The History of NSP According to Nick Cardiff:

It was cold. Real cold. Colder than any other month I’d been a part of. It was April. It would have been the year 2005, but somehow, after the Y2K bug hit full force and Skynet went A-wire… well, we called it Year 5. Maybe not the most creative solution. We just figured we’d start over again. The human-made system of time worked for two thousand years so who were we to go changing it. After all, we were still resisting. We were still breeding. We were still… Human.

Before ‘The Year That Must Not Be Numbered’ people called me Nick. Nick Cardiff. That name died over the span of that horrible year. But it also birthed something new. Something deep down inside my gut that I could feel splitting like two atoms fused in Nitrate. I was forever more called, El Mariachi. I enrolled into a school; A special school. Pre- T-Y-T-M-N-B-N it was known as Illinois State University. Now it was known as Normal-State. Not state like Nebraska(RIP), no. State like ‘state-of-mind’. It was all we had left. I enrolled in this special school with the hopes of learning how to outsmart them…

“To overpower them”, the school told me; “You have to be like them”. I was on a one way ticket to a secure job of survival with an amazing pay-rate as I was enrolled into acting classes. I soon learned that I fit in with my classmates. It was hard not to. Especially with what we had to go through when the sun went down. Putting Beer Pong and F* the Dealer on hold while we had to go secure the perimeter… it was tough. We lost some good actors out there. Some, when they were on their game, you couldn’t tell whether they were them or us… I dare you to try. It wasn’t long before I met a girl. It was rare after T-Y-T-M-N-B-N but they were still around. I won’t lie when I say we took a liking to each other. Alissa Jones was her name… I think. I can’t be sure what with all the ether that was used in The Battle of Shaker Heights. Damn glorious day. Anyway, we stayed up all night once talking about what dreams may come. That’s when it happened. We had this amazing… idea. We would put up a show, for people like us! We were already on a fast-track for sweet salary jobs with studying for our acting degrees. Why not do something for free? Everything was dreams and rainbows until… the next day.

My friend Mikey, the first person I was going to call up about this great idea, calls me up first. He says, “Hey, Dude! I got this great idea where we put up a show and practice what we’re learning! It’ll be great!” I was not enthused. Was he spying on me? I told him to stay put, that we had some things to sort out. I could tell that he could tell by my tone I was already loading my guitar case. When I got to his place, he was ready for me… Bullets flew as we fought for who had the idea first. Rohde was there. He stood by watching. The poor boy just couldn’t decide who to fight for. But that’s what happens when 4 like-minded friends all have the same idea at the same time. Bullets and indecisiveness.

Later that day as we were laughing about the whole debauchery over a pint of stale Victory-Gin, we decided what to do. We would create a 501©3 Not-For-Profit company. That’s how Nothing Special Productions was born.