[Board] Fwd: Re: Would you like to be a Guest of Honor at Penguicon 5?

[Rob Landley]

Finally heard back.  She's interested, but swamped.  Should I invite her for 
2008?

Rob

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Would you like to be a Guest of Honor at Penguicon 5?
Date: Thursday 20 July 2006 6:58 pm
From: TamPierce at aol.com
To: rob at landley.net

Dear Rob,

Thank you so much for inviting Tammy to be the guest of honor at  Penguicon.
It sounds like a truly great event.  Unfortunately, Tammy says that she is
consumed with regret, but that her month  of April 2007 was gone by April
 2006! She is deeply honored, and  only wishes she could have come.


Best wishes,

Sara  Alan
For Tamora Pierce
_www.tamorapierce.com_ (http://www.tamorapierce.com/)
www.SheroesCentral.com



In a message dated 6/28/2006 10:06:29 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
rob at landley.net writes:

Penguicon is a combination Science Fiction Convention and Linux Expo,  April
20-22, 2007 in Troy, Michigan.  It's a lot of fun, and we'd  like to invite
you to be a Guest of Honor.

Guest of Honor means all  expenses paid, plane ticket, hotel room,
transportation to/from the  airport, meals etc.  (There's no speaker's fee
though, this is a  hobbyist event.)  We put you on anywhere from 6 to 10
panels

We have the standard convention activities you're used to: panels,  dealer's
room, masquerade, anime room, gaming, readings, filk,  signings...  We also
have free 802.11b wireless internet access, and  some of the panels are about
Linux.  Plus we have live swordfighting  demonstrations, liquid nitrogen ice
cream (and a hot sauce tasting, sushi  making tutorial...  We're organizing a
whole "food track" this  year.)  And we've decided that to balance the Rocky
Horror Picture  Show you also have to have a Buffy Singalong.  (A Buffy the
Vampire  Slayer Musical Episode Sing-along, sort of the anti-rocky as it
were.
We schedule both.)  We have charity auctions sometimes, we did one  for the
Comic Book Legal Defense fund and another for the Electronic  Frontier
Foundation.  (Generally a charity one of our GoHs is  interested in.)

At Penguicon, we mix science fiction with real  technology, which means that
in
addition to the traditional readings and  signings we have crossover events.
When we got Terry Pratchett as a  GoH one of the things we asked him to do
was
play first person shooters  (Unreal Tournament, capture the flag mode)
against
our other Guests of  Honor.  (He came in second.)  We once had a panel
titled "blogs  as literature" with Neil Gaiman, Steve Jackson, and Jeff Bates
(one of the  co-founders of slashdot).  On the geek side we had Eric Raymond
(founder of the Open Source Initiative) write and present an essay on the
history of science fiction, and at the most recent one Chris DiBona
(Google's
Open Source Program Manager) spent most of his free time playing  "are you a
werewolf" in the game room.  (I'd like to point out we  didn't actually
_schedule_ him for that...)

If you saw the video of  liquid nitrogen going into a swimming  pool:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/18/liquid_nitrogen_meet.html
that  was us.  (It's me holding the bowl, and Howard Tayler of the webcomic
Schlock Mercenary recording the event.)  The reason we ordered a 180  liter
tank of liquid nitrogen for the weekend was for the aforementioned  ice
cream,
but on Sunday the ingredients ran out before the liquid  nitrogen did so we
threw some of what was left in the hot tub, and then we  got the _big_ bowl
and Howard went to get his camera ...  We'll  probably do it again this
coming
year.

One of our more notable  panels last year was "Tea Parties in Science
Fiction",
which John Scalzi  explains far better than I could, and even has an audio
recording  of:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004165.html

There's also the  Chaos Machine, which is sort of a cross between an erector
set, pachinko  machine, model trains, modular office shelving, and a chaos
machine:
http://www.combatcamerastudios.com/penguicongal.php

I  mentioned Howard Tayler, who was in charge of the Chaos Machine and whose
writeup of the weekend is  here:
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/21/penguicon-day-0
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/22/penguicon-day-1
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/23/penguicon-day-2
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/25/penguicon-day-3

And  lots of photos with descriptions  here:
http://matt-arnold.livejournal.com/126342.html

(It's not that  this past year was more notable than previous years, we're
just
getting  better at recording the goings on.)

Our confirmed guests so far this  year are Bruce Schneier (author of "Applied
Cryptography"), Randy  Milholland (author/artist of the webcomic "Something
Positive"), and John  Kovalic (he does everything, you may have heard of his
comic "The Dork  Tower", or the games "Apples to Apples" and "Munchkin"...).
Steve  Jackson and Eric Raymond are returning too (sort of a GoH Emeritus),
and  we have more invitations outstanding (like this one).

The website is  http://www.penguicon.org

So, does this sound like  fun?

Rob

P.S.  The cc: is John Guest, this year's con  chair.  I'm just co-founder of
the event, I try not to have any  responsibility anymore.  I want to _go_ to
the thing.
--
Never  bet against the cheap plastic solution.

-------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.