This Wednesday, be a part of the inaugural Philadelphia WordPress Meetup, happening at Future Media Concepts in downtown Philly. This free meetup will gather a number of WordPress-loving-geeks in one room, to talk about WordPress 3.0 and more.

Web Dev Studios are providing pizza, and you’ll have a chance to win a free copy of Professional WordPress. Expect a lot of other WordPress themed giveaways throughout the meetup.

For more information, check out the Meetup page.

WordPress Meetup @ Future Media Concepts [ www.meetup.com ]

This weekend, the 2nd Annual Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con hits our fine city, taking over the Rotunda on August 8th. Expect a number of indie comic artists, rare limited edition books, release parties, and more.

Guests include Eisner nominee Ken Dahl, Earmon Epsey, Ink Answer, Benjamin Marra, Ian Harker, and Philly’s own webcomic legend, Box Brown. New York publisher Secret Acres and several other exhibitors from out of state (mostly Brooklyn and NYC) will have booths set up.

The PACC will also have a limited edition anthology of some of the best cartoonists exhibiting at PACC, with a cover drawn by Brown. Check that out, here.

It’s only $3 to enter, $5 for admission and a ticket, $10 for admission, a poster, and the limited edition book. For more information on the Con, visit the PACC’s official blogspot.

Philadelphia Alternative Comic Con [ www.phillyaltcon.blogspot.com ]

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy might be two of the most recognizable people from all of Star Trek, but Jeri Ryan isn’t too far behind them. Okay, you may not know her name right off the bat, but I’m sure you recognize the blonde bombshell Borg pictured above. Yeah, that’s her. Eyes back on the article now please. Thank you.

Anyway, Jeri Ryan, who played 7 of 9 on Star Trek: Voyager, is making a rather rare appearance at this year’s Official East Coast Star Trek Convention. It is being held at the Hilton Parsippany, in Parsippany, New Jersey on August 13 – 15. I know it is a bit of a hike from Philly, but totally worth it if you consider yourself a Trekkie, and it is a “must attend” event if you consider yourself a Voyager fan.

More after the jump!

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Local comic celebrities Tony Trov and Johnny Zito (Black Cherry Bombshells, LaMorte Sisters, Moon Girl) have released their latest creation, Carnivale De Robotique, for free via Comixology, the popular comic app available on iTunes for your iPhone / iPad.

Originally thrown together for Indy Skip Week, Carnivale De Robotique eventually expanded into four full issues. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, well, here you go.

Carnivale De Robotique is the story of a rebellious Nanny Droid, Wendy, who runs away to be a ballerina in the robot circus.

Robots who crave more than their programing allows for escape to Carnivale De Robotique; an amazing fairground full of electronic delights. Here, Wendy becomes a popular dancer and falls in love with Pagliacci the lovable clown. His rival is Baal, The Artificial Strong Man, demands Wendy’s heart and threatens to destroy the circus to get it.

Hit up the comic’s official website to grab the first issue for free for your PC, iPhone / iPad, or PS3.

Carnivale De Robotique [ www.carnivalederobotique.com ]

It’s back. The annual Make Philly BBQ. This weekend, head over to Fairmount Park for this yearly gathering of crafty Philadelphians. All are welcome to this public, fun BBQ.

This year, Make:Philly teamed up with Wondergy, a “Philadelphia-based science educational entertainment company.” According to the Make:Philly website, “Wondergy is a team of scientists who love to play with the world around them. They put interactive science education in unexpected places like Phillies games, skateboarding competitions, concerts, corporate meetings, birthday parties, and of course, BBQs.” We can support that.

The Wondergy team will help guests make “Solar Smores” (Smores made using the Sun, clearly) and will create an epic explosion to launch a trash can 20 – 50 ft into the air, using the sun… and some liquid nitrogen.

And in traditional Make:Philly BBQ fashion, bring a water rocket! If you need to learn how to make one, peep this Instructables page.

All takes place this Sunday, from 1pm to 3pm, at Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park.

Make:Philly’s Summer BBQ [ www.makephilly.com ]

Sunlight on a Garden Spray by Britt Miller

Our buddies (and a great new local startup) DrinkPhilly.com recently launched their new website and opened a shiny new office in Old City Philadelphia. To celebrate, and give back to the artistic neighborhood, they’re doubling their home office as an art gallery, and opening their doors this First Friday.

Adam Schmidt, the founder of DrinkPhilly, also plans “to showcase featured craft brewers, wine makers, and cocktails at the events to also help those local in the industry, as well as feature live music and food by local restaurants.”

