Penguicon 6.0 recap: day 1
Posted by wolfger on April 20, 2008
Got out to the hotel around 2:30-ish, feeling a little tired already (not a good sign). Lounged around the hotel room waiting for the first session:
LJ Meet & Greet. Basically picked up a ribbon and left, because I’m not all that big on LJ (my tweets get posted there, as well as the occasional silly meme) and because it was completely unstructured. I may not be painfully shy, but I also don’t care much to go around introducing myself to strangers. Some kind of moderation, going around the room asking each person to introduce themselves, would have been nice. The intros probably wouldn’t take long, and then people could mingle. A solid hour of just mingling didn’t work for me.
Tom & Frank pre-show. Tom’s always funny. Frank has his moments. The panel started off with the sound technician (Tommy Toon?) playing Avenue Q’s “The Internet is for Porn”, which most if not all of the attendees participated in. Then Tom and Frank took turns entertaining the crowd. Was fun.
Opening Ceremonies. In my opinion, the low point of Friday night. Scheduled for an hour it took 30 minutes, and was basically just “hey, look at these people. They are your GoHs. GoHs didn’t actually do much speaking as they did the last time I attended opening ceremonies. There was a computer voice that played a role in the ceremonies. I’m not positive, but I think the rest of the audience found it as annoying as I did, and the brief moments of humor induced by it were not enough to compensate.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: the Coming of the Linux Desktop. Jono did a nice presentation on where things stand and where things need to go. Community, Distributions, Chuck Norris… He also made some reference to Penguicon doing something with a bollock, which he assured us all meant that Penguicon was awesome, but we’ve all seen enough English humor to know bollocks are normally used in a bad context. 
Psychology of Swordsmanship. Not a panel as such, which disappointed me, but a roundtable discussion with the crowd about martial arts, and their psychological impact on us, the martial artists. So it wasn’t what I thought it would be, but I liked it, and the Aegis folks impressed me enough that I scrubbed whatever was next on my schedule and stuck around for knife fighting.
Arrgh! Prepare to be Boarded. Otherwise known as “knife fighting with Aegis”. Very different from SCA combat, but still quite fun. Light contact, because it doesn’t take much to cut skin with a sharp knife (and because nobody’s wearing any protection of any sort). I didn’t win any bouts, though I had 1 or 2 double-kills, and disarmed my opponent once (which, if we had been fighting for real, would most likely have been a kill for me, but it being a tournament I let him pick up his knife). A couple people told me I fought well, despite ending up a bloody mess on the floor. Well, my opponents have all been doing this for some time, I suppose. 
Ars Until Dawn. I didn’t show up on time for this, but it says “until dawn” right there in the name. False advertising! The room was empty, so I cruised around the hotel and hit some parties and the consuite for beer.
Shoggoth on the Roof. Fun. Funny. Entertaining. Fiddler on the Roof meets H.P. Lovecraft, with puppets playing the roles. Got downright raunchy towards the end. Then Chthulu shows up and destroys everything. I think the audience is still wondering if the guy in the Chthulu costume was supposed to come tumbling out into the audience, and if the stage was supposed to start falling apart….
