I've got lots of Nerdy Convos. I had an argument with a City Council Member on why Mayor McCheese would be a great replacement for our recently deceased mayor. While he brought politics to the table, I brought the ideas, of paving our streets with McNuggets, and replacing our police system with Big Mac. I did this all at a City Council Public Meeting.
I'll share a good one when I have more time to type.

Me and Grenedire argue who would win between Bowser and Dedede.

We got brawl and I knocked him on his ass. I was Bowser.

@Stater

Aww hell naw, logically speaking Dedede would win, all Bowser does is pull levers, and Dedede can fly!

Back when Yu-Gi-oh was the shit, everyone was collecting the cars, myself included. After I got my Blue eyes white dragon deck from the 7-eleven much to the dismay of my father, I promptly took it with me to school the next day. I read up on the rules and you know how in the first season of the show(assuming you watched it) they could just spontaneously summon a monster each turn? Completely different from the actual game where you have to sacrifice a certain number of monsters to summon a high leveled monster plus a whole bunch of rules. Anyway the kid I played against randomly put out a 6 level card onto the the field which made me pissed pointing out the above statement to him. He began to argue with me that's how they did it in the show. You see the whole Yu-Gi-Oh card collecting craze was similar to Pokemon, they bought the cards because they loved the show but they never bothered to actually learn how to play it. I decided "Hey, if this guy is gonna be a ass about it, might as do the same thing" so I summoned the Blue eyes white dragon from my hand and proceeded to destroy the monster. For some reason he summoned a monster with 1200 atk in attack mode which destroyed him. I then proceeded to do a direct attack since he had no monsters or trap cards. I had a full set of life points and he had around 2000 or so left, (I think you start with 8000 life points contrary to what the show does). He summoned a 1400 atk monster in attack form and promptly said "I destroyed your blue eyes white dragon". At this point I was thoroughly confused and asked why? Your def points is 0, I answered " It's in attack mode". "No, with my previous monster and this monster I wiped out it's def points". The thing is, he seemed to have this insane conception that def points were like HP points....which is never shown in the anime so I was wondering where the fuck he got his information at which he answered, "I just know". I was incredibly pissed and proceeded to go into detail of the game's rules at which he looked confused. "But the show was never like that" he answered, I said, "Well yeah but the show and the actually card game are not similar at all",(until later on when the show adapted some of the card game's rules). I explained to him def points are used when the monster is in def position and in order for a monster to destroy the defending monster, the attacking monster must have a higher attack than the defending monster's def points. He believed that was too stupid because the game would just drag on which I answered, "Of course you dumbass, that's why it's a strategy game plus if you're smart enough with trap and magic cars, you can easily win"
I then noticed he didn't have a deck with him, I asked where it was, he answered "I only have 7 cards with me."
I gave up, tried to ask other people if they knew how to play, they didn't. I left my deck at home, went to gamestop, found a Yu-gi-oh gameboy advance game, played that and never touched my cards again.

Uh sorry about the typos, I was in a rush

I have argued with people on forums over why Zero is not Proto Man or Rush, just because both are red (among other related Mega Matters), I have fought very nearly to the death with another role-player over 12 gold pieces mere minutes into our inaugural session (it was a rolled encounter with other enemies that finished us off and brought the campaign to an abrupt end), and I have come to blows defending the Super Nintendo against the SEGA Genesis.

I guess that last one might be the closest I feel to being ashamed, as it turns out my dad was right: both are actually quite good. So while I find this so-called console "war" and all of its many irrational fanboys spread throughout to be inane and irritating, and I am a little ashamed of my past actions, I still hold some nostalgic fondness for those times.

Go figure.

well shamefull as it is me and i dont know how many people have argued over whos hotter.samus aran or lara croft

A friend and I once got into the classic "Which Would Be the Hottest Alien Chick to Bang?" conversation. Being a Trekkie, he of course, argued the merits of the Vulcan Chick from Enterprise, while I proposed there would be no greater lay than a Twi'lek dancing girl. My friend started his rebuttal, but then started screaming, "HOW DO I GET INTO THESE CONVERSATIONS WITH YOU!?!"

I took that to mean I won.

I WILL FIGHT TO THE DEATH ANYONE WHO CONTENDS THAT DICK SARGENT MADE A BETTER DARRIN STEPHENS THAN DICK YORK.

high school, junior year, after a physics class, me and two other guys got into an argument about calculus, namely, about who deserved the credit. I'm certain the idiots argued in favor of Leibonitz just to get my goat. of course, by modern standards, it's got to go to Leibonitz since he published first. but the obvious Newton win is obvious. yeah.

I had a close to knock down drag out fist fight with a fellow USAF Security Police officer when we were part of a four person guard detail.

We were discussing who would win. Batman or Superman. The movie had just come out, so he knew *all* about Supes. He didn't know dick about Bats.

The other two guys ended up getting between us before we actually started hitting each other.

During the fight, the nuclear weapon we were guarding in the back of the aircraft was unattended by us.

Ah those were the days...

Hey Davelog: Two wrong Dicks don't make a right Darren.

Major Nelson was the real Dumbass.

Myself and a lifelong friend nearly ended our friendship over the movie...Waterworld.

We argued over the length of time it would take for humanity to forget about dry land. Remember in the movie how dry land was a "myth"?

Oh, how we argued. I argued that there was no possible way that humanity could forget about dry land in a measly 100 years. While my friend thought that it was very possible.

We damn near came to blows and came extremely close to ending our friendship. There were a few weeks where we would not talk to each other.

All over a stupid Kevin Costner movie.

BTW....EdGreen gets my vote. Putting National Security on the backburner to defend the Dark Knight. You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar!!!!

I got in to a fight over the pronouncment of the word zebra while playing Far Cry 2 with my best friend (as I'm English I pronounce my z's zed so I say zedbra, anyway who gives a shit). It lasted 2 hours and almost ended in a fist fight.

We didn't talk to each other for 2 months.

My boyfriend and I do a "Which Comic Book Character, if real, would I cheat on you with?" nerd argument. Who, why, etc.

Try being my room mate walking in on that fight.
This week's was his Pheonix, mine Iron Man.

Also, after we chose, we debate on who would win the fight.
Of course, it was Pheonix this week.

I nce had an arguement with my best friend over the pronouncement of the word zedbra (as I'm English I pronounce z's zed so I say zedbra, anyway who gives a shit) while playing Far Cry 2, it lasted 2 hours and got so heated we almost had a fistfight.

We didn't talk for 2 months.

I still think it should be pronounced zedbra.

The closest thing I can think of that I ever had to a shameful nerd argument was when a friend of mine who was also a fan of DeathNote once asked me if Light Yagami was gay.
At one point in the series Misa is in lingerie and trying to seduce Light but he is too busy contemplating one of his complex evil plans. My friend thought that Light might be gay since he did not want to have sex with Misa.
I then went on to explain to my friend that Light was a sociopath and therefore the only thing that really gave him pleasure was having power over others by killing people.
I feel ashamed now that I felt the need to defend Light Yagami's sexuality. Acutally just thinking about it right now makes me feel a little embarrased.
Was there any indication in the manga or the anime that Light was homosexual? If there was I did not pick up on it. Anyhow now I can't remember why I cared, or if my friend even really cared.

Goku vs. Superman

That is all.

Actually, just to follow up, allow me to suggest a bit of light reader courtesy of something awful.com

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/goku-vs-superman.php

I am currently, at this very minute, in a window playing World of Warcraft, arguing with another player about whether it's worth the time and effort of the players to go and defend the Tauren city Thunder Buff, because (and you can quote me on this) the Tauren leader Cairne Bloodhoof has contributed very little to the well-being of the Horde as of recent times.

Hell, if you even UNDERSTAND half of that, you're a nerd.

Okay, so the topic is more childish than nerdy, and it was more of a rant than an argument but...

It was in 8th grade Leadership class and we were just hanging out for a reason no longer remember. It was near Christmas time and someone near me talked about the stupidity that is Santa Claus stating not only is he "creepy" but "there is zero chance Santa could visit all those houses in one night".

For some reason, I decided to challenge this. I was well aware that Santa didn't exist but I felt the theory held at least a bit of weight. I stated that Santa's sleigh could fly the opposite direction that the world spun, thus saving time. In addition, I argued that not everyone celebrates Christmas, cutting down on the number of houses he needed to visit. I also said that he could have a network of parents to which he sent Christmas presents to in advance, also cutting back on the houses to visit Christmas Eve. I closed my rant with the fact that "Santa has magic powers, he can make all kinds of stuff happen. So nyeh." The girl who started my rant just looked at me funny and played it off as a joke. Looking back, I still don't know if I intended it as one or not.

Why I decided to defend an imaginary fat man I stopped believing in at the age of eight, I don't know. I do know that it's occasionally brought up around Christmas time by the friends that have stuck with me since middle school. It's not one of my proudest moments...

Punchy McJesus,

In fact you're both wrong. As a word nerd and an Australian who has studied speech and drama and thus received pronunciation, the word should not be pronounced zedbra, with the d sounded out. It should be pronounced zebra, with the e the short vowel form. I don't like zeebra (long vowel form), but it is essentially accepted amongst the Americans, but I would never say it in any of the colonies or in the Motherland for fear of being ridiculed, and I personally think it's wrong (the way you do).

Of course, if you were meaning zebra (short vowel), then yes, I wholeheartedly agree with you.

Just don't get me started on monopthongs, dipthongs and tripthongs....

In the late 90's, my roommates and I were junkies for Mariokart on the Super Nintendo. We modeled our entire life around this game. We developed a philosophy around it, wrote poems, and discussed the proper etiquitte for using the lightning bolt. We thought we owned that game.
Well we came to find out that my brother's girlfriend knew the game as well. Her brothers lived in a house across town and also played Mariokart to the point of obsession. We quickly formed a tournament complete with different levels and pairings that lasted all night.
The point of this story is that during the first round of competition we realized that there was a fundamental disagreement in nomenclature.
We called the rainbow ? cubes "Boxes", their house called them "Presents". This was like a slap in the face. They are clearly not presents. Where are the bows? Morons.
The argument continues to this day.

I would like to suggest that the guy in charge of Anime Insider in the magazine's early days was not a total jackass and enemy of anime culture as he may have been portrayed as on this blog.

I also would like to request that Rob start a forum about the value of working within a magazine's mission statement.

I once made my husband sleep on the couch for a full week because his D&D thief stabbed my sorcoress in the back.

Also, edgreen totally wins.

I wasn't part of the argument, but I was there for it.

In the anime Riding Bean, Bean Bandit gets shot point blank in the forehead, and the bullet doesn't even penetrate his headband. It knocks him silly for a moment, but it doesn't kill him or even knock him off his feet.
The bullet is still on his headband at the end of the anime.
This began an argument over if it was because Bean was such a tough SOB or if it was due to him having a metal headband.
The anime showed no sign of him having a metal headband.
This stupid argument became a screaming match that almost became a fist fight.
I sat in a chair with my jaw on the floor wondering if I should remain friends with these two morons.
Years later in the Gun Smith Cats manga it showed Bean Bandit had a metal lined headband.
But he's also a tough SOB.

My buddy once sent an email to all his friends and at then end was just a small question. More like a survey than anything.

He asked, "Who would win in a fight, Spider-Man or Luke Skywalker?"

I ignored the first page he emailed me and just went on about this question. It wasn't just a simple answer. It really depended on the time's in each character's lives. The eviroment that the fight might take place. I talked about alternate realities and Extended Universes. I brought up a lot. Maybe too much.

I wrote for five pages. And not five double spaced pages filled with flowery prose. It was five hard pages of clinical and straight forward idea. It read like VCR instructions and was not entertaining except for all the rendom senerios I brought up. Things like: Captian Universe Spidey, or Dark Force II Luke, Black Costumes for both. Is this in New York or Tatoinne? New York 2099? recently finished.

Probably the worst part of it was that I never gave an answer. I just said, if "this" and "this" then Luke would win. If "this" and "that", Spidey would win. Five pages of that.

My friend ended up sending me an email back saying, "I'm glad you're still a geek."

Yeah. I gave a giant arguement and the only conclusion was that I'm a geek. I guess I lost that one.

I once got into a very very heated argument that lasted at least one week with my friend over weather or not MEN COULD GET PREGNANT.

ok, it's probably the only one i may not only be ashamed about, but also regret...

i used to moderate a anime forum in the late 90's, and in the forum there was tons of female fans that used to idealize and even dream about anime characters as ideal boyfriends for them, so like every jelous nerd i would ridiculized those characters, and show to the girls that they were all gays and would never have any interest in any female...

and them suddenly the girls discovered yaoi and loved it, with all those male characters they used to dream about that i have called gay, so i kindof feel a little responsible for that, possibly creating some more people to write FFF...

Burrito tuxedo, I am laughing SO hard

Back when I was in highschool a group of my friends at lunchtime actually had a debate over who people thought the sexiest Muppet was. Janice from the Electric Mayhem and Mokey from Fraggle Rock were popular candidates.

This eventually spilled over into discussion if Kira from the Dark Crystal counted as a Muppet.

About a year ago me and two of my friends were in the middle of a all night Rifts session. One friend was GM'ing while I was playing my character, a sweet ass shifter and my other friend was an asshole of a gunslinger and generally making life miserable for our already heavily drinking GM. Anyways both of our characters were in a small old-west style town that was being besieged by a small army of bandits who had mega-damage body armor, mech suits and generally armed to the teeth. It was going to be hell for our low level characters.

Anyways, having already completed a decisive recon mission, I was now staying with the townspeople helping set up a defensive strategy for the upcoming siege. My friend was leading a small group of town militia men to do a similar recon mission (to find the bandits base of operations). Being less than subtle about their presence his group was confronted by a somewhat large group of bandits. Naturally a epic scale gunfight ensued and my friend's gunslinger, who was a bit of a dick, killed off or maimed most of the bandits and was toying with one unlucky bastard, he had already disarmed him of his weapon by blowing his hand off, and preceded to make a called shot on one of his legs, blowning it off.

While the bandit lay rapidly bleeding to death, our GM remarked how he was going to loose EXP points for failing his recon mission by instigating a full on bloodbath. My other friend then remarked how one bandit was still alive and that if he could bring him back into town for "questioning" and got reliable info from him, his mission would be successful. Me and the GM preceded to ridicule him for his soon to be failure(he was being unbelievably cocky before hand so we were just relishing this) and reminded him that his only hope for succeeding lied on a half-dismembered man who would die of blood loss in seconds. Then my friend stated that he was going to take out his laser rifle and use called shots to cauterize the wounds, thus preserving the bandit for questioning. The smug looks on our faces turned to dropped jaws and what preceded for the next half an hour was a heated, intense and unbelievably outrageous argument revolving around weather a laser rifle could indeed cauterize such mortal wounds and if the ordeal itself would kill the bandit. In the process several Rifts guidebooks were poured over by both parties, weapon damage and NPC stats were thoroughly examined and more medical science bullshit was spouted out than a typical episode of House. We took EVERYTHING into consideration. In the end, my friend (the lucky bastard) rolled against incredibly high odds and saved the bandits life by torturing him a bit more and blasting his wound with a laser rifle. The fucker ended up riding off into the sunset with the grotesquely mutilated, nearly comatose bandit strapped across his horse like a burlap sack and he got EXP points in spades. Afterwards(our GM completely hammered at this point) all three of us realized we took part in one of the the most epically absurd arguments in our nerdy lives.

I get into so many heated debates about Star Trek, D&D, WoW, Star Wars, Firefly and so many other nerdy things that I honestly don't know which is the most shameful. So I'm going to go with the time that my friend had to grab my arms and pull me back from trying to beat someone up after they insulted my favorite Star Trek captain and said Enterprise and Captain Archer were the best. I was pretty damn drunk, but still...

ARRGGHH...God,I HATE these stupid arguments!!! That being said,EdGreen totally wins...anyone who was willing to get in a fight and leave a nuke unguarded to defend the Dark Knight is OK in my book.

I'm gonna assume physics counts.

A friend and I were arguing about the merits of centrifugal force. Not the force itself, just the term. As such, all it is, is the absence of centripetal force. I argued that the term is necessary, especially in early physics. It aligns well with "objects want to keep constant state", etc.
He argued otherwise.

Idiot.

How about this, what's the perfect temperature for those who fall on the Jusenkyo springs to be halfway transformed? (This turned iunto one of those Self Impregnated Ranma arguments.) Me and a former buddy of mine spent an entire Spanish class debating this notion and half of Phys Ed. To this day we do not speak to each other...

NeverPlayedWOW: I've been there...

The worst one I've seen...
Truck
vs
Monkey

Myself and this one dude I used to work with were Very Fond of the old chestnut where one or the other makes the pointy-gun-hand gesture and goes, "Bang", whereupon the receiver of said gesture says, "I'm Bulletproof". Then the "Shooter" has to invent a reason why his bullet can defeat the receier's bulletproofness using some hypothetically scientific BullShit, and then the two contestants go back and forth, one-upping one another for reasons of Bulletproofness and reasons of Bullet Penetration. On one particular occasion, I decided that the only way to win this paradoxically endless argument was to have my character commit suicide. I posited that being dead made it so that the character was thus eternally bulletproof. My co-worker rebutted that since the point of shooting at someone is to effect their death, I had actually, and inadvertantly, given him a De Facto victory. The argument that ensued over this conflict of opinion lasted longer, and was more contentious than any of the actual bullet-versus-sheild arguments had ever been. We didn't speak for three days afterward, and would occasionally even resurrect the particulars at random times for nearly three years along, which would cause the battle to begin anew as though it had never ended. What a shameful and geeky way to waste time at work, indeed.

Does arguing with my 11 year old nephew about why Transformers 1 and 2 suck hard, count?

Well, too bad I can't enter, because while I've had my share of rather nerdy arguments, I feel no shame in them. Booya.

Well, this argument wasn't nerdy but it was really stupid.

When I was in the seventh grade I always stood with a group of people that got to school early because of the crappy bus system. So while we had to wait outside for an hour we would get together and talk. One day someone brought up Winnie the Pooh. Yes, I actually type that. Well, she said that Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were secretly gay.

No, I'm not kidding. Not only did this spark massive outrage but we all argued for 30 minutes on this topic. At first it was a group of about 5 people. By the time class started it was over 20 and this same debate lasted for about a week. A WEEK!!! And I will admit I was apart of it but who the hell just comes out and says something that stupid?

Toph: I bet someone's written fanfic of that. Winnie/Piglet i mean.

myself and my freinds often engage in strange and bizzare discussions of nerdy things, what would win a fight? dog monkey or monkey dog? which olsen twin would eat the other if left on a deasert island with one another? how many pork pies could you fit inside of jabba the hut? would godzilla be able to defeat the boxing kangaroo from tekken if they were both the same size, or does all his power come from his size? T-rex VS a team of sharks if both parties were in space?

but i know i cannot win. because i feel no shame for these arguments. infact i saviour them, and speak louder when we're walking past people on the street. because i know, that each of our bizzare lines such as "but if the pope's a robot how does he believe in god?" the people passing by will only hear snipits, and they will wonder "what the hell were they talking about?" and for being able to confuse a random person, i feel no shame.

yes i know this eliminates me from winning. i just haven't entered a TR contest before and felt like sharing something

Remember Beast Wars, arguably the greatest Transformers series ever?

Remember the follow-up to it, Beast Machines, probably the most polarizing Transformers series ever?

Well, one of the controversial ideas presented on Beast Machines was the concept of Cybertron originally having organic life before the Transformers. Optimus Primal and friends found skeletal remains of organic life in rocks within Cybertron.

