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December Geek About Town!

‘Tis the season! Here’s the last round of Geek About Town for 2016!

 

Thursday, December 1: MoPOP Campout Cinema: Die Hard

8:00pm (doors open 7:30pm), MoPOP (formerly EMP Museum), 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA

Tickets $12 ($10 for members)

This event is 21+

It’s up to John McClane to save this office holiday party gone wrong in the Campout Cinema screening of Die Hard (1988).die_hard_poster

New York City officer John McClane is in town to visit his estranged wife and daughters on Christmas Eve. But when the holiday party his wife’s attending in the exclusive Nakatomi Corporation building is taken over by a group of terrorists, it’s up him to take on the villains and save the hostages from certain death.

Watch the film that launched Bruce Willis’ career as an action hero, and gave Alan Rickman his first starring role as Hans Gruber, the German leader of the group of thieves.

Tickets include admission to Infinite Worlds of Science Fictionwhere you can view artifacts from another Bruce Willis-led film: The Fifth Element.

For more ’80s-themed holiday fun (and a place to show off your ugly sweaters!), join us at Yippee-Ki-Yay Happy Hour (21+, free) before the screening for themed cocktails, old-school hip-hop, and clips from classic ’80s holiday films and TV.

 

Saturday, December 3: Rat City Rollergirls presents: Debutante Brawl

5:30pm-8pm, The Rat’s Nest, 19022 Aurora Ave N, Shoreline, WA

Tickets $20 adults, $15 for kids

Want to meet Rat City’s newest home team skaters? Check them out in the Debutante Brawl, a Rat City tradition where our newly drafted skaters go head to head to show you what they’ve got! This year, we’ll have two mashup teams: Grave Danger and the Sockit Wenches will join forces as the Danger Wenches, while DLF and the Throttle Rockets are combining to become the Rocket Liberation Front!

Doors open at 5:30 with our first whistle at 6pm. There will be a reception/meet and greet in the lobby to follow the bout; maybe you’ll find a new fan favorite!

Tickets are $20 and available online or at the door; kids 6-12 are $15.

 

Sunday, December 4: 15th Anniversary of Spirited Away

Check your local cinemas for screening times and ticket prices!

 

Sunday, December 4: Doctor Wholidays

6:30pm-11:30pm, MoPOP (formerly EMP Museum), 325 5th Avenue N. Seattle, WA 98109

Tickets $24 ($18 for members, $9 for kids under 15)

Time Lords big and small are welcome to join us for our annual celebration of BBC’s iconic series, Doctor Who. Don’t miss out on this yearly tradition including the famous holiday-themed TARDIS photo op, plus costume contest, Whovian bingo and trivia, screenings from Doctor Who Christmas specials, festive live music, Doctor dance party, family-friendly holiday activities, and drink specials that are sure to make you wibbly wobbly!

Tickets include admission into MoPOP’s Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction, which features the original Dalek and Cyberman used in the filming of classic Doctor Who episodes from the 1980s.

 

Tuesday, December 6: All Geeks, All Games at Mox Boarding House!

6:30-9:30pm, Mox Boarding House, 13310 BelRed Rd, Bellevue, WA

Our All Geeks, All Games events are growing in popularity!

Join GeekGirlCon and Mox Boarding House in Bellevue and help us continue to expand our community of diverse and inclusive gamers to the East Side!

Help us fill that beautiful Tournament Room with folks enjoying our favorite games in a safe and accepting atmosphere. Why mess with the headache of traffic when you can come and play games with us instead.

Staff from both organizations will be on hand to help facilitate gameplay for the shy to the extroverted, from the expert strategist to the board game neophyte. With a huge lending library of games on hand, there will be something for everyone!

As an added bonus, if you play a board game from their library and love it, you can buy a fresh copy for 20% off! How cool is that?!

 

Thursday, December 8: Seattle Human Rights Day: Jose Antonio Vargas

jose-antonio-vargas_headshot

7:30pm (doors open 6:30pm), Thursday, December 8, 2016

Seattle First Baptist Church, 1111 Harvard Ave, Seattle, WA, 98122

Free!

