We’re already over halfway done with PAX East, and my friends Dan and Jay completed their two panels. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may recognize one of them from PAX West 2023—”Fight Mii,” a show where audience members come up to create Miis live under a time constraint and pursuant to a prompt provided by the host.
Here are some photos I captured from the show:
These final two bonus photos are from the Mario Kart tournament on the day after “Fight Mii.”
With a successful “Friends ’til Death” panel on day 2 of PAX West, we went into day 3 with an autographing session followed by Failboat’s “Fight Mii” panel.
The premise of “Fight Mii” is for audience members to participate in creating Miis in accordance with a prompt given by the host. Usually, audience members compete against each other, but for this iteration of “Fight Mii,” the audience members were allied against “Team Failure,” the team representing Failboat and consisting of his friends.
Here is our friend Aidan, who owns the “Skip the Tutorial” channel on YouTube, filming Dan in a pre-panel interview.
Moments before the start of the show, I peeked back behind the curtain to make sure Dan was still alive. He was mildly surprised.
At 8:30 PM in the Monarch Theater, Dan went live with his signature gold sequin shirt. Unfortunately, his co-host Jay wasn’t able to make it this time around, but Jay filmed some pre-recorded segments which Dan played for the audience to provide them with the prompts.
Between each round, Dan came down into the crowd to pick some audience members to compete.
I was the first challenger from Team Failure, and my mission was to create a Pikachu Mii. This was my first time ever laying hands on any Wii game whatsoever, so it was not exactly a smooth experience. To top it all off, the voting system was highly rigged, in that the audience cheers determined which team won… and of course, the audience voted for their own representatives. Long story short, I got demolished.
The next challenger on Team Failure was Aidan.
Dan realized that the voting system was a bit one-sided, so instead, he brought Stitch from the PAX team up to be the judge instead.
My favorite part of Dan’s panels is when he brings out the prizes. One of the prizes was a book of animals in the “Baby Touch and Feel” series.
Not bad.
Next up was Dan’s college friend Sam. The prompt was simply “red,” so Sam put red foundation on his Mii and called it a day.
Stitch came back up to judge the Miis and select a winner.
The next prize… HP printer ink cartridges.
Hello, Douglas Douglas.
Stitch came back up to judge the Miis again, and she ended up picking Doug’s Mii.
His prize? An inflatable unicorn sprinkler.
In traditional Doug fashion, he decided to pull a prank on Stitch and, on his way back to his seat, he pulled out $11 from his wallet and handed it over to Stitch to make it look like she was bribed to pick him as the winner.
For the final round, our friend Altrive was up to close out the panel.
The final prize? An ironing board.
This was a fun panel, and Dan is a very high-energy performer. Even though I wasn’t notified of my requested appearance until literally the morning of the panel, and then proceeded to have absolutely no idea what I was doing, I am still glad I got to participate.
If you missed it, PAX live streamed this panel on their website—you can check it out on the “Streams” section of the PAX West website.
I’m currently in Seattle, Washington for PAX West 2023. I have a lot of photos of the event, and I’ve also been spending time with friends and doing other tourist activities around Seattle; I’ll be posting those over the next week or two after I get back home. But for now, I wanted to share some photos from yesterday’s “Friends ’til Death” panel with DougDoug and Failboat at the Oriole Theater as soon as possible.
A part of PAX is taking place in the newer Summit building of the Seattle Convention Center. It’s a very nice building, and I really like its architecture as well—it is very modern, but there are still some nice wooden elements indoors that make it feel cozier and off-set the usually harsher feeling of today’s contemporary style.
We arrived just shy of half an hour early for sound check, set-up, and a quick rehearsal.
PAX usually has live streams of panels, but unfortunately, they did not have one for the Oriole Theater. We still wanted to share the show with people who couldn’t make it to PAX, so we brought our own equipment to film. As you might have noticed already from my pictures, I was on photography. Berry, Doug’s creative director, set up a camera at the back of the theater to film the primary camera angle.
Our friend Aidan who owns the “Skip the Tutorial” channel on YouTube filmed a side angle, where he was able to get shots of Doug and Dan in addition to some crowd reactions. Doug’s team has all the footage now, and it will likely be edited and published at some point in the near future on one of Doug’s YouTube channels.
A few minutes after 9 PM PDT, the panel started with Doug and Dan walking out on stage.
