• OMG, I had a Magic Wand Reader! My mother worked at Texas Instruments and bought one for me when I was 4 (1984). I loved that thing to pieces."Magic.Wand.Reader.Come.Read.With.Me." I had several books... I seem to remember one with Bill Cosby and one with semi-trucks (teaching colors, I think.). Anyway, no one ever knows what I'm talking about either, so even though your comment is months old, I had to reply!

• In case you didn't know (I didn't!) there is a DVD available from WB. http://www.wbshop.com/Flight-of-the-Dragons-The/1000123494,default,pd.html?cgid=

• You're welcome.

• I know this is late, but I watch that every christmas and it makes me so unbelievably happy! It was a family tradition for me too and we have a very old VHS copy we taped forever ago when it was on TV (should figure out how to convert it to DVD or something) I know there are a bunch of issues w/ releasing it because of copyright with some of the songs. Regardless I love it and it's nice to know someone else does too!! :D

• Wow those are really nicely illustrated, I love the style. I'd never heard of this before, thanks for documenting it, I'll definitely be checking 'em all out. Though now that I think about it... something about those looks really familiar to me, especially the later books. I never read them but maybe they were in the school library... hm. Anywho, thanks for the tip!

• another is the dodgeball game for the NES. man that game was fun!!

• this is about as obscure as i get... "the tomorrow people" not the tardo Nicolodean remake, but the original british series. Russell T Davies needs to take a look at this property to see if he can do for it, what he did for doctor who.

• OMG, that might be it!! I know what I'm doing today instead of working!! Thanks so much!

• I've got to get my VHS copy transferred to DVD.

• Mad Monster Party - an old, childhood favorite. If you haven't seen it, I do pity you.

• I hope I'm not too late... damn time change... Anyway, for me it's a game from the NES: Snake Rattle & Roll. My brother and I played that game ALL the time, always yelling at each other when someone would waste all their lives trying to jump for something that was obviously a death trap. I still have an NES and I still have the Snake Rattle & Roll game... I've played it as recently as 6 months ago... :)

• What do you mean "including" the dentist song. You say that like it's the most obscure, least interesting of the songs. That's the very first one I'd commit to memory and dare sing aloud.

• My entry to this contest is the old school LIFE SIZE K'NEX toy: PLAY SKOOL PIPEWORKS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5cgK5EUmKo It was awesome. I was art nerd, so you could make a painting easel, a art table, cabinets, or a drawing desk. But when you were feeling more active you could make jungle gyms, scooters, forts, swords, robots, skateboards, the inside of a pirate ship and literally ANYTHING your mind come up with. My parents got me the highest end model so I had the extra set of wheels. No one else i know EVER speaks of the toy. My room was filled with the toy pieces and we still have my set in our basement, so I know I didn't make it all up. In fact my toy chest was actually made of pipeworks, so when I put my toys away, I was actually putting them away inside of my toys.

• I loved Downtown too!

• Sitting around in my underoos, playing with my Mighty Men and Monster Maker (sounds dirty) and watching a cartoon movie called "Faeries" which I remember was pretty intense as a kid,..about a hunter called to the faerie world to hunt down the King's shadow,...I remember it was like a ritual every night before I went to bed,...which, now explains alot.

• I loved Zamzara for C64. Great graphics & Music and hard as hell!

• *ahem* Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch The novelization of the movie "Gremlins" ("Curse you, Mogturman!") And, lastly, "Battle of the Planets"...not "G-Force," not "Science Ninja Team Gatchaman," "BATTLE OF THE PLANETS," complete with 7-Zark-7 and his pup-bot, 1-Rover-1, and with Keyop's weird Twikki from "Buck Rogers" speech impediment.

• Also the thing Trek has with the number 47. Not to mention Lucas hides a 1138 in every Star Wars movie. And let's not forget A113....

• Damn you. I was going to mention that. the Samurai Pizza Cats are solid win with crispy outer shell of awesome.

• The novelization to the movie "Fame." The original one, not the crappy remake. I know I know, it's a book based on a musical but it's so good. The best bit of the book (and the movie) is the beginning, when the kids are auditioning to win a place at the school. The prose captures the spirit of the school really well. Best bit is, I bought the book when I was in my early teens at a Christmas Fair in Dublin (Ireland) for about 10p. Ah, memories.