During this time, I got into an argument on a message board about whether or not this was actually possible, based on the relative size of Cybertron to Earth from the Generation One three parter The Ultimate Doom. Cybertron, with its infrastructure scaled to 30, 40 foot robots, appeared to be smaller than the Earth. Now, if Cybertron was originally a rocky planet, then either large chunks of planet would have to have been excavated and/or terraformed, or the base planet was really small.

The case of the former does not make much sense. If we are using the Quintesson origin (where Cybertron was built as a factory), it would be easier to just start from scratch. If the Primus origin is used, then there is not as much of a problem, though how that large of an area of rock formations survived several million years of warfare and rebuilding was beyond me.

In the case of the latter, since Cybertron is already smaller than Earth, the original planet Cybertron was built from would have to have been tiny. If that is the case, how could there have been enough gravity to have an atmosphere? Even if the organic lifeforms on Cybertron did not need to breath (which would be rare in any fictional universe), there had to be oxygen on Cybertron since there is evidence of combustion, and Spike can breath just fine on Cybertron on his trips with the Autobots. I concluded that someone created or imported (for lack of better term) breathable air.

To this day, whenever someone I talk to feels they are getting worked up over nothing, I mention that I got into a heated argument on a message based on whether or not a fictional planet could have had an atmosphere.

to the point of the embarassing article lead-in, i used to watch sailor moon. every day it was on, which on usa network in the early to mid 90's, was weekdays. and i used to care about it. anyway, the show preceding it briefly was called "Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills". Look it up, it's real. i also watched "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" since its inception, so those kinds of shows dragged me in. and i had to try and argue in my young age (i'm 23 now, so that seems like forever ago) that TTAFFBH was actually a better show. you know, using 10-year-old logic and all for a bunch of kids who hadn't seen it. i sounded like a psycho probably. theme song is relatively simple for both shows, i think that helps.

Kat : I've been threatened with physical violence myself for having Archer as my favorite captain. Guess I should count myself lucky for internet anonymity here ;)

Over to the shameful discussions :

I was playing AD&D 2nd edition with some friends, as a gnome illusionist. The party was scouting out a camp of ogres that were way out of our league for fighting. My character wasn't even high enough level to have invisibility :D

Anyways, after a little consideration, I came up with a clever solution. I used Silent Image to create a false ogre, relying on the specific type of illusion (a glamer, if I recall the term correctly) to have my back while I snuck into camp. Memorizing the route I would have to take, I walked inside the illusion toward the tent I wanted to investigate. The DM rolled saves for the ogres (since a large ogre making no sounds is kinda fishy), and declared they could see me.

This prompted a 3 hour long discussion of the finer points of illusionism, and the qualities of figments (illusions present only in the minds of the targets) and glamers (illusions that are actual visual constructs, ie magical holograms). Needless to say, no more AD&D was played that evening, and the campaign died. I did however almost manage to get the DM to concede to my points ;) (We continued playing together, luckily, but I was never allowed to play illusionist again :P )

Newton v. Einstein.

Not about who's right -- but who was *smarter*.

No, not much funny or entertaining about it. But really think about how much each had to work with at the time...

My money is on Newton. And I've had this argument too many times to recall a specific delightful example. The fight is either with physics-non-personae or with physics PhDs [or candidates].

S.I.N. = winner, bitches.

My brother and I once had an argument over how to pronounce "chocobo." Yes, the big birds from Final Fantasy. He kept insisting that it was pronounced like 'chuh-cohba' and it is most definitely not. This was years ago by the way, and we still can't talk about it because he refuses to relent his position on the matter and we know it'll only cause problems.

Our original argument included me screaming such things as: "THERE'S NOT FUCKING 'A' AT THE END, AND I DON'T SEE A 'U' ANYWHERE, YOU ILLITERATE BITCH!"
"JUST ADMIT THAT YOU'RE WRONG FOR ONCE. I WILL FUCKING STAB YOU."
and
"WHO TAUGHT YOU ENGLISH, I'M GOING TO GO BACK AND KICK THEM IN THE NUTS!"

I can generally just shrug things off but he was so stubborn about it. My pronunciation may not have been correct (cho-ko-bo), but his sure as hell is about as wrong as you can get. Ugh, I'm getting mad just thinking about this again, which is even nerdier and more embarrassing.

Middle School I tried to defend the honor of the beloved Sega Genesis against my friends with the Super Nintendo. Lets just say Street Fighter II was the nuclear power that my SNES friends needed to destroy any arguments as to who has the better system...until EGM previewed Sf2 Chamionship Edition on Genesis. I passed the magazine around in the morning, it was news to them, lets face it, my Sega Genesis now has controllable bosses and character vs. same character! I basically shoved it in their faces that Genesis was still better.

What the EGM pics showed was very early stages of the game, which included a really large black bar near the top where the names are. It was ugly I admit, but I didn't tell that to my friends, I felt the news alone that an updated Sf2 would shut them up. Arguments after this always ended with "The Genesis version of SF2 has small characters and a HUGE BLACK BAR AT THE TOP!" I was actually laughed at for this. The arguments stopped because it took FOREVER for the Genesis version to show up, at one point I was ashamed that the Genesis version looked liked ass, until it was finally released and it looked better and black bar was gone (I believe Capcom retooled it to look more like it should, that was the reason for the delay.)
By then I didn't care, it must have been because I was arguing over something stupid and I should be just enjoying my Genesis for what it is.
BTW its still better than Super Nintendo.

A few years back, my friend and I were at a bar drinking some suds. A fine ass chick was playing one of those bar touch screen games all by herself. My friend told me to go and talk to her, and being shy I said "No way, dude". A minute later he grabs my beer sets it next to her, "Now you gotta talk to her." he says leaving for the pisser. I go grab my beer say hello and proceed to udder the phrase that no one in the history of mankind has ever picked up chicks with... "I like video games." You guessed it. I went home alone that night, and my friend still brings it up from time to time to bust my balls.

In High School my friends and I used to argue about who would win in a fight between Superman and Jesus. I mean think about it: both of them died only to be reborn, both are probably super strong, etc.

Needless to say, the we never really got to a straight answer. The argument generally came down to a question about the distinction between Jesus and God. Obviously, (duh) if God comes in, Jesus would kick so much ass. However, Jesus without God Jesus probably couldn't do much damage to Super Man unless he wanted to smother him in loaves of bread.

The corollary was Jesus v. Superman v. Powerpuff Girls.

These fights would generally get loud and heated. When asked what we were fighting about people around us were generally shocked at the blasphemy of it.

Aww, youth.

By the way, the whole horse video is stuck in my head. I somehow was thinking about animals, and it popped in. I was terrified that it actually stuck with me.

Its consuming me. Destroying me from the inside.

I hope you are happy.

@Gerald: In some places your opening statement could be considered fighting words...
*cough*Truck beats monkey*cough*
Dangurous: TTAFFBH was the one with the giant turd-like Zordon-esque alien, or am I mistaken?

I am not sure what is the worst part of this, where it took place who was involved or the topic at hand

It was at a Bruce Campbell book signing, at my local out of the way bookstore. I worked next door at the video game place. Two regular walk around the place and touch everything and basically being annoying nerds.

These two fine gentlemen looked like this one was the basic stereotypical over 30 nerd. Ponytail balding, slightly overweight Iron Maiden shirt. The other was Gimli, short long red hair long ass beard. Seriously looks like Gimli.

So walking around after getting my book signed I overheard them in a heated argument about wookies. They were actually arguing about how tall one is. Gimli was screaming that they are 2 meters tall, and stereotype was yelling back at him that they are 8 feet tall (do the math, they were obviously on break from their mensa meeting. It finally breaks down to stereotype telling calling Gimli a closet case and a waste of his moms sperm. Gimli then let out a scream of pure nerd rage and cracked his friend in the jaw with the Star Wars guide to creatures.

Nice little side not Gimli got banned from the store I worked at the next week for trying to stuff games down his pants.

A friend and I were having a detailed discussion about the Smurfs being communists, Papa Smurf's ressemblence to Karl Marx, how come there was only one smurf girl, etc. as a suggestion DON'T HAVE THIS TYPE OF DISCUSSIONS IN FRONT OF HUMAN FEMALES.

Some friends and I were discussing the notion that Twilight was actually cool because the subtext of it was that it was ultimately about whether Bella's choice is to get into Necrophilia (shag Edward) or Beastiality (shag Jacob). Then another friend came up and said it was even better, because they would both be committing statutory rape, so its all about her decision to be involved in Paedonecrophilia or Pedobeastiality. Only way to make those terrible books worthwhile.

any time some one brings up

"Cavemen vs. Astronauts"

my friend and I argue like crazy. The record is a three hour debate involving roughly 12 people.

(the other good one is Anne Frank vs. Helen Keller).

I do not recall how the argument started, but when I was with a friend of mine we started talking about Star Wars. He declared that General Grievous did not have lungs, while I argued that he couldn't cough with out them. We had about a 15 minute fight over whether or not this cyborg alien owned lungs. Eventually I ended up writing a letter to George Lucas asking whether or not Grievous had the organs.

Unfortunately all I got was an automated letter claiming that Mr. Lucas was not able to read my letter but was thankful to have received it.

About 10 years ago, just before The Phantom Menace came out, I remember getting into a heated argument at 3am in a kebab house in Southern England with a friend about the focussing crystals in the hilt of a lightsaber, him claiming that with bigger crytals he could make a 'broadsword' lightsaber. I pointed out that he was clearly an idiot. Surely the size of the crsytals would have no bearing on the size of the blade generated, and in fact you would need double the amount of crystals to produce a 'broadsword'-type blade.

This went on for hours.

Neither of us had girlfriends at the time.

2.
first: whether or not 'sushi' is 'seafood'. It is not.
second: 'evolution vs mutation'. after copious amounts of tanqueray.

Speaking of Cavemen vs Spacemen...

http://jeffelden.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

I got into a HUGE fight with my boyfriend over who Harry Potter should have ended up with. He was a Harry/Ginny shipper from the get-go and I was one who hated the typical bullshit and wanted Harry to upset the status quo and date that lovable weirdo Luna. Or, go slash on us and date Draco. We argued so insanely and angrily about who Harry Potter ought to be dating that I ended up punching my boyfriend (in the arm, but I wanted to punch him in the face).

When the sixth book introduced Harry's monster in the chest that lusted for Ginny and not Luna or Draco I about threw that book in garbage because damnit, my boyfriend won that argument.

(We are planning on getting married. So, I hit my future husband during an argument about who Harry Potter should be dating.)

The nerdiest argument I've had is with my wife - should I continue wasting time trying to win a shirt that features a robot with flying boobs, a shirt that I can't wear out in public with her, and one that most likely wouldn't fit? Since I've exacerbated almost all my nerd knowledge already she raises the point of why enter when I won't win and all it does is make me angry, it's just a shirt, my responses aren't so well thought out and kind. So complain all you want about an argument with a boss, my hopeless endeavor of winning one of your shirts is a fighting point within my marriage.

@Adam, that made me laugh out loud. You'll at least get an honorable mention for that one.

I once got into a week long argument with my friend over which bleach character looked better: starrk or nnoitora.

it ended when I photoshopped his head onto embarrassing photographs and threatened to give them to his girlfriend.

Ok, heres mine, i was arguing with this girl nerd in school cause i was bored in math. the topic went to chewbaca, and i argued that because he doesnt have very productive fingers, how can he use a gun, it went on like that until she suddenly says that were arguing about that to the poeple behind me, i of corse would like to have SOME dignity in the eyes of my peers, so i was ready to strangle her. Oh and the strange part is that that same girl was cought with child pornography on a school laptop the following summer. yes...

I argued with a cop over what Captain America would do... Virginia Beach, VA has a "No Profanity" law on the beach and beachfront. There is a $75 dollar fine for breaking this law. Wanna know how I know?

I was stationed there in the Marines and was out with some buddies on the waterfront having some drinks. Being the shameless nerd that I am, and apparently not looking to get laid, I was wearing my Captain America costume shirt. After a few too many Jagerbombs I stumble out into the street to smoke. I look up and see the "No Profanity" sign there on the light post. It looks like a no smoking sign, but instead of a cigarette it's got "$@%!%". Yes, really. Feeling that my 1st amendment right to free speach was under attack, I say to no one in particular "What the fuck is this shit?" Right behind me, a cop. He tells me he'll let me slide if I watch my mouth and move on. Being inspired by Cap's recent (at the time) rebellion in Civil War, I reply "NO! Fuck this! I fight for the fucking freedoms of this country and free speach is one of them!" He tells me it's to protect the kids at the beach and not everyone wants to hear it, blah, blah, blah. I ask "What fucking kid is out at 1 in the morning? This is bullshit!" This was the last straw for the cop, who took out his ticket book and wrote me a $75 dollar citation. He attempted to hand it to me but drunk and indignant I yell "I ain't taking this shit!! Fuck you pig, I'm Captain Fucking America!!" My buddies heard the comotion finally and came out to stop me from getting thrown in jail by promising the cop they'll get me home ASAP and start to drag me away. As two of my buddies drag me kicking and screaming, the last of our group was still trying to smooth things over with the cop and I see him write another ticket to for me for my continued abuse of the law. Rage filled my veins. "FUCK YOU COP!! THIS IF FUCKING AMERICA!! THE FUCKING A DOESN'T STAND FOR FRANCE!!" At this I got loose of my friends and ran as far and as fast as my legs would go. That's the part I'm ashamed of. Cap took a bullet for his beliefs, and I ran like a bitch for fear of a few hours in a holding cell.

The shirt that looks like his costume, not an actual costume shirt from Halloween...

Around the time House of M had finished a buddy and I were talking about the Scarlett Witch.

The conversation started off quite fine, discussing her history and then her powers and what she could do with them.

We then brought up the idea that if she can make two children whilst being bat-shit insane, then how hard could it be for her to make a garden gnome with a Simpsons pin pals jacket.

The conversation evolved into what we would make if we had those powers. I said airplanes, he said swords, I said a new doorknob (mine was broken at the time) and so on and so fourth.

Here is where shit got real. My friend said she'd be able to make cup cakes... The fuck would she make cup cakes for?

First off they are cupcakes, the impostor to the muffin throne. I can't even fathom why people even enjoy the small abominations. They pose as muffins without tops and yet to taste good; they need frosting. It's bullshit! You want cake , cut a piece off of a real cake. I don't need that shit.

Okay that was one of the major reasons, the next was the fact that apparently he thought it would be cool for Wanda to create baked goods. I told him you might as well just ask the hot Genie from I Dream of Genie, since she's into that slave for her man type deal. Seriously though he would have her resort to baked fucking goods. What kinda shit is that? I wanted her to make bad ass things like weapons and statues of Paulie Shore riding his scooter from Encino Man (seriously that would just be awesome).

So this argument went on and in the end resorted to me calling him a little bitch who has a secret desire to be a magical baker. He called me lame and crazy because apparently any down person would want to have an unlimited surplus of cupcakes.

Looking back I could have averted this argument is I had simply not given into my deep rooted hatred of stupid ass cupcakes. To sum my feelings up...

NO MORE CUPCAKES!

My nerdiest moment could have cost me my life, and I didn't even know it at the time.

My brothers and I often argued over who's turn it was on video games, while this was often settled orderly, in some games this was won by which one of us could convince the others that he had the best strategy to get over the next hurdle.

We had been having a hard time beating Boba Fett in Shadows of the Empire for N64. I had been trying hit and run tactics, my brothers were each trying their own thing. My parents let us know there would be only one more turn before bed, and I desperately wanted to try one more run. In great nerdly fashion, I claimed that I heard a new strategy at school that day and wanted to try it out. Middle brother protested, and asked what it was, claiming it was his turn based on our normal rules. I told him I couldn't tell him without trying, and with the assent of little brother grabbed the controller and proceeded to waste a turn doing pretty much the same thing as I had tried on my last turn, failing just as miserably.

When my Dad said that was enough, I headed to bed, but middle brother protested. This led to a confiscation of the N64. I woke to a weird tapping on my window later that night and notified Dad about it the next morning, but apart from that I didn't know about anything else that happened that night until years later.

The house calmed down with my brothers and I in our bedrooms, but apparently middle brother was still angry. Later that night he went to the kitchen and pulled out a butcher knife. Luckily Mom caught him, learned his intent to hurt me or himself and got him to go back to bed.

Apparently that did not fully defuse the situation. Still worried, Dad was keeping watch on middle brother's door, and so my brother disassembled the casement on his window and wandered around outside my window for most of the night with his little league bat, tapping on the window occasionally for whatever reason.

I only learned about this about a decade later when middle brother had been diagnosed as Bipolar and that the accounts of my parents on this incident were a major indication that he had a history of manic episodes. It makes me feel awful just thinking back on it.

My friends and I routinely argue about whether or not Terminator's time travel rules are stupid. Specifically, the rule in which only organic matter or things inside organic matter can be transported back in time. I love the first two Terminator movies, but it's so freaking contrived.

If they can send a robot back in time by giving it skin, why can't they send weapons back in time, too? Or bombs, robotanks, whatever. If the Terminator needed anything, all they'd have to do is transport it in a big bag of skin and it'd be fine.

They should have put some clothes in that skin bag, too.

One time I beat someone up because of Harvest Moon 64, a game about growing vegetables and making friends. I'm not joking.

See, I was in the military at the time, and we were out at sea, and I was obsessed with Harvest Moon, so I spent all my free time on patrol playing it. This one guy on the boat thought it'd be fun to make fun of me for playing the 'sissy game'. To be fair, I gave him plenty of warnings to knock it off. Well, finally, one day I had enough. I was watering my vegetables, he was dogging on me, and I lost it... picked up the nearest object (a metal trash can) and chucked it at him (it bounced off him and hit someone else I hated... bonus!), and he ran for his life, with me in hot pursuit, fists flailing.

That day, coincidentally, a Chaplain came on board to talk to us, and he brought up something about how we might be feeling stressed being out at sea, and how this might make us lash out at other people. You could just hear the record scratch noise as EVERYONE turned to look at me.

My other biggest nerdy argument is my long running one with my friend... who would win in a fight, Mega Man or Samus Aran? Definitely Mega Man.

At work I would frequently get into an argument with several co-workers of mine... it was the tale as old as time. Who's faster: The Flash or Superman? My co-workers just couldn't fathom my insistence that The Flash is faster than Superman.

My now ex-boyfriend and I once got into an extremely heated discussion on how to pronounce Cthulhu. Throughout the whole arguement I maintained that I was correct because unlike him I had actually READ H.P Lovecraft. Eventually we got to yelling and after a while he admitted I was right and I was extremely self satisfied. Until we read the story in English class and found out he was right all along.

An old friend of mine and I once had a 20 minute argument as to which was more useless; a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory or Stormtrooper armor.

I once got into an argument over of the stupid parts of Final Fantasy II/IV. This is not an uncommon argument to have, since characters die and come back more often than a year's worth of General Hospital, but the person, instead of nodding and saying, "I get where you're coming from, but the game's still awesome," started arguing every facet of every ridiculous part of the game with me (Possible SPOILERS ahead, to the 2 people who haven't played it I feel sorry for).

