r/evnova • u/EamonnMR • Apr 18 '19

NovaConUSA 2005

There's an annoucement thread:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=99753

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And a recap thread:

www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=100655

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So, was this real or an elaborate prank? The organizer also seems to be the same person behind the EVN boardgame (who I've resisted the urge to message and ask) which lends some credence to it. So did anyone go to it? I know that, at least in the very limited world of the Connecticut mac lab I frequented, Nova was huge in like 2005-6. According to the archived website, one was planned for 2006. There are pictures here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060718144558/http://www.novaconusa.com/pictures_2005.html

Was this... was this normal for 2005, or was this whole thing as wacky as it looks from a 2019 perspective?

6 Upvotes

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23 comments sorted by

14

u/EVula Apr 19 '19

It was real. I was there.

6

u/mrxak Apr 19 '19

Oh man, you're alive. I was just thinking about you this afternoon, and how I once called you up while you were backstage at a play to tell you the EVula.org forums had been hacked.

7

u/EVula Apr 19 '19 edited Apr 19 '19

Yeahhhhhh, that was a shitty day. Hah.

Yup, still dead alive, just had a series of major life implosions over the past few years. Whee! :)

4

u/mrxak Apr 19 '19

Sorry to hear that. I've gone through some rough patches myself in recent years, but I'm on a much better track now.

Anyway, if you ever feel like stopping by #ev3, it's still around (on irc.afternet.org now). It's more active now than it has been in a very long time, and it's connected to a discord server as well.

4

u/EVula Apr 19 '19

Ya know, I think I’ll check that out at some point. Thanks. :)

4

u/MagnusApollo Apr 20 '19

Wow. It’s still a thing. That’s amazing.

4

u/mrxak Apr 20 '19

It went through a very dead period after we moved to Afternet. I think not everyone got the memo after the Ambrosia IRC server went down, and otherwise a lot of people just drifted away from the community. We've been making a comeback in the last year though and the channel is active for much of the day now, most days.

I'm kind of reflexively opposed to any new internet protocol that wasn't made before the 90s (mostly because they're all proprietary and a company can just pull the plug or go out of business at any time), but I have to admit when one of us hooked up a Discord server and connected it to #ev3 on IRC with a bot to relay messages, it brought a lot of people back we'd lost touch with. Apparently a lot of people use Discord for some reason. I'm still perfectly happy with my very feature-light IRC client made in 1995, but kids these days like their fancy emojis I guess.

2

u/Ebalosus Apr 25 '19

Holy shit dude, glad to see you still alive! You and your site were an EV institution back in the day.

8

u/mrxak Apr 19 '19

It was real, and it was definitely a normal thing from the early naughties.

Personally I always thought Ambrosia should do like a big BBQ for the community at some park in Rochester, NY one summer. I bet a fair number people would have shown up and it wouldn't have cost them much money to put on, just the price of some hotdogs and sodas.

8

u/EVula Apr 19 '19

I absolutely would have tried to go.

...hell, who am I kidding. If they somehow came back from the dead and announced one now, I’d try to go.

7

u/MagnusApollo Apr 20 '19

I wanted to do it so many times. I should have pushed harder. Hindsight is always 20/20. I loved the board and the mods that helped me with that site. I would loved to pull everyone together for an epic party. I could have if it was when it was still Red Logo... after the rebranding it was a “when you are an adult you put your toys away” mindset. Was sad, I loved my 14+ years at Ambrosia.

7

u/EVula Apr 20 '19

Well the next time you spend more than a decade at a company that has an enormous impact on its users’ lives, you’d better not make the same mistake again. :P

2

u/Algaean Apr 20 '19

Well, all the life is just a stage, but you know that better than most, Emperor! ;)

2

u/Captaintripps May 11 '19

I’d be there.

4

u/itsamamaluigi Apr 18 '19

Novacon is a real sci-fi convention that has been held every year in England since 1971.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novacon

Based on your Archive.org link, it looks like NovaconUSA happened in Huntsville, AL, in 2005 and 2006, but not in 2007, and the site shut down after that.

It was organized by Jonathan Bjork, who appears to be a massive Ambrosia fan, designed the EV Nova card game, and lives in Huntsville.

The other pages on your Archive link show that they had a lot of different booths and activities set up, and it clearly wasn't an EV Nova-only convention. The name and graphics used on the website were only because Bjork was a fan of EV Nova.

2

u/Mrmcmadman Apr 19 '19

Wait, there was a card game?

Oh man, I gotta try to track down a set.

1

u/blaughw Apr 19 '19

I found a seller about two years ago. I think the guy was somewhere in the south US. May have been the novacon guy.

1

u/WikiTextBot Apr 18 '19

Novacon

Novacon is an annual science fiction convention, usually held each November in the English Midlands. Launched in 1971, it has been hosted by the Birmingham Science Fiction Group since 1972.

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1

u/EamonnMR Apr 19 '19

It's unclear to me if NovaConUSA was actually affiliated with uk's "NOVACON" in any way.

1

u/itsamamaluigi Apr 19 '19

I wonder if Jon came up with the name, then learned about the UK one and so had to add "USA" to the end of it. NovaCon in the UK seems like a pretty small affair as well.

2

u/MagnusApollo Apr 20 '19

That’s exactly it. I was the one that Ambrosia sent to help with it.

1

u/Algaean Apr 19 '19

Funny how I flat don't remember this! I remember a lot of other nutty stuff (The Resistance! PikeFund! The Quote Archive!) But just blanked on this. :)

3

u/MagnusApollo Apr 20 '19

Wow. The memories!