Category: Uncategorized

 

Our Maker Market is chock full of artists from our community who make everything from paintings to leather to unique electronics.  This year, our makers are not reselling anything – it all comes from them.

This is the final post in our series – check out the previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to see the other great artists attending.

 

The Web Comics track is back this year and our track head, BluRaven C. Houvener, hopes you are as excited as he is for the reboot of this track.  If you are interested in seeing what else is happening this year check out all of our programming.

 

How to Start Up…and Keep Your Webcomic Going

Do you like Webcomics? Do you read webcomics? Have you ever wanted to start one of your own? Join Laura Cascos and her partners from the 7+ year running webcomic Sidekick Girl and BluRaven C. Houvener, writer and illustrator of the 3+ year running webcomic It’s Just Another Day as they take you through tales of how they started up, got out there, and kept it going….and more importantly, how you can too!

 

Webcomic Underdogs Meet and Greet

Webcomic Underdogs is an online organization with the mission of bringing together underground webcomic artists, writers, and publishers. Join us for a fun, exciting, and informational meet and greet that hopes to bring together many webcomic lovers and makers, and educate those that are interested in webcomics but have never quite known where to start.

 

Snake Oil Comics Podcast

Snake Oil Comics is a comics and nerd lifestyle podcast recorded live from Coy’s Comics in Saginaw, MI. Hosts Travis McIntire, Devin Foether, and Jason Lloyd strive to support the industry they love by interviewing independent comic creators, talking about significant comic storylines or characters, and getting a comic shop owner’s perspective on what’s hot and what’s not.

 

Learn to Draw a Dragon

Join our featured guest, Terry Pavlet,  as he teaches you how to draw a dragon!

Our Maker Market is chock full of artists from our community who make everything from paintings to leather to unique electronics.  This year, our makers are not reselling anything – it all comes from them.

This is the fifth post in our series – check out the previous posts 1, 2, 3, and 4 to see the other great artists attending.

 

 

This is our final post showcasing all of our amazing featured guest this year.  If you missed the previous posts make sure you check them out 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.  We are maintaining a full list of all of our guests at This Year at Penguicon.

 

My Parents Favorite Music

Steffeny “Steffo” Messinger refers to her pseudonym/moniker “My Parents Favorite Music” for the video game and pop culture influenced music she writes, produces, and records independently.

Releasing albums as pieces of the map to a mysterious island, she tours the country bringing clever wordplay and a colorful presence to her musical adventure, and every listener is welcome to be a part of the MPFM story

Ruth Suehle

Ruth Suehle is a community marketing manager in Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards group, which supports upstream open source software communities and their projects.

She participates most in the Fedora Project and is co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O’Reilly, December 2013).

Previously an editor for Red Hat Magazine, she now helps lead discussions about open source principles at opensource.com.

Ruth is also a senior editor at GeekMom.com, where she covers the adventures of motherhood alongside technology and sci-fi.

Snake Oil Comics

Snake Oil Comics is a comics and nerd lifestyle podcast recorded live from Coy’s Comics in Saginaw, MI.

Hosts Travis McIntire, Devin Foether, Stephen Sharar and Jason Lloyd (the occasional fourth chair and laugh track of the show) strive to support the industry they love by interviewing independent comic creators, talking about significant comic storylines or characters, and getting a comic shop owner’s perspective on what’s hot and what’s not.

They also keep things fresh by getting into fairly regular shenanigans on the show by not always sticking strictly to comics talk.

StarF

StarF is a hip hop artist from Minnesota who primarily functions within the nerdcore community.

He occasionally yells at a microphone and calls the results music. Once in a while he likes to go out in public and shout at groups of people much to their confusion, calling it a performance of this aforementioned music.

If you’ve ever wanted to experience the excitement of some guy who likes to LARP as a rockstar yelling words at you in rapid succession over wonderfully bass-laden instrumentals it would be in your best interest to see StarF perform.

Tim the Balloon Guy

Tim has been making his one of a kind balloon art for over 25 years.

Come by his table with your unusual request (comic book characters, fantasy monsters, machines and more) and watch him make them a reality.

Mark Ramm

Mark Ramm, Co-Benevolent Dictator-For-Life of the TurboGears framework, is a long time Python web developer.

He’s currently working at Canonical Ltd, sponsors of the Ubuntu project, to make it easy to deploy services to the cloud.

