With PAX East once again gearing up to summon the tens of thousands of loyal subjects back to its breast, earlier this week we here at SideQuesting felt it imperative to provide you, the reader, with some handy tips and tricks to survive the entire ordeal. However, there is a tiny portion of the population we neglected to address with our guide: the brave, beautiful individuals who aren’t able to attend this year. We humbly present you with this supplementary guide on how to survive not attending PAX East 2011.
Things to Avoid
Right off the bat, your best bet is to avoid Twitter at all costs. Let’s face it; everybody you know, follow or interact with on Twitter is going to be at PAX East. It promises to be a constant flood of excited, elated tweets talking about how awesome PAX East is or vague, not-nearly-detailed-enough updates on panels you spent hours meticulously planning the best way to see and still make it to all of the other cool stuff going on until you realized the travel costs were too much and you had to resign yourself to tossing those plans out the window.
Gaming forums! You should avoid those too. On top of their ability to cause the same amount of trauma the fast paced Twitter can, they also have a second, more damaging level of psychic whiplash you need to be aware of. The slower, less real-time updates found in any forum can lead to subconsciously leaning forward, nose only inches away from your monitor while you summon all your willpower to avoid clicking the refresh button in your browser, only to belatedly realize your other hand has somehow crept across the keyboard and has been furiously mashing the F5 key to force a refresh every few seconds, even though forum posting is the last thing on the mind of anybody at PAX East because of all the awesome stuff they’re doing.
Playing anything online is also an absolute trap waiting to happen. Normally you jump online to kill some time or relieve some stress by shooting dudes with some of your best online friends. Hours feel like minutes and the number of suckafoos getting annihilated by your RPG-7 is climbing so high that if you graphed it out it would be a steeper incline than Everest. Except now all your buddies are at PAX East having a full on brodown, which means there isn’t anybody to play with. If you try and go online you’ll find this strange, hollow place where no light shines. The guns there don’t fire quite right; the med packs don’t heal quite so well. That guy sneaking up behind you with a combat knife actually gets you, because the friend who would have popped him in the apricot to save your life isn’t there.
It’s a bleak, empty place where hope dares not tread, and for the duration of PAX East you shouldn’t either. It might be a good time to bust out your copy of Final Fantasy VIII and try for that No Junctioning run, because the abject depression from Squall is infinitely more tolerable than the silence from your empty party on Live.
Things to Do
It isn’t all bad, though. There are still plenty of things you can do to keep yourself from remembering there are people probably doing keg-stands right now and talking about how awesome life is. SideQuesting has gone above and beyond to provide you with five awesome, extreme, and downright crazy ideas to keep yourself in good spirits while desperately trying to last for three excruciating days.
1. Learn to knit.
Trust us on this one. Not only will learning the delicate art of weaving yarn into clothes take up a solid amount of time, but it will enable you to provide an invaluable service to others when you finally make it to PAX East. March in Boston is a chilly place, and being able to whip up a scarf or a toque is guaranteed to make you the life of the party.
2. Try Psychic Guild reading
Reading in any manner is healthy for a person and opening your mind to new possibilities is one of the best things you could do in your free time. Checking out sites and learning about Psychic Guild reading, One Card Tarot and seeing what your upcoming future looks like based on your horoscope is bound to have you entertained.
3. Sort your socks.
Socks are probably the least important article of clothing when it comes to coordination. Your footwear covers most of them, and your pants cover the rest. Nobody is ever going to see if the socks on your feet actually match. Maybe they’re wildly different, or maybe they’re both white socks, but with slightly different patterns. Who cares, right? Wrong; spring and summer are just around the corner, and that means it’s soon time to break out the shorts. Take some time and sort those socks back into their proper pairs so you can keep looking good all year.
4. Go for a jog.
Look, as gamers, going out for a nice jog might be something reserved for special occasions. It’s definitely not high on our list of priorities, either. But maybe this is one of those special occasions; things can only turn out great from a nice jog. You get some exercise, maybe you tire yourself out and have a nap, or maybe you get hit by a car, wind up in the hospital with a morphine drip and when you snap out of that fugue state PAX East is already finished and you’re totally in the clear. It’s win, win, win!
5. Become a vigilante.
Every city has crime, and every hero needs an origin story. Missing out on PAX East is actually a blessing in disguise, in that it can be the catalyst that launches your career of stalking the nights, striking terror into the hearts of unsuspecting criminals. After you take down that drug cartel and reveal why you do what you do to some lucky reporter you might even be asked to give the keynote at PAX in the future. You’ll be proof that even missing out on PAX makes you a winner.
6. Invent time travel.
Now hear me out. Obviously inventing some sort of device that allows for the instantaneous travel through both space AND time is a technological feat that can’t be accomplished with the knowledge we as a species have accumulated to this day; the very notion is silly. But travel through time alone? Now that’s the ticket. By our calculations working out the kinks on such a device would take about three days.. carry the two, divide by seven.. We humbly suggest you start working on it on March 11th. By the time you finish PAX East will be done for another year. Success! Your time travel worked!
1 Comment