A Mad Man, a writer, and a sexpert walk into a bar… And to know the punchline, you’ll need to come to the special ONESIE edition of Nerd Nite Edmonton! At our last Nerd Nite, the mere mention of a onesie whipped the audience into a frenzy. So if you come to Nerd Nite 18 in your own onesie, you’ll be eligible to win fabulous prizes! If you don’t come in a onesie… well, we’ll all know who the real nerds are. Celebrate a New Year with your fellow nerds. Be there and be square.

When: Wednesday, January 21, 2014 (doors @ 7:30pm, show @ 8pm)
Where: The Club (Citadel Theatre, 9828-101A Avenue Edmonton)
$15.75 in advance, includes fees & GST (Tickets available 01/12/14 at 9:30am TICKETS ART SOLD OUT)
$23.40 at the door, includes fees & GST
[Children 17 & Under Will Not Be Admitted]

Return to Insight: the art & science of advertising
Adam Rozenhart

At some point in your life, you’ve probably turned to a friend and said, “That’s a stupid ad,” or “I hate that commercial.” It might surprise you to learn that the people who work in advertising often say the same thing—but for very different reasons. The average person is exposed to as many as 5,000 advertisements each day, and even for the ads you hate, a lot of thinking and research goes into them. In this talk, you’ll be taken through the creative process of developing an advertising campaign—from the brief to concepting to research to execution. And you may be surprised to learn that contemporary advertising is a lot like Mad Men, minus the smoking and drinking.

Bio: Adam is the head of the digital team at Calder Bateman Communications and has helped lead a number of clients into worlds they never imagined. His client work has included projects like Plenty of Syph with Alberta Health Services, Thanks Alcohol with the AGLC and the NoHomophobes project with the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies at Services at the U of A. In 2007, with a small group of partners, he founded the wildly popular hockey blog OilersNation.com. Adam was named one of Alberta Venture’s Next 10 in 2011, Avenue Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2013, and was awarded an Alumni Horizon Award from the U of A in 2014.

Fan-Fiction: The Stories You WISH Would’ve Happened!
Tammy Lee

Are you convinced Hannibal sent Abigail off to live in Europe? Did you wish they had just killed off Sylar in season one? What if Ellie, instead of Chuck, had gotten the Intersect? If you are mystified by all of those references then you need more nerdy television in your life! More importantly, these questions are the sort that lead inquiring minds into a realm of speculation and hit or miss grammar skills that is fan fiction! There’s a lot more to fan fiction than tweens pining after Edward Cullen. You’ll walk away from this presentation with a well-rounded knowledge of the stories, the community, and the issues surrounding the creation and consumption of fan fiction; and, dare I say, a burning curiosity that may require the use of an anonymous browser to satisfy.

Bio: Tammy Lee is barely a writer, mostly a senior web developer, and has been writing, discussing, and reading transformative fiction since the dark times before the Intrawebz. She is a mentor with Ladies Learning Code, a co-organizer for WordPress Edmonton Meetup, and she is on the committee for Social Media Breakfast Edmonton.

Weird Sex
Heather Proctor

We humans think we’re sexy creatures. But in comparison with the rest of the animal kingdom, we are an unimaginative lot when it comes to sperm transfer. In this talk I will take you on a tour of sexual diversity, starting from the very fundamental questions of what is ‘sex’ and what are ‘sexes’. From there I will discuss crazy gametes, hermaphroditism, acrobatic postures, traumatic insemination, genitalic role reversals, and more!

Bio: Heather Proctor is a professor in Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. She had her eyes opened to sperm-transfer diversity during her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, where she investigated the evolution of copulation in water mites. She has retained this prurient curiosity and when not lecturing to undergrads about the wonders of biological diversity, continues to study sexual morphology and behaviour in tiny arachnids.