Matt Betts

Ohio native Matt Betts is a pop culture junkie who grew up on a steady diet of giant monsters, comic books, robots and horror novels.

Matt’s poem “Godzilla’s Better Half” was nominated for a Rhysling Award for speculative poetry in 2010. Matt’s first novel, the steampunk/zombie/alternate history adventure Odd Men Out was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for excellence in independent publishing. His urban fantasy novel, Indelible Ink, is due out from Dog Star Books this summer, and a sequel to Odd Men Out is in the works.

Matt currently lives in Columbus with his wife and sons.

 

 

Our Maker Market is chock full of artists from our community who make everything from paintings to leather to unique electronics.  This year, our makers are not reselling anything – it all comes from them.  This is the fourth post in our series – check out the previous posts 1, 2, and 3 to see the other great artists attending.

 

The schedule of events for 2015 is now up!  We are jam-packed with 394 individual events and 479 hours of programming.  We have an incredible 103 hours of tech programming alone!

We are hoping to have other formats as we get closer to the event, so keep an eye out for that.

This Year at Penguicon now hosts our schedule and event descriptions as well as info on our Maker Market vendors, Featured Guests, Emeritus Guests of Honor, and of course our Guests of Honor for this year.

We want to thank everyone who is contributing to their community by presenting this year, and we’d also like to thank our programming team for working so hard throughout the year to bring these events to the community. They work hard to ensure that there is something here for everyone.

If you see any errors in the schedule, please contact [email protected] ASAP.

 

Our Eco Track head, Jessica Roland, hopes you will be as excited as she is for all of the wonderful panels that are happening this year in her track.  If you are interested in seeing what else is happening this year check out all of our programming.

Rethinking Urban Spaces

We’ll talk about the types of lands used (single vacant parcel, blighted multifamily flat, commercial space) and what is legal. We’ll use three examples: An Urban Farm, A Shipping Container homestead retrofitted on a pre-existing blighted bungalow, and a Retention pond created from the basement of a blighted home. Participants will break into groups to come up with novel ideas for repurposing urban infrastructure together. Maybe we can come up with some truly innovative project ideas for real world use!

Homesteading for the Beginner

Interested in learning how to live a more self-sustaining life? Come and see how you can get started on the homesteading path from two experienced homesteaders. Learn how they got started and what they have found to work.

Conflict in the Garden

Gardens project a peaceful image, but having one can lead to a struggle against nature, pests,family members and even yourself. We’ll talk about methods of cultivating peace in gardening, including Integrative Pest Management, low maintenance gardening, choosing beneficial and native plants, easy vegetable plants, and self-motivation.

Farm Detroit: The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative

Overview of the story behind the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, an in-depth explanation of each of its 15 different projects, and overall site development plan. Themes include: Detroit, blue & green infrastructure, social innovation, and social entrepreneurship.

 

 

We continue to preview all of the amazing guests that will be at Penguicon this year.  If you missed the previous posts make sure you check them out 1, 2, 3 and 4.  We are maintaining a full list of all of our guests at This Year at Penguicon.

David Gazdowicz

David Gazdowicz has been a video maker and animator in the Metro Detroit area for more than a decade.

He currently splits his time between teaching at the College for Creative Studies, freelance motion graphics, making mini-games and his lovely wife.

David has had work exhibited both locally and nationally. His latest showing was an installation of his retro video games at the last Detroit Design Festival, Offworld Arcade, and various other venues in 2014.

Jared Ficklin

Jared Ficklin is a partner and Chief Creative Technologist at Argo Design. A designer and technologist, Jared has two decades experience creating products and visions for major companies.

Jared designs with technology and has a passion for innovative or unique interaction models especially those involving interesting inputs and outputs like touch, multi-touch, voice, gesture, sensing and projection.

Jared spent 14 years of his career at frog design contributing to the visions, strategy, intellectual property and products of clients like HP, Microsoft, AT&T, LG, SanDisk, Motorola & many more.

His work has generated patents & has reached the marketplace through successfully launched products. He was once a cowboy in 1867 for the PBS living history experience known as Texas Ranch House.

Jen Haeger

Jen Haeger has a degree in Veterinary Medicine as well as a Master’s in Forensic Science, so she decided to forget all that and write novels like Moonlight Medicine: Onset and Moonlight Medicine: Epidemic.