I bring up Cid essentially blowing himself up to protect the party on the airship, and not only surviving, but being in decent enough shape to completely refit the airship they bring him later. He counters with, "Well, maybe he dropped the bomb and it went off before he landed and the ground that swelled up created a cushion that was enough to keep him from a hitting the ground at full force." I talk about how impossible it is to live in the underworld, and he makes up this whole system where there's fungus that lives in the dark corners of the underworld they eat and how they can collect the condensation from the heat and make water, and they don't need much because they're dwarves anyway. Then when Golbez is decimated by Meteo with nothing left but his hand, and all the party can do is sit and stare at it idiotically while he steals the crystal at a snail's pace, he argues Golbez would've still been powerful enough to cast some sort of stun magic. When I wonder how Rydia can survive being sucked under a vortex, he says, "Well, as long as she can stay above the water in the vortex, it's possible she could survive." And on and on and on. And that's not getting into the "Well, you didn't SEE him die" with Yang, "The airship COULD'VE showed up in time to catch them" after the first encounter with Tower of Bab-Il, and all those other things that are in the realm of possibility of someone finding a director's cut of Dragonball: Evolution that makes the film a masterpiece. After about an hour of this, I decided to stop because I'd ran out of things to argue and he wasn't willing to admit a damn thing. Teach me to argue with a guy who was in debate club.

OK first off I'm sorry if someone else has already posted something like this, because I haven't read them all yet and this little nugget is knocking at my brain.
About a year ago I was introduced to a smoking hot nerdette at a party by a mutual friend.
We wound up sitting around and talking all night long though towards the end of the night the topic of conversation shifted to the power rangers of all things.
We wound up getting into a heated debate over which rangers came first and in what order they were replaced by their various evil-turned-good counterparts.
Eventually this turned from a heated debate into an argument into a shouting match.
We finally borrowed my friends computer to look it up online and lo and behold I was right.
Then in my finest moment of idiocy I proceeded to lord it over her (why am I such a dumbass).
I am not surprised in the slightest that she didn't call me back.

The argument was simple.
Which Final Fantasy was better, 8 or 9?
It's been ongoing for a long time between myself and a friend of mine with no real end in sight. My main argument is that FF8 basically ditched all the old school RPG elements and replaced them with way too many CG scenes and emo-romance nonsense whereas FF9 went back to more traditional elements (such as a leveling system where you didn't go up every 1000xp) and actually gave a satisfying ending to the story (something square fails to do the majority of the time).

His argument is that he liked the story better and the characters looked more realistic.

I don't get new-school gamers.

dear DJRM
Yagami> aside this I have recently found myself ranting over augmented reality becoming the fifth dimension over my friend who doesn't acknowlege time as the forth dimension :P
edgreen has my vote, the dark knight's honor oversteps guarding nukes anyday

Any iteration of the Great Joel vs. Mike Flame War in MST3K fandom,

try reading yagami backwards

This is less an argument and more of a debate, but back in high school, my friends and I were discussing various aspects of the Star Trek holodeck. The question arose as to what would happen if one took a dump in a holographic toilet. Since the toilet is obviously not real, when you end the program, would the dump be waiting for you on that grid floor? The debate raged for weeks, going into various aspects of how the holodeck safety protocols worked, whether they'd be smart enough to know the difference between destroying a dump and killing a human, and whether you'd step in it if it was there, since you're really in a pretty small space. Ultimately, we reluctantly settled on the fact that unless the safeties were off, the dump would indeed remain. Not all parties were happy, but it made more sense than anything else.

Radar: "Pull levers?" Wha?

Burrito Tuxedo: You're both wrong. ;P In Super Mario Kart, they're ? panels, aka Question Panels.

This really isn't worthy of consideration, but I think it's at least funny enough to share.

Way back in the day, when Usenet ruled the roost, I used get into arguments with a certain poster over episodes 25 and 26 of Neon Genesis Evangelion. This poster actually preferred the odd, thrown together TV episodes over the movies, which actually, y'know, concluded the series. I couldn't believe that any fan of Eva could prefer those crazy TV episodes, and the arguments would go on and on.

Fast forward a few years. The argument forgotten, the poster and I start up an Internet friendship.

Fast forward a few years more. The poster, who turns out to be a wonderful young woman, and I become close. We start dating.

Fast forward a few more years. The poster and I are now married. Over dinner one night the conversation turns to run-ins we've had with crazy otaku. I say "I used to get into arguments with this idiot on rec.arts.anime who actually thought the Eva TV ending was better than the movies-- Oh, wait, that was you!"

The conversation was a bit chilly for a few minutes after that. :-)

I know a lot of people have posted about how they like to argue with their friends about who would win in a fight between two particular characters. I have a similar story.

But first, some background information.

When my friends and I debate the outcomes of hypothetical fights, we take it seriously. We have established rules and regulations. And fully drawn out tournaments. And, since we usually discussed these things at lunch, the official title for our conceptual tournaments is The TASTE Brackets. (TASTE stands for "Total Action Showdown Throwdown Extravaganza" and refers to both the location of arguments and the personal opinions represented in the outcomes.)

Naturally some of the participants are the usual suspects like Chewbacca, Charizard, or Darth Maul. But we also delve deeper into pop culture. Some notable fighters include The Truck/The Truck Driver from "Duel", The Carver from "Nip/Tuck" and Zap Rowsdower from "The Final Sacrifice".

Now, plenty of arguments have come out of this. Can "Illiteracy" as a concept be an entrant? On what terrain would a Moby Dick/Ash (circa "Army of Darkness") fight occur? When it comes to Davy Crockett should his legendary characteristics be included or only the stats that history supports?

But no argument was as heated or vitriolic as one that came up in the very first tournament.

Cyclops vs. Benjamin Franklin.

Seriously.

It was the second round and Franklin had, in my opinion, barely made it past the first. He just got lucky because of the inherent disorganization of a Pack of Lasercats. I assumed that we would agree that Cyclops would eye blast the hell out of him and then move on.

Oh how wrong I was.

My friend insisted that, given the prep-time and available items that we had agreed upon, Ben Franklin would figure out some way to win via mirrors or lightning keys or some shit. We were eventually talking in raised voices and making very forceful jabs with our fingers.

Then our biology teacher told us to be quiet and refocus on the intricacies of the human ear.

After that class period the debate continued. It spread, like a virus, to our friends and our classmates. Everyone was arguing for days on end about various aspects of the match-up.

Ultimately it was decided that Cyclops would be the victor.

But I think we all knew who the real losers were.

Back in the Usenet days I got in regular fights with some grumpy jackass who preferred Anno Hideki's Evangelion movies (which were a big FU to fans) to the original two episodes 25 and 26 (that far better fit the themes the series had been developing).

Years later I realized the man I married was the same poster I used to argue with. He's still a bit of a grumpy jackass, (and he's also a cover hog), but I love him anyway.

That doesn't mean he's not still wrong about the end of Evangelion, though.

I spent a good part of last year arguing with people over the webs how Legend of Chun Li could have been a good movie, race was unimportant in Dragonball, and Justice League Mortal should definitively exist. Justice League Mortal didn't exist, I haven't seen DB yet, and Chun Li...I saw that stinker on an early morning cheap show where the only other people where a lost old lady and a horney couple where the rest of the audience, and I think I was the only one who expected a decent movie. I don't know why I had to get so involved, but I guess I like swimming against the current. I still hang at the JLM pageboard with the other 5 guys who didn't hate JLM on sight

I'm embarrased to share this story for the dual reasons of it expresses my friend and mine love of Heroes, which seems like an unsafe opinion to hold here and it reveals that my friend and I have not gotten over our teenage girl need to make lists of hot guys.

The challenge starts out with just naming five people you would have date and suddenly boiled down into a heated discussion about which power from Heroes would equate into the best sex. While going back and forth about whether Sylar's bad boy persona would be mind blowing literally or figurativly we managed to confuse every other person in the van.

What makes the story worse is not our love of mediocre shows but what happened to the guys in the front seat who were supposed to be concentrating on driving. While we debate the relative merits of mutant actors we disturbed our dear friends so much that they crashed a van into an innocent deer. We managed to not only kill a little bit of our self respect but also a life. I still feel bad.

To this day, I still like to tease my 19 year old daughter by arguing with her about the possibility of a "hybrid" in the Underworld movie series. She gets so mad to the point of tears at times with me and i get so tickled, I'm almost crying from laughing. She thinks it's totally ridiculous that anyone could even entertain the idea of a vampire/werewolf and the movie is completely unrealistic and should be basically banned.

I have another that involves proving a thief can't do a back flip in chain mail, but it's a one argument per post =)

So, you were arguing politics, on WoW, over an npc's actions, and whether there was a point in assisting a fictional, ineffective ruler?

you sir win.

my worst nerdy arguments happen very often in my art class. Me and this girl always argue about who would win a chess match: L or Light Yagami. I'm (of course) on L's side. Then when we almost get in fist fights about that, we change to: who's is L's true successor, me for Near and her for Mello. But yeah, we're not exactly friends anymore, more like rivals now.

This is going to sound ridiculous but I actually got in a fist fight with a guy over the definition of what a nerd is. He wanted to say it only included comic book/anime/D&D fans and I said that plus it includes people who are socially awkward and really into math and science too. One thing lead to another and we were fighting outside a bar and my fellow engineering friends had to break it up.

Alright me and a friend of mine got into a long drawn out debate over the next set of races added to WoW (which of course he was even more annoyed to find the random ass pick of worgen as the alliance pick)We broke it down into two sides alliance and horde

Alliance
-Me

Honestly. I couldn't come up with any new races for the alliance that I couldn't just shoot down myself in a few seconds. They really aren't that good at making friends... go figure. -shrug-

-Friend

His first thought was pandaren (misspelled most likely) Mostly due to the fact that they were allied with the nightelves, but of recent showing they are just about completely neutral with who they work with and have no interest in the wars sense nobody can find them. (IE chen stormstout and the pandaren that worked with kael/vash)

He also agrees that the alliance isn't good at making friends with other races that would require a unique model. (other choices were other human nations [which technically he was right on this one], Wildhammer dwarves, half elves, high elves.)

Now onto horde. I actually do more than shut down his arguments in this one..

Horde- me

Goblins, I got this one right though it wasn't hard to guess considering that it was one that was already been established by the past lore. Though how they decided on it now was not how I figured they would break the neutrality. His response was basically the same as mine to the panderen one. Neutral but they like being active sense they make more money out of being neutral.

Stonemaul ogres, Also already established via old lore and still allied with the horde to an extent and having served as allies to the horde against the Admiral Proudmoore and under the forsaken (although their leader was possessed at the time) This was his best guess from mine of being the next choice.

His

His choice was an odd one. Naga, Though he argued that they did have a relation with the blood elves of silvermoon [though they person they worked with isn't welcome their anymore and dead] they do share a common dislike for the night elves and most likely with the dead traitor kael thas. It was a stretch but it would require major bends in lore (which isn't much of a leap for blizzard to make)

His weirdest push for both sides though were dragonkin. Both having ingame models, human forms, ect ect. He put out that their were two (at the time of the argument seeing as one is still alive) now leaderless clan of dragons in the lore. The chromatic and blue dragons and either could easily pick a side to work with as a means to rebuild and protect themselves with. (though as of now the chromatic's leader Nefarian seems to be alive lorewise [despite appearing to be dead for a while, and even thought to be confirmed in game] though there always is the expansion after the next.)

We wouldn't of been ashamed and felt bad about having wasted a bit of our lives and almost crashing at least twice (we had this conversation while driving, we did run a stop sign at one point though.) with this debate only to find out the next day with the cataclysm announcements...

Re-enactment time. Let us set up the scene. I'm trying to explain to a friend why I like Godzilla. We're watching Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

Me: I like what he stands for.

Him: What do you mean?

Me: Well, he's an allegory for nuclear war.

Him: Really now.

Me: Now don't mock me! I'm serious. He's the perfect metaphor. He's big, indestructible, and causes destruction wherever he goes. He was even created by radiation! It's perfect.

Him: Sort of like The Hulk.

Me: *laughs* Dude, the Hulk is retarded. All he does in every issue is run around, get angry, then destroy everything in his path.

Him: Sort of like Godzilla.

Me: Wha-no, nonononono not at all! The Hulk can be hurt and stuff. Like the time the Silver Surfer took away all his radiation.

Him: I thought you hated the Silver Surfer?

Me: I do, and I hate The Hulk too, but I still know enough about them.

Him: Yeah, I guess, but that's so fricken specific! How do you know something that specific and nitpicky about two characters that you hate? More importantly, why would you want to know that?

Me: ...That's not important. We're going off track, Godzilla is an awesome metaphor for nuclear war that works on several different levels.

Him: Let me get this straight. We've been watching, for the past 90 minutes or so, a movie about time travelers who want to stop Godzilla, so they go back in time to a island during World War 2 that has a dinosaur on it for no real reason, transport it to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, plant 3 mini dragons on the island to create a new monster that they can control, who is a gigantic dragon with 3 heads that fires lightning out of his mouth. Meanwhile, Godzilla is made when a nuclear sub hits him, he fights the dragon, then he goes to destroy Tokyo for no apparent reason, so they go into the future and make a new dragon that's a cyborg to fight Godzilla, and you're trying to tell me that somehow this is an advanced metaphor for nuclear war?

Me:...Okay okay, I just like it when Godzilla stomps Tokyo to the ground.

Him: That's all I needed to hear.

End scene.

@ Douglas Goldstein

Oh, snap!

Mego Spidey FTW!

Worst nerd argument? The one I get engaged with anytime I meet a fellow Dune reader who reads the prequels, which I hate with an upmost passion. I'm what's called a "Orthodox Herbertarian", which is anyone who believes that the only canon Dune novels are the ones written by Frank Herbert himself.

The Trust says otherwise, which gives Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson the right to write tons and tons of shit Dune prequels, sequels, and (horror of horrors!) interequals in the greatest science fiction series of all time. Orthodox Herbertarians, such as myself, find issues and conflicts with the books as to why they should not be considered canon, and do whatever they can to stop the the unending rape of this amazing universe.

My ultimate weapon? Only the personal blog of the craziest/most bad ass Dune fan of all time, Sand Chigger (http://chiggerblog.hairyticksofdune.net/blog/), and Jacurutu.com, the Cast Out forum. They have the most amazing synopsis and lists of conflicts with the original books, and the BH/KJA books for arguments why they're shit. It's enough to make me cry with joy.

Although I haven't come to fisticuffs, there have been screaming matches, and some pushing, and maybe some burning of certain offensive books. I have also sworn on my soul that if I ever meet Kevin J. Anderson, I'm going to punch him in the face.

Even weirder? I'm almost an Ultra-Orthdox Herbertarian, believing that the original Dune novel is almost Canon of Canon, like some Tabernacle of the series. I also believe that the Dune Encyclopedia is not apocrypha, which is semi-heretical. Is it a religion? Maybe.

And for the record, edgreen86 is my new hero. Batman > American national security any day.

First of all I've got comic based tattoos. I just bought batman the animated series toys off of eBay last night. There isn't a day that I don't rant and rave bullshit to my friends and family about comics or star wars, etc...
My wife could probably argue why "Boba lived ".
Thusly, thinking of a nerd based argument is like grasping at air; it's abundant, but I got nothin'.

The semi-nerdiest fight that comes to mind is from last Halloween. My wife and I threw a party, & my brother in law showed up. We had a great time drinking beers, watching day of the dead, and eating candy.

Then he started barking about McCain and what a good president he's going to be. Naturally, I called bullshit and we fought for the remainder of the party. Toward the end he storms in, tried to be funny and decides to pick his wife up. He loses his balance, drops her, and she almost flies through my coffee table. Drinks and snacks fly everywhere. At the height of his embarrassment I say, " is McCain gonna clean this up too?" and he looks down at me and says from his clown costume," fuck you asshole. If you were anyone else I'd fuck you up."
which makes me in my sith costume stand up and say," good, give into your hatred!".
He cracks a smile, throws his arm over my shoulder and tells me he had a great time.

Anne Frank versus Helen Keller? That is just sick.

You mean fighting each other, right? Coz I can't imagine anyone not picking Dutch jailbait if you're arguing the other thing.

That's easy, I got into an argument with a dude on a message board about who would win in a fight, the Power Rangers or the Ninja Turtles. It never got heated, but it went on way too long.

I remember once I stormed out of my friend's house because we were arguing over whether a futuristic society with a work force of indentured service would have the will power to revolt if a persuasive leader ever came along. I think it was in reference to Apokolips.

I punched a friend in the face when he suggested that the "Mega Man: Powered Up" art would be ideal for an adaption of the first "Protomen" CD. This happened last weekend.

A few years ago, when the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out, I was as I do now, working at a comic shop in front of racks of action figures. I will start but saying i have no room to talk, I am a tried and true geek who has gone to Star Trek cons since she was in 7th grade and heck! I was working at a comic shop!

Two guys come in, one tall and lanky with acne and an obscure band shirt, the other shorter, wider and wearing a trenchcoat in a California summer. The two talked loudly about some obscure pop culture reference at the time and were the general sort of noise and chatter you get in your LCS until they hit the action figure racks and proceeded to utter the nerdiest damn thing I had ever heard.

Remember: Star Trek con attending, role-playing game loving, X-Men fangirl here.

The shorter of the two turned to his tall buddy and declared to the empty store that LEGOLAS was far inferior to DRIZZT because DRIZZT has two scimitars and a panther and it was IMPOSSIBLE due to the LAWS OF PHYSICS to stab someone in the eye with an arrow as seen in Fellowship of the Ring. The man believed in panther familiars named Guenhwyvar but not being able to stab someone in the eye with a sharp stick??

I jumped up and for the first time in my life, "NERD!" got to be shouted from my lips at someone rather than the other way around. Horrified by both the declaration and my gender, the short one proceeded to press his point saying that the arrow would have to break from the pressure once it entered the eye socket. I nearly ordered them out of the store.

I always find myself getting into arguments with poeple over whether or not the Joker and Harley Quinn have had sex (I'm on the side of yes). Apparently, a lot of people believe they haven't. This leads to an analysis of the differences and innuendos in various comic books and the cartoon and usually ends in loud shouting.

Back in 2002, one of my college housemates and I had a heated debate over whether or not Chewbacca has a moustache or not. Despite an obviously different, darker, and thicker patch of hair above his lips, my friend Chris denies that the wookie is sporting a 'stache. As pointless as this debate was, it still persists today. During the 2005 release of the Special Edition DVDs, Chris finally saw the moustache but argued that George Lucas digitally added it in. (why?) This summer, I used the Chewbacca masks from the movie Stepbrothers as well as the 'Mustache Rides' t-shirt from Topless Robot's Geek Apparel of the week as evidence in my favor.

Damn, that one Adam did with him arguing with his wife about trying to win a TR shirt is friggin hilarious...I put my vote on him.

Oh god. After reading all of these posts, I think I may loose an internal argument about whether or not to kill myself. But okay, fuck, here's mine. It's short and sweet.

Years ago I hassled my wife, because during a conversation she insisted on saying the name of the second Alien movie as "Alien 2." It drove me nuts, and I would correct her, but she continued to pronounce it the wrong way. (Probably just to piss me off.) Finally, after I had said Aliens "with an S" close to twenty times, she snapped back saying, "Oh, you mean AliensSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS."

She still says "AliensSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS" to this day... and all I can do is nod and smile, seeing as how she so beautifully called me out for being a nerd.

Oh god...

This only happened a few weeks ago. As a rule, I avoid arguments and confrontations, 'cause I'm a big pussy. But this was too much to bear...

I was in the local comic shop, talking to a fellow geek. Proper stereotype, this fella - overweight, too small black metal tshirt, greasy hair. He was telling me how he'd bought a box of cheap comics at the local auction house, including the jewel of his collection, Fantasic Four #122, which he claimed was the first Hulk vs. Thing fight.