• I wouldn't say Portal is very obscure, even in the non-geeky world, but its greatness is lost to some people. It's not only great fun to play, but it has some of the best writing, mechanics and ideas I've ever experienced in a game. It might sound cliched now that the game is so popular but GLADoS has to be in the running for greatest AI character ever. Some people just dismiss it as a boring puzzle game. It's true that the story doesn't start until a while into the game, but that's needed to gradually ease you into the puzzle solving so you can concentrate more on the action later. It's sad that some people don't realise how great this game is.

• The storytelling idea was genius. I liked how the characters behind the stories developed too. Most of the time the stories somehow related to something that was going on in their lives, and it also let us get less sucked into the scary stuff because even inside the show it was only fiction. AYAOTD was fricking badass.

• A couple of things I like are obscure but not really strictly geeky in the TR sense, so it took all weekend for me to remember this: PROBE. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094529/ Just a little series co-created by Isaac Asimov... God, this series frustrated me so much. I must have been a ten or eleven, jaded by my mom's shows (LA Law, Cosby Show) when this little thing came on. It just shook up my world. I thought it was the most awesome thing ever. Better than Moonlighting! Better than Starman! Hell, ten times better than Murder, She Wrote! And ZOMG, it stars a cute and intelligent Parker Stevenson, pre-Baywatch. What more could a girl ask for? I saw two episodes, tops, and wanted some more... ONLY FOR IT TO DISAPPEAR FOREVER FROM LOCAL NETWORK TELEVISION. Now, remember this was back in the 80s, there was no internet to tell me what happened to the show. To top it off, I grew up in a small Southeast Asian country, not everyone watches American shows and/or likes science fiction. So every time I brought it up, testing to see if anyone else saw it, friends would look at me as if I was crazy. This would happen to me for the next twenty years. I haven't thought about Probe in a very long time. Upon googling there are some eps up on YouTube. I'm worried to watch it, though, just in case it isn't as good as I remembered it to be. All those years of geek love and frustration might just go down the drain, you know?

• MAKE ME A PIZZA!

• anime show Big O. It's honestly the only anime show I'm a fan of. It's a wierd matrix/batman blend and it's only had 2 seasons of 13 episodes a piece. They're really cool though. Hope that's obscure enough.

• Wanna talk about "obscure"? Try to talk to people nowadays about poetry. If it's not something they read in high school, they have no idea what it is. I love American poet Kim Addonizio, but no one has ever fucking heard of her. What's worse is that even the father of contemporary confessional poetry (Addonizio's genre), Theodore Roethke, is wholly unheard of even by people who've been through college English. I'm pursuing a career in a dying art form...how's that for obscure?

• Probably too late for the contest, but I just wanted to say that I played hours upon hours of Nobunaga's Ambition when I would visit Korea for three months every summer. My Korean wasn't great and the only thing in English on tv was the Armed Forces channel. My cousin taught me the basics of finding it on the computer with DOS commands and then I would proceed to conquer with my mighty armies.

• Same thing happened to me- only with Kiki's Delivery Service ;)

• Well this is probably not obscure in North America, but in Colombia (yes, it's spelled Colombia not Columbia, learn it already!) where I live nobody has a clue when I mention SHE-RA. That was one of my favorite shows and even though the serie is almost identicall to He-Man and it's completely girly-girl (I mean it even has a freaking koala-bird thing with rainbow ears) I loved it and I tought she was the ultimate badass warrior. Thank God I have evolved and now I like Xena... Oh wait... Shit!

• You're just fucking with us, aren't you? I'm looking that up. Sounds too awesome to be real.

• Yep, pretty much this.

• I think that was a story from Breakfast of Chapions, one of the many awesome yet stupid works Kilgore Trout has made over his years of writing. I heard there was a movie of that one starring Bruce Willis, but I never saw it and I heard that it sucked big donkey balls compared to the amazing book.

• I caught it late night on Showtime. I thought it would be jsut another bad movie. How wrong I was. It is more than a B-movie! It is AMAZING!

• That... That depressed me. Gunuinely. Imagine if that happened to say, Mario. It's like all of my childhood memories being destroyed as the series moves on to become a porn game. It's like FFF made flesh. It really, really, makes me sad. You deserve something for that happening to you.

• <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverhood">The Neverhood Chronicles</a>. It's an incredibly underrated PC game from 1996. And it was the first game I ever played that genuinely mixed puzzle-solving and humour into the story. It didn't have brute-force "rocks are blocking my path" incentives to do the story in the right order so much as that you had to pay attention as you went around the world. For example, as you went down a lift and glanced in someone's window, you'd see bottles of coloured fluid on the window sill. Noting down the proportions of each colour would give you the percentages needed to make up a potion <b>much</b> later in the game. The geeky humour in the Neverhood was unbelievable. Much of it is laugh-out-loud funny. There's a place with a big sign that says "Do not jump into the quicksand. You will die.". It is the <b>only</b> place in the game where you can die, and you can't say you weren't warned! Why is this place there? Well, just because they could. I still don't understand why the Neverhood is barely heard of, yet Myst spawned 5 sequels.

