When Apple announced the iPad, I was so unimpressed and bored with it, I couldn't even muster a "meh." It seemed to solve a problem that didn't exist, and while I kept waiting for Apple to make the case for it, I don't think they ever did.

I mean, if I'm going to spend five hundred fucking dollars on a device, the company had better make a very compelling case for why I need it. They should also not tie it into the worst mobile service provider in the history of known space, but I didn't even get that far on the decision tree, on account of it costing five hundred fucking dollars and just being a big iPod Touch.

I'm not knocking anyone who thinks it's awesome and shiny and a must-have precious, I'm just saying that at the moment, the iPad (oh, what a truly unfortunate name) isn't for me.

However, I saw an article this morning that made the first move toward a compelling case for the iPad: boardgames. I'm not talking about checkers and chess or even Monopoly … I'm talking Ogre, Car Wars, Settlers, Battlelore, Talisman, Arkham Horror, Dungeon … I think you get my drift.

It would be incredible to play boardgames that look like boardgames on a tablet device. You know that awesome Carcassonne game on Xbox Live? Like that. Imagine how awesome it would be to play Car Wars on a tablet: it would look just like the Deluxe Edition, with counters and a map grid and everything, but all the math and DCs would be done by the computer – unless you really wanted to overlay a turn key, I guess. You'd never have to worry about the dog crashing into the table and knocking your vehicles around, you could play against an AI, and you could flip over to another window to go shopping at Uncle Albert's, all the way back (or, uh, forward) to the fantastic 2037 catalog.

If I could take books, and movies, and boardgames I love with me when I went on trips (even if it was just a commuter train trip for an hour) then I would have to make a substantially more difficult saving throw versus WANT. Right now, I just have to roll a positive number, with a +20 bonus and no chance of critical failure.

One of the themes of my PAX keynote was Welcome Home, which everyone who had been to a PAX before could understand. For the first timers, though, I wanted to help them understand exactly why it is we say that, so I said:

All of the things that make us weird and strange in the real world? Those things that people tease us for loving, those things that we seem to care about more than everyone else at work or school? Those things make us who we are, and when we’re at PAX, we don’t have to hide them or explain them or justify them to anyone; instead, we celebrate and share them.

We have come here this weekend, and we will go to PAX Prime in Seattle in August, and we will be back here in a year, and back there next year, and the year after, and the year after that, because just playing games isn’t nearly as fun as playing them – together – surrounded by thousands of people who love them as much as you do. The next 72 hours are going to go by faster than you realize, so make sure you stop and look around a few times every day and appreciate this time. It will be over before you know it. 

I'm glad I took my own advice, because the weekend flew by and was over before I knew it. I'm truly grateful that I carved out some time for myself, and spent nearly all of it playing in the classic arcade and classic console rooms. I even played 4-player Warlords on Atari for the first time ever (2-player being the best we could do in the 80s, since nobody I knew had 4 paddle controllers – well, two controllers, since … aw, forget it. If you know what I mean, I don't have to explain it to you and if you don't, it's not that important.) and made it farther in Dragon's Lair than I think I ever did when I was a kid.

I was completely exhausted by the end of the day on Sunday – but not sick! HA! HA! I WIN AT NOT GETTING SICK AT PAX! – and as I sat on my bed in the hotel, zoning out at something stupid on television while my HP and Manna bars slowly climbed out of the red, I began to feel a familiar sense of ennui. I feel this way every time a PAX is over: a sense of sadness and loss that I've never really been able to identify more eloquently than "post-PAX blues." A fellow PAX attendee e-mailed me this morning, though, and summed up the feeling in one word: Homesickness. I'm home, yet I feel homesick. I know that may sound weird, but it perfectly sums up how I feel today.

I spent a lot of this weekend feeling grateful, and that feeling continues today: I'm grateful for my friendly local game shop, I'm grateful for my game group, and I'm especially grateful that I only have to wait about 3700 hours for PAX Prime, instead of the usual 8760. 

Uh, not that I'm counting down, or anything. (Except that I am.)

I'm posting this from an airplane that is currently 37966 feet above Port Stanley, Ontario. It's -78 Fahrenheit about 7 feet from where I'm sitting.

And I am currently on the internet, while my position is updated on Google Maps in front of me in almost real time.

There's just enough turbulence to be annoying, but not enough to be upsetting or frightening. It should stop in in about 15 minutes, if I am reading the map I have from Weather Underground in another tab correctly. A small child a few rows behind me is having a full-on tantrum. I feel really terrible for her parents, who are doing everything they can to calm her down. I am very grateful for noise-cancelling headphones.

Now we are over Detroit. Hi Detroit, sorry I keep missing Penguicon.

This is the first time I've flown with in-flight internet, and while I totally understand that a lot of people take this completely for granted, it's pretty awesome to me that I can do this. You see, I remember a time when our headsets were nothing more than plastic tubes with uncomfortable foam cylinders on the ends. We paid up to $4 to use them, and we watched the most banal and idiotic programming ever, because it was all we had. I remember airlines switching to headsets that were deliberately incompatible with our Walkman (remember those?) headsets, so they could continue to charge us outrageous fees to be "entertained" in-flight.

