Recounted here is the origin story 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 "Hymn to Red October" from the soundtrack to the 1990 submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October. Once you've legally downloaded "Hymn to Red October" (or whatever your epic music preference), keep on reading.

Nerd York City's DNA can be traced back to September 14, 2008 and a never-baked soufflé called newyorkanimefans.com, a proposed spin-off of the no-longer-of-this-world New York Anime Festival. New York Anime Fans looked to create a year-round collection of Japanese events in New York City geared toward otaku. That idea didn't get off the ground, but the seed remained, and — each passing year — as no one else was gathering together NYC's nerdy events (Japanese of otherwise), the drumbeat for what would become Nerd York City only grew louder.

We finally got off our asses in 2010 to launch the first iteration of Nerd York City. We remember, too, building it all out on May 24 in a fevered sprint after watching Doctor Who "The Eleventh Hour" 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're glad we changed that.

At first, Nerd York City's vision was pretty simple. To be a repository of upcoming happenings and spotlight on the institutions spanning NYC's various species of geeks. We wished this kind of website existed to help us plan our own weekends, and, since it didn't, 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've expanded a bit, too. But we'll get to that.

First, let's talk about Nerd York City's first two years. 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 - which we thought would be our killer app but never really got any traction - and exploded on Twitter - something we didn't expect to become as central as it is to Nerd York City today. What else? We redesigned the site twice, including one version with an overly thought out nerdy subway map motif that we were really, really proud of but we've never, ever gotten a single comment on. There was even a joke that the Alderaan stop was closed. Comedy gold!

Lastly, we went to New York Comic Con twice during these first years, each time planning on a Nerd York City Tweetacular, but each time not posting once during the weekend because of the Javits Center's shitty reception and wifi. Meanwhile, our non-Nerd York work took us to Orlando, Chicago, San Francisco, England, France, Germany, Singapore, and (for just a few hours) Japan, and Nerd York City continued to update from each of the above like clockwork.

It was a fun ride, but we really felt like we were only tinkering with the Nerd York City concept, just making some ripples in some pretty deep waters. In short, we had greater ambitions for Nerd York City than occasionally changing its skin. Even if that skin did include an awesome Alderaan joke. Like the long gestation of the original Nerd York City, though, it would take considerable time (and a week-long forced sabbatical from our day jobs during Hurricane Sandy) for us to commit to building what you see before you. So, what is Nerd York City today?

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 cataloging content, Nerd York City is now positioned to comment on, curate, and create content of our own. Nerd York City is a hyper-local blog that speaks to national stories but concentrates on niche news too NYC-specific for Newsarama, CBR, or IGN to report on. Or, succinctly and far too aspirationally, a geeky Gothamist.