Except it isn't - that happened way back in FF #12. But he would not let it lie - he insisted he was right. The argument went on for about 20 minutes before we were both asked to leave. Before I stormed off, I asked this collector where he lived, as I was "gonna show him who was right". Well, he was dumb enough to tell me his address, so a couple of hours later I turned up on his doorstep clutching my copy of FF #12.

As he opened the door, I thrust the comic in his face and screamed "YA SEE? FF #12, 1963! 6 YEARS BEFORE #122!", then ran off giggling like a schoolgirl whilst he stood there confused.

Totally worth it.

We would argue which version of the Joker would win in a fight.

During university, one of the flatties I was with and I would watch "Star Trek: Voyager" nightly (in syndication). I think we ended up watching every episode that way. Anyway, after a few weeks of this, he began to remark "The Delta Quadrant proves that the human form is superior!" By human form, he meant homo sapien looking beings, standing on two legs, with two arms, each arm having opposable thumbs, with endoskeletons, standing six feet-ish, etc. I countered with "No, it proves that the production staff had only humans to choose from to cast." (Save for species 8472.) He probably scoffed at my lack of imagination, but c`mon, really now.

I was president of my anime club for my senior year at college. We had always shown stuff subtitled, but one new member requested that we show some dubbed stuff. I kinda ranted in his face about how we would never do that, and every reason why dubs were inferior. I preached. I mean, even before I was into anime, I had a great appreciation for foreign film. I was pretty much disgusted that someone in the club would even suggest this. Yeah, well... Someone else told me later. He was dyslexic. He couldn't read the subtitles. He just wanted to be able to enjoy one episode out of the 8 shows we screened every Sunday night with out having someone explain to him what was going on.

Me = ASS.

My husband and I have had some VERY heated arguments, emotive ranting and some pushing about which is better/cooler more generally awesome;

Lion Voltron or Vehicle Voltron

(Lion Voltron of course. Just couldn't leave it alone!)

Oh man, this is perfect and still really fresh in my mind. On Monday, I noticed a girl in my Religion course was wearing a Batman and Robin shirt. Not recognising which Robin it was, and thrilled to be a fellow female Batman fan, I decided to ask her.
Me: Hey, I like your shirt! Do you happen to know which Robin that is? I couldn't place him.
Her: Uh, it's THE Robin. (eyeroll)
Me: Oh, I gathered that much. It's just there have been, what, six or so, and I was just wondering if you knew.
Her: Are you fucking stupid or something? There's only one Robin, always has been.
Me: Er, no there hasn't. Trust me on this. Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Carrie Kelly, Julie Madison, Tim Drake, and Stephanie Brown.
Her: You're just making up names now!
Me: What? No, I'm not! Even if you don't count the temporary girls, there have still been three long-term Robins!
Her: I've been reading the comics since I was six, I think I would know.
Me: Are you kidding me?
Her: There's only been one Robin, just like there's only been one Batman. Shut the hell up and stop trying to prove an imaginary point.
Me: Actually, speaking of Batman ...

At that point, she got up and moved across the classroom, but not before stating loudly that I was a delusional bitch who knows nothing about comics. I got weird looks for the rest of the class and am not looking forward to going back on Monday. I don't believe I was in the wrong, but now I wish I'd never said anything!

When I was going through tech school in the Navy to be an electronic technician (hardcore nerd crowd if there ever was), our class adviser would come in every Friday before we were let go to see what movies we were going to go see over the weekend. Mind you he was a graduated nerd, having gone through the same program and taught for 20 something years. Then on Monday, when we all returned he would debrief us on the movie selections and compare them with his own. One such weekend we were discussing the Mummy Returns. A classmate spoke up about how much he liked the movie, but was turned off because of the part about the blimp. Our adviser always one to play devil's advocate, probed the kid for details. He explained, if you were to attach rockets to the basket of the balloon as per the movie, the basket would simply fly around the balloon according to the laws of physics. Our adviser interrupts at this point. So you suspend your belief that the dead can be resurrected using ancient magic and can assemble an army of dead followers, but you can't get past a rocket propelled blimp? Boom Lawyered!

Pluto is Max's mother.
After being fucked by Goofy she went insane. (I mean, who wouldn't?) and decided to do the forbidden thing... Take off her gloves... *bum bum bum!*
This led to a de-evolution and turned her more dog-ish.
Now Goofy didn't know what to do. He couldn't let his son grow up with a dog for a mother. So his good friend Mickey volunteered to take care of her in the most humane way possible...
This is why Pluto looks like Goofy and all other dogs in the cartoons actually look like dogs.

I once got into and argument with my ex nrrd grrl girlfriend about the merits of the first Robocop movie. Having purchased the Criterion dvd at a super cheap price, I went on and on about how awesome the movie was and that the Criterion version was the unrated (NC-17) cut. She then told me that Robocop was a dumb concept and she didn't care to watch it.

I couldn't believe my ears, a dumb concept?! I tried to explain to her that the movie was a metaphor for capitalism and that it wasn't just some dumb flick about a guy who gets blown apart then put back together as a cyborg cop. She apparently remembered Robocop as a cheesy cartoon/tv series but I wasn't having any of that. I told her that anything after the original was just pure marketing bullshit to make money, kinda like the whole concept of the original movie, make more products to sell and/or upgrade things out the ass for a profit.

Instead of listening to me, she went on about how dumb the plot was and how stupid he sounds and how he spouts off cliched catchphrases. It broke my heart to hear her saying all those awful things about poor Robocop.

The sad part is that she's a tried and true nerd. She has a ginormous Yoda tattoo, reads comics and watches insanely awesome movies. But she hates Robocop.

She still thinks Robocop sucks to this day. It's sad that she doesn't recognize how truly awesome it really is. Ugh.

The worst argument/fist-fight that me and my buddy ever got into was about Street Fighter II "throwing etiquette".

This was back in the arcade days when everyone was playing Street Fighter II. There are two schools of thought on throwing in SF, one says throwing is a cheap move that reqires no skill, especially if your opponent is blocking your attacks and vulnerable. The other contends that if you weren't meant to throw in the game, Capcom wouldn't of let you do it in the first place. One night we were playing with a scholar of the latter philosophy and it led to bloodshed.

This guy was pissing us off because his style of play was just walking up and throwing you. My friend tried to explain to him why that wasn't cool and he just blew him off. We made up our minds that we had to beat this guy and get him and his giggling friends off the machine and out of the arcade. We lost round after round because of this guy's cheap throwing play style and my buddy had enough. He told him that if he threw him one more time he would kick his ass and the dude threw him and told him to fuck off. Next thing, everyone is pushing each other and the brawl spills out into the street.

Suffice it to say that the police were called and we had to explain to two grown men wearing guns that we were fighting over a video game. Oh, and we had to pony up $50 a piece to replace the arcade's front window.

The nerd argument that still boils my blood is my old roomates confedence that the fucking Predator could kill Batman. Absolute bullshit. All the cocksucker would say is "he's got a shoulder canon, and he can turn invisible!" Anyone who gets killed by Danny Glover can not beat fucking Batman.

I was in a RPG with two of my guy friends (Let's call them Mr Rad and Mr. Bear). I don't remember what started it, but they just started getting mad at each other over the rules. I did my best to break up the fight, but it didn't work! In the end me and Mr.Rad left the RPG. Mr. Bear was the creator, so he couldn't leave...

I really wish it had never happened. And now Mr. Bear re-invited me to the RPG!

AUGH!!

When I was 14 or 15, I was friends with a guy a few years older than me, and he embodied the word "geek." However, I felt pretty on par with him when we started discussing our favorite characters in Lord of the Rings. Not a difficult topic, presumably. Except when the conversation turned to Gandalf. Years later I can now knowingly admit I was in the wrong, but at the time I thought I was the smartest little bitch on the planet because "Gandalf has one of the elvish rings of power so clearly he must be an elf!" My friend tried to correct my misguided ways, but I just kept on insisting. Eventually he turned away in disgust and suggested we play Magic the Gathering, where he promptly kicked my ass.

Years later I read the Silmarillion and realized the folly of my ways. To set the record straight, Gandalf is one of the five wizards from across the sea and is in no way, shape, or form an actual elf. I'm sure he probably doesn't remember the incident at all and probably wrote me off as a geek wannabe. All the same, this argument has stayed with me for years, niggling the back of my brain every time I think about Gandalf, Magic the Gathering, or my own socially inept existence.

Paul Sebert: I'm ashamed to admit that I kinda had a crush on Mokey. But the much hotter muppet is Chili the Sheep, the stunt-muppet companion of the German emo-muppet Bernd das Brot ("Bernard the bread"). That shit is avant-garde.

My only real shameful nerd argument that went badly was when I ruined dinner by arguing with my parents over whether artificial intelligence could ever be capable of conscious thought and emotions. My parents, being naturalist reductionists, argued against. They remain in the wrong, and we do not discuss it.

All my other nerd arguments (who's hotter? Agent Scully or Agent Starling? Who's a bigger badass? Darth Maul or Agent Smith?) were good-natured and never got out of hand (and were thus boring: every issue worth caring about is worth ruining a friendship).

Long time reader, first time poster.

I've got two entries, and I hope that doesn't disqualify me, but whatever. I think they're fairly funny.

These are really more shameful on my friends behalf than mine, but the fact that I participated in such nerdtastic idiocy is enough to put the shame squarely on my shoulders as well.
Onward.

Runner up (for me):

Growing up, we weren't dirt poor but we weren't middle class, either. Kind of lower middle class, or whatever. Regardless, my parents (probably mostly my dad) indulged myself and my brothers rabid video game lust and we generally got to pick one new console to own as the generations went by and they let us rent games and consoles every weekend. However, as many of you are aware, more involved games take longer than two days to beat, so I eventually turned to borrowing from the vast collection of games my friend James had.
James was an only child and his parents spoiled him rotten. He was a Nintendo fanboy, so he never had any Genesis games, but he always had the latest Nintendo games. I remember him eagerly awaiting Super Contra and when he got it we would play it and I would always die because I sucked at games like that. I'd have to sit there and watch him play for like an hour because he was super good at them while he made fun of me for not making it past the first level. It pretty much sucked balls.
At any rate, we were both eagerly awaiting the (ultimately disappointing) SNES release of Mortal Kombat, and we went apeshit when it came out, playing for hours on end.
Eventually, I became insanely good at the game and would pretty much just beat his ass every time. This went on for a few weekends and I started to notice a disturbing trend in James' behaviour. When he lost he would scream that the game was "cheating" and then proceed to smash the controller against the nearest surface and scream "WHY GOD!?" (I'm not making that up). Then hold his head in his hands and mumble incoherently about how fucked his life was.
Eventually, after a particularly humiliating defeat with Liu Kang and the flying kick maneuver, he screamed "I CAN'T PLAY WITH THIS FUCKING CONTROLLER, IT'S BROKEN!" then demanded we switch controllers. At this point I pointed out that if one controller was broker, they both were because he smashed the shit out of them all the time. He reiterated that the only reason I kept winning was because I had the non-broken controller. We swapped and he promptly lost again. "FUCK YOU, GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" he screamed. I honestly tried not to chuckle as I went to go call my parents to pick me up, but I didn't do so well and left him screaming obscenities in the gaming den.
A year or so later, at the tender age of maybe 13, he had to take nitro-glycerin pills because he had a heart condition that the doctors gathered was due to the stress he incurred while gaming.

First Place (as far as I'm concerned):
Even back when Another World and Flashback came out, I was one of the only kids I knew who had played either, and part of a still smaller cult of kids who thought they were super kick ass. Delphine software, as far as I was concerned, could do no wrong. Thus, early on I learned you should never place that much faith in a game publisher.

My mom was a hairdresser and, as such, made friends with townspeople at an alarming rate. Right at the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year, she made friends with a single mom who lived a few streets over and had a kid my age. Since the kid didn't know anyone in town my mom thought it would be awesome for me to hang out with him. I was fairly ambivalent about the whole scenario until I hung out with him for five minutes and discovered he was obsessed with Shaquille O'Neal. If I'm not mistaken, our first time hanging out was spent listening to the first Shaq rap album and playing NBA Jam where he'd always enter his initials as SHQ whenever we played arcade mode. Mind, I hate sports games.
The next time we watched a bunch of Shaq highlights while I contemplated ending my 13 year old life.
Then Shaq Fu came out.
My mom had an errand to run at their house (emergency haircut or something), so I was kind of forced to go with her. Dude trotted out Shaq-Fu and extolled its virtues while I tried to manually shut my brain off, to no avail. At first, I realised the game was incredibly irritating to play and that the fight mechanics were horribly broken. Being a lover of fighting games, and also retrospectively glad "Kazaam" hadn't come out before Shaq-Fu did, I kept on, thinking there might be some redeeming quality to this game.
As every nerd knows, there is none.
Not much later, my mom informed me it was time to leave and, on my way out, I said something of the effect of "What a shitty fucking game." I think he said "Fuck you," as I strolled out the door, blissfully happy I was no longer playing that wretched abomination. Turns out, it doesn't matter what he said because he never talked to me again after that. He avoided contact with me at school and my mom never forced me to go over there again, because his mom told my mom he didn't want to be friends anymore.

And that, dear readers, is the most shameful nerd argument I've ever had.

M.

Edit:

"Super Contra" should be "Contra III: Alien Wars" in my above post. Not that it matters one bit, but I just now realised that Super Contra wasn't a game for the Super Nintendo.
Probably why they named it Contra III.

M.

I know, I'm pandering, but One Piece versus Naruto.

Also, I totally somehow missed the last line of the contest post that says "One entry per person".

Fail.

M.

well...this one is kinda stupid...
i absolutely HATE twilight. i hate it with a passion. but all of my friends love it, which, of course, pisses me off to no end. well, feeling left out and such (stupid...i know), i decided to read the first book. couldn't get past the first seven chapters...so i just asked a friend of mine to tell me everything that had happened in all the books (the last one came out so she had already read that one). well, much to my dismay, she says, 'bella gets pregnant-' and i respond to 'wait. how the hell did that happen?' she says, 'well...you know...they' and i say 'no not that! i mean how the hell can she get pregnant, edward is dead!' she says, 'well, their sperm is frozen with them. whatever they had at the time of them turning into a vampire is what they'll have for the rest of their life.' and say that is the stupidest thing i've ever heard. this is what i say, 'if that's the case, then why isn't there more vampire babies going around? look at edwards 'mom' and 'dad' shouldn't they have alot more vampire babies?! and don't dare try and tell me that vampires don't do the nasties with humans! their should be hundreds of half vampire half human babies! and that stupid vampire edward was really a virgin for like a 118 years?! that makes him a bigger nerd than me!' and she says, 'well it's just a book! and anyway, they have this baby that ages faster than normal-' and i yell, 'WAIT! WHAT?!!?! it ages FASTER?! wtf?! shouldn't it age slower?! its a effin vampire baby!!!' and she says, 'well, that the only way for the baby to end up with jacob-' and i scream, 'THAT STUPID WEREWOLF?! THAT ONE?! THE WEREWOLF IS A GAWD DANG PEDOPHILE?! DIDN'T HE LIKE, LOVE BELLA?!' and she says, 'well, he liked her scent,' and yell, 'and what's so special about her scent?! did it ever explain why 'such a plain girl' is attracting every gawd damn supernatural creature?!' and she counters with, 'well, she's his scent type (or something like that)' and i say, well, then shouldn't edward like other girls who smell like bella?! and what happens on her period?!' and she says, 'well, bella has a unique smell,' 'WHY?!!!!' 'i don't know'
finally...this whole thing ends with me screaming saying that anyone who likes twilight is a complete idiot who can't read worth shit and doesn't understand the term 'plot' and the entire lunchroom looking at me weird.
all because of gawd damn twilight. which i don't even like. but got into a heated discussion about.
(btw, true blood, underworld, so much better.)

This isn't so mush a debate as a bet, but it's certainly embarrassing... Back in high school my friend and I were just about obsessed with Jim Henson's Labyrinth- and more specifically with the "Bowie Pants."

One night, we decided to watch the movie and count how many shots were devoted entirely to David Bowie's crotch. We even debated what would counts for this, settling on any shot that was 2/3 or more Bowie-codpiece. And then we watched a kid's movie, noting how many times an 80's pop/ rock stars crotch made an appearance,

*sigh * I lost the bet- turns out there are only like 5 "Bowie Pants Moments" in the whole movie. Apparently they just sort of... stand out.

Years ago, my gaming group was interviewing a potential new recruit; a recruit who has since then become known as Marcus The Unclean, due to his horrible - even by geek standards - hygiene.

Marcus was somehow able to find a way to piss off nearly every single person in the group without even trying in one hour. But even with all the complaints about children, teachers, homosexuals and various religions, what every one claims to remember best about that night is his argument with me and what made me the only person to start actually trying to argue with him instead of biting our lip until we actually got through one adventure.

What did he do to set me off? Insult my religion? My job? My fetishes?

Worse. He challenged my knowledge of comics and kept insisting that there was a story, in main-line Marvel continuity, where Bobby Drake (Iceman) became a Herald of Galactus for several years.

I once had an epic debate with a co-worker about why Fred Astaire would kick Gene Kelly's ass in a fight...alas, I lost...

Choosing the most shameful nerd argument is like trying to decide which Scientologist is the biggest moron.

I think there should be a tie for first between every nerd argument ever had. Just sayin'.

@Electronsexparty - your fight with your future spouse about Harry Potter's ultimate romantic conquest made me laugh out loud. My girlfriend and I have gone through the exact same feud; her argument is that Harry and Hermione were the ideal pairing, while I thought Harry should have went the Luke-Skywalker-in-the-original-trilogy route and stayed unattached. We've been fussing about this for the better part of five years, to the point where she tried to beg off a date to see the Half Blood Prince film.

The latest nerd argument I got in was over Terminator Salvation. I disliked pretty much everything except the digital Arnold cameo, but that was a huge problem for my friends, who all hated everything about the movie. And because I thought one scene in an otherwise dull and unnecessary sequel was cool, I was the runt of the group for about a week.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=916087&topic=49482454 I'm sebrith

There a couple things I'm ashamed about.
1. For the real reason I was arguing until like halfway through was because I REALLY did hate that saying... not even to make a point or anything...
2. I'm pretty sure I was being trolled.
3. It was so damn off topic and eventually the the TC actually had to tell us to shut up.

... But come on... how much more of a nerd argument can you get than how you don't need women on a Gamefaqs message board?

I once had a half-hour long argument with my roommate about whether his stomach was or was not a bag of holding.

I once got into a screaming match with my brother over a particularly bright light in the night-sky. He insisted it was the North Star, while I KNEW that that was impossible because the Polaris isn't all that bright. I started telling him it was probably a planet, but he immediately started argueing that if it was a planet, it would have some sort of color. Never have I wanted to punch my brother so badly. TO THIS DAY, we can't talk about starts without bringing the fight back up.

This is so easy.
The argument I was a part of in regards to STAR TREK,
is the ultimate nerd conversation.
Does the two part The Menagerie episode count as one or two episodes?
It's kind of a big deal obviously.

@kat

ARCHER!?! I mean he's obviously the worst captain. Not only for what he did, but for being so bland while he did it! I mean Janeway, for example. Bad actions every now and then. Even times I'd call her outright evil. But at least she had personality while doing it. I might not like what she did, but I could enjoy watching her doing it.

Some background info: My friends and I have frequent "Geek Challenges," where we select a comic-related topic (ie: "Canadian super-heroes" or "heroes without superhuman abilities") and take turns naming characters that fit the criteria. Fail to think of a character, or name a character that doesn't fit the topic, and you get a strike. Three strikes and you're out...Last geek standing wins. As you can imagine, these challenges can be pretty short or VERY long, depending on the topic.

