People in Halifax's music and theatre scenes complain about the frustrating situation where nothing will happen for weeks and weeks and then multiple big events all end up scheduled for the same few days. My life feels like that sometimes–in fact it does so right now. I've got a lot going on!
Starshipsstarthere at the Dark Odd Artists Show
I haven't set up my starshipsstarthere art booth in nearly a year, but I was personally asked by the organizers to take part in this coming Saturday's "Dark Odd Artists" show. My work tends more towards wacky juxtapositions and sometimes satire, but it's had some dark moments. In anticipation of this show, I've re-printed some of the darker stuff from the site, like Weeping Angels:
Or zombie hordes storming the Citadel:
I even dusted off Pixelmator and made two new pics, premiering in print this Saturday. One is another take on the harbour steps at the new Queen's Marque complex, mashing it up with the creepy Sardaukar blood harvest pods from a particularly memorable moment in Dune Part 1:
The other new pic takes the already pretty dark and gothy look of the video for My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade" and sets it in Halifax's historic downtown Grand Parade, outside City Hall. I really like how this one came out - the source material is already pretty dramatic but I think it all comes together as more than the sum of its parts.
Also, this will be the first chance people will have to buy prints of the popular Fallout-themed "Vault 902" picture I made after a summer trip to Debert's Diefenbunker:
I'll also have my usual "Mod Lewis" prints and cards and other favourites.
The event is on Saturday from 10 to 4 in the Maritime Hall at the Forum, next to the bingo/farmer's market hall. Come say hi and buy a picture!
Burger Bash Quick Reference is Live!
Next week is the beginning of the Halifax Burger Bash, a fundraising event that has restaurants all across the metropolitan area selling special burgers and contributing a share of the proceeds to Feed Nova Scotia. I certainly enjoy burgers, so this is makes for a fun time to eat out. However, the promotional website has always been pretty heavy and slow and not very mobile friendly. I've often found myself downtown just wishing I could bring up a quick list of what burgers are where. So, since web stuff is what I do for a living, every year I make my own version of the burger bash site and share it around. Over the last few years I've made an effort to have it be as small and lightweight as possible. Previously I had to write a Nokogiri script that scraped the website, but this year they've added a link to download a CSV file with all of the pertinent information, so it took me next to no time to build this year's version, which is now live.. It even has a GPS-powered "find the burgers nearest to me" button, which I never tire of trying out as I wander the city.
Giving my Punk Rock Software talk at Volta
I've found that making my own renegade ultra-light Burger Bash website is part of a hacker tradition that reflects the anarchist "D.I.Y." traditions of punk rock, like the code version of a 90 second long Ramones song in the face of the bloated indulgent double-album prog rock of the mid 70s. I've turned this parallel into a fun conference talk that has entertained audiences at ConFoo in Montreal, Self.Conf in Detroit, Halihax, and was the last talk ever at Fredericton's Maritime DevCon. The talk covers music history, the surprising parallels between music and software in the 1970s, and even has time to explain every single line of code in the site (which only takes about 10 minutes). And yes I discuss burgers. So many burgers.
To celebrate the start of Burger Bash 2025, I'm going to be giving this talk as part of a lunch series at Volta next Wednesday April 2. We considered catering burgers for the event, but that turned out to be too difficult, alas. But you can sign up here - hope to see you there!
Nerd Nite Karaoke
And if that wasn't enough, next Monday April 7 I'm doing "PowerPoint Karaoke" where I will be improvising a talk in front of someone else's slides, probably about marine biology. I'm going to be making slides for someone else, so I think I'll do something about software and maybe LLMs or integrating with OpenAI. It's at Propeller Brewing on Gottingen. No tickets needed, just drop by!