Hello Boston

COVID-19 is definitely a thing right now, so my trip to Boston for PAX East wasn’t really that much of a “trip,” but rather, hiding indoors and away from people until I actually had to go to the Convention Center to do my panel, then scurrying to the Convention Center to speak, then running away as quickly as possible. … But it was still a nice experience.

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That picture of the Magic: The Gathering area is actually one of the very few photos I have of my PAX East experience. After my co-workers and I completed our panel, we stopped by the MTG area so a few of them could compete, and I sat down in the least-populated area possible while waiting for them to finish before going to dinner.

The panel itself turned out acceptably overall, and actually pretty well considering it was the first in-person live panel that a few of my other co-workers did. We let our Content Director take care of the logistics of the panel, and he decided to call the panel “Esports 101,” which ended up not really being that relevant of a title, but we still went over the general basics of running an esports company and finding success in the esports industry in the coming year.

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Our Senior Partnerships Manager actually did an exceptional job at answering questions, which made it a bit tougher for me, so whenever it was relevant for me to speak, I ended up going on tangents and sharing other related advice as supplemental information to the topics discussed and questions asked. I guess I’m happy it ended up that way—me going on tangents is probably the most on-brand thing that I personally could have done.

My favorite moment of the broadcast was when I was captured staring disappointingly into my microscopic water cup as I realized that I was already out of water and there was still about half an hour left to go in the panel.

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After we wrapped everything up at the Convention Center, our team dinner was at a restaurant by the water. I let our other staff members take care of pretty much all the travel logistics so I could just go from place-to-place in peace, so I don’t even know what restaurant we went to, but they had amazing lobster rolls. It also had a decent view behind us, though it was a bit too dark to actually see the rich texture and vastness of the ocean.

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These are my takeaways from Boston:

  1. It’s way too cold in the winter, and my brain literally stops working if I’m outside for more than like a minute and a half.
  2. The Boston Convention Center has quite literally the worst convention food I have ever tasted out of all the convention centers I’ve ever been in… and I’ve been to a lot of convention centers.
  3. The city feels anciently old, but it’s like a clean and well-maintained old, so it’s actually pretty pleasant. That may be surprising coming out of my mouth, because I’m someone who likes ultra-modern aesthetics. I walked through a random alleyway to go to an Uber pick-up area, and even the alley looked and smelled clean.
  4. Boston is the first big city where I haven’t seen homeless people, which is surprising because every other city of this size seems to be layered with homeless people.

With that trip complete, here is my updated travel map:

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