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 third post in our series – check out the previous posts 1, 2 to see the other great artists attending.

 

 

Julie Winningham, our film track head, is excited about everything in her track this year and wanted to share a few of the awesome events.  If you are interested in knowing what else will be at Penguicon this year check out all of our programming.

The Smithee Awards

Do you like B-Movies? So do we! Do you find you don’t have the time to sit through all the B-Movies you’d like to watch? Well, you are in luck. We’ve watched a whole bunch of B-Movies over the past year and picked out the best parts to show you. To go one better, we’ve arranged the clips in classic B-Movie categories (Stupidest Looking Monster, Worst Science, etc.) in which YOU get to vote which clip is the best worst clip of its category. With 19 categories and 5 clips per category, it’s an evening of fun and bad cinema entertainment. Come for a category or the whole show. (Clips may contain violence, nudity or strong language, often all at once)

The Walking Dead: A user-friendly guide to the zombie apocalypse

Come join us for an open discussion forum on the success of the “Walking Dead” series as well as its flaws and mistakes. We will go into classic questions of survival during the zombie apocalypse: Where do you go? Where do you get resources? When do you dispatch your neighbor Fred who may or may not be a zombie? We’ll answer all of these questions and more.

Midnight Monster Movies with Dr. Bob

Dr. Bob Tesla returns to Penguicon! Last year, Dr. Bob and Nurse Feratu brought you The Giant Spider! This year, Dr. Bob is bringing more of the cast with him. Together, they will be showing you Christopher R. Mihm’s “It Came From Another World!”

More Than Human Vid Show

Come watch an awesome selection of fanvids (music videos created by fans) in some of your favorite fandoms (like Battlestar Galactica, Pacific Rim, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc.) themed around the con’s unofficial theme of human augmentation!

 

 

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, and 3.  We are maintaining a full list of all of our guests at This Year at Penguicon.

#teamswoop

#teamswoop is a collective of musician/artist homies from the Detroit area. They’ve gained a rep around the con/fest scene as the crew who is always partying harder and playing louder than anyone else around.

With styles ranging from chip to juke to breaks and about 17 things in between, a #teamswoop party has something for everyone. even if it’s just a tall glass of bunny milk.

Emily Gonyer

Emily Gonyer is a grown unschooler and 2002 graduate of Clonlara School in Ann Arbor. She has been using and encouraging the use of free software since the mid-90s, when she first began to use GNU/Linux.

In 2011 she participated in GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women working with the GNOME Engagement Team. Following her OPW internship she was a successful Google Summer of Code student working on GNOME Clocks with Seif Lotfy, Allan Day and Eslam Mostafa.

Since then she has continued to contribute to the GNOME project as well as Wikimedia, Mozilla and Ubuntu.

IT in the D – Dave Phillips and Bob Waltenspiel

What started as three guys forming a networking group at a bar in Ferndale has blossomed to close to 5,000 members. The guys who founded Detroitnet.org expanded to offer the “Pink Slip Party”, where the only attendees could be people looking to hire IT professionals, and IT professionals looking for work.

In 2013, responding to the call of “There really isn’t a good local tech podcast”, “IT in the D” began. The live show has guests from local IT staffing companies, business owners and C-level executives.

Host Bob Waltenspiel has worked for NTT, NEC, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Cisco Systems, and was awarded the Elite 40 under 40 designation from L Brooks Patterson.

Host Dave Phillips has been a helpdesk jockey, a team lead, a systems architect and even a Vice President over the course of his more than 20 years in information technology.

Jeannie Arquette

Jeannie‘s has a background in art, fashion, and costume design, She is also a highly skilled face and body painter. A twenty-year veteran of the Fashion and beauty industry, Jeannie has received multiple awards in fashion design and body painting.

Her other skills include traditional beauty and creative makeup, film/tv/theatrical/costume makeup, airbrushing & special effects. Jeannie offers training classes and workshops and is also the designer/creator of Artifice FX a line of prosthetics and creates beautiful custom stencils.

