On day one of San Diego Comic-Con International, our Google calendar was a naively tight grid of panels. The plan was to bounce between Hall H (capacity: 6130 people) and Ballroom 20 (capacity: 4908 people), leaving just enough space in our schedule to briskly walk from one room to the next. What we learned on the first day was that at a convention of this size, attending any event isn’t possible without serious forethought and sacrifice.

Aaron H. Swartz is an accomplished 24-year-old by anyone’s standards. He co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of three owners of the massively popular social news site Reddit, and recently completed a fellowship at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

The original Portal was released in 2007 to critical acclaim. It was a very short, polished game based on a novel concept — players wield a portal gun that can fire a blue or orange portal onto certain surfaces, and things that go through one portal come out the other, preserving their speed and relative direction. By applying this simple idea in different ways, the player navigated through test chambers of increasing difficulty, all while evading the once-helpful robotic test administrator’s attempts to hurt your feelings (and kill you).