Geekadelphia

» see geekadelphia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Philadelphia kept a blog about itself for ten years and one day, and I have never set foot in Philadelphia. The first post went up on 29 November 2007 and the last one on 30 November 2017, which is the kind of symmetry nobody plans.

Tim Quirino and Eric Smith started it without a business behind it. Smith's own account is that they wanted somewhere to ramble about whatever interested them and a place to host whatever videos they made. For a long stretch the money it earned covered the hosting bill and nothing past it.

What it covered was the city's own nerd economy, the hackerspaces and the people building things in rowhouse basements. It threw parties as well. In 2008 it ran a Battlestar Galactica night in Old City with The Hacktory and Indy Hall, and it dressed the Trocadero Theatre for screenings of Jennifer's Body in 2009 and Zombieland the year after.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the geek awards ~

In 2011 Geekadelphia and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University started handing out the Philadelphia Geek Awards. The second ceremony sold over four hundred seats in a few minutes. Smith's working definition of the word was generous on purpose: a geek was anyone with a hobby or a side project they cared about enough to pour themselves into.

The awards outlived the blog by less than a year. The organizers retired them in August 2018, saying plainly that keeping the event funded well enough to operate had been a struggle.

~ go home ~

Quirino had left already. He went to San Francisco in January 2014 to work as a designer at Facebook, a year after the two of them had rebranded the operation and incorporated it as Analog Boys. Metro Philadelphia broke the closing on 31 October 2017, a full month before the site itself got around to saying so.

The last post was called "You're Still Here? Go Home." Today geekadelphia.com still answers. The domain now carries search-engine filler about people-search services and background checks, posted under a byline the blog never had.

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