The entire theater was completely filled, and unfortunately, many people even had to be turned away (which was even more motivation for us to capture the event so we could share it with everyone). There were a surprising number of people in the overflow area, and once the panel started, people who were denied entry started crowding around the glass doors to peek in. The framing of this photo below doesn’t even show the whole theater.
As the panel began, Dan explained the premise of the show—he would be playing Dark Souls while he and Doug answered questions from the crowd, but the instant Dan died, the panel would end. This is a live rendition of their “Friends ’til Death” podcast, during which they are playing a game, but the instant they die, the podcast episode ends.
Here’s a view from the theater from the other corner—you can sort of get a better idea of how packed it was.
Very pog.
As you can see by Dan’s oozing confidence, he knew exactly what he was doing. Side note: this was his first time ever playing Dark Souls.
There were a lot of people lined up for an opportunity to ask their question.
A few minutes into the game, Dan started getting himself into a bit of trouble. The crowd went wild telling him to run away, but unfortunately, their efforts were in vain.
Upon Dan’s death, they both got up and marched straight out of the theater. The panel was over.
A lot of the crowd chased after them out of the theater, but a line formed of people who wanted to meet me, so I stuck around for a while to chat and take photos. Someone even brought a Ryobi cordless power inflator for me to sign.
After wrapping up with everyone inside the theater, I found out that an impromptu meet-and-greet had formed out in the common area outside the theater with Doug and Dan, after their fans eventually caught up with them. Two of Doug’s fans hand-painted these amazing signs for the panel.
If you missed this panel, either because you weren’t at PAX or got turned away at the door, you still have two more chances to see us.
Today, Sunday, September 3, 2023 at 6 PM PDT, Doug and Dan will be holding a more formal meet-and-greet in the Autographing Area, during which I may be lingering somewhere in the background.
Two and a half hours after the start of that, today, at 8:30 PM PDT, Dan will be holding his “Fight Mii” panel in the Monarch Theater, during which Doug will be there momentarily as a special guest, and I will be running around taking photographs again. This one should be live streamed on one of PAX’s broadcast channels.
… See you there?
A few months ago, I made plans to attend TwitchCon 2022 in San Diego, a convention run by the company behind the streaming platform Twitch.
I had last been there in 2017 when Tempo was still heavily involved in esports and video gaming content creation. I wanted us to have a strong presence at the convention due to Twitch’s relevance to our industry, so we set up a booth, held a panel, and even ran a small tournament on a pair of classic arcade machines. Since then, there wasn’t really a good business purpose to attend TwitchCon (and it was shut down for a few years because of the COVID-19 pandemic), so I hadn’t returned in subsequent years.
The reason I was going to attend this year was to accompany my friend Doug Wreden. By now, I’m sure at least some of you are aware of the various fun things I’ve been doing with Doug during my time in the Seattle Metropolitan Area, most recently eating an 18-pound salmon with him live on stream as a stretch goal for a recent charity event.
Doug ended up canceling. He had residual exhaustion from attending PAX West, he had a lot of work stuff going on, and he is still not fully recovered from his health issues (which you can learn more about if you look at some of his old YouTube videos where he talks about his condition).
This was perfectly fine to me. I recognize that people’s plans can change, and as long as they communicate that to me, I’m always extremely flexible. In fact, I am the type of person who, if you have plans with me but message me half an hour before meeting up telling me that you want to cancel because you just don’t feel like going, I will still be perfectly fine with that—as long as there is transparency, honesty, and overall respect for my time in the long-run. … More on that later.
Doug let me know weeks in advance that he’s reconsidering TwitchCon. Although my original plan to attend was based solely on going with Doug, I decided that I would still attend whether or not Doug was going, mostly because I had a stop in Las Vegas threaded in on the way to San Diego, but also because I don’t really like changing travel plans.
I should have canceled too.
TwitchCon reminded me, again, just how much I hate the communities within the esports, video gaming, and live streaming scenes. I “suffered” through this several years ago when my primary duties at Tempo were esports and content creation. It was a very valuable learning experience and I am very grateful that I got to participate in it, but it’s not something that I ever want to do again.