This Human Rights Day celebration puts a spotlight on local organizations and initiatives who are making waves in the community, and places them in context with broader issues happening across America. This year’s program (the city’s 17th annual event!) features journalist, filmmaker, and immigrants’ rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas (White People) as the keynote speaker. An undocumented immigrant himself, Vargas, who also founded the Define American organization, has worked to elevate the conversation around immigration and citizenship in America.

 

Friday, December 9: GeekGirlCon Board Game Night at Wayward Coffeehouse!

7:00pm-10:45pm, 6417 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA

Do you love board games and enjoy teaching others how to play? Explore the board/card game hobby and meet folks happy to teach you their favorite board games! Come and play with folks who love playing games. And the best part about the GeekGirlCon game nights with our friends at Wayward? They are absolutely FREE with no cover charge!

Our group is inclusive and totally newbie-friendly. We play a wide range of modern board and card games as well as some classics. You might find CodenamesLove Letter, SplendorKing of Tokyo, Völuspá, slashAlien Frontiers, Locke & Key, Coup, Tokaido, SuperfightThe Resistance, Colt ExpressSkull and Roses, Settlers of Catan, 7 Wonders, Toc Toc Woodman, FLUXX and many more!

Bring a game with you or just bring yourself. Join GeekGirlCon staffers, make some new friends, play some games, and enjoy some delicious organic, fair trade, and shade-grown coffee.

 

Saturday, December 10: The Ada Party

10:00am-5:00pm, The Living Computer Museum, 2245 1st Ave S, Seattle, Washington 98134

Tickets $10

All-ages public event celebrating one of the first influencers in computing history, Ada Lovelace! Join us in our brand new interactive 1st floor space for birthday treats, presentations by leading ladies of the tech world, workshops for all ages, and a film screening of Code: Debugging the Gender Gap!

 

Saturday, December 10-Sunday, December 11: GeekCraft Expo

11:00pm-6:00pm, Seattle Center Pavilion, 305 Harrison St, Seattle, WA

GeekCraft Expo is a curated craft market specializing in handmade, “geek”-themed crafts of all kinds; clothing, accessories, toys, home decoration, furniture, art…if it’s geeky and made by hand, it can be found at a GeekCraft Expo. If you’d like to see some examples of what you can find at GeekCraft Expo, visit our photo gallery page.

 

Tuesday, December 13: Why do we vote the way we do? With Hanna Brooks Olsen

7:30PM, Tuesday, December 13, 2016

The Public Room, Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Ave, Seattle, WA 98101

Free!

Why did you vote the way you did—and who helped you make your decision? Between fake Facebook news, the domination of cable news personalities, and the rapid shrinking of local media outlets, it’s harder than ever to figure out how we even feel about an issue. Often, we turn to trusted sources…like our friends and family. But what does that mean for our ballots?

Join Town Hall Scholar-in-Residence, policy wonk, and Seattlish co-founder Hanna Brooks Olsen for an original talk on the subject of trust and voting, followed by an interactive conversation about the role of the news, social media, and community spaces (like Town Hall!) in politics, both local and national.

 

Thursday, December 15: Star Wars: Rogue One Premiere: Cinerama

4:00pm-1:00am, Seattle Cinerama, 2100 4th Ave, Seattle, Washington 98121

Garrison Titan and Alpha Base return to entertain fans at The Cinerama!

 

Thursday, December 15: Star Wars: Rogue One Premiere: PacSci IMAX

4:00pm-1:00am, Pacific Science Center, 200 2nd Ave N, Seattle, Washington 98109

Garrison Titan roams the Pacific Science Center to entertain fans awaiting Rogue One in IMAX!

 

Wednesday, December 21: The Good Shubzilla Augustus B Heart Sic Ill Almond Roca Tom Hutch

8:00pm-12:00am, Substation, 645 NW 45th St, Seattle, Washington 98107

See GeekGirlCon’s very own merch manager/resident rap superstar, Shubz, in a live gig at Substation!

