Date: Wednesday, January 22nd
Time: 8pm
Location: High Noon Saloon
First is Lucas McGranahan with “Dark Side of Your Mom: What Freud Got Right”: Sigmund Freud revolutionized modern thought, but his thinking is often caricatured or dismissed. I will defend Freud’s best ideas, no matter how much cocaine he was doing when he thought of them.
Second we have Ania Bialic with “All I Want for Christmas is Warp Technology”! For decades, Star Trek has captured the imagination of nerds and non-nerds alike, with technology that once seemed like pure science fiction—until now. Instant translators, Bluetooth, tablets, and holograms are already part of our daily lives. But what about the real juicy stuff? Transporters, warp drives, photon torpedoes, and food synthesizers—how close are we to turning Federation dreams into reality? Join us for a deep dive into the physics of Star Trek (with a few Picard memes sprinkled in) to explore how far we’ve come and how much farther we have to boldly go.
Our last speaker of the night is Connor Ciecko, presenting “POLISCI1977: A Brief Overview on the Political Happenings of Star Wars”! We all know about the blasters and lightsabers and Han Solo shooting first, but the foundation of why the stars were in a war is a little less clear. We’ll start with the Phantom Menace and work our way to Return of the Jedi and outline the political context underneath each movie in an attempt to explain the unrest in the galaxy. Is Jar Jar Binks the mastermind behind the largest conflict we’ve ever seen on the silver screen? Probably not, but he is the reason why the second Death Star blows up.