• Hell yeah! Killer 7 is one of the best games ever! Dan Smith kicks ass!

• I love the game Ninja Gaiden. "Dumbass everyone loves that revolutionary game with the insane difficulty and groundbreaking storytelling." Nope, that game sucks. Its too hard. I love the generic beat'em up. I would go to the gas station every day before, and after, school to play that game. When they replaced it with skate or die, I was pissed, and went back to playing Rampage. I loved that Ninja Gaiden so much I bought an Atari Lynx just to play that one game. I never got to beat it on the Lynx, because that thing would kill the batteries before I ever got a chance to finish.

• For the first one second of reading your comment I was going to kill you.

• My choice is an obscure book series called Twilight. No, not that Twilight. This was a series of horror books for older kids that was published in the 80s with the tagline "Where Darkness Begins". It had some wonderful titles by a rotating cast of authors, including a few who went on to further fame like Richard Laymon and Bruce Coville, whose D&D inspired Spirits and Spells may be the best Twilight book. The books had cool titles like Blood Red Roses and Watery Grave and some nifty painted covers. As a kid, these books were my gateway drug into horror. But I never hear of anyone remembering them the way people recall Christopher Pike or the Goosebumps series that came a little later.

• Don't worry. I once put £40 into a Revolution X machine (the Aerosmith game). It was my birthday (19th, maybe?), and I wanted to get to the end of the game! Actually, I don't think we did, even with two people playing co-op. Apparently there is now an REO Speedwagon game too.

• So I've thought about this for a while. Somethings I were going to say (like commander keen) were already mentioned, and some (like Ultima II for the Atari ST) weren't really obscure enough even if they were the proverbial linchpin in my life as a nerd, and came into my life through very slim chances. I didn't want to confuse mt intense nostalgia for nerdy things with obscurity which so many entries had. In the end i've decided to go with something that while extremely nostalgic for me is still pretty obscure. In the nineties there was this magazine that was called FLUX. It was about comics and video games and music. It was the most awesome damn magazine my teenage eyes had ever come across. I found issue #6 in a store, immediately bought it, and then immediately asked my father for a subscription which he bought for me. I got issue 7 in the mail and then nothing.... the freaking magazine was canceled after a mere 7 issues. I was devastated and have never had a magazine subscription since. I <i>do</i> however still have issues 6 and 7 in my possession. so yeah, FLUX magazine is my entry.

• Yep, it was on BBC children's TV when I was 10 (winter of 1986?). I can still sing the theme song now (though some of the words are lalalala)!

• While this entry may be cheating, it is still obscure from my and others perspectives. What I mean is that it is a sad day when people don't see the value in Portal. What happened was that I had once brought my Xbox 360, and a copy of The Orange Box to a sleepover, for fun. Plugging it in and playing Portal, my non-geek friends were...adamant to the content of the game, saying that it wasn't really exciting. These people were more into shooting games, you see, and also at the age when game design doesn't matter much. I was disheartened. I realized that just because something nerdy is well-known to some, it isn't to others.

• Conker's Bad Fur. Lord knows how many childhood abruptly ended after that game was released. Good times...good times.

• Gotta be monster rancher. The most cliche anime of all time. Seriously. If ever you wanted to introduce a layman to all anime tropes and are on a time budget, look no further. Dense hyperactive main character. Level-head, sometimes abusive, occasionally flirty female. Gentle giant that gets pissed when the weak are victimized. I'm-too-good-for-this anti-hero and on-again off-again foe. Hyperactive horny comic relief side-kid. Tiny, seemingly harmless, meek character cum powerhouse. Despite all this I shamelessly profess my love of this bottom shelf anime.

• Dude, everyone's heard of this movie.

• Oh man, yes. Scorched Earth rocked and editing the text for it too. Funny thing was, at one point I got an update for the game with new weapons, and my friends at the time & I fairly quickly decided we didn't like it and reverted to the previous version. Some of the new weapons just seemed too cheaty...