One of the topics we used was "characters with fire powers." This is a pretty broad topic...There are TONS of comic book characters with some sort of fire ability. We played for what felt like an eternity, until my friend and I were the only two left in the game. After a while, it became really difficult to think of an answer...A third strike was imminent for one of us.

That's when my friend said "Cannonball" (of the New Mutants). This did not sit well with me! We must have argued for 20 minutes about whether or not Cannonball (who has the ability to project a propelling "blast field"--of which fire and smoke is a byproduct--from his body) counted as having "fire powers."

So that's my story: a lengthy, detailed argument, involving both the Internet AND the Official Marvel Handbook, about whether or not Cannonball of the New Mutants has fire powers. I think I conceded the point, but it still comes up in conversation to this day...

Another quick anecdote: At the last comic shop I worked at, my coworkers and I used to have pretend "arguments" about who would win in a fight between Darth Vader and Dracula. I think we did it to mess with one of our more annoying customers, but it's been a while, so my memory is kind of hazy. Of course, there's no real argument to be had--EVERYONE knows that Darth Vader would win! He's got the Force, man! :-)

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=197338&topic=45517299

I nominate PrimePikachu because he has been arguing for over a year now and still is that this character http://www.ffodyssey.com/wallpapers/ff9/ff9_quina2_1024.jpg is the sexiest thing ever...

Most shameful nerd argument? Probably the debate I had on AIM proving that Batman is the winner of the "Who is cooler, Superman or Batman?" because Batman can actually masturbate and have sex without killing someone. Here's the convo:

allyndnoir (1:22:34 AM): He's from the planet Krypton and has abilities exceeding that of a normal man by a million fold because of the radiant energy of our Yellow sun
allyndnoir (1:22:52 AM): Batman is just a normal guy in tights who has parent issues.
AnniT116 (1:23:05 AM): right
allyndnoir (1:23:08 AM): and a neat car
AnniT116 (1:23:13 AM): :D
allyndnoir (1:23:54 AM): then again, I guess it'd be better to be Batman considering he gets pussy all the time
allyndnoir (1:24:02 AM): and Superman can't even masturbate
AnniT116 (1:25:15 AM): how do you figure that?
allyndnoir (1:25:28 AM): I'll show you. I'm going to do some simple math here:
allyndnoir (1:27:36 AM): a peak human can lift what 800 lbs maximum?
allyndnoir (1:28:12 AM): according to the Death of Superman story arc
allyndnoir (1:28:19 AM): Superman can lift 800,000 tons
allyndnoir (1:28:21 AM): which is what?
allyndnoir (1:28:39 AM): 1,600,000,000 pounds?
AnniT116 (1:28:47 AM): sure
allyndnoir (1:29:36 AM): thats damn near a 2 Million percent increase over a peak human
allyndnoir (1:30:04 AM): now
allyndnoir (1:30:42 AM): A normal human can ejaculate at 28 MPH (well, that's the average speed)
allyndnoir (1:31:17 AM): so if superman has a peak increase of 2 million times across the board
allyndnoir (1:31:33 AM): he'd ejaculate at a speed of 56,000,000 miles per-hour.
AnniT116 (1:31:45 AM): hollllllyyyy eff
allyndnoir (1:32:55 AM): Superman ejaculates at almost twice the speed of the voyager space probe
allyndnoir (1:34:04 AM): imagine that shit..

A D&D fight.

There were six of us, and if I remember correctly, the bard got this really sweet staff or something, and the rogue wanted it. After trying to take it away from her, he ended up shooting her in the head with a crossbow. The rest of us were taken aback (including the DM), so after a pregnant pause, we ended up dogpiling him and throwing him in the town jail. Back in real life, the rogue got really mad at all of us and started screaming at us that we were traitors and not acting in character and we yelled back that he just shot our bard IN THE HEAD, but he didn't see that as important and that we should've stood by him as that's what friends do. He went on and on about this for the rest of the night. We decided he was a psychopath and pretty much stopped hanging out with him soon after that.

I suppose that's not really shameful for me, but more for the rogue. Maybe the mere fact that we're playing D&D... ;)

The most shameful Nerd argument I've ever seen happened to be one of the biggest I've come across in about 18 years of being online.

Back when D&D 4e was coming out, there was the introduction of the Dragonborn, a race of pseudo-dragons that pretty much replaced the half-orc as the big fighter type. Well, apparently they became a small controversy because of a very strange reason: people wanted to know if they were going to have breasts or not.

Not kidding.

On the Wizards of the Coast boards, the nerd rage went on for weeks about breasts or no breasts and resulted in a thread that spanned approximately 50 PAGES of forum posts. The only reason it came to a halt is basically because it was pretty much 'decided' that the breasts would come or go on the DM's prerogative.

That was, by far, the most shameful nerd argument I ever witnessed.

I got into Arguments about Shadowrun 3rd Ed versus 4th Ed more often than i care to remember.
Also about ClassicBattletech versus Dark Age
Also about the new Marvel/DC-Movies and the original Comics they are based on.
I don't know whether or not it's something to be proud about that i actually won most of those arguments too . . Yes, i managed to "win" arguments which were based entirely on different tastes.
Also:
Enterprise Versus Stardestroyer.
Death Star versus Unicron.
About which DC/Marvel Character could beat which DC/Marvel Character.
And i still say Kitty Pride or blink could win in an fight against the Hulk in full Anger Mode . .

@Allynd Dudnikov
here is something for you to enjoy ^^
http://www.larryniven.org/stories/Man_of_Steel_Woman_of_Kleenex.shtml

Okay this isn't an actual argument. but hear me out. As for what Carla wrote, I think I out geek you here. I used to WORK at Star Trek cons as a volunteer security person. I was one of the lucky few who used to be able to hang around with the stars and such (I worked in a TOY STORE ALSO in New York city... where a lot of our clientele were famous folks, so I was used to being around them). Anyway, this happened at a con shortly after DS9 had started airing... I was told to "check in" to a room where Brannon Braga, Ron Moore and Lolita Fatjo were sitting and signing autographs (the person who was SUPPOSED to be there watching over them left for NO reason). The three of them had a few fans waiting for autographs.. and at the VERY END of the line was a fan.. a REALLY BIG FAN.. who stated to them that DS9 has become their favorite show.. and the she has now adopted the Bajoran religion as her own. They smiled and signed what she had (personally, I had seen this kind of behavior before and I didn't want to tell HER that it's JUST a TV show.. BUT, I'm a smart ass).. and as soon as she left the room, I turned to them with my arms outstretched as if I was trying to wegh two objects and said "reality... Star trek...reality... Star Trek.. guess she doesn't see the difference, huh?". They laughed (thank god)....

I work at a comic store and one day; just after the Amazing Spider-Man Obama comic had just come out, a customer came in and said how he had the book and it was going to be worth lots of money. And I countered that one day when all the hype dies down around Obama it will settle into a regular; not so inflated price, just like the death of Superman. Well he had an answer for that, what if Obama is assassinated he said almost gleefully. I was kind of flabbergasted and taken aback because I got the feeling he was HOPING Obama would be assassinated in order for his comic to increase in value. I have never been so ashamed of a comic "fan" in my life. Maybe he was just a filthy speculator and not a "fan" but either way I wanted nothing more to do with him after that.

My most shamefull nerd arguements came almost every friday night in my house playing magic the gathering with my friends. On one occasion I threw them out and it took awhile before they came back. Shameful on many levels but when you keep piling on enchanted creatures on one guy so he's indestructible thats what I call bullshit. NOW GET OUT!

It all started when we started a new D&D group with a new person as DM. We were all fine with this until he pulled out his d12 die...

Yes we argued and fought over die shape.

His d12 had a rhombus for each face where as mine and the former DM used the correct type of die with a pentagon as each face.

One roll of the new die, i gave it a fair shot, and i knew instantly this could not be an accurate way to roll.

So long story short, 10 thousand rolls of each die, 2 notebooks full of results. Math and engineering majors arguing with physics majors.

By the time we had finished we had the amount of friction calculated, tested on different rolling surfaces, even tested rolling in a vacuum chamber. And at the end of it, i got the first roll of the game over turned almost 4 months after the roll.

What makes this shameful was the spell i was rolling for, fireball against a rat in the tavern where we all met up...

Either the time I was arguing with a friend of mine whether light and sound can exist in Outer Space in real life the same way it exists in Star Wars and Star Trek (no matter in space means no sound and no dust means no reflected light), or the time I was arguing with a friend who's the better and more "outgoing" gamer

I was friends with this guy named Chris at school. We rode the same bus to and from school. I am one of the biggest Star Trek nerds in the world and of course, all the bullies at school totured me worse then a farm animal about it. So, one day, in a moment of insanity, he decided to join the bullies and turn on me and tell me Star Trek sucks and tries to pull the Trek book I am reading out of my hands. So, I grab his head and actually break the school bus window with it. For some reason, we stopped being friends period and the bullies all backed all for a while. Hmmmm, actually this is one of my favorite moments, not shameful...

@Zerosys - You win, it was probably Venus, which doesn't tend to look colored to the naked eye, and is usually pretty bright.

This thread somehow spawned a two hour argument last night on AIM about whether it would be considered beastiality for Cheetara to boink Snarf, considering she's half cheetah herself. It got pretty heated at one point, with both of us degenerating into bold italic'd caps and trying to outshout each other's text, which oddly enough doesn't seem to work, with much technical Thunderean jargon and referencing of supposedly ironclad online "sources". It finally ended when I made a siderant about how much I disliked the New Thundercats, and Pumyra in particular, and my friend called me a moronic heathen and metaphorically stomped offline saying she was never speaking to me again. I then proceeded to write a three page email defending my position, but I came to my senses somewhere at the beginning of page four and let it slide. :

(Note: I swear I'm not a furry. But it seems OBVIOUS to me that it can't be beastiality if it's two animals who're going at it, it's just logic! ...excuse me, having one of those "this is not my life" moments.)

When I was younger, I used to LARP for about two straight years at a Dragoncrest chapter. The chapter ended up dissolving, but I still love LARPing to this day.

However. I've gotten into many an arguement where the other person just didn't seem to get the point of playing around in a forest with swords made out of plumbing pipe, foam, and duct tape. And spell packets made out of birdseed and cloth. They just didn't get that it was FUN.

Sure, we got weird looks when we went out to eat in full gear, but it was a blast. I felt just a wee bit pitiful, though, trying to explain this to people who think that LARPing is prancing around in the woods with imaginary friends.

the argument was over whether lois lane would survive a full-on encounter from superman. well, given how interspecial love-making is a nebulous affair at best, it was more of a series of inquiries. but there was furious discussion, nonetheless.

first is the thirst. if supes isn't even eyeing other women--which rarely and inexplicably it seems he didn't, he's gunna have a whole mess of jittery, faster-than-a-speeding-bullet energy, too much to contain. it's a blunt instrument, sure, but given how fast it's coming at her, it may as well be a well-honed dagger. lois's only hope is to slip supes a mickey and further hope it's in the right shape and direction, because if that guy's made of steel there isn't any way she's going to bend it to her will.

second, if clark kent is super pent, the pressure at which he erupts could be disasterous. i've seen water at high pressures cut steel like butter. it'd be like laser surgery for that poor woman but with a blind and drunk doctor pointing every which way but south.

third, well third is a temporal concern which may yet be too far ahead of me. if supes killed lois in the heat of passion(the good kind) and then flew around the planet in the opposite direction to reverse time and undo who he did, would he still remember boinking her?

then there was the question that if superman was incapable of sexual relations with anyone from earth, would sex with his hot cousin be abnormal and wrong for him? with our sympathies for our superhero, and the way supergirl looked in a skirt, debate always ended on this matter.

@avenon: And if he *didn't* remember boinking her, couldn't it lead to the same choices being made, trapping him in a boinkloop forever?? Deep. :x

I've argued both sides of the "Is Popeye a Superhero" debate.

It should come as no surprise that my biggest nerd argument involved Power Rangers. After ten great years under the Saban umbrella Power Rangers changed ownership to "the mouse."

In the very first episode of the new season (Power Rangers Ninja Storm) the character of Dustin started talking about the spandex-clad heroes. Another character then remarked that Power Rangers only existed in comic books.

WHAT?! How dare he?! Is Disney restarting the show from square one? Are we pretending like the 11th installment is the first and the previous ten don't matter anymore? I argued until I was blue in the face for days and weeks about how Disney was slapping fans in the face.

It turns out that the executive producer was Doug Sloan from the early seasons of Power Rangers and he was making his return to the series after about a 6-7 year absence. He was floored. He thought it was just a throw away line that meant nothing since the characters who were making the comments became the actual Power Rangers by the end of the episode.

Needless to say he was confused and I felt like a major ass. This just goes to show folks that "the mouse" isn't all bad.

P.S. The current, 18th season of Power Rangers will most likely be the last. Disney has decided to go in a different direction and we won't be getting new, love action PR for at least the considerable future. Dang it.

I can't tell you how many times I've gotten in fights over Sony vs. Nintendo.
And I've been on both sides.

What company was the bigger rascist- Hostess with Twinkie the Kid or Fritto's with Fritto Bandito. One side had the stereotypical Mexican bandit the other was a delious spongecake creamfilled Nazi (well he was supposed to made up from John Wayne the biggest Nazi on Earth!). The Hostess "white flour" gang won! Yea! That was a sad and boring day at the mortuary to say the least!

since we have had two posters argue about both the joker and superman doing the wild thing. i do not feel so bad about mine entry. for the nerdest and shamefull argument i have had is with my friend who being a star wars fan to the highest order . over whether before Lei finaly whacks Jabba if Jabba actually managed to do the wild thing with Lei which would be proably rape since doubtfull lei would have consented. not after my friend shocked wound up spitting out his beer over such a thing. being suggested. thus proving that sex should not be talked about with a star wars fan considerning jabba

Aingeal dar Cathu: I'll throw down on that one. It's NOT bestiality because neither participant is a beast. Both are reasoning anthromorphs fully capable of giving consent. Bestiality is generally regarded as unethical on the grounds that you're humping something that can't tell you beforehand whether it wants to...man, I'm already ashamed of this one and I haven't even finished making my case.

Asat: not necessarily, depending on where you're at. for instance in NJ, you apparently have to cause "torment" to the animal.

http://www.trentonian.com/articles/2009/09/25/news/doc4abc330f2a3f3353796294.txt

it's too short and too funny an article not to quote the whole thing:

"MOUNT HOLLY — Because prosecutors couldn’t definitively prove that the oral sex performed on Moorestown Police Officer Robert Melia Jr. by five cows wasn’t consensual, the animal cruelty charges against him were dropped.

Bestiality is legal in New Jersey, so the burden was on the Burlington County Prosecutor team to prove that the five underage cow calves didn’t enjoy fellating Melia.

Judge James Morley ruled Wednesday that prosecutors did not present enough evidence to jurors that Melia’s video-recorded actions constituted torment to the animals on a Southampton farm.

The judge disregarded the prosecutions claims when they reportedly said the suckling calves’ repeated head-butts to the officer’s stomach when they didn’t get their expected drink of milk was a clear indication of at least mild annoyance to the cows.

Melia was charged with tormenting the animals after police found the video footage of the officer and his barnyard pals while they were investigating allegations the officer and his former girlfriend Heather Lewis together molested three young girls.

Those charges remain against the officer."

My cousin introduced me to RPG's when I was about 9-10 years old by having me control a character in Final Fantasy 3. We never got in a fight over me "messing it up", as one would expect, but every single time we played the game(it was a 3-5 day marathon during Summer break), we would argue over the pronunciations of certain things in the game. He always seemed to be in the wrong. Figaro Castle= Fi-gar oh was how he pronounced it(i usually conceded that one because it sounded better for a place name).
These are how he pronounced things, and in parenthesis is how the name was spelled, and my assumed pronounciation afterwards when not obvious).
Then there was Rag-nork(Ragnarok), Chick-a-boo(Chocobo), Tri-uh-totch(tritoch(tri-tock)), Buh-Ha-mutt(Bahamut(ba-ha-mew)). There had to have been tons more, but the most important one of note here was how to pronounce Chocobo.
I never really argued with him on this point, but when FF7 came out I looked at the name of the bird really close and realized there was no way in hell it was pronounced "Chik-a-boo". Needless to say, about two weeks after the game came out, my cousin Josh heard through the grapevine that I had already bred a golden chocobo and he wanted me to do the same for him, and that his buddy was going to pay for me to do it on his game too(that was pretty awesome). Anyways, when I got over there, everytime he said "chick-a-boo", i would correct him with my pronunciation. Eventually, he got sick of me correcting him in front of his friend(we were 13 and 15 years old at the time, his friend was probably 17), and out of a little girl hissy fit, he decided to "correct" me by pushing me off the couch and onto a 2-liter soda bottle. I kicked him in the ankle(sending him to floor crying), and then took his memory card home with me and proceeded to wipe clean all of his saved games. Needless to say, that little incident made us stop talking for at least 2 years. Funniest part about all of it is that when Final Fantasy X came out, when I finally heard a character say it's name, I was wrong about the pronunciation too.

Did Naboo kill the Spirit of Jazz with Johnny Rotten's safety pin or just wound him?

@yIntagh

Damnit. Now I have to watch that episode again.

Brb, nerd investigation.

M.

@Asat: I'll consider that being on my side, because you still agree it's not beastiality, whether for the reason that they've both got animal characteristics or that neither of them is an animal. And so I can rub my friend's face in being confirmed wrong by another "ironclad internet source", which I can describe in vague terms and make sound more legitimate than Some Guy On a Website. Kyahahaha.

I once got in an nerdy argument while eating dinner with my wife´s family.

I and my sister-in-law (who isn't a nerd) where discussing what was better - movies based on books or the books that the movies where based on. I was of course speaking for books' superiority, she was advocating the movie medium.

One of her argument where that movies where great because it helped the books publicity. Her example for this was that NO ONE HAD HEARD ABOUT THE OBSCURE BOOK 'LORD OF THE RINGS' BEFORE THE KEWL MOVIES CAME OUT!!!!!!

I got so angry that I called her an idiot, said that I couldn't stand being in the same room as her and stormed out in the room. I did this in front of my wife and my mother-in-law. Not a very proud moment.

Man, thinking about it still makes me angry.

A good college friend and I will post interesting things back and forth on Facebook. He LOVES Batman, and so if I find anything about the Dark Knight, I post it to his profile. I 'found' an animated version of 'The Dark Knight Returns' in the style of Bruce Timm on YouTube, so I posted it. He then chastised me for assuming that I had not seen the video, and then went on a tanget about his comic superiority. I conceded my inferiority in the realm of D.C. Comics, but retaliated with the fact that though he may hold a candle in the realm of comics, I held a blow-torch in anime-geekery: I collected 72 Dragon Ball Z t-shirts over the course of 10 years, being able to wear a different DBZ shirt everyday for three months straight, and spending more than $2000 dollars on a horribly odd collection. My friend than admitted that in the argument I was the winner, but in reality I was the loser....

@LJSLarsson: That makes ME angry, too. Thanks. I first read them fifteen years ago, when I was ten. My copies had been passed down through my entire family by my grandmother, uncles, and mother. Too bad the books are so obscure no one's ever heard of them, huh?

x-men gold team vs. blue team.

@Aingeal dar Cathu: It's bestiality because they're two vastly different species. Doesn't matter that Snarf is sentient, he's their pet! Pluto shows signs of sentience, too, but if Mickey fucked him, it'd definitely be bestiality, so it's no different with Snarf/Cheetara!

