To those of you familiar with the Linux and Free/Open Source community Think of a weekend long Linux Users Group meeting with hundreds of other geeks, which also just happens to have nationally acclaimed guests, a LAN party, its own wireless network, hotel room parties, lots of folks talking about Science Fiction and Fantasy, a place to buy cool t-shirts and buttons and such, amateur singing, anime, a costume contest, and free caffeine and snacks always available.
To those of you familiar with Science Fiction conventions Imagine all the convention features you know and love, with the
addition of wireless internet access, computer game tournaments, people who know
about online publishing / books on demand / digital art, a programming
track involving computing topics and another one focusing
on the crossover between Science Fiction and computing. Imagine seeing your favorite creative visionaries meet the innovators who are creating the future you read about in SF.
Tech Guest of Honor: Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager for Canonical
Tech Guest of Honor: Benjamin Mako Hill - Debian/GNU, MIT Media Lab, Free Software Foundation, Ubuntu, Wikimedia
Author Guest of Honor: Vernor Vinge, Multiple Hugo winning science fiction author, computing visionary
Author Guest of Honor: Tamora Pierce, fantasy author, co-founder of Sheroes Central
Webcomics Guest of Honor: Randall Munroe of xkcd Gaming Guest of Honor: Keith Baker, creator of Ebberon world for Dungeons and Dragons
Hack of Honor: The Giant Singing Tesla Coils
I'm feeling much more myself today. Much better. I think exhaustion might have played a factor in my malaise yesterday, but today I'm firing on all cylinders with a full 8 hours (give or take one) of sleep under my belt. It's time to face the day!
The plan:
I just got done swapping out routers (one thing down) and I have several hours of projects and homeworks to complete.
I have to test my audio setup on the new lappy for the SMOScast we are recording tonight... (that's right, bitches, I'm getting all energy-drinked up and we're gonna make some audio hell tonight at...)
Then we're off to the SMOS dinner at li885 and evilbitch316's place in Wyandotte. I suggest that all of you come. ALL OF YOU! I haven't been getting out much, and this is proving to be a drunken, debaucherously good time. As far as I can tell, there's a keg, food, a Jer willing to get absurdly stupid, and audio recordings. To sweeten the pot, we are forcing sheryl67 to accompany us, in costume, and Ger will be donning my personal favorite costume... slutty angel (well, she calls it an angel, but I like slutty angels, so there ya go).
So, if you're not going, what is wrong with you? What can you possibly have going on that is more entertaining than me (and the rest)?
Reminders:
This is a potluck, so while there will be some food there, please bring a dish to pass.
This is, essentially, BYOB, although there seems to be a keg of Strongbow in the plans, so bring a $5 keg donation and get shitty on the good stuff.
Don't forget the Dr. Horrible Sing-a-long Blog auditions will be taking place tonight, so prepare to sing for your supper!
There is every likelihood to be some serious goings-on, to include beerpong (which frightens me), karaoke (which should frighten you), a bonfire (can I light it?), and molestation by me (not optional, ladies, mandatory)
Excited? You know I am.
So now that I'm in a good mood, talk to me. What's going on today. Tomorrow? This coming week? What should I be planning for? What am I missing? How much do you love me?
[Note: Crossposted over to the Penguicon community blog solely because of the important reminders, not because I'm such a whore for attention that I felt like broadcasting my good mood. Okay, not SOLELY because of the whore for attention thing...]
Amy and Limey will be hosting our next SMOS Dinner, 11/08/08 at 6:00pm! This is a Halloween themed party!!! They live in the Wyandotte area, please email me for the address.
This will be a pot luck dinner! So if you can, please bring a dish to pass along! Amy and Limey will be providing the main course, which is spaghetti with and without meat. Sides dishes and deserts are welcome. Drinks are BYOW(hatever).
I am looking for people to host a late November and early January SMOS dinner. If you are interested, please email me!
I have updates boys and girls. If you have attended one of our SMOS dinners we try to get a house party atmosphere, yet we try to also plan some type of activity.
Some activities planned may include: SMOS cast Karaoke Dr Horrible screening/auditions Costume contest Bonfire Beerpong
Dinner As mentioned in the original post. Pasta is the main course. There will both meat and veggie based sauces. I have been messaged by folks who have volunteered to bring lasagna, garlic bread, and a couple deserts. So feel free to bring whatever suits you.