Jeannie also loves to paint on canvas and almost anything else she can get her hands on.

Samuel Hansen

There is a surprisingly high likelihood that if you have ever listened to a mathematical podcast that you have heard Samuel Hansen’s voice.

Of course, that also means that there is a surprisingly low likelihood that you have heard Samuel Hansen’s voice, given that it is rather unlikely that you have actually listened to a mathematical podcast.

Samuel is the person behind the ACMEScience network of podcasts, featuring shows like Science Sparring Society, Strongly Connected Components, and the twice Kickstarted Relatively Prime.

He enjoys long walks in front of whiteboards, wearing headphones during any hours he is not asleep, and very large batches of single origin decaffeinated coffee. Oh, and he loves talking about mathematics too.

Many of our Guests of Honor have enjoyed their experience at Penguicon so much, they’ve come back again and again.  We’re fortunate enough to have a number of them return this year! Our returning Emeritus include:

Bruce Schneier – Keynote Speaker (2007)

Rumors are, he PGP signs his grocery lists so that he can detect if someone has tampered with his milk.

If you’re even remotely concerned about internet security and privacy, you cannot miss Bruce’s keynote address. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press.

In his spare time, he’s also the Chief Technology Officer of Resilient Systems, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and a board member of EFF. He also has written 12 books, and has 250k readers of his blog, Schneier on Security. He’ll be speaking about his new book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.

Ed Mason – Gameface Labs (2014)

Founder & CEO of GameFace Labs, and creators of the world’s first 2.5K-pixel Wireless VR device – and it’s based on Android! Ed previously worked on cloud gaming with a view that streaming games themselves in 3D was a significant step above streaming videos, and went on to showcase a 3D Cloud gaming platform with a zero latency solution for stereo (and ultimately VR) cloud gaming at the EuroGamer Expo in London. Last year, he showed off the Mk5 prototype in the halls of Penguicon, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what advances Gameface has made in the last year. Check out his interview at last year’s Penguicon!

Erika Carlson – Girl Develop It (2014)

Erika Carlson is a software engineer and Apprentice Program Director at Detroit Labs, where she trains new programmers in web and mobile development. She is the co-founder of the Detroit chapter of Girl Develop It, a non-profit organization which provides affordable, beginner-friendly programming classes and a supportive learning community for women. She has taught programming to students ages 9-65, and believes that anyone can learn and benefit from basic programming skills. Erika is a happiness ninja, and says she believes in magic, needs at least six hugs a day, and tries to laugh as much as possible. Check out her interview at last year’s Penguicon!

Eric S. Raymond – founder, Open Source Initiative (2003)

Eric S. Raymond is an observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. His research has helped explain the decentralized open-source model of software development that has proven so effective in the evolution of the Internet.

Mr. Raymond is also a science fiction fan, a musician, an activist for the First and Second Amendments, and a martial artist with a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Open Soda (2012)

Based on Cory Doctorow’s Open Cola, Open Soda was our Hack of Honor for 2012.

Blasted Bill, 2005 Chair, created it to provide an Open Source Soda alternative for the Penguicon Community, and has been joined in recent years by Anthony Distel, who has been instrumental in creating new flavors.

Check out their surveys on our Facebook Group for examples of which flavors might be on tap this year!

Karl Schroeder – Author (2010)

Karl Schroeder is the author of Lockstep, Permanence, New York Times Notable Book Ventus, and the Sci-Fi Essential Book Lady Of Mazes.

Karl also is a technology professional, and has spoken at Penguicon on such topics as the emergence of the internet as a layer on the physical world, busting the metaphor of the brain as a computer, and technology as legislation.

One of his concepts, known as “thalience”, has become popular in the artificial intelligence community.

Nick Farr – Hackerspace evangelist (2013)

Nick Farr is an Accountant in New York City. Graduate students studying Hackerspaces (perhaps unfairly, he says) credit him with popularizing the concept of Hacker/Makerspaces in the Americas.

