SRGE Day 1

I made sure to sleep and be rested for the day. Although this was a chill show, it was going to be right after a really busy one. It was about 7:50 in the morning, and I missed the opening of the show. Paco slept next to me, snoring away.

I was able to find parking fairly easy this time. It was a saturday, and less people worked. I had a 10 hour parking period, and I bet myself I wasn’t going to make it. The ferry was mostly me just sitting there, and enjoying myself. I bought some food, and tried to have a nice breakfast. One worker there had really nice hair. A little girl waved at everything crossing the ferry. Some people waved back at her.

On the walk to the monorail I saw a building had been completely torn down. I had taken pictures of it before, during the Emerald City Comicon, and now it was gone. I also overheard a conversation about the cost of living in the city. A two bedroom pad was about $4,000 a month in some parts of town. This was mind blowing. The building that had been torn down was apartments. Now we have apartments going for nearly the dot com bubble prices.

I realized that a lot of the homeless there had been in the city for a long time. They had been taken care of by various organizations, but these organizations had been torn down like that building. The city wanted rich people, and didn’t think about the cost of taking care of the many homeless in the area.

When I got there, I found out some interesting stuff. The first was the badge to get in was old school floppy disks. The hard small ones that held Doom in case you were wondering. Also, the power cords in the indie game and arcade area blew a circuit, so we had to move the cords again. It wasn’t dull that morning.

Not only that, one of the machines wasn’t powering on. It had fallen the day before, and we had worried about it a bit. All we could do now was turn it around, and hope someone could fix it later.

For Saturday I did a lot of interviews with various folks. That will be detailed later. The big things were one lady had her booth directly under the AC, and she was freezing. There had been some errors for booth set up, and people were given round tables for their displays. Stuff like that was something I dealt with all day.

I met family of booth runners. Some artists brought their husbands, while others brought their kids. One little girl worked under a table and played on her tablet while mom sold stuff. I got to shake her hand.

There was some issues with the original break room. It was small, and locked most of the time. They gave us pizza, and none of us could fit into the room. So I and another guy went looking for a better spot. We found one, but it felt like a dungeon. There was another, but it felt unsafe. Oddly enough, the sound coming from the convention floor made it feel like zombies were right around the corner.

I think the two coolest people I met that day was an indie game guy, and an arcade fixit guy. The indie guy had some really cool life experiences. His Grandfather was in the manhattan project, and he loved talking about the technical details of game making. The arcade fixit guy worked at Round1, and I may have begged to see stuff.

There was some wandering around. One booth was selling Xbox 360’s for $20. I decided to wait on it, and bought a game for my original xbox.

Eventually I ran out of things to do, and ended up playing some Tony Hawk 2. By that time people were leaving, and the show was winding down. Ben showed up, and chatted with me, and the one indie guy. It was an awesome conversation, but I will write about that in the interviews section.

Soon enough I was let go, and Ben hung out talking about cool ideas. He wanted to do a hardware history of videogames. He would do the research, I would do the writing. I added it to the list of books I should work on.

On the ferry I bought a sausage dog, and enjoyed my trip. Two girls ran laps around the ferry to see who could do the most. Smart parents. I worked on notes.

When I got back to where I was staying, I chatted with my buddy’s girlfriend and son. I wrote in my notes Frau und zein sohn. That day had taken up a lot of petty cash, so I had to go to a store nearby to grab some cash. I bought a phone charger, and a Dr. Pepper.

Little did I know, I had overspent that week.