PAX East 2025 Panels and Reflections

So, I gave two talks at PAX East in Boston back at the start of May and I want to gather some of my thoughts about them, how they went, and then just kinda travel log the rest of my PAX experience at the end.

But first the links. Both of them are available on the official PAX YouTube channel (and I've pulled copies just in case that goes down some day).

Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods

Silkposting – a Culture of Trolling

This post took a bit for me to put together because while we were in a streaming theatre for both of these panels, the second panel got bumped from the live stream by the World of Warcraft devs announcing that Legion Remix was real and not just the most obvious summer event possible given the success of Mists of Pandaria Remix last year. At the start of the Silkposting panel I erroneously take a lighthearted shot at Taliesin, who I assumed was on the panel as a moderator or something given that Blizzard had brought him out to Boston last-minute, but he was just in attendance, not actually on the stage, so I apologize for that joke I made up on the spot not being grounded in the factual reality you expect of me.

Though CoD went up on the YouTube channel while we were still at the con, we weren't sure if Silkposting had even been recorded due to not getting streamed, and I'd more or less accepted that it was lost to the sands of time when it appeared out of nowhere yesterday.

So, for PAX East the pitch process was much, much shorter than I'm used to at West, I don't know if there's just generally less demand for programming at the Boston event, but the whole process was basically only two months. In contrast programming pitches are open for West right now and close at the end of June, so a whole month for pitching and then all of July and August for prep. I have a lot of insecurity over all this stuff; despite all the empirical evidence right in front of me I assume that no one is going to take me seriously at these events, so back at the start of the pitch process I decided that it was safest to pitch 2-3 panels and then let PAX decide which they thought was the best. Well, turns out that when you do that there's a risk that they will approve both of them.

In the event of that, dear reader, what I would recommend in retrospect is to choose which of the two you, personally, would rather focus your attention on, and then politely tell the people on the programming team that you're withdrawing the other one. You can even make it look magnanimous by using language like "taking more than my fair share of slots" or something! Also, on that front, complete side-track here, if you have an idea for a panel or a workshop but figure that you're "just some rando", pitch it. The programming team at PAX obviously likes "known" presenters to a degree, but they also take a lot of pride in making sure that there's a spread, that PAX would stop being PAX if it were wall to wall AAA announcements and didn't have panels from Just Some Randos who are passionate about visual novels or making things out of EVA foam.

Despite the self-inflicted stress of preparing two panels at the same time and trying to get them both up to the standards I try to hold myself to I think this PAX on the whole went better than I ever could have hoped.

I love the opportunities that I have to meet so many of you, chat with you about your interests, hear about all the cool, strange, wonderful things that you're into, and hopefully leave you all a little entertained with something new to think about.

Call of Duty: Ghoss – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods

This panel has been years in the making, I've had the idea for a video about Call of Duty: Ghosts kicking around since I originally did a series of Call of Duty streams - nicknamed CoD Fishing - back in 2015. It's a video I still intend to make, and this panel was effectively the first draft of that video. I'm actually pretty happy with how this turned out on the whole, I think it's a really good foundation for a more tightly scripted version with, like, sound and gameplay clips.

You wouldn't think that a panel would be all that different from a video given that despite my delusions of grandeur my videos are ultimately complex slide shows, but a live event has some considerations of its own. The obvious is just that your control of timing is much more fickle, you can't edit out your ums and ahs, you need to script around much looser blocks of time, and that means using tools like PowerPoint or Keynote. There's also a technological element. You can't just roll up with a 6 hour block of gameplay footage that you intend to scrub through to find the exact moment that you're thinking of at any given time, that would be insane, so all your clips and screenshots need to be pulled ahead of time.

There's also a dialect to a panel that audiences expect; while Why It's Rude To Suck at Warcraft LIVE was pretty successful as a panel I wasn't satisfied with my own delivery and cadence, it feels even more scripted than the actual video that much of the script is abridged from. I found I was making the same mistake with the first draft of this panel and did a fairly radical pivot much closer to the con itself than I'm proud of, tossing pages of script in order to deconstruct the whole thing back down to bullet points.

That's a long way of saying that I think the primary weakness of this as a panel came down to me under-anticipating the visuals that I would want and not pulling enough clips and screenshots and supplementary material before I left for the east coast.

The second major (and fairly obvious) weakness is the conclusion where I just straight up forgot what I meant to say and had foolishly only left myself a note saying "pull it all together." It turns out that the conclusion of a presentation is fairly important, some would argue extremely important, and if you're going to get overly-specific with the wording of your notes that's maybe where you want to do it. Trusting that you're going to remember what you were thinking when you're deep in the disruption of travel and have a chronic case of con brain from staying up late, getting up early, and walking around or being "on" all day is basically trusting a scorpion to not sting you as you cross the river.