The captain just turned off the seatbelt sign, earlier than I expected. (In my defense, I was estimating my position.) My Weather Underground map says that the flight should be smooth until we get over the Colorado/Nebraska border. When I was a kid, turbulence freaked me out. When I was a teenager, and understood what caused it and how planes were designed to handle it, it stopped freaking me out, but I always wanted to know about how long it would last. It's was easier to deal with something like that when I knew it would eventually be over. It blows my mind that I can not only be online, but I can access a map to find out that information for myself.

Behind the Google Map, I was listening – live – to The Rachel Maddow Show until it ended. now I'm watching Vanguard (probably the greatest investigative journalism show on TV today) on Current TV. Anne was watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory next to me, and now she's channel surfing.

We're over Lansing, Michigan, right now. Someone with math skills may be able to figure out how fast I'm writing this.

I know it's not a big deal to a lot of people, but the fact that we can do this brings me as much joy and excitement as being able to carry a mobile version of the Internet in my pocket. I was so excited, the very first thing I did once I got connected was tell Twitter, "I don't know what's more amazing to me: that I can say, "hey, I'm online from the airplane," or that I can say it to 1.6M people at once."

All of this is prelude to something I really wanted to post about, which is in itself a prelude to what I imagine will be a fairly lengthy post about PAX…

Last night, I joined Scott Kurtz, his awesome former intern Mary, and Kris Straub in the lobby bar for a quick Guinness. We didn't get to see each other very much during PAX (I almost reflexively wrote that #PAX) so it was our only chance to catch up since we last saw each other. 

The lobby was filled with gamers, playing all sorts of games: Magic, Dominion, Settlers, a euro board game I didn't get close enough to positively identify, but could recognize from the scoring track.

After I'd finished my Guinness (about 5 rings, I guess, for those of you who know what that means; it was the end of the con, after all) a guy who I figured was in his early thirties stopped me on my way back up to my room. He pointed to the guy next to him, who had some card games in his hands, including Zombie Fluxx and We Didn't Playtest This at All.

"Would you like to play with us?" He asked.

I told him I'd love to, but I was on my way upstairs to go to bed, because I'd had a really long day, and I was pretty close to dead on my feet.

He told me that he understood. Then, I saw this look in his eye that told me he wanted to say something more, so I waited a second, and he continued. I'm going to recall the things he said as best as I can:

"I've played games my whole life, but this is the first con I've been to," he said.

"That's awesome," I said. "You picked a great place to start, but I should warn you that you've been ruined for all future cons that aren't PAX."

He grinned and said, "I really wanted to play games with people, but I'm here by myself. I wouldn't have had the courage to find people to play with if I hadn't heard your keynote where you talked about playing games together. So I just came down here and found some people who were playing, and joined them."

I felt myself starting to tear up. This had been a theme throughout the weekend, because I lost count of the number of people who told me something I said in my keynote inspired or validated them in some way. Shit, I'm tearing up now just thinking about it (while I'm over Lilly Lake, Wisconsin, listening to South Park behind the map).

"So I started playing with them, and that guy over there," he pointed to a guy sitting on the other side of a nearby table, "has a weekly game night that he invited me to. I'm going to start playing with him.

"I just wanted to say thank you, because if I hadn't heard your keynote, I wouldn't have come down here to play games, and I wouldn't have met these guys. This is something I've wanted my whole life."

Something was seriously getting into both of my eyes. I would have hugged him, but I was doing my best to leave a PAX without getting sick, so I gave him the Iron Guard Salute and told him how much it meant to me that he took the time to share his story.

See, I try to speak as eloquently as I can about why I believe games and gaming are meaningful and important, and why PAX is awesome … but it's never going to be as meaningful or as good an example as meeting someone who exemplifies those words.

I'll have much more to say about PAX when I get home and have time to reflect on the weekend, but now I'm thinking about watching something on-demand, just on principle … or maybe I'll build an amazing downtempo playlist from the giant MP3 library, and listen to it while I play my DS. 

Whatever I do, I'll be doing it from the future, where I live, because I am one of the luckiest people in the world … but I'm waiting until South Park is over, because this one (about Catcher in the Rye) is surprisingly funny. 

(For those of you who are keeping score at home and need closure, I'm now over West Liberty, Iowa.)

The adrenaline and excitement from an incredible day at PAX East is finally wearing off, and I'm on my way to sleepy time, where I am a viking.

Before I go to bed, though, I wanted to share a little bit from my keynote today. This is excerpted from my speech:

Gaming is the foundation of the best friendships I’ve ever had, and it’s the mortar that has held my group of friends together for almost 25 years. 

We are all here today because we love playing games. Some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter. PAX is where we come together to celebrate that, and today, I’m going to talk about the power games have to inspire as well as entertain us.   

When you play a game – any game – you’re using your imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time. When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn Diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. I suspect that for many gamers of my generation, that’s equally true … and I know that my kids will be saying the same thing in 20 years about people they’ve never met face to face, but interact with almost every day in an online game that will make Call of Duty look then like Pong looks today.

Andrew said that he was watching Twitter while I was giving the keynote, and the word he saw most frequently was "inspiring." He said the second most frequent word was "funny," so I'd say that, even though I initially thought I dragged a bit in the middle, everyone in the main theater (~4000!) got out of it what I hoped they would.

I'm having an amazing time here. Thank you to everyone at PAX East for being so awesome and kind to me. I can't wait to play games tomorrow!