Illustrator Rosemary Trevale is currently asking for submissions for Picard Day, starting June 16th and running through June 23rd. Sure it’s a weeklong  celebration instead of one day, but whatever, it’s Jean Luc Picard.

For those of you who have never heard of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jean Luc Picard is captain of the Enterprise and is played by Professor X from the X-Men films. He’s awesome of course, and that’s why you should go to Rosemary’s Picard Day Blog and send over your illustrations, comics, or any other Picard celebrating items you may create. Head over to Rosemary’s Picard site here, and submit your work.

Illustration by Rosemary Trevale / Picard Day Blog

After hosting a number of great design related lectures through the month of April, Philadelphia’s chapter of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), is hosting an Adobe CS5 Workshop next month.

The three hour seminar will dish out all the newest tips and tricks that come with Adobe’s new Creative Suite 5. They’ll go over the newest tools, features, etc, and there will be a raffle for a chance to win your own copy of CS5.

Why you’d attend a class on CS5 without actually owning it is beyond me, but hey, you can give me your copy when you win it. Remember, gifts to Geekadelphia are tax deductible.*

The seminar is on Monday, June 14th, running 9am til noon. There’s also an afternoon session from 1pm til 4pm. It’s only $55 for non-members, $30 for members of the AIGA.

For more information on the event and the AIGA, visit their official website. Go get your learn on.

American Institute of Graphic Arts
www.aigaphilly.org

* No they are not.

Being a shutterbug and a video guy as well, I found this super interesting. The director of the show House Greg Yaitanes, let this interesting tid-bit out on his twitter earlier this week. Turns out the House season finale which will air May, 17^th will be shot completely with a Canon 5D Mark II.

This sparked quite a conversation with fellow Canon users and the director on his twitter, which I highly suggest you check out if you have any interest at all in photography. Now this is a still camera, but it shoots beautiful HD as well; and while the camera does retail for $2,500, this use on a major network show like House is still pretty unprecedented.

While I am a little upset this is a Canon instead of a Nikon, I find this fascinating nonetheless.  While the HD video shot with DSLRs have been mostly regulated to shorts and more experimental media, its great to see it truly go mainstream. But this is not the first time the Canon 5D Mark II made headlines either; it was also the camera to shoot the first digital presidential portrait of Barak Obama.

I know I am not the only camera geek who reads this site, and when I saw this video I almost lost it. The Nikon vs Canon divide quite literally has almost a Montague vs. Capulet air to it, which sometimes rivals your typical internet argument over Mac vs. PC. It me reminded of that moment when you scope a friends camera rig for the first time, and seeing whether he is a “Nikon guy” or a “Canon Guy” and how that sits with your personal belief system in camera hardware. Warning some language maybe a bit NSFW so turn down you speakers and don’t bother that guy next to you working on his TPS reports, enjoy the video.

Barcamp Philly was a massive success, and the after-party at National Mechanics was a lot of fun. We’d like to thank everyone for helping us get involved, especially Roz, Rommel at Showtime, SouthPeak Games, Melissa at Quirk Books, the dudes at Brave New Worlds, Paul and his crew at National Mechanics, and every single person who came out.

For those of you who have been wondering, we raised nearly $500 for Child’s Play Charity during our silent auction. Still waiting for a couple slackers to pay up for their items, but once we’ve got all the coin, we’ll print out a fake novelty check and send that money on over.

Check out my Flickr page, with a TON of photos from the event. Thanks again! Can’t wait for next year!

Barcamp Philly
www.barcampphilly.org

Remember back in August, when we threw that release party for Section 8? It was a lot of fun. Blue Robots were guzzled, games were given away, chicken parm sandwiches were devoured (thanks Tattooed Mom!), and everyone had a blast.

Our new friend Brett Silver took a whole bunch of great photos, and posted them up on his site, Event Updates. Go check them out.

Thanks again to Technically Philly, Tattooed Mom, Open Source Cupcakes, Sandbox PR, Timegate, SouthPeak Games, Mike Worth and the VGI, and everyone who came out, Twittered, Facebooked, etc. about the party. Looking forward to throwing a lot more like this.

