I believe German). All I know is that during the depression, at the ripe old age of 15 he left his family behind and struck out on his own. I’ve heard the stories of him eating sandwiches composed of a slice of bread, a thin slice of lard, and another slice of bread. I also know that he survived the depression in good enough shape to join the navy the instant WW II started. I’ve often wondered what that past looks like, but I never asked.

…

“He’s back at the VA in hospice care.”

….

I am 16 years old; I am recently driving and have gotten my eyebrow pierced to seem cool (said piercing would be ripped out at a concert in college, not cool). Due to my latest body modification we are sitting at Grandpa’s house comparing piercings, tattoos, and discussing further modifications. One of my aunts shows us her new tattoo on her shoulder blade. Grandpa rumbles in his chair

“Bunch of damned hippies”

“Grandpa, there haven’t been any hippies in this family, and tattoos aren’t really a hippie thing”

“Anyone getting a tattoo in my family is a hippy.”

…

Grandpa doesn’t hold with hippies, and anyone with a different worldview is a hippy. He was raised in a very different time from the rest of us. Having been a member of the navy in WW II, Grandpa has some odd ideas about both the Germans and Japanese. This is slightly odd as he never got any closer to war than being the chef for admirals in San Diego. He doesn’t like the idea of any of his grandkids dating minorities. He doesn’t hold with certain people going into government. He wasn’t a perfect man, and I can make no excuses for his extreme distaste for those different than himself. I will say that he was never overtly mean to anyone I saw him interact with. Imagine the harmless old grandpa with a different worldview from countless movies, stories, TV Shows, etc. He seemed to embody that spirit perfectly. Kind of a harmless good old boy from Wyoming who never expanded his world view.

…

“You don’t have to come home or anything. Sorry to have to tell you this at Thanksgiving, I hope you still have a good time”

“Yeah, Dad, wow, thanks for calling please keep in touch.”

“Bye kid, I love you”

“I love you too Dad” (this is the first time I’ve said this in 15 years)

I hang up the phone, I am 30 years old, and I cry.

I began the project in contrast to friends who were doing NaNoWriMo, because the thought of writing 3000 words a day was more than I could fathom. Novels are long. Plays are short. And this idea was too much fun to resist.

I told people about it in hopes you’d keep me honest and not let me slack. I hate quitting things I’ve announced with authority that I’m doing. It’s a bit humiliating.

Anyway, you’ve noticed that November is over?

I did finish the play. It was awful.

My goal was to write five minutes at least of dialog for every song. That would lead to a series of episodes that ended up being about 90 minutes long total. The result of writing a play this way was something disjointed, overly dramatic, and mostly incoherent. I decided I could do better. After all, I’d like to write something people might actually enjoy or even care about.

So I got that out of my system, and I started again.

My new goal is to finish a second draft by the end of December. I’m writing three pages a day. I have a better overarching story, more likable characters (I think) and a writing routine that doesn’t involve drinking until the blank page no longer scares me.

Once the second draft is done, I’ll revise. Then I’ll release it to the Joco forums. It’s going to be a creative commons work, for obvious reasons, and I know that there are lots of Joco fans who have more talent than I do. I’m hoping a few people will take an interest and help it become something great.

After people give some feedback, I’d still like to do it as a radio drama in serial form. Just for fun.

Thanks to everyone who thought the project sounded cool. I hope it is!

Without further ado, here are the top 8 things I enjoyed about PAX:

8: Fortune telling

We reunited seamonkeys took the monorail to the Seattle Scifi museum

We went to the SciFi museum in hopes of wandering around and seeing all the classic SciFi novels, memorabilia, etc., that we’d so enjoyed last time we visited. Unfortunately, the entire wing now holds (temporarily) an exhibit on the movie Avatar. We did get to check out a pretty cool Battlestar Galactica exhibit, but that was not enough to justify the cost.

In an effort to salvage some enjoyment from the trip, I decided to have my tarot cards read by a guy reading a Star Trek novel outside of the museum. I’ve always wanted to know how that worked, and this seemed like a good time to find out.

Tracy got a nice instagramized photo of the event.

The general impression that my reader gave was that I was looking for some sense of family, and that I was a person never satisfied to stop doing things in a creative capacity. I didn’t think either of these readings were particularly right, but I gave him some money anyway.

7. The Concerts

It’s pretty telling about how awesome all of PAX was that the concerts are so near the bottom of my list. The concerts were great, of course. We sat in line for the Paul and Storm/Jonathan Coulton concert for a couple of hours eating dinner, decompressing, and occasionally doing a Mad Lib (if I could persuade anyone, which was harder than I expected).

The best part of the concert, aside from hearing a couple of Joco’s new songs a day early, was this power-geek-band moment:
.

There are lots of videos from different angles, but I chose this one largely for its proximity to the stage and the inclusion of the chorus, including our friends The Doubleclicks. Other videos, including this one, show off the particular effect on the VGO’s violinist, who clearly wasn’t completely aware of how the song was going to go. (She’s in the background at about the 1:40 mark laughing uncontrollably.)

Also fun was the Doubleclick’s ninja gig, which was even visited by R2D2.

6. Triwizard Drinking Tournament.

A major reason for going up to Seattle a day early was to participate in the Triwizard Drinking Tournament. Dressed in our house colors (red and gold for Gryffindor, black for death eaters), we paired up with other houses, did shots, created unholy mixed drink combinations, and generally got as sloshed as we’ve ever been (with the appropriate drunk tweeting and epic hangover the next day).

Each place we met new people. Particularly cool was meeting the people from Casually Hardcore, who posted some more pictures.

Here are the pictures we came away with.

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5. Board Gaming

That's our friend Jeff demoing the Ankh-Morpork game with us. We'll be buying it.

In previous PAXs we’ve spent most of our time wandering the convention hall until we’re bored, then exploring Seattle. This year, having rediscovered our love of board gaming, we decided to do things a bit differently.

We checked out the game “Poo,” which was fun if a bit simple. We played games with our friends in line, including “We didn’t play test this at all.” We also took some time off to demo a very cool Terry Pratchet-based game set in Ankh-Morpork and the Pathfinder system of D&D 3.5.

Sunday I decided to sign up for a Roborally tournament. The tournament started at noon and was slated to go as late as 6. The Joco Seamonkey reunion photo took place at 3. Taylor signed up too, so we were both highly surprised when I made it past the semi-finals (and he didn’t).

When 3pm rolled around the game was still anyone’s. I was a few squares away from the second flag (of 3), which would have put me temporarily in second place. But I really wanted to take part in the photo, too. So I made myself a deal: If I could get to the flag in the next round, I would stay and miss the reunion. Otherwise, I’d call it quits.

I then put down a turn right instead of a turn left and ran directly off the board. The seamonkey reunion photo was delightful.

My Onward Robots shirt was a happy coincidence.

Next time: The countdown ends with more sea monkeys, cosplayers, and a few surprises.

Here’s the original page:

http://prime.paxsite.com/schedule.php

Here’s the link to the .ics

pax.ics

Thanks to everyone who made it out, and we’ll hope to see you all next time, June 4th.