Friends of Armed & Dangerous party 2016!

This year’s meatspace party for blog regulars and friends will be held at Penguicon 2016 On Friday, April 29 beginning at 9PM.

The venue is the Southfield Westin hotel in Southfield, Michigan. It’s booked solid already; we were only able to get a room there Friday night, and will be decamping to the Holiday In Express across the parking lot on Saturday. They still have rooms, but I suggest making reservations now.

The usual assortment of hackers, anarchists, mutants, mad scientists, and for all I know covert extraterrestrials will be attending the A&D party. The surrounding event is worth attending in itself and will be running Friday to Sunday.

Southfield is near the northwestern edge of the Detroit metro area and is served by the Detroit Metropolitan Airport (code DTW).

Penguicon is a crossover event: half science-fiction convention, half open-source technical conference. Terry Pratchett and I were the co-guests-of-honor at Penguicon I back in 2003 and I’ve been back evey year since.

If you’ve never been to an SF con, you have no idea how much fun this can be. A couple thousand unusually intelligent people well equipped with geek toys and costumes and an inclination to party can generate a lot of happy chaos, and Penguicon reliably does. If you leave Monday without having made new friends, you weren’t trying.

Things I have done at Penguicon: Singing. Shooting pistols. Tasting showcased exotic foods. Getting surprise-smooched by attractive persons. Swordfighting. Playing strategy games. Junkyard Wars. Participating in a Viking raid (OK, it turned into a dance-off). Punning contests. And trust me, you have never been to parties with better conversation than the ones we throw.

Fly in Thursday night (the 28th) if you can because Geeks With Guns (the annual pistol-shooting class founded by yours truly and now organized by John D. Bell) is early Friday afternoon and too much fun to miss.