I honestly don’t know how these people are going to survive in the real world without just all becoming “Karens.” It is astonishing to me how large a percentage of Twitch community members act as if the world revolves around them. I’m not sure what went wrong that caused these people to think that they deserve to be treated exactly how they want, while completely disregarding the wishes of others. There is no irony more ironic than how sensitive these people can be, yet be oblivious and ignorant to how arrogant, entitled, and passive-aggressive they look to everyone else outside their “safe space” bubble.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, because most of my meetings during TwitchCon were outside the convention center with people who didn’t bother purchasing an admission ticket. I think people realize by now that the convention could potentially be a good networking opportunity, but they don’t want to deal with the clown fiesta that is TwitchCon itself. I arrived in San Diego on Thursday, attended all my meetings and appointments, and stayed off-site until Saturday afternoon.
On Saturday, I promised someone I would meet them in Room 26 of the convention center at 2 PM. I left my hotel with ample time to walk to the convention center, pick up my credentials, and make my way to the second floor.
I received an email from Twitch prior to the convention informing me that I am required to get a vaccine validation wristband prior to entering anything hosted by Twitch. The email indicated that this validation process would take place at Bayfront Park.
Because my hotel was in central Core-Columbia, I approached towards the San Diego Convention Center at its western entrance. Bayfront Park was in the southeast near the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, so I walked all the way across the length of the convention center to get there. Once I arrived, there was nobody there and there were no signs anywhere instructing me where to go. I messaged someone I knew had already made it into the convention center, and I was advised to go to Entrance A instead. That’s where I just was before walking across the entire length of the building.
I walked from where I was near Entrance H and retraced my steps all the way over to Entrance A, finding a random Twitch employee who was able to give me a black wristband for vaccine validation along the way (very much not where Twitch told me where they would be). After getting my wristband, I went into the convention center through Entrance A and walked through the security checkpoint.
I proceeded to set off the metal detector, but the security officer didn’t tell me to empty my pockets or take off my belt or boots or anything… just to walk through it again. Needless to say, I set it off again. The security officer looked extremely confused at the metal detector, as if she had been on her way to McDonald’s but randomly stumbled upon TwitchCon and was asked to be a security officer for the first time ever, and suddenly realized that this metal detector wasn’t a Big Mac®. After I walked in circles three times (setting off the metal detector each time), she just waved me past.
Prior to being let further into the building, I was told that there was a mask mandate enforced by Twitch and that I would be required to remain masked while inside the Convention Center. I did not have a mask with me because I use masks for scientific purposes and not for political ones, so they gave me an oversized surgical mask with a non-functional nose bridge pinch. I promptly quite literally became unable to see, as my warm breath from having already walked a few miles was now going straight up the mask and onto my glasses, fogging them to impenetrable opacity.
Now blind, I stumbled my way to the badge pickup counter to scan my QR code (which miraculously worked as intended), retrieved my admission badge, and started heading deeper into the convention center. There were no signs anywhere and I was sort of lost in the middle of an open area, so I went to a group of security guards and asked them if they could point me towards the direction of Room 26. They discussed amongst themselves for several seconds, and then one of the security guards told me to follow her. She led me through a door that said “Authorized Personnel Only.”
On the other side of the door, she told me to take the escalator all the way up to the second floor, and that would be where Room 26 would be. I thanked her and went all the way up, but ended up in an abandoned corner of the convention center that was clearly a restricted area. A janitor saw me and stared at me as if I was missing a head. I meandered around, still half-blind from my fogged-up glasses, until I found a door leading to the courtyard area. As the door shut and locked behind me, I looked back and saw an “Employees Only” sign on the door.
There were a lot more convention-goers around me now, so I was definitely getting closer, but I was still pretty lost, and I couldn’t find any maps anywhere. I kept roaming around and asking random Twitch staff members if they could give me instructions on how to finish getting to Room 26, but literally everyone I asked said they didn’t know and advised me to ask someone else. I would go to the “someone else” they recommended, and that someone else wouldn’t know either.
With the power of the process of elimination on my side, I narrowed down where this enigmatic meeting room could possibly be to a single section of the convention center—the only section that I hadn’t walked through yet. I saw a sign that led me from Room 31 to Room 28, so I followed that sign, naturally assuming that Room 26 would be further down from Room 28.
I made my way to Room 28 and discovered that the path forward had been arbitrarily blocked off by security. One of the security guards looked like he wanted to let me through anyway, but the other security guard on duty stopped that from happening. He explained that the meeting rooms were laid out in a circle, and I would have to walk all the way around to the other side of the circle to get to Room 26.
I was 34 minutes late for my meeting.
Remember how I said earlier that I am extremely understanding when it comes to rescheduling plans, as long as the other person is frank and communicative about it? Well, the other side of that is, if I don’t receive appropriate communication, I will become extremely irritated.
