terriko

We met one of the women who works at the hotel in the elevator, and she said that they loved having PAX there because even though it was a huge crowd of people, everyone always seemed so happy.

So I've spent the weekend around happy people, playing games and seeing demos and getting free stuff (including oh so many free t-shirts. Kudos to Sega for tossing women's shirts into the crowd! I'm so excited about mine.) It's weird how normally after a conference, I feel kinda exhausted and don't want to be around people, whereas coming back from PAX I feel relaxed and eager to try out a few more games.

This weekend, my personal group raised $80 for Child's Play with our cookies, and we handed off a box of them to someone more eager too, so she probably raised even more (I'm guessing she was the one who raised $4000 -- since she was over 2k when we met up with her!). The whole group raised $7900 + a bucked o' change. I got to hear about the work that happened behind the Humble Indie Bundle (including some insinuation that another bundle could be in the works!), saw some hilarious out-takes from Telltale, watched an excellent concert from Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton (And I'm sure MC Frontalot was awesome, but from where we were we couldn't make out his lyrics, and the performance lost something when you had to use a cell phone to figure out what was being said! Apparently opera halls aren't designed for nerdcore, but at least he makes all his lyrics available for free!) Susan and I tried out Kinect and found it surprisingly, shockingly fun. Especially the battle/trick race game we were playing that had us holding our hands up to drive imaginary cars and tipping around to do tricks. When we got there, there was basically no line, but we gathered one with our antics!

Susan's hat and my backpack were clear hits, and less trouble to wear than full costumes, so now I want to make more hats. People were always surprised to hear we'd made them ourselves including the patterns -- and some were disappointed because that meant they couldn't just buy one themselves!

Anyhow, it was a very fun weekend, and I'm coming back feeling less stressed and ready to conquer this term.

Recipe for Katamari Cookie (there can be only one?):

1. Bake some gingerbread and sugar cookies
2. Place cookies a little too close on the cookie sheet
3. Put them in the oven and let them become one disturbing mass
4. Cover with all the icing you can find
6. Roll up a little bit of every type of sprinkle available
7. Continue rolling up other cookies, candies, decorations, people, the family dog...
8. (optional) Try to get the darned song out of your head