Featured artists include resident Geekadelphia mega crush Britt Miller. No relation to the body builder. That’s one of her pieces featured above. You can scope out some more of her artwork at brittmillerart.com.

The DrinkPhilly office is located on the corner of 3rd and Chestnut (239 Chestnut St) on the second floor. The exhibit opens at 5pm and runs until 9pm. Interested in submitting your artwork into the next First Friday exhibit? Drop DrinkPhilly an email at info@drinkphilly.com.

DrinkPhilly’s First Friday Exhibit [ www.drinkphilly.com ]

Poster Art by Dave Perillo

This First Friday, swing by Brave New Worlds in Old City to celebrate the Autumn Society’s newest exhibition, Turning Japanese: The Rise of Supermen, Robots, & Monsters. A tribute to Japanese pop culture, the exhibit features a number of fantastic local Philadelphia artists.

You can check out some work by Jim Grue, Glen Brogan, Oliver Akuin, and Anthony Pedro on the Autumn Society blog (or by clicking their names).

All goes down this First Friday, August 6th, from 6pm to 9pm. See you there, Geeks.

Turning Japanese: The Rise of Supermen, Robots, & Monsters [ www.theautumnsociety.com ]

The folks over at Disney were nice enough to send me a copy of their dual disc (DVD and Blu-ray) special edition of James and the Giant Peach which streets today August 3. I am a huge fan of stop motion, Henry Selick’s (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline) films in particular, so I was really excited to check this film out in HD.

The film tells the story of a young boy, crossing the Atlantic Ocean on his way to New York in a giant magical peach with a group of giant anthropomorphic insects. The story is well known for it’s macabre tone and would seem like a perfect fit for Henry Selick; but the film fell short of expectations in it’s original theatrical run only making 28 of its estimated 35 million dollar budget.

James and the Giant Peach is a lucid acid trip for children, with its mixture of no less than 2 different types of animation, book-ended by equally strange live-action segments. The story is fun, the songs are catchy and the animation in the film is amazing. Even with my strong adversity to Randy Neuman I still love this film. But I do think the film’s over-all lack of a strong focus is why James and the Giant Peach seems to lack the cult following that The Nightmare Before Christmas enjoys, even to this day.

Check out the review of the disc after the jump!

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This Saturday’s 104.5 Block Party at the Piazza brings OkGo to the popular hangout in Northern Liberties. But the treadmill dancing band isn’t all that’s invading the Piazza. All of Philadelphia’s hip, social media loving Twitterati will likely be in attendance, and we’ve teamed up with PYT and Vitamin Water for a fun, Foursquare event.

Head to the Piazza and check in at PYT at 4pm to help create Philly’s first Foursquare Super Swarm. After you’ve checked in, head over to the Vitamin Water tent and show them that you’ve checked into PYT to prove you were there. Why?

Our own Timmy Q (of Big Red Tank) whipped up a stellar looking Super Swarm 2010 t-shirt that you’ll be able to get at the event. Check in to score a free “I Went to Super Swarm Philly 2010 & All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt” shirt at the Vitamin Water tent. I’ve put a picture of the shirt after the jump.

So that’s it Geeks. 4pm. PYT. Check in, get a shirt, and potentially nab a Super Swarm badge on Foursquare.

104.5 Block Party at the Piazza [ www.radio1045.com ]

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If you’re any kind of film geek you’ve certainly heard of the Mecca to Cinephiles across the nation… the Texas treasure known as The Alamo Drafthouse.

The Drafthouse is well known for its great programming, diverse genre nights, and is a destination for some of the great film geeks (Quentin Tarantino, Harry Knowles) of our generation.

I bring this up because the Alamo Draft Rolling Roadshow will be in Philadelphia doing a Rocky-thon on Thursday, August 19th, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They will be showing the first three Rocky films back-to-back on those historic steps he ran up so many years ago.

You can find more about the event here. If only they would have capped the night off with Over the Top… that would have been truly epic!

Welcome to Dialog Tree, where we still discuss the finer topics concerning video games, technology and other issues you’re less geeky friends care not to talk about — we just decided upon a better fitting title. So, let’s have a dialog, shall we? Have questions or something you’d like to see discussed? Let us know in the comments!

Aggregame, a social platform for video games, released the results of a year-long study of gamer’s tweets in the form of a neat looking infograph. Clearly inspired by tag clouds that visualize the popularity of tags used in blog posts (the larger the word, the more frequent the tag), Aggregame’s infographic states some of the obvious while revealing some provocative information about what motivates us to play video games aside from the fact that they’re just plain fun. (more…)