Sunday Steph and I took a relaxed approach to the conference. We went to a few panels, stopped by a few booths, and nothing really stood about about Sunday. We had a tasty lunch, but long wait at the Pho place. Later, we went to the Double Fine party, and had a drink. We had a relaxed evening, with dinner on our own at a really cute little hole-in-the-wall called zig-zag cafe. It was fantastic, but Steph ran off early to go to a panel. I really enjoyed the quite time with her.
We had a late start to the day since we wanted to go to the Glass Gardens and let Andrew go around the convention for a while.
Steph was nice enough to help me out with handing out the flyers for Apocalypse Overload. She was looking good in her Faith costume. I was in my Dr. Horrible costume, and it made a huge difference. I really don’t like random outreach, in person or online, but that is what I’m doing for now.
We went into the convention and saw some more of the indie mega booth. I really like that corner of the expo. We ran into David and Candice there and went to watch David battle it out in an Assassin’s Creed 4 multiplayer competition. He got 2nd by 7 seconds.
Steph and I went to a Pho place for lunch, which was delicious. The service was slow, but they were so overcrowded that wasn’t surprising. We went to two panels on gender and gaming together, which was cool to hear about. Most of it was saying that people should be respected in the way that they want to be respected, and that the system is broken in favor of specific groups.
I stayed behind to work, while Steph, Candice, and David went to a Geeky Burlesque show, and Brian and Nick went QR code hunting.
Friday was overwhelming at PAX. I’m not a big fan of crowds, and PAX seems to be nothing but crowds. I was able to handle it for a while, and did enjoy the indie mega booth. There are a good number of games that look very interesting. It is amazing to see the influence Clash of Clans and MineCraft have had on the games that indie developers are making. There weren’t too many original projects, but a lot of them did build well on top of well defined mechanics. The originality was certainly there.
I really liked the Pixel Junk Inc. game that Steph tried out, as well as Cannon Brawl.
I competed in the Goldeneye tournament and had a disappointing first round knockout. I’m sure I could have made it to the final 4 match, but the disparity in skill level made it more of a hunt than a match. The settings were also quite strange as the organizer had never played the game before.
Nick, Steph, and I played two pretty good board games. The first was a dice drafting, resource management game called Castle Dice. It was quite good, but not good enough to buy. We didn’t finish the game either, as the guy at the booth was just showing us how to play and implied that he didn’t want us to stick around and play it.
The second game was a very fast paced interactive dice roller. It was the next in the series of Space Cadets, called Space Cadets: Dice Duel. In this version of the game you are going up against another team, and you have to load missiles, get lock, and move to be able to shoot them. Then you must also dampen their lock, build up shields, and make sure they can’t shoot you. Steph, Erin, and myself won handedly both times over Nick and the two other guys there. We destroyed their ship without getting hit both times if I remember correctly.
Steph and I went to a really nice wine bar after that. We had several flights of wine (Sweet, Alsace, and Port) as well as some phenomenal desserts. We were joined later by Andrew and Nick. We were almost done at the wine bar, but we stuck around for a bit longer and had another desert with Nick.
This morning Steph and I walked to the Chihuly Glass and Garden under the Space Needle.
The gardens were really pretty. The favorite exhibit for me was the interior garden that we could walk all the way around. He has a dozen or so basic forms that he then combines in all sorts of combinations and colors. The walk was also very nice as we stopped by a suisse cafe for breakfast and a little glassworking shop on the way back. Seeing all the glass I really wanted to get back to the glassworking, if it wasn’t so expensive. Should I be able to rent time I would totally go more often. We got back and picked up Steph’s Saturday pass from Andrew and went to the convention.
Below is a ton of images of the glass art.
Last night I had Steph drop me off at SJC so that I would be there, and she wouldn’t have to drop me off at 4am. I didn’t get much sleep in the airport, but I did sleep decently well on the flights.
I just got to the room and hooked my mac mini up to the TV. It works surprisingly well as a monitor.
I went to the 13th annual Russian River Beer Revival and BBQ Cookoff.
None of the pictures here are mine, since I wasn’t about to take a phone or camera to this event.
On the way there Nick and Fred came to pick me up. Fred is the Box intern from last summer that is now full time at Box. The drive there was longer than expected and Nick and Fred were mainly talking about Box and SF Living. I dozed off for a bit, but joined in the conversation when it went back to other things. We got to the campsite right at sunset. I set my tent up wrong at first and had to get Brian and Andy to help so that I could get it set up. We then ran by the grocery store to get food and beer. We had a nice sit around the fire. Andrew and Adam showed up later and they got the tent set up quickly. I went to bed decently early, and had a really restful sleep due to the 4 beer.
The owner of Camp Outback in all his glory. He does fire dancing at night for anyone who wants to watch.
