Allow me to start off by saying that from an aesthetic standpoint, Seattle is a beautiful city. It reminds me very much of Vancouver, the city that I guess I can call home. In fact, if I were to be blindfolded, driven to Seattle and told I was in Vancouver, I might believe you, except for one very glaring difference. Now, I’m not an easy person to aggravate, but I have a new and very strong hatred for one-way streets. Seattle is made of them. I’ve never really liked one-way streets, but I could never place the reasoning. Not only did I fully realize this dislike, I embraced it. One-way streets can burn.

A few friends and I attended PAX 2010 this past weekend. It was great. But before any of the fun was to begin, our hotel had to be located. Perhaps it was an error in judgement to use Google maps to begin with, as it had led us astray in the past, but returned to it we did like fed cats. It made out our journey to be a simple one. Fourteen steps. Eleven of which were all before the boarder. What a cakewalk. And so it was, until step fourteen. You see, what Google had failed to mention, was that it had our end destination set behind the hotel. Perfect. An easy fix really, “Lets just make left turn here…”. Nope. One-way street. “Ok, lets go down one more block and then we’ll make the turn and head back up”. So make the left we did, only to find another one-way street going in the opposite direction of where we wanted. This pattern continued for some time. At one point we managed to find our way back onto the I-5 back towards the boarded. I felt like we were in one of those bloody icy-floor puzzles. You know the ones. Sliding back and forth, bumping into rocks until you find that perfect path to the other side. In the end though, we made it. Life achievement unlocked. All was well. We had a weekend of video games ahead.

One such video game was Gran Turismo 5. I have never been especially great at the whole racing simulation genre of games. It might be something as simple as my love for arcade style racers that doesn’t mesh well with actual physics. Maybe it’s the good little driver in me that has this ridiculous compulsion to stay in the lines while doing 200kph in Tokyo City. Or maybe I’m just bad? That’s probably most likely. I did however get to play it in a nifty little racing booth thing. Yeah. Those cool chairs that have a wheel with pedals and a gearshift. Not one of those dinky little things you can pick up at Best Buy as the next best thing. Too bad the upholstery smelled of Mountain Dew. Ah, conventions.

-R.A.D