Beware: What follows are the ramblings of an exhausted writer who's collected more frequent flyer miles than hours of sleep these past few months.

So here I am, in my parents' house just outside of Seattle, stirring in the afterglow of my very first PAX. It's been a strange show for myriad reasons. The event passed by in a sort of haze, having taken place a couple weeks after I got back from Cologne GamesCom and a couple weeks before I leave for Tokyo Game Show. I mean, I have a vague memory of playing Left 4 Dead 2, but... zombie clowns? Were those really in the demo? Or was that a byproduct of my travel fatigue delerium? The screenshots of the game seem to back up my story, but I don't know. The Internet is a notorious liar.

As a show, PAX is like every other event I've covered this year... only distilled down to its most basic elements and served in a liquid form that can and will blind you with its concentrated potency. The size of its show floor and its attendance totals are a mere fraction of the gargantuan events I've been to recently. Shows like San Diego Comic-Con and the aforementioned GamesCom. But whereas those events feature acres upon acres of Things I Don't Care About like, well, comics, towering statues of Stan Lee, and entire halls developed to obscure free-to-play MMOs, PAX has none of that. It's a modest-sized show floor bursting with high-profile games. The first thing you see when you walk in is Mass Effect 2. The last thing you see when you reach the most remote corner is The Beatles: Rock Band. It's that kind of show.

And its size means familiar faces--like an industry-wide class reunion. Working as a previews editor, you meet a lot of people and collect a lot of business cards. Designers, public relations, producers, public relations, creative directors, public relations. The list goes on. But if there's one thing I'm bad at--okay, if there's another thing I'm bad at--it's connecting names to faces. So the sheer frequency at which I run into people I've met but whose names I can't immediately recall makes for a frazzling experience walking the show floor. That doesn't happen in a place like Germany. That doesn't happen when I've never covered your vampire naval strategy game before.

But, most of all, I think what made this show so strange for me was the odd sensation of the past leaving me behind. The whole time I was there, I could never wrap my head around the fact that this show spawned from an online comic I started reading when I was 15. Picture teenage me spending hours catching up on the entire Penny Arcade archives after I discovered the site in the summer of 2000. Picture me spending even more time in Photoshop cooking up my own Penny Arcade comics for their dead (but not forgotten) community site, The Bench.

Now picture me on Friday, sitting in a room equipped to seat what seemed like 10,000 people for a panel about Splinter Cell: Conviction and Assassin's Creed II. I spot Gabe standing off to the side of the stage, or what I think is Gabe, because I'm seated roughly 2.4 miles deep into the audience. This is all from him and Tycho, from Penny Arcade? The same comic I haven't read regularly in at least a couple years now that I don't find it anywhere near as essential as I used to? The disconnect between my current self and my former self was pretty overwhelming at that moment in time.

Strangeness aside, I'm glad I went. I may not be much of a Penny Arcade fan any more, and I may desperately need the time to relax at home in San Francisco before I head out to Tokyo in a couple weeks, but the experience of seeing this show was worth it. I probably wouldn't have seen zombie clowns back home.