SnowCon: a geek’s winter wonderland

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Get ready nerds for a fun weekend of games and pop-culture. Bang Pop presents SnowCon: The Central & Northern Maine Gaming Convention, this weekend from Jan. 16-17 at the Black Bear Inn & Convention Center in Orono.

“It’s going to be crazy, geek-tastic, a lot of fun and have lots of events. It’s the place to be this weekend for gamers and non-gamers,” said organizer of the event Gibran Graham.

The event will kick off Jan. 15 at The Dime in Old Town at 8 p.m. Stand-up comedian Sax Carr, a former Old Town resident, will perform. Carr hosted his own local cable talk show around Washington D.C., for five years and currently does stand-up around Los Angeles. He has performed in various cities and clubs across the nation. DJ Dehuman 8 will also spin up some industrial and goth music on loan from Gothic Maine’s Plague night at the Asylum in Portland. Tickets to attend cost $5 at the door for this 21+ event.

Author Ethan Gilsdorf, who wrote “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An epic quest for Reality Among Role players,” will also attend. His writing has been hailed, as “Imagine this: Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ ” by National Public Radio’s “Around and About.” On Jan.17 at noon Gilsdorf will present photos of his time in New Zealand exploring the filming locations of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films. He will be doing a reading and a Q-and-A session as well.

The event will hold a variety of games like Catan, Carcassonne, Axis and Allies, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic.

“The heart of it all this weekend is the games — we will have all the games from last year and more. Strategy games, miniatures, card games, new game called rowboats, regular table top games and classic games, like Monopoly, or Apples to Apples,” Graham said.

“I had to kick out a dozen people last year at 12 as they were playing a marathon of Apples to Apples. It’s really a good place to meet people to play games,” Graham said.

There is also a steampunk soiree event which will give fans the chance to dress up like they were from the Victorian era. Steampunk stems from a genre and imagined culture of science fiction that came out from the possibility that computers were never created and instead we relied on steam. There will be a contest for the best persona and most impressive shininess for costumes.

SnowCon will also present the short film, “Crossing Shadows.” The film is inspired from Shadowrun, a first person video game that takes place online. The premise of the movie is, “Doing the same kind of Shadowrun missions over and over again, a bunch of friends try to renew their ideas and organize a live-action Shadowrun mission. The frontier between reality and fiction gets blurry when the live-action mission gets in the way of serious events,” said director Olivier Bonenfant. The cast and crew, who are from Montreal, will present the film on Jan. 16 at 8 p.m.

Online pre-registration is $30. A day gaming pass is $20 dollars and to observe costs $10.

Registration begins at 8 a.m. on Jan. 16. For more information visit, bangpopmaine.com.

• Winter Carnival weekend to `Beat the Winter Blues’ (February 16, 2001)
• Film Review: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (March 6, 2010)
• Walking in a Wal-Mart wonderland (December 7, 2006)
• Winter commencement cancelled (November 12, 2001)
• Annual ROC trip heads north for Winter Carnival (December 4, 2003)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010, 11:55 pm. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.