Holy crazy packaging, Batman!

When I first heard about the Batman: Arkham Asylum Collector’s Edition(s) I knew, at once, that I had to have one. As anyone here at Geekadelphia will tell you, I am a sucker for limited, special, collector’s, and special-limited-collector’s edition games. I just can’t help myself. Ben has, time and time again, berated me for this vice of mine, especially after he saw my Soulcalibur IV Premium Edition, yet I continue to spend far too much money on pointless extras. And the Batman: AA CE comes with a Batarang (on a stand), a behind the scenes DVD, a ‘journal’ with a leather dust jacket, DLC, a massive plastic batarang case, stickers… just so much! How could I resist?! Stuff like this makes me happy.

What doesn’t make me happy? When advertisements for collector’s edition show off the product in an exaggerated light, leaving the consumer (me) quite upset. The supposedly awesome Batarang that comes with the Batman: AA CE? Made of plastic… and it’s scratched to all hell.The folks over at Ars Technica have a detailed article about the Batarang that perfectly sums up my thoughts. Which are essentially “hmph!” and “bah!” Come on Eidos, that was not cool.

Anyhow, I’ve got a gallery of the ‘unboxing’ after the jump, because Batarang aside, this is a pretty sweet looking CE. The ginormous case is going to look sweet on my shelf. The Batarang… that can stay inside.

Expect a full review in a few days… or whenever I finish this game. Extremely excited, especially with people proclaiming it to be this year’s Bioshock.

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I like to take pictures and with Wizard World Philly 2009 it gave me the chance to fire up the SLR and fill up some SD cards. I took a ton of pictures but these are my favorites. I  have been meaning to post these for a while now, but things kept coming up. Here is a link to my flickr stream for Wizard World 2009. I hope you enjoy them. I honestly can’t wait for next year!

Not be confused with Philadelphia’s Plastic Little, of course.

Photographer Vincent Bousserez gives you an insight as to what little plastic people do in their spare time.

There are over 100 photographs over on his Flickr stream. From running into monstrous bunnies to hanging out on a giant’s eyewear, they certainly go on some epic adventures.

Enjoy!

Little Plastic People via A Welsh View

Beep Beep! It’s the jerkmobile. Waaah-nakin Skywalker can’t seem to walk these days.

I really thought I’d seen all things Star Wars under the sun, but I guess I missed the transit chapter from our favorite Dark Lord of the Sith. I’ve found some images of tall, dark and handsome mocking machinery and transportation systems in a polished glory. As entertaining as this is, it has far from seduced me to the Dark Side: I’m somewhere between pissed off, laughing really hard and contemplating buying a cape.

Picture of our boy Darth riding a Vespa like a true Philadelphian, after the jump.

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I am in love with this idea. Inspired by Michael Hughes’ hilarious Souvenirs photo project (do check this out), Jasone Powell has started a series called ‘Looking Into The Past’.

Images are made by finding old photographs of places, printing them out, and then holding the print up in the modern day location that the original photograph was taken. So far, all historical images have been available for free at the Library of Congress.

He’s created a group on Flickr for this project, for those of you shooting your own.

This sort of thing is PERFECT for us folks living here in Philadelphia, what with awesome websites like Philly History and all. We have tons of archival photography from all around the city.

Who’s up for a little photography fun? The weather is warm and the city is waiting.

Speaking of looking into the past, looking back at Geekadelphia’s post archive today, I realized that this post is the 1000th post on the website. Awesome. Thanks for reading, everyone!

Looking Into The Past via Reddit

Wow, the folks behind Night Zero, an online photographic comic about the (eventual) zombie apocalypse, recently turned their camera lenses onto a different, but quite similar topic. Valve’s awesome zombie survival game, Left 4 Dead.

Head on over to their Flickr stream to check out several great photos of models posing as your favorite Left 4 Dead characters. Well done guys. Well done.

Left 4 Dead in Real Life via Reddit