@Aingeal dar Cathu: It's bestiality because they're two vastly different species. Doesn't matter that Snarf is sentient, he's their pet! Pluto shows signs of sentience, too, but if Mickey fucked him, it'd definitely be bestiality, so it's no different with Snarf/Cheetara!

This afternoon, my friends and I were playing Soul Calibur 4 and decided to make a custom character based on a Metal Gear Solid character. I decided to make one based on young Ocelot, but my friend angrily yanked the controller from me and demanded to ask if I ever played Metal Gear Solid in my entire life. He then proceeded to make a character that looked like Snake. Miscommunication or not, the argument was intense and there was a lot of unnecessary yelling over something that wasn't even worth arguing about.

Regardless, seeing Snake do Amy's taunt is utterly embarrassing to watch.

One night, my friend, my room mate and myself were idly competing in a thread on our anime club's forum called 'Red 5, Standing By,' or some such nonsense.

The point of the thread? Ala the trench run in episode IV, we start naming red things to stand by, much like they did in Family Guy's Blue Harvest. We were pulling crap like Omega Red, standing by, and Aka Red (from gekiranger vs. super sentai, i think) standing by.

Well, I had done the character Red, the main character of the Poke'mon manga. My room mate then said 'Poke'mon Red Version' standing by.

I got pissed, and said that the red version was BASED on the character Red, so they were the same charater, and therefore his entry was invalid. (Turns out it was the other way around, btw.)

He and I argued for about twenty minutes, and he then began running from his PC to the living room where we were hanging out, back and forth, checking wiki and righting DESPERATELY to prove me wrong.

At first, I was just a pissy nerd wanting to be right too badly, but then, it got funny, so I just kept insisting I was right to piss him off. He finally started yelling at me to admit I was wrong of he was seriously going to hit me, that I knew I was wrong and to tell him he was right.

I still pretend that Poke'mon Red is based on the character Red around him, just to make him angry.

So, the argument is actually... nearly a year long now!

Psylocke.

My cousin and I got into a debate about how to pronounce her name. Not even as interesting as telepathic v. ninja, or English v. Japanese. How to pronounce her good damn name.

I was arguing psi-lock, he was arguing psy-loak. Like cloak.

And the biggest problem? I still have no idea. I live in Australia, so can someone ask Chris Claremont at the next Comicon for me?

When I was in 3rd grade my would drop me off at a babysitters house before school and pick me up there after school while they were at work. The woman's oldest kid was in 1st grade and one day after school he wanted me to play Ninja Turtles with his action figures. I got a Turtle and he was some Villain character (I don't really remember). We're kinda making them fight each other, he makes his guy swing at mine with a sword, and I make the turtle jump a foot or so into the air (or what would be maybe 10 feet if it were to scale). He loses his mind.

He yells at me that Turtles can't jump that high, and yell back asking if he's ever even seen the show. They jump like that in the opening credits! He argues that it'd be impossible to jump that high, and I argue that they're Mutant Fucking Turtles. And Ninja no less. He wouldn't budge so I gave up and walked away, throwing the Turtle at him as I turned. He yelled "Hey!" and I turned back around as he sucker punched me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me. At that age I didn't even know you COULD have the wind knocked out of you. I panicked as I was doubled over and unable to breathe for a few seconds. When I finally got a lungful of air, I looked up at him and he was pretty smug and proud of himself. I clocked him square in the eye and he dropped to the floor.

Then he ran crying to his mom and I got in a shitload of trouble for beating up a 1st grader.

It was the only fist fight I've ever been in. And I won. Cuz I displayed - TURTLE POWER!

So my husband and i just got stationed in WA state from Kodiak, AK. We find the perfect house and a few days later our household goods arrive. Before i even get a chance to check the inventory and figure out which box has what in it, husband person is already unpacking the Death Star Lego Set for rebuilding.

I argued against the Legos and for the furniture but alas, was soundly defeated by the pitiful whining of a 30 year old man. Not a particularly boisterous arguement between the two of us, but i still resent having to sit on the floor to build the Death Star instead of the Couch. In retaliation I'm trying to teach our new kitten Starbuck how to use the force to blow up the Death Star.

The Man With Two Brains: Oh, come on, it's completely different! Pluto can't consent, short of waggling his floating eyebrows suggestively at Mickey... Snarf can actually speak English and be all, "Yes, Cheetara, spank my ass, SNARF!" So, if you think about it, he's really asking for it.

...which had nothing to do with my point.

Not really a single argument, but embarrasing none the less: my dyslexia often gets me into shameful debating positions on Science Fiction topics.
I probably know more about the exact design of the Enterprise then the great Spaghetti Monster has ever wanted me to, (which is sad, I know) and yet, while I am a walking encyclopedia of Star Trek wisdom I STILL occasionally slip up and say 'Star Wars'. Noooooooooooo!
I can't help it, truly. It always ruins every inch of my credibility at conventions.

My most shameful nerd argument was a fairly tame one; just a discussion about Superman and Batman with a non-nerd. This little high schooler could not grasp the concept that THE Dark Knight is, at the very LEAST by being on the Justice League without a single superpower, a greater force to be reckoned with than Superman.

In hindsight, I became far too animated on this subject considering I'd initially arrived for a church meeting. The initial discussion went on for at least an hour and a half while I brought up comic and movie point after point after point, even as the meeting began going on around us.

The discussion wound up being tabled by the meeting's host politely knocking our heads together(figuratively), where the brief shame of getting reprimanded for an argument over Batman quieted me.

The instant the meeting was over it began again, of course, and will not die until the lass submit's to the Dark Knight's power. I think the "man of steel, woman of kleenex" article may boost Batman's favor...but there you have my tale!

I think the most shameful argument ive ever had was. Was Which X-man would be best to have sex with. We Firgured That Scott would just be boring, and maybe if he orgasmed his glasses wouldnt be enough and they would break. Beast would a....well a beast in bed, and might possibley rip you apart if he got too into it. We didnt even consider rouge.

And Then we eventually got to charles xavier, and though he doesnt have a lot of strength, he can read your mind and know exactly what you want when you want it, making Charles Xavier the prime canidate for our terrible disscusion

The ones that my friends and I tend to get into spats about recently is whether lightsabers can cut through Wolverine's adamantium

@Fondoofushu: What about being a parpalegic? That would rule sex out if his junk isn't working. He may be able to read your mind and maybe give you an orgasm with his mind (mindgasm?), but it isn't sex unless there is penetration with a penis...

Just my two cents on the Cheetara/Snarf argument, Beastiality is "the practice of sexual relations between humans and animals" by definition. So since they are anthromorphs and not humans it isn't really beastiality.

Why do these things get stuck in our heads, and we continue to discuss horrible horrible things just to prove... What exactly? That we are right? Is being part of being a nerd just having to always be right?

@Nick,
Don't worry, you're not alone. That slip-up has got me many a time as well.

The biggest argument I can remember was back in the days of the original Super Smash Brothers-so, '99.
My buddy and I, we were both 9, and neither of us had really heard of Ness before. He'd never even heard of EarthBound, and I'd only heard of it because of an article in Nintendo Power. But he was convinced that that little EARTH (goddamnit) behind Ness' damage counter was a Pokeball and that Ness was a character from Pokemon. Of course, this started up a screaming match, and there's nothing quite like a screaming match between two pre-pubescent 9-year-olds. That was his only argument, by the way. The symbol was a pokeball and THAT was THAT.
Later on, when Melee came out, he was showing me his trophies, and we got to the one of the 8-bit Ice Climbers. He was positive that the trophy had "glitched" because "he knocked his GameCube while the trophies were loading" and, again, refused to listen to the FACT that, GODDAMNIT, THE ICE CLIMBERS CAME FROM AN NES GAME AND THE TROPHY WAS LIKE THAT BECAUSE OF THAT BLLAAAAGH. At least we had learned how to swear by this point, so the argument was a little more interesting.

This story isn’t really nerdy in the sense of trivial nerd knowledge but in the sense of over the top science geek. That said I will continue.

A few years ago I worked part time as a line cook at a breakfast place. It was one of those places where the servers are either young high school girls working part time or single moms. I was 20, I had a high school diploma and was going to the university full time for engineering (I’m 24 now so I’m really just finishing now), and, for the most part, my fellow cooks were in their 30’s and 40’s and had never really finished any type of schooling for one reason or another.

Anyway, I was working with a cook friend of mine at the time, he was an exception in that he was educated and going to school. When our middle-aged large uneducated manager walks up to us and tries to help us out. During this time he says something to the effect of “Yea dawg, Swiss cheese evaporates in the oven.”

This sounded like a load of shit. My buddy and I explained to him that in order for that to happen the cheese, which was the same color of the egg in most omelets, would have to melt, which it did, and then boil, which it very much did not. He thought that was a load of shit. We explained that not only is the oven not hot enough to boil the cheese, but that if it was, there would be some evidence of it. HE was not convinced. We had to resort to SCIENCE, in a more direct manor to prove it.

We weighed a plate on a scale and then added a handful of Swiss cheese, and weighed it again. This gave us the weight of the cheese. I know that you (the reader) already know where this is going, but it can’t be helped. We placed the plate in the oven and waited the average time it took to make an omelet, then took weighed the plate containing some much melted cheese. No change. Then we put the plate back and left it in the oven for some time, perhaps an hour or so. Again we took the plate out, weighed it and again, no change.

We reported our findings to my manager, and by “findings” I mean, we told him he was an idiot and we were ashamed that we felt it even had to come to this, and all he had to say was “I’m not paying you to waste food on science experiments.”

Now that I’ve written all this out, the story isn’t nearly as entertaining as it was at the time. It also sounds quite pathetic.

Okay, I don't know if this qualifies as "nerdy" per se. All I know is that I come from a house divided - over whether or not the person whom Marion drinks under table in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark is a man or a woman. My mother and I insisted that it had to be a man, my brother and dad were equally adament that it was a woman. The whole episode led to rewatchings, detailed sociological arguments about sex and physicality, until finally, we went through all the credits to look for the real name of the actor/actress to find:

"Pat".

And that is DEFINITELY a MAN.

@Izandra That was some night. All I know is my character (mage) ended up stealing all of the treasure and running away. LOL. And we never played D&D again...

So I'm 25 and I'm somewhat intelligent, I graduated high school and have some college. One of my former co-workers a high school graduate and army trained cook, were having a conversation one day about GI Joe, and how they were the LEAST EFFECTIVE covert team in the history of the world wether real or fake. Now anyone that is twenty something and has any nerd cred whatsoever "knows" and they also "know" that "knowing is half the battle" as a kid that was one of my favorite parts of the show (what can i say i was immpresionable and would be a morally remiss murderer smoking drug addict had duke shipwreck and the rest of the gang not been there at the end of each episode to teach me right from wrong. fuck mom and dad what do they know?) So I immeadietly question his line of thinking and ask "why the fuck would you say something like that?"
Ed looked at me and said "Having been in the military and knowing something of combat and tactics i can say they are ineffective because for a covert team they killed alot of bad guys but also because of the mass amount of damage done to military equipment. IE the cobra blew up alot of their vehicles so alot of joes died."
I stopped peeling potatoes and composed myself because i was a little pissed and dumbstruck. After a moment i looked at Ed and said "Ineffective because they killed a lot of bad guys? Did you ever watch the fucking show??? I never saw a single cobra die in my entire time watching that show! The only Joe that ever bled on screen was Duke and how dare you even mention combat and tactics! The only thing you learned in the military of combat and tactics was how to silently and skillfully serve the officers table as to not disturb their dinner conversation!!!!!
Ed didn't speak to me much for the rest of the day but i didn't care. The joes are friggin awesome and don't know how to lose. Let that be a lesson to all who doubt. GO JOE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't think I can describe how much I'm loving this post. (And jotting down some crib notes just in case some of these arguments come up in the future)

At Squirrelnut

I'm an ADnD2 DM, in the psionics handbook there are invisibility spells where the creature with an int lower than 13 automatically fails their saving throw. I think it's a similar ordeal with illusionists and I know it works the same way with the priest spell: Command. I think that illusion in the ADnD2 world illusion is changing the self (especially if you're using spell components) and psionics is changing the self from another's perspective (because you have to have mindlink and contact in order to perform some of the abilities).

That was pretty geeky.

The most geeky argument I've had was with a television screen the first time I saw 'The Grinch who Stole Christmas.' I loved it until the very end when the Grinch punked out and gave everyone their presents back. I was irate and from that point on wouldn't watch the last 10 minutes of the movie, I would just end it before he got all soft and pretend he went on with his bad self. (Yeah I was a pretty cool kid.)

That wasn't an embarrassing story.
It was disguised as one so you could let us know you worked for an anime magazine.

Many, Many years ago, I was running a heavily modified version of Shadowrun. My players had a bad run & they were all captured & knocked unconscious. (Yes, I admit it, I was railroading them into the next adventure.) They woke up in the middle of a blistering desert, wearing nothing more than their skivies. I explain how INCREDIBLY hot the sand is, & tell them that they take a point of damage every other round, just for walking in it.

Soon thereafter, a monster battle ensues. One of my players gets his hand bitten off. I tell him that he's now taking additional damage each round due to blood loss.

He replies that he shoves the stump into the sand.

I look at him for a moment, & then say, "Ooookay. It really hurts. Now what do you do."

He tells me that he's taken care of the blood loss.

"By packing the wound full of sand?" I ask.

"No, the sand's hot enough to burn us, so I'm using the hot sand to cauterize the wound."

I fell out my chair laughing. I told him it WAS hot, but not THAT hot. A two hour argument began about if you could or could not cauterize a wound with hot sand.

Okay, I'm a huge Nintendo nerd and I love the Smash Bros series. I had a friend who also really liked Smash Bros and we'd talk about Brawl a lot before it came out. Once it came out, we started talking about what could and should be in the next one. Because as nerds, we like to look ahead to the future because nothing is ever good enough. One character I brought up that should be added is Starfy from the Legendary Starfy series. He has five games in Japan and one recently released here which sold relatively well, I think he deserves. I was really adament about it. I came up with a moveset and a stage he could claim as his own. But my friend, being a dick who likes to put me in my place, came up with one arguement against him; he can't hold items. Starfy is a starfish with little stubby arms. My friend claimed he'd never be able to pick up let alone hold any of the many items. This upset me. So I instantly came up with excuses as to why he could hold items. I argued that starfish can stick to thinks so he could use those suction thingys that you clearly can't see on his design to have the items stick to his hand. I argued that his stubs are just long enough to be able to slightly clutch the items in his fist. I argued that if Kirby and Jigglypuff can pick up items, so can Starfy. This arguement went on for far too long for no reason. I was agruing about whether a fictional Starfish, one that can not only talk, but fly and transform into a dragon, can weild and use a fucking baseball bat.

Eventually the argument was ended when I got fed up and just shouted "It's a video game, they can do whatever the fuck they want!"

I'm a huge nerd with no life.
Please permit me to wear a t-shirt with the logo of a nerdy blog to further prove that I am a huge nerd with no life.

I've had way too many of these to count, but for the 'best nerd argument' I think I'd have to take the challenge literally.

So in high school, I was the rarest of breeds, a geek-jock. I was a standout player on the football team, and thus actually pretty popular, but when not on the field or working out, I had no interest in cars, hanging out at the mall, etc., but I had been an avid gamer since gradeschool, so I hung out with the gamer geeks.
This threw the whole social balance out of whack. The 'popular kids' had no idea who they should be able to tease or look down on, and who were my friends. This was particularly important, since the defensive line, which I played on, was particularly tight knit, and my main workout buddy made a point of threatening to beat up anyone who gave my friends any trouble - all in all, those years, the main nerd collectives at the school had it a lot easier than the horror stories I've heard from friends since.

Anyway, eventually, this protected status was finally challenged. One of the other guys insisted that not all of the school's social rejects for one reason or another could possibly be my friends. I off-handedly told him, that no, only the geeks were my friends, the nerds were fair game. I was joking, partly having recently read an article in some gamer magazine or other about the differences between nerds and geeks.

Apparently this caught someone's interest, or someone was really trying to partially put right the great ladder of social order, as for the next week, the locker room turned into the hub of an argument over the differences between nerds and geeks and how one could tell the difference. Because, obviously, its not a cut and dried thing, and I had no interest in singling anyone out, and most of them certainly didn't know most of the people in the select subgroups by name, it just kept devolving. It turned into yelling, screaming and throwing football helmets. It carried into the weightroom. I was at the center of the argument, but wasn't the only one involved.

Potentially the height of it was showing up at one of those 'students gather around, two guys are fighting' things, to hear two of the guys on the defensive line with me arguing loudly with a couple of the other guys on the team while a very confused nerd looked on. The argument?
DL guy: You can't stuff him in his locker, dude, he's a geek, not a nerd!
All the while, the other guys were insisting equally loudly that he was a nerd, not a geek. They'd been somewhat broken up, so by the time I got there it was just shouting, but they'd actually gotten into a fistfight with each other over this, with each side passionately defending and listing off long-since-confused points to prove whether the guy at the center of all this was a nerd, and thus fair game, or a geek, and thus protected.

So, speaking literally about 'nerd arguments', that would be the best one I've ever been involved with.

Asat:

yes, we were talking about if Anne Frank and Helen Keller fought each other to the death.

after much debate, we settled on Anne Frank would slaughter Helen Keller.

This isn't so much a shameful nerd argument as a shameful put-down but here goes. A couple of friends and I went to our city's yearly convention and one of the events was a Muggle Quidditch game. For some reason (so not my idea) we decided we were going to play and tried to get up a team. We managed to get a full team after a bit of struggle and we played and, I will admit, it was ridiculously fun. So afterwards, one of my friends and I go up to another friend and start telling him off for not playing Quidditch because it was so much fun. He listened to our rant for awhile and then, as we ended with, "You should have played Quidditch with us!" he responded, "I got laid instead." Our response: "So? You can get laid anytim-oh." Most shameful argument but an admittedly great putdown.

@Aingeal dar Cathu: Being that Cheetara is a humanoid and snarfs aren't, if Cheetara and the particular Snarf we all know and loathe were to bump uglies it would indeed count as bestiality! Doesn't matter whether he could consent or not. I mean, dolphins try to fuck human women all the time, and it'd still be bestiality if someone let them, so how is this any different? Answer: it's not.

@loci: You haven't been around here very long, have you? It's been pretty well-known around these parts for quite some time that Rob used to be a big part of Anime Insider.

I'm not really ashamed of this cuz I think I handled it pretty well, given that it was a lose-lose situation.

I was with a friend once at a Wendy's restaurant. We had a deal: he'd help me figure out any particularly cryptic sections of a particular textbook I was using, and I'd buy him food. So we got our food and got settled at the only available table with decent lighting.

Sitting behind my friend, with his back turned to us, was a particularly rotund guy in aged, stained sweatpants and a too-small red t-shirt with the obligatory wolf painting on the front. He had thinning, greasy, shoulder-length hair, but as he was alone, we figured we were safe.

How wrong we were.

After too short a while, his two friends -- your stereotypical unwashed, lanky middle aged gamer, and a shorter woman with limp, uncombed hair to match -- shuffled up and sat down. And started talking.

Thus I began an epic battle with my dignity (not to mention my sense of humanity). I managed to blow Coke all over my textbook trying to muffle my laughter into my straw. I really wish I had had a camera. Sadly, I don't remember all the details of what we heard, but I do distinctly remember the key points: in order of appearance, the words "T'pol," "Berman," "Millenium Falcon," "Hayden Christensen," and "Klingon hymen".

At that last, we valiantly cleaned up the Coke, and took our food elsewhere. We laughed so hard once the door closed behind us that people actually stopped to check we were ok.

