In the summer of 1999, a fledgling guidebook company called Get Cultured paid me $2,000 to travel around Southeast Asia—from Bangkok to Hanoi to Singapore and back to Bangkok—and write about the region’s sights and sounds. After two months of touring on the skimpiest of budgets, I had filled a stack of notebooks with my chicken scratch, and wrote dozens of (what I hoped were) erudite entries—only to have the company fold before it could publish a single word. Still, I never lost my fondness for guidebooks. So when our editorial team learned that JCK Las Vegas 2015 was undergoing a dramatic redesign that would see its disparate pavilions united by a new neighborhood-oriented layout, it seemed like a no-brainer to position this issue’s cover story, “Welcome to the JCK Neighborhood,”  as the ultimate guidebook to the show: equal parts information and inspiration. NOLA goo