Beverages.. For the Most part BYOB.
We will have some soda and such. For those wishing to partake in adult beverages we have a small selection of those also. If you have a poison of choice
THE KEG Strongbows will be ordered this week. There have been a handful of generous donors that secured half the keg. If you want to have a stake in the keg, I ask that you contribute at least $5. So Don't forget your favorite mug. You can either pay at the door or donate here
As Per the poll results Any additional funding will go towards additional food and beverages. Thanks to those who voted.
CRASH SPACE The Attic will in fact be done. After three years of aggravation the new subfloor is installed. Carpet should be installed this week. While the ceiling height is low, it should still provide additional space for those who don't want to drive after a night of celebration. If you have an Air bed we'll find a space for you. As always chairs and couches are first come first serve.
What are you doing tonight? Hopefully, your answer includes hitting up some of the great Halloween parties going on around here, but if your plans didn't include a party, let me direct your attention to one that you should consider...quoted directly from the dude throwing the Stilyagi shindig:
Stilyagi Halloween Party on Saturday the 25th.
We'll be serving chicken wings, smoked pork loin, black bean chili (thanks Andy), scratch made pumpkin pie and the chocolate fountain will be there as well. We'll also be serving punch and some snack foods, please feel free to bring additional munchies and beverages, we'll have coolers and ice available.
Important Details
Party starts around 7 PM, ends whenever
Please bring yourselves, friends, family, guests, etc.
Please bring games, cards, etc. to share, we will set up a gaming space again this year
If you're willing to help with setup, cleanup, or you have other questions please contact me off list at bradley_d_atwell@yahoo.com
There aren't any Stilyagi or AASFA elections this year, so we'll have the whole evening for the party. The party will be in the Common House at
Great Oak Cohousing 500 Little Lake Drive Ann Arbor, MI 48103
The link below gives directions and maps from the Great Oak website
Also, please remember to park along Little Lake Drive, as parking in the lot is very limited. There is handicapped parking available for those who need it closer to the common house.
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
The Bradaki, Ger and I will all be out there, and we hope to see you as well. Who knows, perhaps I'll do something entertaining, and then you'll only HEAR about it, and not get to witness it firsthand...and really, who wants THAT, eh?
Do you have a passion for singing and Whedon? Combine the two by performing in the live action performance of Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long blog at Penguicon of '09! I am looking for people who are willing to sing and act in front of an audience, willing to have fun, and able to make regular practices. Not a fan of singing or even being seen by people? No problem! We are also going to need people with creativity and a passion for building to help make stage props, costumes, and assist with the production. No prior experience is necessary.
Auditions will be held at the following SMOS dinners: the November 8th one at Limey and Amy's place, and on December 6th at Allison's house in New Baltimore. There may be another SMOS dinner between them; if so, auditions will be held there, too. All you need to do is find me and sing a song at the party. I will be taking part preferences into account, but there is no guarantee that you will get the part you audition for. Also, feel free to audition multiple times. If you are interested in helping out in a performance and non-performance way or if you have any questions, email me at geralyn.eadie@gmail.com.
Practices will be held once a month until March, where we will most likely step it up to more as needed. This is a time commitment.
I am very excited about this production, and I know it is going to be absolutely awesome! I can't wait to see what amazing talents the people of penguicon have to offer!
Hello, boys and gouhls. The time has come for the dead to walk among us again.
November 8th the Z's will be hosting our annual Halloween Party. This year with a twist, a SMOS will be taking place at the same time. We would like to invite you to our post Halloween Party. So before you put away that costume for a long nap, put it on one more time, come out and celebrate with us.. You don't have to have a costume to come... (Hey I am the costume guy, it's kinda what I do) Activities are still in the planning stages, but I assure you there will be something on the slab.
For the dinner portion of the evenings festivities, as at an usual SMOS, it will be pot luck. We are planning a main course of spaghetti with and without meat. Side dishes and deserts are welcome.
Beverages are BYOWhatever or you can buy into the Keg. (Now here's where things get interesting.)