While this may not stack up against some other entries, here I go:

Okay, so my best friend and I are both nerds. I've always known it, but he was reluctant to admit that fact until just a year or two ago. What changed his mind, you ask? I'll tell you.

One day we were playing a game on Xbox LIVE. Though I can't remember the game, the conversation is burned into my brain. We had been playing for several hours with a few of our friends, but all but one of them signed off for the night, with the remaining friend taking a quick bathroom break. I mentioned to my best friend that I had went and picked up my comics from the local shop earlier that day, to which he replied "Okay, yeah, I know you're a fucking nerd. I don't need you to remind me every Wednesday."

Now, I found that very ironic. Without skipping a beat I said "You know, you call me a nerd like it's supposed to insult me. You DO know you're just as nerdy, right?"

He scoffed at the idea. He honestly couldn't see how he was a nerd, despite how obvious it was. So he returned to making fun of me over my love of comics. I couldn't listen to it anymore, and decided to point something out to him.

"Uh, you DO play D&D, right?" I asked. To which he replied, "Yeah. So? How is that nerdy?" And all I could do is laugh. "Dude, when people think of the ultimate nerd, they think of D&D players every friggin time."

What followed was a 10 minute shouting match as we both argued over which was the nerdiest hobby. Now, my friend is a Texan, and the kind who you just CANNOT argue with. Not because he's right, but because he THINKS he's right about whatever topic is at hand. I was becoming infuriated by his insistence that my hobby was somehow worse than his, so I simply had to feed more fuel into the fire.

"Oh yeah?!" I shouted, barely able to contain the rage in my nerdy little heart. "Well AT LEAST I DON'T PLAY WoW!!"

That was the final straw, and I knew it. The gloves had come off. "How the hell is World of Warcraft any nerdier than the other games I play online with you?!" He shouted back over his mic.

"Do I really have to answer that?" I asked calmly, with a smirk on my face he couldn't see. He thought it over for a short while, reluctantly speaking his next sentence. "Fine, I'll give you that one..."

I was victorious! Or so I thought. Before I could even dance in my seat in triumph, he shot back with another burn. "But at least I'm not the one who collects toys!"

-GASP- HOW DARE HE?! He proceeded to tear apart my love of plastic action figures made to look like characters from my favorite comics, movies, and games. THAT, in my mind, was a LOW BLOW.

I don't want to make this too much longer than it already is, but I'll break it down for you: My defenses were:

Comics are a way of escape for me, and transport me to a world where super powers exist and each hero saves the world once a month. I stated that I only read about character I'm attached to, such as Deadpool, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. Heroes who all have their flaws, much like myself.

As for collecting action figures, I told him those were a way of holding on to my inner child and that the ones I keep in the package may someday be valuable, while the ones I open proudly decorate my game room and fill me with joy whenever I look at my collection.

His defenses: D&D was HIS way of escaping his everyday life, forgetting his troubles as he takes on the role of a character involved in a grand fantasy, the likes of which can never really happen in the real world.

For WoW, he said the game was a way for him to pass quite a bit of time when he felt reality had failed him, and that much like D&D, allowed him to become someone else during his hours of play.

All in all, we argued for almost two hours about which of us was the bigger nerd. Had we been next to each other at the time, we probably would have ended up trying to end the discussion with our fists, but over Xbox LIVE it took something else to end it.

At the peak of our anger towards each other, our epic conversation was suddenly interrupted by the annoyed shouts of another. "Will you idiots shut the hell up!! Good god, I'm embarassed to know either one of you now!"

As it turns out, our friend had returned from the bathroom just a couple of minutes after our conversation started, and sat there in amazement over what was being said. My fellow nerd and I turned silent; our shame keeping us from saying a word while the third person sitting in the lobby of our game went off on a rant about our stupidity, and how we should off ourselves. His rant ended with one final, blunt sentence: "You know what? You're both the most hardcore, fucking pathetic couple of nerds on the planet. If EITHER of you deny that, I will fly in to murder you both in cold blood. I'll TALK TO YOU TOMORROW!"

His gamertag disappeared from the lobby as he made his exit at roughly 3AM, leaving the two of us to wallow in our shame. Except, we didn't. We started laughing our asses off like we had never done before. From that day on, my friend has embraced his nerdery to the fullest and makes no attempt to hide it, and we even have a mutual respect for one another.

Now I'm 18, he's 19. He recently joined the air force and has even been married for about a month now. Me? Still single, living at home. I guess as of right now, he wins.

Some time ago, my then-girlfriend and I went to see the movie Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo Del Toro.

The two of us were/are both big fans of Del Toro's work, and as I'm a fairly huge mythology/folklore buff, I was really looking forward to this movie.

And it was brilliant, it really was. The performances were excellent, the visuals were stunning, the sudden and brutal violence was harrowing and then.

And then.

It got to the part of the movie where the little girl eats the food off the table she's been forbidden to eat, rousing the horrible monster who kills the girl's two faerie companions.

She returns to the Satyr, who, upon realizing that she disobeyed his orders not to eat that food, shuns her and leaves.

This is brilliant. This is exactly how fairy tales go - they are moral lessons and there's never any 'backsies'. She screwed up and now she has no escape from the horror that is steadily overtaking her life. The flights of fancy up to now had been marvellous escapism, anything to keep her away from her real life, and now she has no escape.

Brilliant.

And then, near the end of the movie, the Satyr shows up and forgives her.

WHAT. NO. THAT NEVER HAPPENS. EVER. FAIRY TALES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.

Once a rule has been broken in a fairy tale, that's it. There's no going back. There's only punishment, never ever ever forgiveness.

I brought this up with my then-girlfriend on the way out, stating that this fallacy ruined part of the movie for me - the little girl was reading OLD-SCHOOL fairy tales, which either end in blood and pain OR salvation, entirely depending on, usually, a single choice the protagonist makes. Our protagonist made the wrong choice. The Satyr shouldn't have come to her, if she wanted forgiveness, she should have gone out to find the Satyr.

She disagreed with me.

The resulting argument lasted about four hours and ended with the outright termination of our five-month-long love affair.

I never faltered. Even as she was threatening to leave.

The little girl shouldn't have been forgiven, not if Del Toro was paying closer attention to the rules of a fairy tale universe.

Sometimes I miss her.

Then I remember the arguement and immediately my mind goes to NO, DAMN IT, I WAS RIGHT.

(addendum)

her arguement was that it was all taking place in her head, the satyr and fantasy elements were all concoctions of her mind as her reality became increasingly oppressive and horrifying.

I said that this only compounded my point - if all this was taking place in her own mind, and she is obsessed with fairy tales, she STILL shouldn't have been forgiven so easily. She'd have been completely familiar with the very black-and-white morality of fairy tales (you're either obedient or you're fucked).

She pointed out that the little girl died anyway, and the Satyr didn't forgive her right away, he made her do a 'test' to see if she'd sacrifice her baby brother.

I called bullshit, she called me an argumentative prick and it went downhill from there.

I once got into an argument with my friends as to what Batman's alignment would be if he were a D & D character.

@xvbones: You were completely in the right. I still think it's an amazing movie, but it would've been still better had it kept truer to its fairy tale roots. Example: "The Death of the Little Hen" the hen and the cock say they'll share whatever they find. The hen finds a huge nut and quickly tries to eat it all so the cock won't see. She dies. Then everyone in the forest dies as they try to give her a funeral. So yeah, do what you say you're going to do, or you're completely fucked.

@Hellhound: I'd say chaotic good. All his actions are for what he believes is right, but aside from his one rule, he'll do whatever it takes to accomplish his tasks.

@xvbones: You were completely in the right. I still think it's an amazing movie, but it would've been still better had it kept truer to its fairy tale roots. Example: "The Death of the Little Hen" the hen and the cock say they'll share whatever they find. The hen finds a huge nut and quickly tries to eat it all so the cock won't see. She dies. Then everyone in the forest dies as they try to give her a funeral. So yeah, do what you say you're going to do, or you're completely fucked.

@Hellhound: I'd say chaotic good. All his actions are for what he believes is right, but aside from his one rule, he'll do whatever it takes to accomplish his tasks.

I once witnessed a knock down drag out arguement about the exact meaning of level 1 of D&D, does it mean that you have been in a few battles or did you just pick up a sword and leave the village. All I could say is that's why I play Runequest :)

My friend and I were at Olive Garden enjoying some unlimited breadsticks, salad and soup lunch. We were talking about Star Wars, and said how improbable it was that the planets were based off single biomes, like Endor is all Forest, Hoth all ice, etc. She brought up the point that in Firefly, the planets are all desert-y. I countered that the Firefly universe doesn't count because the planets were terraformed incorrectly, thus their barren desert appearance. We were getting a bit loud, as as we looked around at the other patrons giving us weird looks or outright avoiding our glances, we decided an Olive Garden at 3pm was not the correct venue for this argument.

I was still totally right.

Ok here we go...

This is the most recent in a fairly long line of nerd arguments. This one revolves around Wolverine from Marvel Comics and whether or not he had superhuman strength....

It started when I mentioned that wolverine had superhuman strength according to the way he was portrayed by marvel. I pointed out how this was rationalized by his adamantium skeleton causing his muscles to adjust to the added weight. I clarified my position by stating that wolverine barely qualifies for superhuman but he does in fact have superhuman strength...

One of my friends decided that this wasn't the case as you weren't super strong unless you could lift 100 tons, and throw a bus around like the hulk or ben grimm... we disagreed, and in the end it was about 5 people on my side and just him on the other... we thought the argument had died... fast forward to two days later, I had received a volley of text messages and voicemails about the nature of wolverines superhuman strength and how unless I could explain how he was superhumanly strong he was not super-strong... So thus began the argument. I contended that if Captain America is to be taken as the paragon of humanity, any physical characteristic he possessed would be the ultimate a normal human could achieve, and as wolverine was demonstrably stronger than the cap, wolverine was by definition supernaturally strong. It was at this point that I realized we were headed down the rabbit hole as I was citing comic book fact as hard evidence and building logical syllogisms to prove the strength of a comic book character... but frankly I didn't care.

I thought the argument had been won... boy was I wrong. Fast forward to three days from that point, and now I get a message telling me that unless I could provide documentation saying that wolverine was superhumanly strong... he wasn't. I was told websites of any type did not count, it had to be published in print... basically my friend wanted me to buy the newest encyclopedia marvel to prove my point. I accepted the challenge and me and a few friends drove around to a couple book stores looking for an encyclopedia of marvel characters... we found one in a bookstore in a nearby city but it was forty dollars and I was not spending that much to prove my point... I was getting ready to give up when I decided to call a friend of mine who probably already owned it, turns out he did and I drove over to his house to borrow it. When my friend heard that I had the book in hand he suddenly was "sick" and no one could come over (he was fine not but four hours before). He knew that the friend that had the book was getting ready to go on a trip and was banking on the fact that I wouldn't be able to borrow the book while he was out of town... he was half right.

The next day I told him I didn't have the book anymore, and he invited us all over to hang out. Right when we sat down I handed him my phone to reveal photos (fairly high res) of the book in question revealing both wolverines strength, captain america's strength, and what the names of each strength category in the marvel universe was. Wolverine was not only stronger than cap, but he had "Supernatural Strength". I was told that I might have shopped the picture (the one I took with my phone) so it was not reliable evidence, and nor were the words of any of my friends...

To this day the argument has never been settled as any evidence shown to the contrary is not reliable as while marvel may say that wolverine has a certain level of strength my friend says otherwise, and his opinion is fact...

My friend and I used to argue over which phaser configuration would cause the least amount of wrist strain on the user. I believe that the Original Series or Enterprise phasers allow the crew member to hold and fire it in the most natural positioning of the outstretched arm. The Next Generation phasers require you to hold it like a television remote and makes aiming difficult at eye level.

So I'm a HUGE fan of Rocko's Modern Life since its inception, and watched it even into college during the reruns. Even found a few friends who were into it (one of which I'll call Javier, or Javi, since that's his name).

So one of the last season episodes, From Here to Maternity, had Filbert the Turtle and Dr. Paula 'Hutch' Hutchison, a cat, expecting children. Opening with Filbert, Rocko, and Heffer racing the stork to the hospital (literally), the trio find Hutch with their egg. Ever the working girl, Hutch leaves the egg in Filbert's care, despite his natural instinct to bury it. With his posterior not fit to properly nest the egg, they recruit Heffer's gluteus maximus to finish the process. After a series of hilarious misadventures, the trio and the egg wind up in jail, where it proceeds to hatch. The result: two sets of turtles (Gilbert and Shellbert), a kitten (Missy), and...a baby steer resembling Heffer (Norbert).

It is with Norbert that our debate begins. Javi stated that Norbert is the by-product of an affair between Hutch and Heffer. I countered that such a baby was the product of osmosis, as the children were still being developed within the egg and since Heffer sat on it, many of his characteristics were absorbed by the fetus that was closest to the portion of the egg directly touching Heffer's ass. I felt that my argument was more valid, as Norbert's eyes were very reminiscent of Filbert's, which could not be a sole product of an affair between Hutch and Heffer. Javi, however, was not convinced, and pointed to many of the show's numerous adult innuendos and entendres cleverly hidden within the show since its inception, as well as a telling line of dialogue within the penultimate episode 'Future Schlock' where, upon his brother Gilbert (or is it Shellbert?) commenting that Norbert resembles 'Uncle Heffer', Norbert responds with the heavy 'Hey, what do ya MEAN?' Still, I would not accept that theory, as despite the adult humor the show has gotten away with, I would not believe that after all the trouble Filbert and Hutch went through to get married in 'The Big Question/The Big Answer', I couldn't believe that she would throw it all away and give it up for a fat bastard like Heffer (Rocko, maybe...he was voiced by Officer Garcia of Reno 911, after all).

Luckily, we reached a compromise: since the show established that a company employing a stork LITERALLY delivers children to expectant mothers, we concluded that Norbert was simply a mix-up in deliveries. Of course, one would have to believe that somewhere within the universe of the show, there existed parents that resembled Heffer and Filbert...which honestly is not hard at all to believe.

So I guess two nerds (well, one nerd...I won't out Javi without his permission) can reach a compromise. But the worst part: I'm pretty sure that somewhere in the tubes of the internets, there's a graphic fan fiction that fully validates, maybe even expounds upon, Javi's original hypothesis...and even worse, that it will appear on this site someday.

I grew up watching Batman TAS. One thing I learned from that, as well as other DCAU shows was that Bruce/Batman has a plan for every eventuality. Nothing escapes him and he has defeated every foe that has come at him. It has been covered in the books extensively as well.

After we got home from the second Lord of the Rings movie we got into a discussion about Gandalf and how powerful he was as a magic user. My wife had been really upset he apparently died in the first movie, and begged me to tell her whether he lived or not. As far as I'm concerned the 3rd rule of nerd club is you don't talk about spoilers. She read the books and fully understood just how powerful this gray become white wizard is.
Her opinion was that he was the most powerful wizard in ever and him versus Dumbledore would be a good fight, but anyone else would fall almost immediately.
A long running discussion with my best friend and I is figuring out how Batman would dispatch non DC foes, and the only person we think he might have trouble with is Logan/Wolverine. Magic users don't stand a chance versus the Dark Knight. Things got hot. My wife eventually ran to the bedroom crying. I called my friend and while he agreed with me, he pointed out that perhaps if she was crying I had gotten a little too involved.
Later that night we made up.
In Summation: I made my wife cry because I think Batman could beat Gandalf.

While I've certainly had my fair share of nerdy arguments (alignments in D&D, my dislike of Harry Potter as a fantasy book, and my hatred that burns like a thousand suns for Twilight, amongst others), I will forgo those tales to take this on.

@Patracolos

There are many problems I have with your statement "it isn't sex unless there is penetration with a penis..." Probably the biggest one is how incredibly sexist and heterocentric it is. According to this two girls are completely incapable of having sex with each other. I assure you that is incorrect.

There are many definitions of sex, also referred to as sexual intercourse. One was agreed upon between my group of friends to prevent arguments during rounds of "Never Have I Ever." There we gave a general definition that would cover all variations of sexual acts which one could make more specific with modifiers. We defined sex as "physical stimulation of a partner with intent to orgasm whether or not that orgasm occurs." Many people seem to have a problem with this definition. I am uncertain exactly why people get so twitchy over that. But that's not the argument at hand. That definition is usually how I see things. However I do understand that it is not at all a widely known or accepted view. Instead I shall take the more academic approach.

While there are definitions of sexual intercourse as only involving a penis penetrating a vagina, that is never the sole definition. Yes it is one of the original uses of the term (dates range from mid 18th to early 19th century), however if we were to pull that argument we would only be able to use the word "nice" to call someone an idiot (OED "Of a person: foolish, silly, simple; ignorant."). Language is a constantly changing aspect of culture, and the definitions of words get morphed and updated all the time.

Here are a few examples:

Oxford English Dictionary - "sexual intercourse n. sexual relations or union between the sexes (in early use often with the), copulation, coition; (now esp.) intimate sexual contact between two individuals involving penetration (PENETRATION n. 1b) and typically leading to orgasm, which serves (between a male and a female of various species) as the means of sexual reproduction, and (in humans) typically expresses feelings of love or desire; = INTERCOURSE n. 2d; an instance of this; (also in later use more generally) any form of sexual contact of this kind between members of the same sex."

Merriam Webster Dictionary - "1 : heterosexual intercourse involving penetration of the vagina by the penis : coitus
2 : intercourse (as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis"

Dictionary.com (just for kicks)- "genital contact, esp. the insertion of the penis into the vagina followed by orgasm; coitus; copulation." (note, it gives penis and vagina as an example of genital contact, not the sole form of it)

This opens it up to a large range of options including allowing the two girls I mentioned earlier to finally get around to having sex.

Have a nice day.

(tl;dr version: Sex is more than penis in vagina. Yay lesbians!)

Two:

In eight grade my lab partner and I could not agree on whether we had distilled ethanol or isopropyl. It got heated and someone pushed the other and the next thing you know we were throwing punches and a bunch of desks got knocked over. Luckily it got broken up and happened when the teacher was out of the room. He and I joked about it in the yearbook.

I had two running debates with a guy at my church about a) which was better: DC or Marvel? and b) who knew more about comics in general. I was the DC guy, but it didn't really make sense because I read Marvel books too, I think his constant dissin' of DC just bugged me. We would make up questionnaires about each our respective companies and submit them to one another to demonstrate who had superior comic book knowledge. Finally, to settle it once and for all we had a big comic book trivia "show down" at our church youth group where we grilled each other and also submitted questions to the other kids. I was pissed because his questions to the group were considered "harder" because this was back in the Super Friends era and kids were more familiar with DC characters. I think we tied in the mano-e-mano showdown. I was totally serious and humorless about the whole affair. Totaly shameful. Totally nerdy.

I've spent the better part of my life under the impression that I am infallible.
I'm the bitch that argues with you for hours and hours and finally ends with "You can think you're right, but you'll never convince me. I'm okay in my own knowledge that you're wrong."
That little statement usually leads to exasperated screams from whoever I'm arguing with and surprisingly, not with a fist in my nose.
The longest running and most violent of which has been my Mac vs. PC argument with my friend.
He claims PCs are the superior machine is ALL aspects. I maintain that the only thing they're usually good for is beating him over the head.

A buddy of mine got into an argument with me while I was acting as Dungeon Master on whether or not Avarial (sp?) would be closterphobic. In Second Edition they were, and it made no mention of it in Third Edition's Faerun supplimental stuff. I said they were, and was enforcing will saves for him to go deeper underground, and he started throwing a sh*t fit. Finally, I told him, "I'm the Games Operating Director, now what the f*ck does that spell, bucko?! You don't like it? Take your dice, and go the f*ck home!"

