Our Guests of Honor are:
If this man was our only guest, we could still have a great con. He is
the author of the Discworld novels, which can only be properly explained
by reading them. A short story set on the Discworld can be found here, and another
example of his writing is here
on the Thud website.
The Discworld has spawned a video game, calendars, two BBC animated
specials, plays, graphic novels, maps, a cookbook, t-shirts, scarves, models,
badges, beer, embroidery, pens, posters and is in the process of
being made into a tarot deck. The artist Paul Kidby has made a career
from discworld art. There is a GURPS discworld supplement. There is an
active newsgroup (alt.fan.pratchett) devoted to him. He has also
co-authored a novel with Neil Gaiman ("Good Omens"), which Terry
Gilliam is turning into a movie.
Terry Pratchett is also an avid player of first person shooters. When asked
for specifics, he replied "...lots. All the big ones. But currently return[ing]
again and again to Thief/Thief2, because of the wonderful fan missions that
keep appearing."
There's an excellent and informative Terry Pratchett fan website at lspace.org. His publisher
also has a website devoted to him.
I don't know whether or not he has a cat.
Eric is most famous as the author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar (the complete text of which is available on his web page), the book
that first described the open source development model, convinced Netscape to open their source code, launched the Mozilla web browser project, and introduced
Linux to Wall Street in 1998. He's also the editor of
The New Hacker's Dictionary (the online version of which is known as the
Jargon File), and president of the Open Source Initiative.
He was also maintainer of the Emacs Lisp library a decade ago,
author of Sunsite's original software cataloging engine (the basis for the
Trove software map used by freshmeat and sourceforge), the guy who put Curses
support into Python, co-founder of one of the first community ISP's back in
1993, a contributor to Nethack, and most recently author of the Bogofilter spam fighting software.
He's also been going to science fiction conventions since the 1970's, in an afficionado of Steve Jackson an Cheapass games, and has more
science fiction books in his basement than most big-city libraries.
Relevant writings from Eric:
The Glossary of SF Jargon page
contains both the
glossary and the essay SF Words and Prototype Worlds on understanding science fiction.
Conventions at light speed talks about how the people running
Linux Expos can pick up a lot of organization and infrastructure techniques
from Science Fiction conventions.
Eric has written a new paper for Penguicon, A Political History of SF, which will be the basis for his History of Science Fiction panel.
He and his wife share a cat named "Sugar".
Sluggy Freelance has been voted the most popular online comic strip on the
entire internet consistently since 1997. Pete Abrams is the man who writes
and draws it. Need I say more?
The very first week of Sluggy Freelance strips involved the forces of evil
installing Windows 95 on a macintosh, followed by an extended star trek
parody. The sluggy freelance fan club's web page is at www.sluggy.net
I don't know if he has a cat either.
J.D "Illiad" Frazer
Illiad writes and draws User Friendly, the only comic strip to be published
by O'Reilley (the technical books people). A picture of one of his characters,
the Dust Puppy, is present in Quake III. The "UserFriendly Productivity Virus" is the
work slowdown that occurs when an entire office discovers the strip and reads through
the archive, which starts here.
The fan website for Illiad's work is at www.ufies.org.
He's Canadian. I don't know if he has a cat.
Co-founder of Slashdot, the website whose
motto is "news for nerds, stuff that matters". This website gets over a
million hits per day, and is quite possibly the single biggest geek
community hang-out on the internet.
He also co-founded the Animefu website,
which reviews and discusses Japanese Animation.
The cat situation remains unclear, but barring further information he and his
fiance appear to share four of them. A picture of the first three are here,
and the fourth (named Sushi) is here.
Guests we can't afford to buy a Jacuzi Suite for, but who are cool enough to
come to our convention in spite of this, include:
Eric Flint
This is an amazingly cool dude, a published author in his own right, and the founder and webmaster of the Baen Free Library which is just awe-inspiring. The
library puts complete books online (in an easily downloadable format) from
authors like Lois McMaster Bujold, David Drake, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle,
and K.D. Wentworth... Here's a great write-up on the library from Janis Ian (the musician)'s website, and an earlier article of Janis's that puts it in context..
Clif Flynt
We have a TCL guru coming, who may be doing not just panels but a tutorial
session even. (See the programming page when we get it online.) Check either
his personal website or his
corporate website for more information.
P.S. a half-dozen other people should go here that I know of, but I'm waiting
to get a complete list at the next concom meeting.