 

Friday, December 23: GeekGirlCon Board Game Night at Wayward Coffeehouse!

7:00pm-10:45pm, 6417 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA

Do you love board games and enjoy teaching others how to play? Explore the board/card game hobby and meet folks happy to teach you their favorite board games! Come and play with folks who love playing games. And the best part about the GeekGirlCon game nights with our friends at Wayward? They are absolutely FREE with no cover charge!

Our group is inclusive and totally newbie-friendly. We play a wide range of modern board and card games as well as some classics. You might find CodenamesLove Letter, SplendorKing of Tokyo, Völuspá, slashAlien Frontiers, Locke & Key, Coup, Tokaido, SuperfightThe Resistance, Colt ExpressSkull and Roses, Settlers of Catan, 7 Wonders, Toc Toc Woodman, FLUXX and many more!

Bring a game with you or just bring yourself. Join GeekGirlCon staffers, make some new friends, play some games, and enjoy some delicious organic, fair trade, and shade-grown coffee.

 

Tuesday, December 27: Jessica Bennett with Jeannie Yandel: Welcome to the ‘Feminist Fight Club’

7:30pm (doors open 6:30pm), Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Great Hall, Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA 98101

Tickets $5

It was a fight club—but without the fighting and without the men. Every month the women would gather, sharing tips for how to tackle the ultimate workplace enemy: sexism. The first rule of the club was not to talk about the club—but the time has come to take it public. In her new book, Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual (for a Sexist Workplace), New York Times journalist and Seattle native Jessica Bennett blends research, personal examples, and playful exercises to create a modern-day field guide for navigating pervasive workplace sexism. In conversation with KUOW producer Jeannie Yandel, Bennett will discuss both overt and subtle sexism that persists, how she took inspiration from the trailblazing women who came before her, and the way that modern gender bias plays into everything from the wage gap to our presidential election.

JC Lau
“Rock On!”

A Brief History of Time Travel: A Mindbending Documentary

By Sarah J. Mendonca, Freelance Writer and Author

 

The thing I love most about GeekGirlCon is its bi-weekly board games nights (sorry convention). While the convention let’s me nerd out for nearly 48 hours straight, the board game nights are what introduced me to the local geek community. On one such night I had the pleasure of meeting Wanda Bertram over a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill. The whole group may have died by zombies, except me of course, but I was still able to learn about an interesting documentary.

It turned out Wanda is the Producer of A Brief History of Time Travel, a documentary that explores the history and connection between time travel and pop culture. As a Whovian, Doctor Who was the first thing to pop to mind. Fortunately once I learned Wanda Gregory, a Doctor Who scholar, was interviewed for the film I wanted to learn more. Apparently you can study your favorite fandom, and get paid for it. Who knew?

This documentary started as a side project for creator and director, Gisella Bustillos, while she attended film school in New York City. For years she’s slowly compiled interviews from experts in various industries, including: video games, speculative fiction, physics, and more.

Gisella and Wanda were generous enough to give their time for an interview with GeekGirlCon.

Movie Trailer:

(https://vimeo.com/100442149)

What got you on to the topic of time travel?

[Gisella] I’ve always been interested in time travel. I grew up reading books like A Wrinkle in Time, and one of my favorite comic books growing up was Calvin and Hobbes. I always loved when he was in a little time machine going back to look at dinosaurs.

But I don’t think I really started thinking about the project until I watched a movie in film school, called La Jetee. It is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. It just brought up these ideas of mortality, timelessness, time and memory. And inspired me to learn more about time travel, and what better what to learn more than doing a documentary about it. I realized that there’s already a lot of documentaries that talk about the physics of time travel, like Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole, but nobody really talks about the history, and that’s the part that really started interesting me.

Both of you are coming to the project with different academic backgrounds, how do you think it has prepared you for such a large project?

[Gisella] Film school was basically a crash course in filmmaking. We had to do a lot of films in a very short amount of time. Going to film school definitely helped my confidence a lot in film. It also definitely helped to have that support system. I can still talk to some of my professors, and get their feedback on stuff. And that’s definitely helped me prepare for the project.