So I have not one but three arguments to share. The first one is quite simple, I was arguing the fact (while watching Land of the Dead) that Zombies can't breathe underwater with a friend of mine who said they could, because I said it would be impossible for the zombies to reach the city by river-walking.

The 2nd, deals with this jackass I know. He states one day that he knew FOR A FACT the villain of the 3rd batman film was going to be the Riddler because the Joker says 'They'll be doubling up the rate the city loses their minds.' In pure confusion, I yell 'WHAT? How does that make the villain the Riddler?' And I shit you not, he had the gull to tell me the following, 'Because the riddler's power is that he takes people's minds.' I stared at him from a moment with look of shock trying to decide if I should answer this guy who doesn't know anything about batman. I decided to educate him. I said calmly, 'No...you must be thinking of the Mad Hatter. He's been know to use mind control. The Riddler has no powers.' Of course, again, he told me the riddler did. I responded, 'No he doesn't. The riddler just commits crimes and leaves riddles behind for people to try and stop him.' He interjected, 'Yea, he takes thier minds with the riddles.' 'No, he leaves riddles because he has a complex of some sort that doesn't allow him to lie. He has no powers. Mad Hatter uses mind control.' Then he told me, 'Well, in The Dark Knight series he did, and that series is what the movies are based off of.' (I haven't read Dark knight returns or strikes again, and found out later the riddler isn't even those books) 'Dude, seriously? Only the car is taken from the Dark Knight. Even if he did have those powers in that series....we're talking post apocalyptic world, where robin's a girl, and Joker is a muscle head. That argument holds no weight.' After this he stomped out of the room for a cig.

the 3rd is bad because this argument was held over the course of a couple months on several separate occasions. It started as an argument about if Robocop was considered to be a robot, a cyborg, or an android. I forgot who was on which end.....but the argument continued to several fictional characters in general who had some semblance of robot parts on them (such as Vader, Vash, or Jet from Cowboy Bebop). It eventually spilled out to if we consider people with prosthetic limbs in real life to be considered androids or whatnot. It got to the point where we were looking through the dictionary to find literal definitions to support our arguments. This might be the most shameful for me because not only did every argument turn into a stale mate, EVERYONE around us asked the three of us to stop....even other geeks and nerds.

That this site is worth the time, effort and energy of my Nerd friends... to no avail...

Doug, Rob really seemed to be taking the mickey out of himself in that article intro. I have been reading his style on this site for over a year and that is how I read it. In addition he has admitted his own bias in writing, although he admittedly lacks compensating for it most of the time. He didn't mention anyone by name, the story clearly shows a lack of evidence to the oppositions point, a hallmark of a nerd's POV on their argument.

Not bestiality.

Helen Keller wouldn't see it coming. HA!

Klingon Hymen would be a really good band name.

After the deadline but amusing story that happened this weekend on vacation with the family. My brother in law chastised my niece for reading Twilight, saying Edward was on the hunt... for hair products. My 10 year old niece commented correctly that my brother in law has the exact same hairstyle as Edward. Pause. He turns around and storms out of the room.

@JimmyPL: It is bestiality.

I'll Pon-Farr duel anyone who says otherwise!

i thought over and over in my head whether or not to post this. i tried to remember a different argument, but none came close to this one.

when i was in sixth grade, i had to go to aftercare after school because my mom worked late hours. most of my friends were in it with me. usually, we watched movies and tv. the teacher this day had brought in the direct to video sequel of the little mermaid.
so me and my friends and watching this stupid movie, and i absently mention to my friend how its sort of funny how Ursula's sister is really thin.
he turns to me and says "that's not her sister, that's her daughter."
well, this simply was not correct. earlier on in the movie, she has specifically stated that she was her sister. and she also mentioned how "mother always loved Ursula more". how could he be so dumb?
"no, its her sister, they've said it a few times now." i tell him.
he whips his head around to me and yells "ITS HER DAUGHTER STUPID"
well, now it jumped up a notch.
"um, no, its her daughter. they've said it a gajillion times, idiot"
"NAME ONE TIME THEY SAID THAT"
i proceed to describe the opening scene where she tries to kidnap Ariel's baby, and she states she is ursula's sister very clearly.
"SHE NEVER SAID THAT"
"IT WAS IN THE FIRST FUCKING FIVE MINUTES, HOW STUPID ARE YOU THAT YOU CANT FOLLOW A MOVIE FOR FIVE YEAR OLDS WITHOUT GETTING CONFUSED?!"
we shouted at each other until we were red in the face. but i couldn't back down because i was a huge disney nerd. plus, i always have to be right (which i completely was). eventually the teacher intervened and she made me move my chair to the row in front of my friend so we weren't facing each other and, in theory, could no longer make conflict.
but then my friend started to complain he couldn't see with me in front of him. i knew he was lying because the tv was elevated and i was not directly in front of him. plus he was just a whiny little bitch.
he decided to kick my chair over and over until i moved. i tried to ignore it, but he kept kicking it harder and harder, until i turned around and started to hit him in the face with my tiny girl fists, and then he kicked my chair so it slid across the floor and i couldn't reach him, but i climbed over it like an animal and my other friends had to restrain us.
the whole time we were screaming at each other "SHES HER SISTER YOU STUPID SHIT"
"ITS HER DAUGHTER YOU BITCH"

me and my friend came to blows over the villain in a crappy direct to video disney sequel. where's my shirt?

dear lord I've got some embarrassing ones,

i used to hang out with a bunch of anime fangirls (the rabid "this character is MINE and no one Else's" kind of fangirl) now it was safe to say these girls counted as "weeaboos" and would spout out random Japanese words in normal sentences and would generally mispronounce them, one of the girls that i hung out with often would constantly mispronounce Zelda names; for example she would pronounce "Saria" as "Sarah" and "Navi" as "Navy", and she would correct me if i pronounced them way they're actually pronounced, and later when i brought up proof she would just say "oh i know that's how they're pronounced, i just like saying them this way" and being a guy who takes pride in knowing his pronunciations this just served to piss me off royally.

but one argument in particular still irks and shames me today, now this one involved at least 3 out of 5 of these girls, and we would argue constantly on how to pronounce...

wait for it...

we would argue on how to pronounce the word "YAOI", i shit you not.
now I've actually found proof of how to correctly pronounce it (as in I've heard it pronounced by the Japanese) and anyone who can sound out words can probably figure out that its pronounced "Ya-ow-ee", THEY on the other-hand, pronounced it "Yoi" (like "Koi") now once again let me bring up the fact that these were girls that would devote a LARGE chunk of time to drawing/writing yaoi fan-fiction and that's practically all they talked about with each other, so you must know that as a Man, and as a man who is also a semi-Grammar Nazi, this was absolutely mind-numbing
and we would argue FOREVER on this topic and one of them kept retorting with "There's no W in there!!!", no matter what proof i laid before them they would always just shrug me off, and in the end this was one of the steps that led me to cut off all contact with them.

in the end, neither side one, they were still retarded weeaboo fangirls, and i argued about the pronunciation of gay anime porn.

probably one of the lowest points in my life as a man.

@The Man With Two Brains: I challenge you to a duel, sir. With no thought to how foolish I'm going to feel when they're all talking at my funeral about how I went down for the Thunderean non-beastiality cause. At least the nerd half of the room would be proud of my sacrifice. When they weren't too busy coming to blows over the argument themselves. My long suffering family, on the other hand, would probably be ashamed to be seen at the event. But they're pretty well used to that by now.

I'm also now kind of concerned you might be that creepy guy who first introduced the internet to the hows of dolphin-fucking. I don't want the only thing people remember about me to be that I got my ass kicked by a Flipper-humper. :/

I had two nerdy friends argue whether the OS Linux is pronounced "Linn-ucks" or "Line-ecks." I wept for the fate of humanity.

My nerd friends and I used have had lengthy discussions about which is the truest nerd late night hangout: Denny's or the Village Inn. This wouldn't seem so sad except we were always in one or the other, seriously discussing the reasons we should or shouldn't go to the other so we could load up on caffeine and have other shameful nerd fights until the sun rose.

I always won because I met my wife at Denny's and have therefore actually known the touch of a woman.

If this is too late for the contest then that's fine, but I'd still like to share. :)

Last year, I finally discovered Gundam Wing thanks to some guy friends of mine. I had completely forgotten about it on Cartoon Network for some reason even though I pretty much spent my entire childhood watching TV. So basically, I was obsessed with Gundam Wing as a female high school student last year.

I've been going to anime conventions for years now and I snapped some photos of Gundam Wing cosplayers last year. None of my guy friends who are obsessed with Gundam Wing are actually into the "otaku scene" like I am, so I put the pics up on facebook for them. The next day at school, one of the guys who had lent me his Gundam Wing DVDs came up to me excitedly.

Guy: Ohmygod, you know those con pictures you put up? That Heero cosplayer was so good!!
Me: What do you mean by "good"?
Guy: I mean he was PERFECT, like the physique and everything!
Me: ....What?
Guy: Yeah, he was really good!
Me: ...Now I don't want to hate on the guy or anything but I mean well he wasn't THAT good... I mean he wasn't fat or anything but he wasn't nearly fit enough to match Heero Yuy.
Guy: But he had the hair and the shorts!-
Me: Wait, wait, OKAY I think my opinion AS A GIRL is higher than your opinion here.
Guy: Well I thought he was pretty good-
Me: NO! I mean, he wasn't ugly but he wasn't that cute! I mean he's awesome for doing that costume but, ohmygod he was not a perfect Heero Yuy!

My friend still does not agree with me. I do not understand high school boys.

@Aingeal dar Cathu: Pon-Farr it is.

Also, of course I'm not referring to the Vulcan mating part of Pon-Farr, but the type of battle Kirk and Spock had while the latter was under the influence of it in Amok Time.

@Oeste
While I did ignore lesbianism, it was only in the context of the described situation. Cheetara and Snarf. Cheetara is obviously female, and Snarf obviously male. Unless you believe some of the fanfic that is most undoubtedly out there.
So your point is taken and if it had been a single sex scenario, then I would not have limited my statement to a dual sexual position.

@ The Man With Two Brains: I'm pretty sure that Snarf wasn't their pet... HE was more like a nursemaid, or babysitter for Lion-O. So Cheetara having sex with Snarf would be like having sex with a (I'm trying to say this as politically correct as possible...) a Thunderian Bushman with down syndrome and dwarfisim.

@Chelsea

I have a buddy who pronounces it "Chacoba" as well. It bugged the shit out of me when we talked about Final Fantasy.

Okay, folks. this deals with comic continuity, specifically about the Golden Age Sandman's girlfriend Dian Belmont. I got into an argument in the late 90's on the Comic Book Resources chatroom. Somebody on there wanted to know why Wesley (the Golden Age Sandman) and Diane (his girl Friday) never got married. Simple. She's dead.

NO! no she's not! Why did Wesley never marry Diane? Because she's dead. Well, NOW she's not, so why didn't they get married? It's Dian. No, It's Diane! This went on for a couple of hours or so with me trying to explain that, until recent (mid-90's DC comic books that I hadn't read), Dian had been D-E-A-D. But the guy wouldn't take "dead" for an answer. The guy was like, "but...what about current continuity? Why didn't they get married in current continuity?" for which there really wasn't a definitive answer, other than a character depicted as being alive in a couple of issues of then-current 90's continuity, makes absolutely no sense in light of all the previous continuity.

The character was written into the Sandman's 1940's stories as his "Margo Lane". A couple of years later, Simon and Kirby decided to give him a costumed boy sidekick (the purple and yellow tights costume redesign was months earlier, probably the work of Cliff Young) and ignored the chick who was never heard from again. She wasn't around in the 50's, she wasn't depicted in the 60's, when the Sandman reappeared. In the 70's, where both Sandman's (Wesley Dodd's) house and the former kid sidekick (who had been turned into a mutant.) were depicted, but not Dian. In the early 80's, Roy Thomas wrote into continuity in the retro-1940's era All-Star Squadron issues (he wrote both that book and Infinity Inc which depicted many, many other obscure 1940's characters) that the reason Dian had not appeared in current continuity for all these years was because Dian had died impersonating the Sandman in the early 1940's. It made sense, since Dian had not appeared or even been mentioned in some 40-odd years.

Post 1986, DC had this huge "apple cart turnover" called Crisis, ostensibly to keep from "confusing new readers" which basically meant that continuity went out the window and it could be whatever the editors wanted, from this week to the next. Basically, it pissed me off and quickly drove me from buying DC books every week to basically stop and think before ever buying anything with a DC slug on it again and concentrated all my fandom and money on Marvel Comics and independents. (I bought to finish the run of "Who's Who", DC's character index and then basically quit the modern stuff. Outside of reprints, I'm proud to say I haven't bought any "new" DC books in the past seven years or so.)

Some snooty European writer started writing a "new" Sandman comic book series in the early 90's that became insanely popular because it had psuedo-Goth characters way, way before Hot Topic existed (the "old" Hot Topic, that is, back when they were a pretentious, prefab "Gap-store-for-Goths". They aren't even that anymore.) This was back in the early 90's when kids I knew primaraly got their "ooh-I'm-SO-trendy-look-at-me-I'm-a-Goth" fix from reading Anne Rice novels and watching Edward Scissorhands a few billion times.

Anyway, this lead to the company doing a "new" Golden Age Sandman Series, which was done solely to exploit the fandom that had developed around this new Sandman series. This retro book, which took place in the 40's, featured Dian as a supporting character. The problem comes in when a writer, ignoring ALL previous continuity, decided to have these 40's characters make an appearance in another book he's writing, a "modern era" comic in the mid-90's, therefore violating the continuity so that Dian, a character who had not made a current appearance in DC continutiy for nearly 60 years and not depicted as being alive post-1942 was suddenly alive, well and still working as the character's girl Friday.

I've had a lot of geeky arguments in my life but this one STILL annoys me to this day.

This wasn't so embarrassing for me as for my cousin, who I was intentionally trying to make look like a dork.

So back in college, my cousin Perry drunkenly gets some cute girl's number at a party. He decides to utilize the digits at some point afterward, but she doesn't call back.

Then, on the way to a class, we bump into her in the hallway, and and awkward conversation ensues where homegirl tells my cousin that, you know, her phone was broken (for two weeks) and that's why she never got back to him.

Perry is too excited to be talking to her again to face the blatant fact that he's being fed some bullshit, so I decide to intervene.

In my extraloud militant-nerd voice, I launch into the Biggie v. 2Pac of superpower debates. "So Perry, I was thinking about it, and I've decided I'd definitely rather be able to teleport than fly. I mean, you could get places faster, and you could sort of mimic flying by very rapidly teleporting short distances, almost like how animation works." I then turn to the girl. "What do you think?"

She has no opinion and scoots away on the quick.

Perry turns crimson.

When he finally lets me explain what I was doing, he actually grudgingly thanked me.

And by "embarrassing" I guess I mean shameful. Either way, it's shondah.

Years ago my Shadowrun players got into a argument with a group of AD&D players, over who's characters would win in a fight. Both sides got very intent and used a GURPs template to square up in a fight.

Round 1. Their mage casts a spell to nullify gunpowder, que much merriment from them.

Unfortunately we had a chemist in the Shadrowrun team, who pointed out that modern weapons didn't use black powder but instead white powder.

This pretty much ended the battle, and we got into an intense loud argument about the chemical makeup of our bullets. The A&D group knew that they'd last about 3 1/2 seconds if we kept our guns and refused to back down.

@The Man with Two Brains

The difference is that while dolphins are very intelligent, they aren't as smart as humans. I hesitate to say they aren't sentient... but they are most definitely animals. Meanwhile, Snarfs are most definitely an intelligent, sentient species capable of human-like reasoning. He's definitely not the same species as Cheetarah, but it wouldn't be bestiality. Just some inter-species nookie.

In the same vain, it isn't bestiality when elves and humans do the nasty to produce those oh-so-popular half-elves, is it?

I recently got into a fight (on the internets, mind you) as to whether Hitler's zombie creations would be immune to fire or not after having been frozen in a glacier since the 40s.

In my defense, I don't think I was taking it as seriously as the other guy. He started bringing up Pokemon logic, as in fire beats ice.

Which is all very silly to argue about anyway. Everyone knows Hitler worked on werewomen, not zombies.

@Doc_Ock_4mugen: Pet/nursemaid... whatever. Nana from Peter Pan showed that an animal could still be both. And anyway, it's NOT the same thing as you describe because SNARF IS ALSO THE SPECIES NAME. Snarfs AREN'T the same as regular Thundarans, so it IS beastiality!!!

@Kenny Strife: The difference is that Snarfs aren't properly humanoid, and are still treated as an animal species while elves are a seperate humanoid society.

And it's "vein" not "vain" in that usage.

@Kenny Strife: The difference is that Snarfs aren't properly humanoid, and are still treated as an animal species while elves are a seperate humanoid society.

And it's "vein" not "vain" in that usage.

Gah! Sorry about the double post!

@The Man With Two Brains: The Snarfs seem to be used as servants, or slaves, not as pets. (In Osbert's case he was the nanny of Lion-O, Lord of the Thundercats.)

The Thunderians are an alien Species that look like humans/Earth feline hybrids. The Snarfs are more cat-like, but they still speak the "human" language, have their own society, like the Thunderian Nobles that they serve.
If Cheetara fucking Snarf is Bestiality, then Pumyra fucking Hachiman is Bestiality too?

It still isn't beastiality because Cheetara isn't HUMAN. So it makes no difference as to whether Snarf is a humanoid or not. One participant of the joining must be human for it to actually be beastiality.
It is possible that the Thundariens have a word to describe sex between themselves and another species from their original planet.
And just a side question: What would you call sex between cheetara and Slythe or Jakalman? They are both obviously not of the same race as Cheetara, so would you consider that to be beastiality as well?

Typos are temporary, but grammar Nazi-ism is forever!

Sex between members of two sentient species with human-like intelligence and reasoning capabilities wouldn't be bestiality simply because neither participant is an animal. Otherwise Captain Kirk is quite the offender.

That's if we widen the definition to include sentient, reasoning non-human species in fiction. If we don't, then it still can't be bestiality because there are no humans involved at all.

@Patracolos

I thought that your mention of your definition of sex was in the section referring to sex with Professor Xavier, not dealing with the Snark/Cheetara argument. To give the full paragraph where you mentioned this:

"@Fondoofushu: What about being a parpalegic? That would rule sex out if his junk isn't working. He may be able to read your mind and maybe give you an orgasm with his mind (mindgasm?), but it isn't sex unless there is penetration with a penis..."

It was only after that you brought up bestiality. Not only is it a two-sex definition, but it discriminates against people with disabilities. So I still have a problem with your definition and the context it was used in.

Went and saw the Dark Knight in theaters. My friend tried to argue that the producers of the movie were WoW fans, because they made mention of the Unstoppable Force and Immovable Object (Both items in WoW). While I argued that both sources got the idea from (ta-da) a book! I had to slap him and tell him to read once in a while...

"I once punched a man for saying Hawk the Slayer is Rubbish.... I was defending the fantasy genre with terminal intensity, when what i should have said was dad you're right but lets give Krull a try and we'll discuss it later"

My wife was 4 or 5 years old when she first saw Star Wars, and she developed a mad crush on, you guessed it...no, not Han Solo, but Chewbacca! She even went so far as to proclaim sternly to her mother that when she grew up she was going to be a Veterinarian so she could marry Chewbacca and take care of him forever!