When did Penguicon become a writing convention and not a Linux/Anime/Games convention?
Looking at the guest list this year, I broke them down into categories.
Writers:
MARK OSHIRO
DR. KRISTINE LARSEN
MARY ANNE MOHANRAJ
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
AMAL EL-MOHTAR
Karen Burnham
Kevin MacLeod
Technical:
JOHNNY XMAS
Jeff MacLeod
Curtis Potterveld
Chad Sinke
Bob Trembley
Other:
CHRISTINE SUNU
MAGIC MEEPLE GAMES
Nemo T Rathwald
Charles Severance
Claire Winn
Which puts Penguicon as a very writing-heavy convention.
Reading the Penguicon 101, they still describe Penguicon as
"Think of a weekend-long Linux Users Group meeting with hundreds of other very curious geeks, nationally acclaimed guests, hotel room parties, debates about world-building and the practicality of ion drives, video games and gaming tournaments, nerdy makers selling t-shirts and hardware, anime, costume contests, and free caffeine and snacks always available in the ConSuite."
- But Linux has been lacking in the last 6 years. None of the GoH or Featured Guests have anything to do with Linux. And no Eric S. Raymond as a Featured Guest.
- "Nationally acclaimed guests"? What? Who? I've never heard of any of these people before (except for MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL who is a known SJW, and Bob Trembley who I've known from past Penguicons).
- "Debates"? Not with the politically correct crowd running things.
- And they are pretty low on Anime again this year, except for the cosplay people.
I would describe Penguicon today as a SJW-oriented event praising bad writers (who are SJWs) where you have people falling over one another trying to be more "victimized" than others. And, oh, ya, there are few technical talks and geeks running around too, but try not to notice them.
Doing some (admittedly cursory) research on each GoH, I see that most of the guests are SJW (or lean in that direction).
Some have laid claims to knowledge/experience that they obviously never had.
***Tangent***Reading the bios of many of the Guests at Penguicon this year reminds me of this person we interviewed. Lots of nice sounding things, but if you really read the bios, you see that they really didn't (and still don't) do anything.
Some years back, I remember interviewing a "highly technical" person for a technical position. His resume was filled with "headed", "lead" and "managed" terms but had no "programed", "wrote" or "created" terms. That didn't fill me with confidence in his skills, but he might have tailored his resume to get past the managers. So we interviewed him (mostly because our management made us). To make a long story short, he never did any of the work on any of the projects he was on. He just went to meetings and talked a lot. Needless to say, we didn't hire him.
***Tangent***
In a month or so, they will have the list of panels for Penguicon 2018. I'll look through them and post on them later.