One of the things that Doug was looking forward to at TwitchCon was meeting up with other Twitch streamers, and not being able to do so anymore was the thing he was most disappointed about when canceling his TwitchCon trip. Because of this, I decided to offer to treat a few of his friends to dinner instead, in his place. They accepted, so I blocked Saturday evening off my calendar for them.
This was on the same day as the clown fiesta above of trying to pick up my credentials and attend the meeting in Room 26. As if this day wasn’t already ridiculous enough, Doug’s friends ended up never picking a specific time or location to meet up, even after I had checked in multiple times. They also didn’t get back to me to retroactively decline my offer either—just complete radio silence. We ended up not going to dinner together, and they needlessly took up a slot in my schedule that I could’ve given to someone else.
If you ever want to speedrun getting blacklisted from ever doing anything with me ever again, that is how to do it.
With all this being said, the trip wasn’t a complete catastrophic failure.
Apart from the two mentioned above, all my other meetings and lunch/dinner appointments went smoothly and productively.
The hotel I stayed at—the US Grant—was very nice. I prefer newer hotels with more modern styling, and the US Grant was a bit more on the classic side, but it was still very pleasant. The staff was great, the breakfast was good (it was also very expensive, but I had daily breakfast credits from my elite status, so the price didn’t matter to me), the rooms were stylish, and the location was pretty convenient.
I also met up with some of Tempo’s former employees, and it was nice catching up. I had some nice conversations with their new co-workers from their new companies, we went to get some good food (I ate the best calamari dish I’ve ever had, at a restaurant that they picked), and I watched in confusion as they played Magic: The Gathering and I had no idea what was going on.
I was considering doing some tourist activities in San Diego while I was there, because there is a dense concentration of a lot of interesting things in Balboa Park, but I heard that a lot of convention-goers were also going to a lot of the tourist hotspots, so I decided to save it for another visit.
San Diego seems to be one of the less miserable big cities in California, so I’m not completely opposed to going back to visit again, if the proper opportunity arises. However, if I could go back in time and rewrite this past weekend… I would’ve definitely skipped this TwitchCon trip.
Back during my esports and influencer marketing years, I would go to events and conventions pretty much once every month or two. However, since the pandemic, as well as since Tempo‘s pivot of its primary business focus into game design, I haven’t gone to any conventions.
I had an opportunity to attend PAX West last year with some friends, but I heard that a lot of companies were withdrawing from attendance due to continuing surges of mutations of the coronavirus, so I decided not to go and instead just continued on my road trip. When the opportunity to attend PAX West arose again this year, I figured that, considering I was already in the Seattle Metropolitan Area, I would give it a shot and go to my first convention since PAX East 2020, days before the COVID-19 outbreak and quarantines across the United States.
I’m staying in various different locations across the Seattle Metropolitan Area while I’m visiting, one of which is with my friend Doug Wreden. Doug lives in the suburban outskirts of the Seattle Metropolitan Area, so we decided to use public transportation to get to downtown Seattle. More on that later.
Once we got to downtown Seattle, we first headed to the Seattle Convention Center for the main exhibit halls. This was one of the very few conventions I’ve been to where I was just a tourist and not working as an exhibitor, so I was able to roam around freely and explore. Unfortunately, I didn’t really find PAX to really be that exciting. It was congested with visitors, and every single booth had a very long line waiting to participate in whatever game or activity they had.
I’m thinking it might be because I’ve just been slowly losing interest in video games over the past handful of years, considering that I’ve been finding a lot of museums across the country to be very interesting, and museums are sort of like extremely small and static conventions. Regardless, the PAX exhibit hall just ended up being a lot of walking and squeezing past people, looking at video games that I could be trying but couldn’t because there were already 10 people playing and another 20 waiting for their turn.
The convention was too large to fit in just the Seattle Convention Center, so they partnered with some of the neighboring hotels, including the Sheraton Grand Seattle. Pretty much the one and only main reason why I decided to attend PAX for a day is to watch some of my friends run a panel, which we used as an opportunity to also hold a larger meet-and-greet session.
Doug and I got first-row seats to watch the panel, but before it even began, we had people coming up to meet us and asking us to sign things. Here is a photo of Doug signing a “contract” that was partially generated by an AI scriptwriter that integrated a lot of inside jokes and memes from Doug’s Twitch stream and his community (I also signed it right after he did).
