The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is a series of gaming conventions held in Seattle, Boston, Melbourne and San Antonio. PAX was created by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, because they wanted to attend a show exclusively for gaming. So off we went, to sunny San Antonio, Texas, to attend a long-time birthday commitment and personal bucket list item–PAX. As we arrived late Thursday night, San Antonio was experiencing some record breaking cold weather, figures. It seemed like exactly our luck that we would go as far south as the United States would allow and still bring the gray rain cloud of Illinois with us. Come Friday, however, the temperature turned in our favor with lovely 60 degree winds and oodles of sunshine.
PAX South is notorious for being a smaller con than Prime, East, or West; though judging by the floods of geeks piling into the massive convention center, small was relative. On the first morning we got to meet some of our favorite Youtube personalities, Jesse Cox (Youtube: JesseCox) and Eric “Crendor” Hraab (Youtube: wowcrendor). We chilled in the armadillo room and got to meet with them personally for about an hour before the real convention events started. Honestly, I was a bit star struck; it was really strange to see people you’ve only seen on Youtube videos or heard on podcasts in real life. For one, they were a lot shorter. Later that day we also got to meet Brooke Lawson, also known as Dodger from PressHeartToContinue; we got pictures with all of these people and they were all super openhearted, even though Jesse tried to eat my hair in one of our pictures. We got to play a bunch of indie games and major titles, such as The Long Dark and Evolve. We got a ton of free swag, so much I had to stuff some of it into my carry-on in order to haul it all back to Jacksonville. The local Mexican restaurants were amazing, and we had the freshest guacamole I had ever tasted and some amazing vanilla bean flan. I was treated to some birthday shopping and we swam in our outdoor hotel pool in the icy 30 degree night chill. We really had the best time and it was the best possible way I could have spent my 18th birthday.