[Wanda] Most of my work in film before getting on the project was just working on a smaller more puerperal level with the Northwest Film Forum, and SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) sometimes. Also, throughout college I ran a speculative fiction journal on campus which hooked me in to the sci-fi fan community, and I got to be apart of that conversation with people who are a lot more into sci-fi than I ever had time to become. It’s amazing how much people know. And I think just the culture around that has also really fascinated me, and that set me up well to help out on this project.

Both of you are in your early-to-mid twenties, and fairly young to be making a film of this caliber. How do you think your age has affected how people interact with you when it comes to making the project?

[Gisella] Initially, I never really thought about my age. There’s a lot of young people who have actually done feature length films. Lena Dunham is the first person who comes to mind, and she has her own TV show now. Richard Kelly directed Donny Darko when he was 25, and that’s like a four million dollar film. So I never thought about it as my age affecting my project. I definitely feel like when people hear about me directing this it turns heads, because I’m not a really nerdy white guy. I’m not the typical kind of person that you think would be doing this. But it’s something that I really love and interested in.

[Wanda] It’s not that we’re young, but I think it’s that we’re young and women. Traditionally we’re not one of the more recognized demographics in geek culture and I think that making this film has been really interesting in terms that we come into contact with a lot of different people who would consider themselves geeks. And the most important ones I think have been other women. Personally I think that its cool to be young doing this project, because a lot of that opens us up to know more about methods of non-traditional fundraising. The fact that we’re around at a time where films are being made with Kickstarter, [or other] crowd funding is exciting.

The director, producer, and editor for this documentary are all women. What has it been like working as an all-female led team?

[Wanda] Its been really great working with Gisella and Dani. Both of them are really inspiring people to work with. We all met through a series of film events around Seattle and the Pacific NW where we discovered a shared passion for science fiction. I think that being women in sci-fi you naturally have a perspective that is kind of subversive. I think we have shared interests of the more subversive or revolutionary side of sci-fi. What’s amazing though that a lot of the people we’ve interviewed for this film, the natural people to interview about time travel, have been men. So we also try to share the voices of a bunch of awesome geeky women. Like Chana Phaedra, a cryobiologist, who is super smart, and Wanda Gregory, a Doctor Who scholar and professor. So that I think to answer your question being a woman has definitely influenced the direction of the film and who we are trying to feature.

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Image courtesy of the “A Brief History of Time Travel” Kickstarter

 

There is a variety of ways you could have funded your project, why did you choose Kickstarter specifically?

[Wanda] We’ve been doing grant work as well, on the local and national level. But we really tried to find a great way to get most of our post-production funding from our supportive fan base we developed during production. Fortunately we can do really gorgeous post-production on a pretty good budget because we’ve gotten such an outpouring of volunteer support. More than that I think that community based fundraising is something that we both really believe in. I think its fantastic model. It makes sense as we keep talking about [our project] and sharing it people all around the world.

If you could travel back in time to the beginning of the project, what advice would you give yourself?

[Gisella] It sounds really cheesy, but there were days where I thought I was going kind of crazy on this documentary. And it’s a huge project, it’s a lot of research, and it’s literally been years working on this. I would tell myself to take it a day at a time, and focus on the little things that need to be done everyday. Because when you think about the big picture you get just so overwhelmed and it can be really daunting.

[Wanda] Personally, I came on a little bit later, but the advice I’d give myself is to I share it with a lot more people. I’d share it with everyone I ran into about it. The more people I talk to about it, the more I realize that time travel has a different meaning for a lot of people, and everyone likes talking about it. The perspective we’ve heard from off the street and who we’ve interviewed have definitely influenced the movie. Personally, I mean both on a promotional level and on a research and development level, I’d talk to more people about it.

Thank you to Gisella and Wanda for taking the time to discuss their film with the GeekGirlCon community.

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The Kickstarter will pay for post-production of the film. A Brief History of Time Travel will be complete in 2015, and distributed at film festivals and conventions. A copy of the digital download is available for $25 via their Kickstarter.

Guest Contributor
“Rock On!”

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