She used to read quite a bit as a youth, but didn’t find truly spectacular writing until later in life when her husband introduced her to the works of Jim Butcher, Neil Gaiman, etc.

She’s an enormous geek and enjoys reading, writing, and watching Science Fiction and Fantasy, and playing Board Games and RPGs, but also tries to get out backpacking every once in a while (which was much easier to do when she lived in New Zealand).

She currently resides in Ann Arbor with her amazing husband and darling, baby, princess kitten named Crunch.

Jorge Castro

Jorge O. Castro currently works on the Juju Ecosystem Team as Cloud Community Liaison for Canonical Ltd, sponsors of the Ubuntu project.

He’s been using Linux since 1998, and his current passion is Juju, the new cloud orchestration tool from Canonical.

Hobbies and interests include heavy metal, paleontology, vermiculture, technology, and scouting out the best beers in the world.

Ken Grundberg – Motor City Free Geek

Ken Grundberg is founder and champion of Motor City Free Geek, a volunteer-driven organization dedicated to the repair and distribution of computers, responsible recycling of electronic waste, and teaching of free and open source software.

Last year the organization was recognized by the Detroit Free Press as a 2014 Michigan Green Leader and enjoys friendly support of local groups focused on social justice.

Ken is also a sailing instructor, life member of American Mensa, likes to bake bread, and has a time share cat.

Mark Oshiro

What if you could re-live the experience of reading a book (or watching a show) for the first time? Mark Oshiro provides just such a thing on a daily basis on Mark Reads and Mark Watches, where he chronicles his unspoiled journey through various television and book series.

Since 2009, Mark has been subjecting himself to the emotional journey that one takes when they enter a fictional world for the first time. He mixes textual analysis, confessional blogging, and humor to analyze fiction that usually makes him cry and yell on camera.

All of this earned Mark a Hugo nomination in the Fan Writer category in 2013 and 2014, and he has no plans on stopping.

Somehow, he’s also writing the first book in a YA trilogy set in a pre-dystopian world, and he’s still determined to fulfill a lifelong goal in the process: to pet every dog ever.

 

UPDATE: It has been confirmed, the great people at Exploding Kittens are going to send us a few copies of their game (which was the most successful kickstarter of all time, with almost 220,000 backers) to playtest during the Volunteer Bash!

We’ll ask that one person amongst the group who wants to play hands over their ID so we have someone to send the attack kittens after if a deck goes missing.

We’re the only location selected in Michigan, so tell everyone, and bring your friends!

Please RSVP on our event page.

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Join us after our next ConCom meeting, from 3 to 6pm (or whenever we leave) on April 12th, for Penguicon’s Volunteer Bash party! It’s going to have a carnival theme and have free food, drink and games! Even if you don’t want to volunteer, come celebrate with us at the Westin Southfield Hotel.

We’d love for you to sign up for an hour or four in any of our departments – we’ll have tables set up where our staff will explain to the things we need help with, from load-in on Thursday to Ops during the weekend through to load-out on Sunday.

Other possible ways you can help include

• Registration
• Panel time announcer
• ConSuite
• Badge Checker
• Games Librarian
• Event/Panel Set Up
• Greeter Desk (an elite core of ruffians who help people without reward)
• Event/Costume Photographer
• General Help

It’s a great way to meet people, get involved, and to give back to a convention that wouldn’t happen without its community – in other words, you.  Whether you’re a volunteer, staffer, ConCom, or the Chair, we are all volunteers.

Along with being able to earn your membership back with enough hours, anyone who signs up for at least an hour (at this event or otherwise) will be entered for a chance to win a free membership! Other prizes are handed out during Closing Ceremonies.

Check out the video we made about the Volunteer Bash in order to win a contest to playtest Exploding Kittens at the event – we’re still waiting on the results! If you’d like to make that happen, just “like” the YouTube video!

RSVP to the Volunteer Bash on our event page.

This year, we’d like to introduce the Penguicon Lab! The Lab will take over the 10th floor Hospitality Suite, and is an open space for attendees inclined to hack, code, or socialize with others.

If you’d like to create a panel, class or other event, just put it on the whiteboards and make it happen! If you want to argue about the best Linux Distro or arrange a Warsow or X-Moto gamefest, this is the place for you.

While staff will check in on a regular basis, this will be unmoderated space.  While the room is rather large, if there are any disputes about space or people using the room to start a war with North Korea, please contact Ops.