2012 Events Are Pending!

Good afternoon, Skeptical Gamers fans! I just submitted a boatload of events for Gen Con 2012. We’ll be repeating most of last year’s catalogue with, as I said in my last post, a few tweaks. Those tweaks include, so far:

• The panel that used to be called “Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and Pop Culture” has been retitled to “Lies, Damned Lies, and Pop Culture: A Choose-Your-Own-Panel Adventure,” so look for the new name when you’re getting tickets. New name, same utter awesomeness.
• “Cargo Cult Science” has been removed from the catalogue for reasons involving its difficulty finding an audience, the difficulty we always have sticking to the time limit, and the fact that Sara Head covers cargo cults in her archaeology talks.
• We have added two new panels. The first is titled “Mixed Media Nonsense: Pseudoscience Across Geek Culture” and will be like our classic choose-your-own-adventure panel but the emphasis will be on movies, TV, comics, and games and what we can learn about real science from the bad science they often contain. The second is called “When Will I Ever Use This?” and will cover all sorts of awesome uses for the math and science that students so often complain is completely useless.
• The talk “Crazy Conspiracies and Coverups: Secrets THEY Don’t Want You To Know About” has been expanded from one hour to two. Last year we went overtime and still didn’t have time for a Q&A. It was a packed house in a very large room and everyone seemed to totally dig the content so we’ve expanded it to give ourselves some breathing room and the ability to cover more ground.

That’s what’s changed so far. I’ll update here if anything else gets added or removed and, as I did last year, I’ll post the full event schedule as soon as Gen Con has confirmed it and sent it to me.

See you in August!

Edit 3/9/12: We’ve decided to double up on both “Mythical Monsters and Folktale Fauna” and “Crazy Conspiracies and Coverups: Secrets THEY Don’t Want You To Know About” since they were both huge and a ton of fun last year. I also got my good friend Rob, one of the founding panel members from way back in 2009 (who has been absent since then) to commit to a talk this year. He’s a math PhD student so his talk is titled “1=0.9999…How Innumeracy Affects the Educated World.” He’ll also hopefully be joining us on the “When Will I Use This?” panel.