• I have an original Mutant League Football game for my sega genesis and i've also got the file for a sega emulator. truly one of the best football games EVER. there was a play designed to kill the ref every time (used for fun or to combat when the other team tried to bribe the ref, also an option in the playbook). There were also various things that exploded on the field and ways to fly off the edge into open space. It was AWESOME!

• This is not a video game or comic, but instead a 1986 film based on a musical which was a remake of a 1960's movie, which was spoof of alien sci-fi flicks and featured a man-eating, singing, baritone venus flytrap. I, of course, am talking about 'Little Shop of Horrors'. Since middle school, I've memorized all the songs, including the one by the sadistic dentist. While it may have had some popularity in the late 80s, it was before my time and sadly, only seems to remain popular in my own mind.

• C'mon! No one's mentioned Harvey Birdman? Really? I know that we being nerds and all makes it a bit more widely known in places like this, but his awesomeness and his unbelieveable inability to explode onto the mainstream should qualify him. And throw Brak in there for good measure. Non-anime Adult Swim really went downhill after they ended.

• I used to watch that show every damn week. I remember not liking it too much, but I watched it because it was about dinosaurs. As a kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs, I felt it was my duty to watch anything involving them. The damn theme song still gets stuck in my head sometimes.

• Mine would be what I could truly call my first nerd love. Discovered in the mid 80s it was my first true sci-fi experience. It was called "Star Fleet". The tale of the crew of the star ship X-Bomber. And their quest to save our solar system from the evil Commander Makara. It was a marionette style show, made in Japan, and dubbed in the UK. Released on VHS in the US, they became my most rented set of video's from my video store. Originally a 24 episode series, it was converted into 8 90 minute films. Films that I will still sit and watch to this day. Though my copies have become greatly worn out, and soon I will have to find a way to get the British box set and a DVD player I can watch it on. This show is still to this day one of my greatest nerd loves.

• The Noid That commercial scared the shit out of me as a kid. He's partly responsible for me avoiding Domino's pizza...until I tried it. Turns out the Noid was sacrificing himself to deter me from a greater evil. He was a hero trying drawing scorn to himself to shield the world from shitty pizza. I salute his memory.

• This movie is the main reason that I'm excited for The Green Hornet. So good.

• For my formal entry I'm putting Alan Moore's Lost Girls. It's the anti-fanservice. The saturation and permeatations of sexuality strips it of titillation. What remains is a deconstruction of cultural attitudes toward sex as only Alan Moore can.

• Miner 2049er. It was an old cartridge game for the Atari 400 and Atari 800 personal computers. (Yes, Atari made computers. They had their own line of cartridge games that were not compatible with the Atari game console, and the 800 had 8k of RAM!) The game was similar in layout to Donkey Kong with ladders and ramps, but had glowing mutants on the board that would melt you. There were PacMan-like powerups that let you destroy the mutants. As you walked over the ramps/platforms they would turn from "girder" to solid and you had to change them all in order to advance to the next level. Here is a link to a video of one of the levels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd_qHoddTA4&feature=related

• This may sound a bit weird, but my irrational and obscure nerd love is for the coelacanth. That coelacanth. The living fossil fish. I'll explain. This is one of those obsessive loves that is impossible to rationalize in anyway other than weird childhood adoration. I was somewhere between 7 & 9 years old when I took a book, about dinosaurs and other ancient animals, out of the library. I was pretty hardcore into dinosaurs at the time so this was pretty much the norm. One of the animals though, that I hadnt read about before, was the coelacanth; a fish that was suspected to be extinct for ~70 million years and was just discovered one day swimming around Africa in the early part of the 20th century. I have no idea why, but my little preteen brain just latched onto this weird fish with a fixation that only the nerd world can appreciate. I dont know if it was my science nerd-brain or just that it was so bizarre or obscure but I just collected info on that fish. I took out every book from the library that had any reference whatsoever and ripped the pages out, making an info binder for myself (pre-internet. Had to collect my data old school). I'd bike to the Museum of Natural History and hang out in the Hall of Ocean Life for hours hoping someone would ask me what that fish was, so I could tell them what year it was discovered and what its scientific name was and who it was named after. I'd alienate and weird-out my friends (who were no cool kids themselves, with their weekly Heroes Quest meet-ups). My parents, were confused as to whether to foster this really odd obsession or potentially wreck my love of studying. I still never figured it out. I think nerds have a deep love and interest in the oddities of the world and thats just how my interest manifested itself. But I still love that huge, ugly fish and still weird people out with poorly segued references to it. So... yeah!

