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Things to do: Cons and Movies

This is a weekend with something for everybody in the theaters. Astro Boy goes into wide release this Friday for the younger crowd (although a few of us older types might just sneak in and say we didn’t). Stan Helsing, the Parody is also out, with a lot of raunchy humor in a creature feature for the teenage crowd. The serious (you can’t really say Adult when the protagonist hasn’t made his 20s yet) movie of the weekend is Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, fresh from the Film Fest circuit.

The London MCM Expo happens the 24th and 25th, and if you like to cosplay in Europe it looks like the party to make. MCM stands for Movies, Comics, Media, and they cover them all. A few of the Media Guests include Terry Farrell, Nicole De Boer, Kandyse McClure, Masahiko Minami, and Ron D Moore. I’m not even going to try to list the Writers and Artists Guests, you’ll have to see the list yourself to believe it.

In the US my personal choice for this weekend is SteamCon in Seattle, with Author GoH Tim Powers, Artist GoH Paul Guinan , and Musical GoH Abney Park. Being a SteamPunk addict myself, I am reading their tweets and wishing I was on that coast this week. So I’m throwing an Abney Park video in at the end of this post, just to show you what you might have missed.

the biggest con this weekend is probably Mile High Con 41 in Denver, CO. It started life as a ReaderCon, and still hosts around 80 authors at various events, but now covers all aspects of fandom. Hot on its heels comes Icon 34 in Iowa City, IA, another ReaderCon that grew. Geek.Kon is a Sci-Fi, Anime, and Gaming convention in Madison, Wisconsin, also this weekend.

In Kansas City Motaku takes place on the 24th and 25th, and if you couldn’t tell by the name it is an Anime con. Necronomicon in St Petersburg, FL, is a media/reader con; if you are there you will get to hear physicist/author/singer Catherine Asaro’s Friday Night Concert!

From tomorrow through Sunday is the Ohio Valley Filk Festival in Dublin, Ohio. This is the event where they hand out the Pegasus Award for Excellence in Filking, and if you want to sing along with such classics as the Superman Sex Life Boogie or The Return of the King, Uh-huh or even A Reconsideration of Anatomical Docking Maneuvers in Zero-Gravity Environment you might want to pick up the Pegasus Award Winners Songbook. If you are wondering what Filk is, you can read the FAQ or listen to some:

And the promised Abney Park video: Enjoy!

Ask A Writer

If you are an aspiring writer, or just curious about the process, one useful event you should look into is Ask A Writer on Twitter. In these segments, renowned writer Lillith Saintcrow answers questions about the business, the process, her works, and anything else she feels like. There is a session coming up tonight at 7PM, but I haven’t figured out what 7PM means in TwitTime, so you can check out her Calender for details (I’m guessing Pacific time zone). While checking into that, I stumbled across Nicole Peeler’s new blog (yes, another author), where I found this fun little song.

Happy Birthday, Nerds and Geeks everywhere!

This week saw a few important birthdays in the evolution of Nerd and Geek culture which I thought I should mention. To start, on the 1st of September, 1902, the very first science fiction movie ever made was released: La voyage dans la Lune. I find it fitting that it was based on two stories about human space travel, one written by Jules Verne and the other by H. G. Wells. After all, between them they invented modern science fiction as a written art form, so it is appropriate they would inspire the first movie (and ironic that Wells would also become the movie critic for a British newspaper who panned Metropolis in 1925). One day after the birthday of Sci-Fi films was the birthday of the Internet; on September 2nd, 1969, two computers in two different locations exchanged packets over some twisted-pair copper. So Happy Birthday, all of us Nerds and Geeks! I think I’ll celebrate by voting for the Scream Awards nominees I like best, and then going to see It Might Get Loud, and follow that up with Gamer. Sounds like a party!