Lit Gloss

by Liz Spikol

Geekadelphia.com has a new look, and it’s white and clean—like EVE from Pixar’s Wall-E, or the MacBook Air. The old site was black, sort of the Atari to the new site’s Wii. But the mission remains the same: make the nerds happy. The site launched last year when partners Eric Smith and Tim Quirino needed an online home for some Stormtrooper videos they’d done. Then, inspired by sites like Geekologie, Neatorama, Technabob and CrunchGear, they started writing about some of their favorite things, like Halo 3 on Xbox 360, a British umbrella that’s also a flask and locally fashioned mini robots. Both were surprised when the site took off. “We get a lot of traffic for a tiny little blog,” says Smith, who owns a chinchilla named Mittens and uses words like “gorgeous” to describe Lego creations. Not long ago, the Geekadelphia crew threw a Battlestar Galactica party. A projector screened the movie while guests played an Xbox live version of the game. The party was thrown with the Hacktory (www.thehacktory.org), a local organization that promotes the use of technology in the arts. “There’s a huge geek scene in Philly,” says Smith, citing not only the Hacktory, but Chiptunes, Make Philly, Ignite Philly, iSepta.org and video game competitions. Geekadelphia is one of the geek scene’s online hubs, a place to buy John Freeborn code stickers, learn about the Hacktory’s Geeks and Toys event in August, or see promo items that’ll be featured at this summer’s Comic-con. Basically, if you understand any of the words above—or if you just love Legos—Geekadelphia is for you.