• We're going bar hopping. First round's on me

• They Were 11. An anime movie about an entrance exam for Space college. The basic plot is that the Universe's #1 University has an annual entrance exam that calls upon inhabitants from all planets. In addition to a written test there is a practical test. For this year's test, groups of potential students are sent to various locations in groups of 10. In the movie, the students are assigned to a derelict space station, but when they're all greeting each other they find out that there's 11 people in the group. A good mix of sci-fi and the Lord of the Flies.

• The Clitoris I've been told that for some, the little bastard can be a pain in the ass to find, but trust me, it's worth the hunt. Love and it loves you right back. Boy, does it ever.

• I loved Pokemon Snap. My older brother pawned my copy of it without asking me. I still give him shit for it.

• What's the most common piece of trippy psychedelic freakout lit in the average American household? The Book of Revelations. Even taken the time to read through that jive? I'm betting that most Christians haven't, and if they did I'd imagine a lot of them would stop being Christians. Dragons, sea monsters, peace-toting dictators. Jesus smiting people with his voice. I want an HBO series. I'll pay anything or be a streetwalker or whatever. Just make it happen.

• They're airing Look Around You on Adult Swim now, just to let you know.

• One word. Uniracers. Hands down the best game created for the SNES. Why, you ask? Because it was the only game my cousins would let me play - because I was the only girl. I wasn't cool enough for their friends, wasn't allowed to play Legend of Zelda or any of the Maddens. Well, the one that they hated was Uniracers. "Lame," they said. "Who wants to race unicycles?" So they handed it down to me. I became a CHAMPION at that game. Played it almost everyday for an entire summer. Then, when they had exhausted all their other games and tried to play it against me, I beat the proverbial pants off of them. Justice. That is why Uniracers is amazing.

• I can still sing the theme song. Say it with me now, "Oh, drugs and losers, dwarves with limps. Flos and hos and one-eyed pimps! Down the alleyway they creep... they're all your friends when you can't sleep! ...Come with me and you will see a late night freak show, jubilee! Kick the sandman in his sack; stay up late, Insomniac!"

• Job: A Comedy of Justice, Friday, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or any book by the great, if a tad sex obsessed, author Robert Heinlein. He might not be obscure, but I discovered his books while living in East Texas, where books are considered either the devil's work or great fire starters. Mentioning one of his books, or any sci-fi for that matter to almost any East Texan will get you one of three reactions: A)Is that one of them weirdo foreign books? B)That's one of the devils books! REPENT! or, my favorite: C) You read old books? Are you a lesbian? Certainly not all people from Texas are like that, but I think all of the rednecks in the U.S.A. are birthed there and shipped out to the rest of the nation.

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hands down one of the most underrated movies of the modern era and Jim Carrey's greatest performance in a display of range that I wouldn't have thought he had prior to the Truman Show. It's about him and his girlfriend, played by Kate Winslet, independently yet simultaneously elect to undergo a procedure that eases the one from the other's memory following a painful break-up. It plays out as they literally "physically" each memory and experience it decaying while trying progressively harder to stem the erasure as the procedure progresses. I honestly can't do it justice. It's beautiful and haunting and surreal and whimsical and morose and vivid. If you've seen it, you know why I'm gushing. If you haven't, then consider my recommendation as your prize for this contest.

• War Planets, aka Shadow Raiders. Mainframe (now called Rainmaker) raised the bar with ReBoot; they jacked it up higher with Beast Wars; they poked God in the eye with War Planets.

• My friend Chris introduced me to anime. Thanks for that. He also introduced me to the most fantastically bizarre anime series I've seen, "Midori Days". It's the story of a high school tough named Seiji Sawamura. He gets in fights all the time and wins them with his invincible right hand. However, Seiji can't get a girlfriend. One night, Seiji wishes he had a girlfriend instead of his hand. The next morning, he's shocked to find a miniature girl in place of his right hand. Her name is Midori. She's one of Seiji's classmates and her wish was to get closer to Seiji, instead of crushing on him from afar. Now Seiji has to fix this mess, despite Midori's protestations. He also has to keep the whole thing hidden from his enemies in the high school, who have a lot of payback waiting for Seiji, as well as his friends and family and other assorted characters. It's funny, it's touching, it's got a lot of action. I nerd love it. One of my top five favorite series.

• If you think about it, the great irony of this contest is that many entries will be overlooked because Rob doesn't know about them. In effect, their obscurity prevents them from being judged as adequately obscure. How do you quantify obscurity exactly. If you don't know what it is, how do you know how many others do? Just because you DO know what something is, how can you determine how common that knowledge is? Sure, it's easy enough to seperate the pop culture figure from the 60's comics easter eggs, but what about between those groups? I'm curious as to your methodology, Bricken.

