Congrats and allow me to pre-welcome you to Seattle as a born native here!
In addition: PREPARE YOURSELF!!! (I'm quite serious)
These cons may be super-exciting for the first-timer, but they are incredibly exhausting marathons. As a vet of well over 10+ yrs of PAXes, E3, CES, Comic-Con, etc...it's rough. So come prepared. My biggest tips:
- [*]Bring hand sanitizer
Everything is touched by many, many, MANY dirty geeks. It's a shame, but it happens. Protect yourself.
[*]Plan your meals AWAY from the venue
You want Subway at the CC anywhere between 1030a and 7p? Then enjoy sitting in that 45 min line. Plan meals OUTSIDE the venue, and in advance. Try to eat outside of the usual breakfast, lunch and dinner times. You'll save yourself a headache! (Also hit me or any other local-GAF for recommendations!)
[*]Give plenty (and I mean PLENTY) of time between "to-dos" or things to see
Lines are long. Chokepoints are plenty. And short skips over to other booths or halls will seem like days. Give yourself TONS of time.
[*]Don't go out EVERY night
Don't burn yourself out. It's not worth it. Even if you wanna hit up the exclusive Machinima/Square/SEGA/Capcom/whatever parties every night (and good luck at that anyways), it's just not worth slogging yourself around the expo hall the next morning. Get a reasonable amount of rest each night. Unless your coldvein, where sleep is never an option. Which is an awesome perk to be born with.
[*]Keep in mind: You will NOT get to see everything you want to!
Don't overplan or overbook yourself. Don't plan on making one panel then immediately the next in a half-hour. Chances are, the line for it was already full when you started the previous panel that took you two hours to sit in line for. Plan on getting to the popular panels EARLY!!
[*]Bring cash for vendors
It's the nice thing to do. And lots of times card readers die or don't work. Don't pay $22 dollars to use the local-nobody ATM in the CC. Pack some cash from your own bank's ATM prior to the show.
[*]Come to the GAF meetup!
Looks like I'll be hosting this again in 2012! Last year's was awesome. Resulting in a Cap Hill pubcrawl of the forever and getting into near-brawls with scrubs dressed has Harry Potter. Also, you get to meet crazy industry cats like AdamF and many others, myself included. It's good times, trust me.
I'll add more when stuff comes to mind. I'm very bored at work.