All that said, my goal at the moment is to get it cleaned up, integrate the feedback from the panel version, and (ideally) present a finished version as a video premiere at PAX West in August.

Silkposting - A Culture of Trolling

The second panel, delivered on Friday afternoon, was very different, much looser, a lot goofier, but having watched it last night, I dunno, I think this one slaps. At one point I was really worried that it just wouldn't play at all with such text-heavy material, but the audience was there for it. The presentation came in about 5 minutes shorter than it was supposed to, but that didn't matter because the thing that made this ultimately a really great panel wasn't even something that was under my control, which is that (IMO) the Q&A portion was top tier.

Q&A sections are always a little fraught, there's forever the risk of the 10 minute "this is more of a comment than a question" that you might need to tactfully find a way to interrupt, but I have to say I've generally been really blessed that all y'all show up with engaging, insightful questions. But even by those standards this was stand out, specifically because not only were the questions good, they were also almost entirely about the panel rather than being general questions about me and Folding Ideas. Questions about the channel aren't bad, I don't want to discourage anyone from asking one at one of these events, I'm always down to ramble about Fifty Shades, WoW, or Ralph Bakshi, but in this case it makes the recording of the panel into a really cohesive presentation, and that's just a really great outcome from an inherently chaotic process. It's neat.

Random PAX Thoughts and Highlights

This was my third PAX with a table in Bandland, a thing that I've come to really enjoy and look forward to. As you can see in the header image PAX responded to our feedback and gave us table covers again, so I was able to have some fun doodling over the course of the four days and impelling nearly everyone who stopped by to pledge their allegiance to Cool or Rad.

I always remember how nervous I used to be approaching artists I respect at conventions so whenever someone's kinda shaken like that I try and disarm them a bit, ask them about themselves, really signal that, yeah, I want to be here, I want to talk, you're not an inconvenience. So at one point a couple came up to my table to say hi in that very shy, flustered sort of way, gassing me up with the kind of praise of my work that I don't think anyone is really well equipped to internalize, and I noticed that they had exhibitor badges.

"So what are you here exhibiting? Do you have your own booth? Are you with a larger team?"

"Oh, we're showing off our video game," the woman replied, "it's just a little indie title, I don't know if you've heard of it, Slay the Princess."

Chat, the face I made. Abby and Tony from Black Tabby Games, makers of the multi-award-winning, universally acclaimed, bona fide hit Slay the Princess, available on literally every major platform, were rambling about my videos as though this whole dynamic shouldn't be completely flipped.

There was just something really grounding and lovely about a couple people who could perhaps justifiably strut around a games convention like they've won instead geeking out over stuff they like and getting a bit flustered to meet a YouTuber.

Anyway, you should play Slay the Princess, it's really good.

Dan's Pin Haul

My PAX experience is always a trip through two worlds, half of it as a presenter and guest that has work to do, someone who is "on", and half as an attendee who likes pin collecting and trading.

I managed to get absurdly lucky at Cookie Brigade and pulled three Nyan Cat spinners, and the PAX Australia Moogle. For context people offered me entire pages of pins just for the Moogle.

As you can see I'm in the process of doing a bit of crafting, building my own pin binder out of felt. The stiff rubber folios are probably technically superior, but I like the idea of something custom.

A Brief Review of Better Man, the Robbie Williams Biopic

The sort of curse of my being is that I'm an introvert who does well being alone most of the day in my office, who is rapidly drained by social events, who doesn't handle loud noises well, but I love meeting people, I love hearing your stories, I love seeing your cosplay or your art or whatever cool things you found at the con. It is, on the whole, a creatively energizing experience, even if it's really hard to juggle that boost with the stresses of travel. Nothing killed my momentum quite as efficiently as my flight from Boston getting cancelled and rebooked, converting a painless-as-possible 7 hour trip back to Calgary into a 16 hour marathon culminating for the first time in my life in throwing up on an airplane as a byproduct of spending all day snacking for want of anything else to do, a nasty bit of turbulence, and the parasympathetic trigger of Robbie Williams' chimpanzee avatar puking during the "look how out of control his life is" montage towards the end of the second act of Better Man.

Instead of rightfully sitting at my computer enjoying some video games after a shower and a proper dinner I was strapped into a crowded plane already preparing for landing, sheepishly holding a bag full of disturbingly warm liquefied almonds and snack cakes, collapsing under the anxiety from imagining that I was about to become the person who made a flight attendant's day worse.

So while Better Man is willing to portray Robbie as a terrible person, a selfish lover, and a leech, it does so as bad boy hagiography, presenting the awful behaviour as ultimately a sort of cost that needed to be paid in exchange for the kind of success that leads twenty years later to a hugely expensive flop biopic where you convince a producer you should be played by a CGI ape, and it made me literally vomit.