If GeekCraft Expo, Oak City Comicon, the East Coast Game Conference, and Ernest Cline aren’t enough for yougeez, you are very hard to please! But fear not: there is plenty more exciting geek stuff on deck. Add these five to your calendar and stretch Ultimate Geekend to infinity and beyond.
The Carolina Theatre will screen 1989’s THE WIZARD in a double feature with The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (Friday, April 15, 7 p.m., $9). Little Fred Savage plays a video-game savant trying to win a tournament while evading his parents and a bounty hunter. Not a great film, it’s basically a feature-length commerical for the Nintendo Entertainment System, which is exactly what makes it geek manna. Of particular interest is the film’s focus on the Power Glove, the NES peripheral that was touted as revolutionary but then quickly faded away. Will the Oculus Riftthe virtual reality headset just hitting the markettake hold or suffer the same gimmicky fate?
As it happens, you can get some perspective on VR in The Nether, a play running at Manbites Dog Theater through April 23, and at ECGC, which features game designer Warren Spector. But Spector isn’t the only tech titan coming to town: AOL FOUNDER STEVE CASE will visit Duke (Tuesday, April 19) and American Underground (Wednesday, April 20) to discuss his book The Third Wave, where he sets forth his conception of the “third wave” of the Internet’s life cycle. Visit www.thirdwavebook.com for event details.
What if A Prairie Home Companion‘s Lake Wobegon and Twin Peaks had a baby, and it was mad for conspiracy theories? That’s the question answered by cult-favorite podcast WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE, which returns to the Triangle for a live show at Meymandi Concert Hall (Wednesday, April 20, 8 p.m., $28–$33).
Former N.C. poet laureate FRED CHAPPELL is also a prolific fantasy author? I had no clue until the Regulator Bookshop announced this reading (Tuesday, April 19, 7 p.m., free) from his latest, A Shadow All of Light, which does indeed have a Dungeons & Dragons rogue painted on its cover. Chappell has won many literary prizes, but who knew such fantastical visions stirred beneath those gentle scenes of rural life? Everybody except me, I guess, since it turns out that Chappell has also won two World Fantasy Awards. I’m coining the genre now: Sword & Prosody.
Looking ahead, I’d be remiss not to mention that FELICIA DAY is coming to Cat’s Cradle courtesy of Flyleaf Books (Wednesday, April 27, 6 p.m, $20) for a Q-and-A about You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), her new memoir about being the queen of the geeks thanks to her web series about online gamers, The Guild. The ticket price also nets you a copy of the book, and maybe the chance to ask her about also playing Vi on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