Saturday morning we went into town for some coffee, and I just walked around the town a bit. It is a nice little place. There were a good number of real estate places in the town, and the surrounding area seems incredibly inexpensive when compared to SF or the Bay Area. Shortly after the coffee run we started walking to the main event. I had with me the holder for the small glass, and a cloth for wiping my hands on. Nick, Brian, Candice, and I were VIP, so we got in a little earlier. There was maybe a 5 minute lag between the VIP getting in and everyone else getting in, which wasn’t even close to the 1 hour that was promised. I wasn’t too bothered by it but it was strange how quickly they let in the rest of the crowd. I was a little upset at the first few places giving me so much of the beer, since I wanted to try a little bit of a lot of different beers. The only bad part about the VIP is the larger cup that doesn’t fit the holder, and is far to much when filled up. There was a really amazing ginger beer that I would like to find more of. I’ll have to try some ginger beers to find something as tasty as this was. At the ginger beer booth, one of the hosts offered me a towel and the small glass for the VIP cup. I gladly took it. Nick then went over and got a T-shirt and a small glass for his VIP cup.
I had soooo much BBQ of beef, pork, and chicken. I didn’t even taste the sides this time. All of it was tasty, and most of it was absolutely delicious.
After a little while I decided to get in the river. It was trying to get down the slope to the river while as drunk as we were, but not too bad. The water was colder than I would have liked, but incredibly refreshing for being as cool as it was. I snuck off for a bit after that to take a nap behind the stage. It was incredibly relaxing and I had such a good time.
As the festival was winding down we all started making our way to the upper deck. We set out from there for the pizza place in Guerneville. We got a good bit of pizza and I ate a ton of it. It is quite surprising how much pizza one can eat after an all you can eat and drink beer and bbq festival. It was really tasty pizza.
After the pizza place we went back to camp, and decided to play some open faced chinese poker. It is an interesting game with all sorts of subtlety. I think it would be fun to have poker at my place every so often and play this variant. It has a lot more strategy to the game itself, whereas other forms of poker have more strategy to the meta game. I took a bit of a nap once the light was too dim to continue poker.
Nick and I decided to leave that night, and Andrew decided to join us. We watched the fire dancing, which was pretty good that night, then we left. On the way back we ran into some crazy construction on 880 that took the highway down to 1 lane. It took us around 45 minutes to clear that section, but that was the only delay. I was dropped off first, since I’m just on the other side of the Dumbarton Bridge.
I really enjoyed the festival, but I don’t think I’ll be going again. The over-drinking and over-eating are things that I will be doing without as much of. I think Nick was feeling the same way about it. I love the atmosphere and the festival, but it has run its course for me.
We got up early and Carlos and his mother drove us to the airport. We got on the first flight, and I forgot my water bottle in the airport there. We got to Miami and had a really long layover. Customs wasn’t bad, so Steph and I walked along the terminal a few times. Steph also got a massage. On the flight from the Dominican to Miami I sat next to a baby in the lap of a woman, the baby was grabbing in touching everything, and smelled a lot like poo. The flight from Miami to SF was uneventful. I was sooooo ready to get home. Steph’s parents came to pick us up and we got back to her place. We started the day at 5:30, but with the time change that was equivalent to 2:30. I watched the new Venture Brothers with Nick, Robert, Candice, and Robert’s Coworker.
We got going late in the day and took Jack and Stephanie to the airport. We also dropped off the rental car while there. Carlos then took us to a nice little bakery and we ran some errands. The bakery was the wooden spoon and the place that made the oreo cheesecake. We headed to old town to visit the amber museum, chocolate museum, and columbus house. The chocolate museum had a tasty chocolate tea that Steph and I got a lot of. We got back to the house in time to party a good bit with carlos family, although Steph didn’t join in.
We had a really nice tuesday in the Dominican Republic. We got up early to get to the dive shop but once we got there we realized it cost more than we had thought and I ran by an atm to get the extra. The dives were great as we went to Catalina Island to a place called the wall and the aquarium. We got 4 lionfish on the dives and 2 of then were big enough to eat. The lionfish was pretty tasty as it wasn’t fishy and was very light. I would love to get some more lionfish fillet. We played some volleyball and had lunch on the island as the dive master Igor told us how he ended up being in the Dominican Republic. He wad s really relaxed guy as was the whole staff. During the dives we saw some rays some eels lots of corals and sponges and fish of all kinds. When boating back to shore we had a fun ride with a few flying fish jumping out of our way. When we got back to shore the others were just driving up and we went to a restaurant for a apetizer that carlos liked which was starch stuffed with meat and fried. We went back to the house and relaxed had dinner and played Settlers.
It's an Exciting World 