Seattle is 14th geekiest city in the USA (really!?)

What do New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, and Las Vegas all have in common? They are the nation's top five geekiest cities for 2023.

Wait a minute ... where's Seattle on this list?

Seattle comes in at 14th, which might have some Northwesterners scratching their heads a bit. As someone who dabbles in the local geek scene, and a defender of nerd pride, it feels as if Seattle should rank higher.

Rounding up the Pacific Northwest's representation on this list of 2023's Geekiest Cities:

• 12th - Portland, Ore.
• 14th - Seattle, Wash.
• 53rd - Tacoma, Wash.
• 62nd - Spokane, Wash.
• 66th - Anchorage, Alaska
• 68th - Boise, Idaho
• 91st - Vancouver, Wash.
• 95th - Salem, Ore.
• 97th - Bellevue, Wash.
• 104th - Eugene, Ore.

These rankings come from the website Lawn Love — because when I think of of the passionate nexus of pop culture, science, nerds, and geeks, I think of lawn care. Admittedly, online lists such as these are pretty nerdy exercises in how numbers can be played with, and stretched, depending on your goals. But there is often nuance in numbers.

RELATED: The Northwest's pinball culture is flipping hot

As I've previously covered in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter, rankings like these are the product of a group of professors and PhDs who develop metrics in order to have some fun with data (and in turn, attract traffic to websites for finance, real estate, or in this case, lawn care).

In honor of Embrace Your Geekness Day on July 13, Lawn Love's smartypants panel considered 13 categories for 200 cities, such as: local comicons, number of comic book stores, geek social groups, larping activity, costume access, Dungeons and Dragons events, book lover-friendlessness, number of video game stores, and more. After weighing these categories on a 100-point scale, a list emerges.

A closer look at this list and one might also realize that it roughly lines up cities by size and population (cities, not counties or metro areas). New York City is about 300 square miles with 8.8 million people. Los Angeles is 469 square miles with 3.8 million; San Antonio is 500 square miles with 2.75 million people; Chicago is 228 square miles with 2.7 million; and Las Vegas is 142 square miles with 642,000 people. That rounds up the top five. In other words, larger cities with more people can cast a larger geek net.

Seattle is 84 square miles (not including all the water) with 737,000 people. Portland is 133 square miles of land with 652,500 people.

At the very bottom of this list of geekiness is Miramar, Florida with 29 square miles and 135,000 people.

Locals know that Seattle is not really just Seattle — it's a multi-city region split up by bodies of water. Looking across the Puget Sound area, one will find a pop culture convention for every month — CybFest NW just happened for Transformers fans, and Washington State Summer Con took over the fairgrounds in Puyallup in June with folks from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "The Mandalorian," "The Flash," and more.

Video game convention PAX West gets about 120,000 attendees in September. Emerald City Comic Con has been nearing 100,000 people for its springtime convention. Not to mention the fact that there are more pinball machines stuffed into the Northwest than probably anywhere else on the planet.

What else is around here? How about MoPOP, Funko HQ, Wizards of the Coast (the company behind Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering), Cafe Mox, Playtest NW (because so many people here are into board games, they make their own), Golden Age Collectables (the oldest comic shop in the country), and Archie McPhees. Of course, there is the whole computer angle to being nerdy. Do I really have to point out the tech companies?

If we expand our scope across the Northwest, there is too much to list. Let's just say there are multiple hobbit holes to rent, a "Star Wars" church in Spokane, and a "Star Trek" hotel room in North Bend, Ore.