It has always been my greatest fear that one of you will engage me in conversation when I'm going to the bathroom. It's not something I ever expect to happen, you understand - I don't think you're clamoring for the opportunity, it's just something I worry about. Thus far, we've been to cons where there was a certain percentage of readers among the attendees and it hasn't happened yet. In my apparently infinite wisdom, we chose to hold a convention populated almost exclusively by the readership. So it's starting to look less like my greatest fear and more like my secret wish.

Here's the comic, which is about something unrelated to the rest of the post.

I hardly know how to condense the last forty hours. Before now I could not imagine what would occur after PAX, the future was a sort of featureless expanse. Apparently, the future consists of me sitting here in the dark trying to make sense of my life while I choke down the worst pot of coffee I have ever made - acrid, and vaguely folgerian.

To say that the Penny Arcade Exposition is the best convention that has ever existed or will exist initially sounds like hyperbole. More than twice as many people attended than pre-registered, and we simply had to do the best we could - our volunteers were uniformly excellent under some very strenuous conditions, and I thank them for it. Certainly there were issues that had to do with scheduling tournaments and so forth that occur at everything like this. There were scheduling conflicts that made it difficult to enjoy all of the convention, requiring you to be strategic about things in a way that might have minimized your enjoyment. I wish that hadn't happened.

The musical event - with Connie's recital, Optimus Rhyme, Minibosses, and The Front - was the sort of thing that changes a person's life, provided you got in to see it. At any other show, lighters might have emerged during the more tender portions of the (flawless) Minibosses performance. It is difficult to describe it in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous, but when I saw the hall lit blue by innumerable LCD panels - GBA SPs, cell phones, and PDAs of various kinds - I very nearly couldn't breathe.

This must be what it's like at Conifur, I thought, the only difference being that people who dress as animals aren't having sex with the suits still on. You can produce your technology and hold it aloft in a place where nobody is going to fuck around with you.

It brings to mind Salk Middle School for some reason, where I would imagine that young people of any intellect whatsoever are still tormented for not being idiots. In this bullshit lunchroom apartheid - a system whose contours are intuitively perceived by those of lower social status - I would sit at tables above my station partially because the agitation of my betters was delicious to me, but also because I was tired of sitting out in some Godforsaken hinterland just because I wasn't good at Lacrosse. At the Penny Arcade Expo, it was almost more than I could bear to be in a place where every table - every table in the room - was ours.

(CW)TB out.

the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night