I normally get Labatts or something of that nature. I however, can get a half barrel of Strongbow. The cost is almost prohibitive at $190. If I can secure enough donations to the cause I will gladly order it.
I've mentioned this idea to a few people at Clave and got a positive response. (Almost a quarter of the total cost was offered but not commited)
Please see the poll below and leave a comment or send a message, if you're willing to donate.
I'll leave the poll open until 10/23. By then I'll have paypal account, for donations, set up.
So remember your vote counts.
Say you don't do cider, yet you want something umm, mildly toxic? I'm sure we can help with that too.
And since there is alcohol involved there will be crash space if needed. Bring your fixins, we'll provide a floor. Note couches and chairs are not subject to reservations. Airbeds are..
Aaron will be hosting our next SMOS Dinner, 09/27/08 at 7:00pm! He lives in the Clawson area, please email me for the address.
This will be a pot luck dinner! So if you can, please bring a dish to pass along! Aaron will be providing the main course, which is Chili and cornbread. Drinks are BYOW(hatever). Aaron does not have any pets. Please bring a lawn chair if you have one!
I am looking for people to host a early and late October SMOS dinner. If you are interested, please email me!
Many of you know who Spider Robinson is, other than that he is our Author GOH this year. Some of you are familiar with his body of work. For those of you, please forbear my post. For the rest, Please take a moment to read through what I will post below, and make up your own opinion. . . Hopefully it will provoke you to know our soon to be Author GOH's work a little better before Penguicon.
Today I was reading one of his books, for perhaps the fifth time, and came across a section that I feel does a very good job showing both the skill, and the passion, that Spider puts into his work. After a little digging, I found it online, so I didn't even have to plagiarize it to post it here for you. This is a small piece from his novel 'Callahan's Key', and is his written account of his own experience of watching a space shuttle launch, in person.
Copied from HerePlease note - I have altered what I found at that site to match the text in my copy of Callahan's Key, because I feel it has slightly stronger effect.
Okay, Youve probably seen film or video footage on TV. But if you haven't been to a launch, at least as close as the thousands of cars stacked up back out on the highway, you just don't know anything about it.
At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it still, tranquil, serene. Three hundred and sixty degree Spielberg, rich and vivid. Lazy clouds overhead, a flight of birds just visible gliding low over marsh flats in the distance, a few boats out on the water. The stillness is not perfect-there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse-but basically the world is as it has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on its surface might come up with.
Then Hell breaks loose.
A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad explosion.
Then the Beast’s two big brothers wake up-the giant solid rocket boosters-and Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue. The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back: it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle stack balanced on top like a pingpong ball on the stream from a firehose. The bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its terrible shoulders and slips them clean.
You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming “Go, baby, go!” like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around you is doing the same, but you can’t hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this literally earthshaking event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings 97 tons of metal and plastic 2 million mi.
With 5 men aboard.
You can read about something like that, and see it on television, and spend a large portion of your leisure hours trying to imagine what it must be like and thinking about what it means, and you think you get it. You're a space buff: if anybody gets it, you do. And I suppose you do - as an intellectual concept. Then you go there and see it with your own eyes, feel it with your own bones . . . .and are astonished to discover that only now, for the first time, do you really Get It. Until now space travel had been real to me in the same sense that World War II was real to me, or China: I'd been told about it and had no reason to doubt what I'd been told. Now I Got It.
For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter-century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part experienced by me-and the two-million-year-old dream had really come true:
The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches.
In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear winter.
No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were going to do this thing.
For some reason, when I read that section, it makes me tear up. .. But Im a sap. I hope it affected some of you, at least a little. . . And perhaps encouraged someoen to go pick up something Spider Robinson has written.
Aaron will be hosting our next SMOS Dinner, 09/27/08 at 7:00pm! He lives in the Clawson area, please email me for the address.
This will be a pot luck dinner! So if you can, please bring a dish to pass along! Aaron will be providing the main course, which is Chili and cornbread. Drinks are BYOW(hatever). Aaron does not have any pets. Please bring a lawn chair if you have one!
I am looking for people to host a early and late October SMOS dinner. If you are interested, please email me!