He pops up in other unusual places from time to time, such as being the emcee of record for Europe’s largest Hacker gatherings, the Postmaster of Burning Man and running point for smuggling former spies into Russia to meet with Edward Snowden. He grew up in Grand Rapids, graduated from the University of Michigan and pursued graduate studies dancing on the Vienna U-Bahn.

These days, he’s simply fortunate to be walking after surviving several (hilarious) brushes with death.  He’s also a rockstar behind our Operations desk.

 

This year at Penguicon, we’ll be having a Timey Wimey prom! Come dressed in your finest formal wear (we’ve heard bow ties are cool) or choose a costume from anywhere in space and time and join the Costume Contest!

Our geek prom is a chance to get down with your peers instead of your classmates – we all know your peer just might be Optimus Prime.  Word on the street is that he’s got some mean moves.

Costume Contest and Hall Favorite

This year, Penguicon’s Costume Contest is being run by N.U.E.T, the Nearly Useless Entertainment Team! You might know them as The Con Scouts, those causers of mayhem and shenanigans.

This year we are making the contest a little more informal.  This means no Muster, Paperwork, or Registration.  You simply show up during Geek Prom before the announcement and say you want to enter!  From there it is in the hands of our MC and N.U.E.T.!

Come down for some fun, dancing, and maybe enter for a chance to win some cool prizes.  Best of Show will receive a free membership to Penguicon 2016!

Our most exciting addition to our Costume Contest is the “Hall Favorite” award.  If you’d like to try cosplay but don’t want to get up in front of a large crowd to show off your costume, the the Hall Favorite is for you!

You can enter both the formal portion of the contest and Hall Favorite – you might win one or both!

N.U.E.T. will find people in costumes throughout the weekend and ask them to participate in the “Hall Favorite” portion of the contest. To do so, let them take a picture of you in your costume, and give them your name and info.  All the pictures will be posted in one location (either registration, ops, or the Greeters Desk), and all Penguicon attendees can cast a vote for their favorite costume!

The earlier you dress up, the more chance you give people to vote for you. Winners of Hall Favorite will be announced at closing ceremonies, and contacted later if they did not attend.

Join us for music, dancing, and fun at the Geek Prom, and let’s see some amazing costumes this year at Penguicon!

We are so proud of this year’s list of programming events!  Please go check it out, it is so amazing.

We have over a hundred hours of Tech programming this year, two Keynote speakers, and a new way of doing the Costume Competition (which we’ll post about tomorrow!)

We’ll have events so you can help assemble hands for Enable, our charity, as well as getting your own RFID NFC implant like the cyborg you always wanted to be.We have open chiptunes jams and at least 4 live podcasts recording over the weekend.

Now’s a fine time to:

• Check out the details for this year at Penguicon
• Pre-register (and make your ribbons)
• Reserve your room (and contact our party planner if you’re having one)
• Order your T-shirt to be picked up at the Maker Market
• RSVP for the Volunteer Bash carnival, and maybe win a free badge!
• Start fretting over how statistically unlikely it is you’ll be able to attend every event you want over the weekend.

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 second post in our series – check out the first post to see the other great artists attending.

Mat Roll

Mat Roll sells his Novel and Mangas, which he self-published. He also brings his 3D printer and demonstrate the many uses of it.

Our submission process for Penguicon events is officially closed!  That means our Head of Programming, Janet, and her team are hard at work on confirming panels, sorting panelists into panels, and scheduling.  Please try to be patient with us, we have around 400 events to work through.

If you have any specific concerns about your own previously submitted event, please contact our head of programming at [email protected].

I took a sneak peak –  as usual, there are panels I never would have expected but make me SO happy to see.  For example, Phil Salkie, half of our Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream duo, will be employing his professional experience for his talk, “Designing Industrial Control Systems to Resist Cyberattack,” which is so very timely.

In the coming weeks we will have a list of programming and descriptions available, and then we’ll put up our schedule (subject to inevitable revisions).  We’ll also continue to post features highlighting some of our favorite panels about once every week until the convention.

Stay tuned!