We’ve got a great lineup for you for the last show before our winter break! What do we get from schlocky TV shows like “Supernatural”? How do modern board game makers use 3D printing in their design process? How does indie video game development happen? Is learning more fun while drinking? Get your answers on November 28th!
When: Thursday, November 28th, at 7:30pm
(Doors & bar open at 7pm, with drinks available all night)
Where: Studio Theatre at Fringe Theatre Adventures
Glenna Schowalter: Exposing the Guts and Wires of Supernatural
In a world saturated with high quality television, why would someone choose Supernatural as the focus of their master’s thesis? Learn what mediocre media can teach us and get the inside scoop on grad school.
Glenna Schowalter is a writer, performer, and theatre technician based in Edmonton. She has a Master of Arts in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Alberta, which inspired this talk. These days she performs with Sorry, Not Sorry Improv doing all kinds of nerdy comedy, including a format that she designed inspired by — you guessed it — Supernatural. You can also find her streaming on Twitch once a week.
Tyler Anderson: Evolution of the Modern Boardgame Designer
With the advent of 3D printing, the monopoly on boardgame creation has been broken! In this presentation we discuss the history of boardgame design and the impact that modern technology has had on empowering creative people to express their ideas in the exciting medium of board games!
Tyler Anderson is an avid board gamer whose history ranges from playing Magic the Gathering competitively to producing board games that have been Kickstarted. He has a deep interest in the functional and mechanistic ways that board games work.
Madison Côté & Derek Kwan: Why Independent Game Developmers (Indies) are the Future of Game Development
No matter what your creative inclinations are, we believe that everyone can make games. Whether you are a programmer, artist, writer, musician, project manager, marketer, designer, and anything in-between–everyone has the capacity to contribute to amazing games. However, making games of any type is VERY DIFFICULT, and being “indie” (independent game developers) is the hard mode of game development. We believe tat indies are one of the most important parts of our game development ecosystem in Alberta, so we are finding ways to support our local indies and to inspire nerds like you to create games yourself! If you love playing cool and interesting games — or if you have ever thought about making games — come listen to this talk!
Madison Côté and Derek Kwan are the humans behind Interactive Arts Alberta, a non-profit based in Edmonton that supports Alberta’s game development ecosystem. Since 2014, Interactive Arts Alberta has supported local game developers by building capacity for games culture and game development in the province. Together, they curate the Game Discovery Exhibition (GDX), North America’s largest indie games festival, as well as its conference which hosts topics such as Indie Dev, AI/ML in Games, Building a Better Games Industry, and Indigeneity and Diaspora in Games. Recently, they launched the “Walkthrough Collaborative Centre” on Whyte Ave, a donation-based community hub for indie game developers to collaborate and connect.
Madison and Derek are also 2/6ths of their indie studio, Cozy Comet Games… making cute and cozy games to play while wrapped up in a blanket and drinking a warm cup of cocoa.
Since the last Thursday of the month falls on Halloween Night proper, we are having our Halloween Nerd Nite on Tuesday the 29th of October. Come in costume as we will have a costume contest! Our 3 speakers for the evening will be covering freaky topics such as unnatural mangling of books for the sake of art, exhuming the rarest of books, and unlocking the energy hiding deep below our feet!
When: Tuesday, Oct 29th, at 7:30pm
(Doors & bar open at 7pm, with drinks available all night)
Where: Studio Theatre at Fringe Theatre Adventures
Books are magical and important and should be treated with respect — but sometimes they can be transformed into a whole other kind of art. Introducing the world of Altered Books…
Winston is a reader, writer, designer, book collector, bookseller, holistic librarian, and all around book nerd. When not in the bookish world, Winston can be found singing in choir, playing with Lego, and just trying to make the world a better place. But he also sometimes wrecks books for fun. You can find him online at butterfliesandaliens.com.
What makes a book rare? What are “incunabula,” and why are they so desirable to collectors? How should you handle rare materials – gloves or no gloves? Step into the wonderful world of rare books in this crash course on all things old, rare and bookish.
Natasha D’Amours is a Master of Library and Information Studies student at the University of Alberta. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Victoria, has worked in printing and bookbinding for several years, and is currently working at Bruce Peel Special Collections as a reading room supervisor and exhibition docent. As you can probably tell, she thinks that books are pretty neat.
The future of housing is captured in the word “sustainable”. Housing needs to be environmentally sustainable, socially sustainable, and financially sustainable. And at the heart of this future is the energy from the Earth, energy that is transferred using geothermal heat exchangers.
Yasushi Ohki is the executive director of the non-profit housing development called Green Violin Community Development Company. With an education in civil engineering and architecture, combined with a career in land development, Yasushi has just completed his fifth year advocating for housing and is about to embark on the next five year Mission to Demonstrate new housing forms.
Nerd Nite Edmonton is back for the Fall, and we’re eager to welcome you back. Join us to hear about video game reviews and why they suck, bike lanes in our cities, and video game history.
When: Thursday, Sept 26th, at 7:30pm
(Doors & bar open at 7pm, with drinks available all night)
Where: Backstage Theatre at Fringe Theatre Adventures
Nathaniel Romance-Senneville: Why Video Game Review Scores Suck
Before you may play a video game, you have to buy one. When there are more than 5 million video games to choose from, this becomes difficult without some research. A lot of us use video game scores to help us pick. In this (hopefully humorous) talk I’m going to talk about why I think those scores are bad at their job, or at the very least those scores are less valuable than we perceive them to be.
Nathaniel started playing video games around the age of four, and hasn’t been able to kick the addiction. No cross-country move, undergraduate degree or soul crushing jobs have gotten in the way of the playing of video games (He even got his partner addicted.) When moving (back) to Edmonton, the bus allowed three bags. He only brought the essentials: His desktop computer, his monitor, and other things he couldn’t remember. In his spare time, he sleeps and works a full-time job.
Karly Coleman: Co-Design and City Governance – Self and Others in a Dispute Over Bike Lanes
I examine how people engage socially with changes to the material infrastructure of the urban environment, and I specifically look at how people argue about bike lanes in Edmonton. I concentrate on how humans influence urban infrastructure and how that infrastructure influences human behaviour.
Karly grew up in small towns located in northeastern Saskatchewan and central Brazil, giving her an eye for exposing the taken-for-granted in people’s lives. She seamlessly blends practicality with humour and so returned to university to pursue her Ph.D. She’s interested in bikes, cats, cozy murder, creative non-fiction, phenomenology and history. When she’s not writing about bike lanes, life in general, and her life specifically, she’s renovating her home, quelling cat fights, or performing random acts of gardening.
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone focuses on a brief history of games as an emerging and evolving medium for art, writing, and play, and the alarming loss of game history that continues to grow. Games are being lost every day, and without concentrated advocacy for recording and access, many may be lost forever.
Nisha Patel is a Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Edmonton and a Canadian Poetry Slam Champion. A queer and disabled artist, Nisha is a recipient of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal and the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award. Her sophomore collection of poetry, A Fate Worse Than Death, engages in the necropolitics surrounding disability, and is out now with Arsenal Pulp Press.