Penguicon's Webmaster (me) is currently looking for an apprentice. This person will mainly be responsible for helping with updates to the main website as information is passed down from other concom members. Other responsibilities will include (but are not limited to) helping to maintain penguicon's wiki, and helping to bring several prior years archived websites back online.
All interested person's should email me directly @ webmaster(at)penguicon(dot)org.
Please provide at the very least a listing of the reasons why you want to be my apprentice. A listing of prior experience in web site maintenance, html coding experience at a minimum, would also be nice but prior experience is not necessary.
Penguicon uses many web based technologies for communicating with its community members and experiments with many new technologies from year to year so also be prepared to learn something new while doing this. If you don't have a strong desire to help maintain penguicons web presence or to learn about new and different technologies please do not apply.
I will be taking applications for the next month (give or take a week or two), after which I will dig through all of them and select my minion apprentice. Please be prepared to answer any and all questions I might fire at you during this process, I will be treating this like a job interview ( to weed out the people that are only interested in doing it for all the wrong reasons ).
In yesterday's whirlwind, I didn't have much time for more than the two snippets of good news to my own blog. You'll see this stuff in the meeting minutes on our homepage blog, penguicon_news, but here is my recounting of it. ( news )
Anne Murphy will be hosting our next SMOS Dinner, tonight at 6:00pm! She lives in the Ann Arbor area, please email me for the address.
This will be a pot luck dinner! So if you can, please bring a dish to pass along! Anne will be providing the main course, which is Hungarian Gourlash and also a vegetarian chili for the vegetarians. Drinks are BYOW(hatever). She has no pets and her house is at the edge of a quiet neighborhood and parking is plentiful. Please bring a lawn chair if you have one!
I was wondering if (hoping that, really) there were other folks than my husband and me interested in this - or a Harry Potter add on to the sci-fi/fantasy track in general. The website for the rocumentary can be found here, and I know it's an awesome movie (though I haven't seen it yet, I fully intend to get a copy) and that a lot of work went into it. Anyway! I hope someone in charge of programming thinks it's cool too and this can happen.
As producers of The Wizard Rockumentary: a Movie About Rocking and Rowling, it is our goal to share the inspiring story of the wizard rock movement and a love of Harry Potter to diverse audiences around the world. For that reason, we are thrilled to consider applications from individuals and organizations who are interested in public screenings of the film. Any permission granted by The Wizard Rockumentary for public screenings will be in writing, so if you are interested, please feel free to contact us at gryffinclaw@wizardrockumentary.com.
Anne Murphy will be hosting our next SMOS Dinner, Friday 9/12/08 at 6:00pm! She lives in the Ann Arbor area, please email me for the address.
This will be a pot luck dinner! So if you can, please bring a dish to pass along! Anne will be providing the main course, which is Hungarian Gourlash and also a vegetarian chili for the vegetarians. Drinks are BYOW(hatever). She has no pets and her house is at the edge of a quiet neighborhood and parking is plentiful. Please bring a lawn chair if you have one!
Well Ladies and gentlemen this Saturday 7pm there is a Smos in Wyandotte. For those who listen to the Smos cast you already know that. The party should have a little something for everyone. The meal portion consists of a taco bar, pot luck. Updated from Comments, Stolen from evilbitch316
There will be the following (all separate except the trays): taco beef nacho cheese vegetarian beans (I usually add Taco Bell Hot sauce to this. If a problem let me know and I won't add it.) corn chips and shells (plain chips not flavored at all) flour tortillas veggie toppings (lettuce, tomato, onion, bell peppers, olives) shredded cheese salsa (I usually buy Chuck and Dave's Mexican style Medium) Fruit and Veggie(/w ranch dip) trays (these all depend on what Block's has on sale)
If I am missing anything that you want or have special dietary needs, please bring it yourself. Also, I may make a desert if time permits. Suggestions?
If you have firewood or chairs please bring them as well, please. Also, we have 2 dogs. We will take all cleaning precautions to help the allergy blessed. Then as a last resort they have a kennel that they can stay in.
I don't know how you could have made it this far today without having seen the news of the excellent write-up Jay Maynard (aka The Tron Guy you have no doubt seen at Penguicon) received from City Pages. Its a great write-up with many photos and, as a bonus, a mention of Penguicon on the first page.
sick
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