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.