To make the most of your reading experience, we recommend you put on some appropriately epic music before you proceed. If we may, we suggest \u201cHymn to Red October\u201d from the soundtrack to the 1990 submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October. Once you\u2019ve legally downloaded \u201cHymn to Red October\u201d (or whatever your epic music preference), keep on reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nerd York City\u2019s DNA can be traced back to September 14, 2008. The earliest glimmer of Nerd York City was a never-baked souffl\u00e9 called New York Anime Fans, a proposed spin-off of the no-longer-of-this-world New York Anime Festival \u2014 which Nerd York City\u2019s Peter Tatara helped launch in 2017. The idea for newyorkanimefans.com was to create a year-round collection of Japanese events in New York City geared toward otaku. That site never got off the ground, but the seed remained, and \u2014 each passing year \u2014 as no one else was gathering together NYC\u2019s nerdy events (Japanese or otherwise), the drumbeat for what would become Nerd York City only grew louder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, while the New York Anime Festival\u2019s no longer with us, Tatara would go on to found Anime NYC<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We remember, too, building the first iteration of Nerd York City all out on May 24, 2010 in a fevered sprint after watching Doctor Who\u2019s \u201cThe Eleventh Hour\u201d with friends. Matt Smith, cold pizza, and cheap Korean liquor distilled into some nerdy Mirror of Erised through which everything was made clear. Of course, up until the actual eleventh hour of starting the site, we were calling the thing fishcustard.com. Golly, we\u2019re glad we changed that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be a repository of upcoming happenings and spotlight the institutions spanning NYC\u2019s various species of geeks. We wished this kind of website existed to help us plan our own weekends, and since it didn\u2019t, we built it ourselves. Nerd York City was chartered as a calendar, a black book, a map, and a guide, and these tenets remain today, but we\u2019ve expanded a bit, too. But we\u2019ll get to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We made a number of friends and contacts. We got invited to a lot of events. We had so, so many startup social networks and baldly shady advertorial offers knock on our door. What other facts could we throw into this paragraph to make it more robust? During this time, we dumped our forum \u2014 which we thought would be our killer app but never really got any traction \u2014 and exploded on Twitter \u2013 something we didn\u2019t expect to become as central as it is to Nerd York City today. What else?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We moved apartments, changed jobs, got a cat, tried fugu, and met Alan Alda twice. And our non-Nerd York work took us to Chicago, Orlando, Los Angeles, San Francisco, England, France, Germany, Australia, Singapore, India, Dubai, and Japan, and Nerd York City continued to update from each of the above like clockwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As coronavirus shutdowns spread across NYC, we made the following post on March 14, 2020\u2026 Hey, nerds, we\u2019re gonna take a break for the next couple of weeks. Stay healthy and safe.<\/em> A couple of weeks would end up being 10 months. With physical shops, theaters, and museums closed, Nerd York City closed down as well, and the Nerd York City team spent the year baking, sleeping, binge-watching Frasier, and getting into relatively good shape \u2014 and then stress eating all our gains away as a slow motion coup almost tore our country apart. We also wrote a book<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As shops and institutions reopened in socially distanced and virtual ways and gave their all to stay alive, we knew Nerd York City was overdue to return. We relaunched on January 19, 2021 with a new look, new technology, and new features in our biggest update yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nerd York City remains a calendar, a black book, a map, and a guide to all things nerdy in New York City, but more than simply doing this because it\u2019s fun, we turned the lights back on with a mission \u2014 to support New York\u2019s nerdy organizations as best we can, as each eyeball and every dollar helps New York\u2019s nerdy community survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For most of its life, Nerd York City\u2019s pretty much been a plump calendar and hyperactive Twitter account, but more than just cataloging content, Nerd York City hopes to create content of our own. Nerd York City\u2019s ideal evolution will turn it into a hyper-local blog that speaks to national stories but concentrates on niche news too NYC-specific for Newsarama, CBR, or IGN. Or, succinctly and aspirationally, a geeky Gothamist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, ya know, we\u2019d even love to shed our binary code and lead some physical events to help bring fans together in a post-COVID NYC. But, until then… Hey, nerds, we\u2019re back after a couple of weeks. Stay healthy and safe<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recounted here is the harrowing history of Nerd York City! To make the most of your reading experience, we recommend you put on some appropriately epic music before you proceed. If we may, we suggest \u201cHymn to Red October\u201d from the soundtrack to the 1990 submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October. Once you\u2019ve legally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-191","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post-preview"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/191\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nerdyorkcity.com\/broadway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}We finally got off our butts in 2010.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
At first, Nerd York City\u2019s vision was pretty simple.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s talk about Nerd York City\u2019s first 10 years.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
And then COVID-19 happened.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
So, what is Nerd York City today?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s next?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n