The panel that we watched was called “Fight Mii,” hosted by YouTubers from the channels Failboat and JayMoji.
The premise of the panel was for Jay to go into the audience and select two contestants to build a Mii (which, if you’re not familiar, is basically like a custom 3D avatar) within five minutes based on prompts given to them by the hosts.
The room wasn’t completely full, but it was still one of the biggest crowds that I had seen from a PAX panel. Here’s a shot of audience members eagerly volunteering to compete in the Mii-building contest.
I thought the panel was great, and the hosts did a great job adding clever twists and turns to keep things exciting and comedic. For example, one of the prompts was to build a Mii that resembles Sonic the Hedgehog, but instead of just announcing it, Dan took off his gold jacket and ripped open his white button-up shirt to reveal a Sonic t-shirt underneath.
This particular prompt had a very interesting result—one contestant properly made a Mii of Sonic the Hedgehog, but one of them must have missed the “the Hedgehog” part, because instead, they built a hamburger from Sonic Drive-In…
Another hilarious thing they did was give out completely pointless and impractical prizes. This one was my favorite—a literal air-circulating box fan. I bet whomever won that had a great time trying to take it on their flight to bring it back home.
After the panel was over, we held a meet-and-greet in a nearby conference room—Dan and Jay had one line on one side of the room, while Doug and I had a line on the other side.
People brought some very interesting things for me to sign, such as a broken blender, toy drill, miniature rubber chicken, catnip mouse, issue of National Geographic magazine, and computer science homework. One person mentioned that they tried to bring in a shovel for me to sign, but it had gotten confiscated by security because it was a metal shovel and could be used as a weapon.
However, my favorite thing that I signed, simply due to the sheer absurdity of it, was a mold of somebody’s teeth.
After a successful day at the convention, we stopped by The Cheesecake Factory, where I ate the driest and most shriveled chicken I had ever tasted in my entire life.
After dinner, we started making our way back to the train station to head back to Doug’s house.
I looked up the Westlake light rail station on Google Maps and led the way. Unfortunately, I led us straight to the coordinates on Google Maps, which were underground… and I couldn’t remember where the entrance was. Doug really didn’t want to miss the next train and have to wait an additional 15 or so minutes for the next one, so we started running around trying to find the entrance to the underground.
We eventually found the entrance right near the infamously dangerous McDonald’s at the corner of 3rd Avenue and Pine Street, and we made it to the light rail stop with a few minutes to spare. My stomach was very unhappy with the fact that we ran, considering that I had just eaten a bunch of really dry chicken, then consequently drank a lot of strawberry lemonade and water to make the chicken easier to swallow.
We got on the light rail, and I continued having an upset stomach, but I just kept my mind off the stomach pain and tried to take a nap (which was pretty much impossible, because I am always conscious of how, on public transportation, dangerous situations in a confined space can unexpectedly erupt without warning, so I always impulsively keep my head on a swivel). However, once we got about halfway to our destination stop, there was an announcement that said that it was the final stop and everyone had to exit the train.
Apparently, there had been an emergency on the train tracks, so they froze train transport beyond a certain point and replaced light rail service with bus shuttle service. This was not ideal, as my stomach had gone from upset to infuriated, and now we had to go find the bus stop and basically take a layover.
After several minutes, the bus arrived, but it was obviously nowhere near as large as the train, so we all sardined on board, probably exceeded the capacity of the bus, and made our way to our final destination.
… That is, the final destination for the public transportation portion of the trip. After we got to the station, we got into Doug’s car, which we had parked in the commuter lot, and drove the rest of the way back to his house.
We took public transportation because we didn’t want to bother finding parking in downtown Seattle, but it seems like the hassle of finding parking would’ve been worth it—a drive that would’ve only taken a little over 20 minutes in a personal vehicle took almost 2 hours on public transportation due to the obstacles faced throughout the whole process.
We finally got back to Doug’s house at almost 2 AM.
Needless to say, my sleep schedule is broken again.
This post is over 8 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
However, I’m happy to announce that the convention grind is finally over. I almost had to extend my grind by accompanying our PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS team to a boot camp in Santa Monica, CA, then to Intel Extreme Masters in Oakland, but luckily, our house manager was able to cover for me for that, so I finally get to relax.
Now it’s finally time to unwind for a bit, recover from over a month of field work (which I am very not used to, seeing as I usually just work peacefully from my desk), and catch up on everything I’ve missed over the past month.