Frontalot Tour Diary: PAX 2010 pt. 1

Greeting and salutations! Vic-20 is back in the game and coming at you live from the Fairmont Olympic here in lovely Seattle, where I sit and rest my weary feet which have covered an ungodly amount of convention-hall ground during this first official day of the 2010 Penny Arcade Expo, better known as PAX Prime.  Devoted readers and foodies will be delighted to know that the Costco turkey rolls are once again piled high in the green room.  They are so very hard to count when one is consuming them, I have found.  I just never know how many I’ve eaten.  This is just one of the many factors which prevent flyouts in general and PAX in particular from helping me maintain my girlish figure.

This is my first PAX Prime, and the sheer scale is awe-inspiring.  The hall, the displays, the hordes of costumed nerds – they overwhelm the senses.  There are many places to read about the particulars in finer detail than you will get here, but there is one bit of game-related news that I will disclose personally: Duke Nukem Forever is actually coming out.  For realz.  I haven’t waited in line for the booth yet, but I will.  Or maybe I’ll just cut the line using my VIP badge!  No, I won’t do that.  That would be in poor taste and might get people talking about me behind my back.

But wait!  That has apparently already happened.  I was informed by Front that my bed-sharing etiquette on tour was deemed unsatisfactory by my bandmates and has resulted in back-room grumbling:  “He never offers to sleep on the floor.”  “He always takes the couch.”  And so on.  Not that anyone ever brought that up with me, of course, but apparently one is expected to divine such information from the aether.  So to my bandmates, I publicly declare: I will gladly take the floor, or the cot, or the bathtub, if it please you.  And for shiz I will have one of those fancy sleeping mats on our next tour so as to prevent such arrangements from impeding my rest.

I might be more worked up about it than I am were it not for the comforting words of Ma Front, who reassured me that I am not a bad person after all.  She has been working the merch booth with Front and generally being an enormous help to us all.  She also showed off her stamina by accompanying us to the Hale’s Ales Brewpub, where two of the staff who are big Frontalot fans treated us to a private tour of the brewery, which holds not only a restaurant and a full-scale brewing assembly, but also a concert hall.  Next time we’re in town we’re totally playing there!  This time we’re stuck playing Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony.

But that is tomorrow night, when we open for perennial favorites Paul & Storm and Jonathan Coulton.   Tonight the hall is rocked by road-warriors the Protomen, chiptune crossover masters Anamanaguchi, headbangers Metroid Metal and the legendary Minibosses.  Front is doing a special set elsewhere at a party hosted by Jinx, and my good friends On The Tundra are playing the Mars Bar.  Where to go?  Vic-20 is conflicted.

On a personal note, my Kickstarter campaign barrels forward, and I have brought 1,000 postcards to PAX in hopes of reaching out to the nerdy hordes.  What I have learned: people don’t like to take postcards off of tables.  And I am not great and shoving them in people’s faces.  What to do?  They must be distributed.  If you, fair and kind reader, are at PAX and wish to help the Vicster promote his project, I will be more than happy to give you a stack of postcards for the handing out in return for goodies as of yet unspecified but verifiably cool.  Meet me at the Frontalot booth!

That is all for now.  Stay tuned for part 2, coming tomorrow!