• Oh Rob. You sad, stupid whore. If the transformer cosplayer cocks constantly going in and out of your throat didn't cause as much oxygen deprivation as it apparently has, you'd know that the answer to this and all life's questions is Wonder Showzen. Wonder Showzen? Wonder Showzen. Anyone who doesn't know what this is doesn't deserve life let alone explanations, meaning the vast majority of the populace should be Holocaust-ed by Nazis on speed. But to illustrate my point, I'll just leave the disclaimer here: WARNING WONDER SHOWZEN CONTAINS OFFENSIVE, DESPICABLE CONTENT THAT IS TOO CONTROVERSIAL AND TOO AWESOME FOR ACTUAL CHILDREN. THE STARK, UGLY, PROFOUND TRUTHS WONDER SHOWZEN EXPOSES MAY BE SOUL CRUSHING TO THE WEAK OF SPIRIT. IF YOU ALLOW A CHILD TO WATCH THIS SHOW, YOU ARE A BAD PARENT OR GUARDIAN. Wonder Showzen Ever wondered what stillborn muppet babies on a drugged out Sesame Street look like? Wonder Showzen. Ever wondered what God tastes like but hate the taste of crackers? Wonder Showzen Ever wondered who invented STD's? Wonder Showzen Ever wondered Wonder Showzen Wonderful Wondershowzen. Egad Wonder Showzen. Better than your failure parents. Prickly as that one time Wonder Showzen-ed. Wonder Showzen Wonder Showzen? Wonder Showzen. Wonder Showzen: the crack babies only natural predator (you're welcome) Wonder Showzen: the needy parole officer Wonder Showzen: bulk package novelty death certificates Wonder Showzen: 80 proof Chinese toothpaste Wonder Showzen: #1 exporter for flies to Africa Wonder Showzen: Internation ambulance drag racing federation Now pay me. In yuan. None of that dollars shit. In 10 the Chinese will be using as toilet paper after they shit out our cats while condemning our treatment of cows.

• Afraid not. All I have is a good old fashion VHS tape of it (do old media format get you extra nerd points?). I've had it for a while already obviously.

• First comic I ever bought for myself was Uncanny X-men 204 and with it Nightcrawler became my first fan crush. He was the reason I became an X-men fan and eventually a giant comic nerd. My first tattoo was of Nightcrawler, and I still love it. In 1992, I got a "BAMF" personalized car tag for my first vehicle, a black Ford Bronco II, accessorized with the first Nightcrawler action figure. Cool, I thought. Went to college. I figured most people would not guess what my tag meant, but surely other comic geeks, right? No, apparently not. People would ask what my tag stood for, most just assumed and never correctly. (My brother and his friends still call me 'Bamf' and swear the B stands for "bitch" laughing at their 18 year old joke) And this was before Dane Cook, which was when I finally had to give up the tag. It's one thing to have people just not understand, it's a whole other thing when they mistake you for a Dane Cook fan. No, just no. Sadly I stopped reading comics sometime after Age of Apocalypse. My car tag now proclaims "YAOIGRL" but I have learned not to define stuff for people, they will figure it out or look it up. Most just stay ignorant. But I still love my tattoo, still want a BAMF plushie, and still collect every thing Nightcrawler related I can find, even from the crappy movies. I have used fuzzyelf of bamf2me as my nicks or email addys forever. And ultimately it was Nightcrawler that drew me back to comics. God, I love him!

• The movie ..Adventures in Babysitting .. Chris' date is cancelled. She gets stuck babysitting Sara 8 who dresses like Marvel comics Thor, her brother Brad 15, and his creepy friend Daryl. Friend Brenda runs away from home without money and is stuck in a creepy bus terminal. A homeless person steals her glasses and she befriends a rat. The group heads into NYC to save her. They have a flat on the expressway and no spare. A man with a hook stops to help and tows the car but gets a call that his wife is cheating on him.. heads to his house where there is a shootout. The kids climb into a Cadillac to hide and realize it s being stolen. They are detained at a chop shop where Daryl finds a playboy that has incriminating notes in it. The centerfold looks just like Chris. He steals it when they escape onto the roof. ..the thieves chase them. They spot Chris' boyfriend's car and find him on a date. He tells Chris it is because she doesn't put out. Brad punches him. Sara wonders off to her Dad's building where her parents are at a party. They manage to get down the outside of the skyscraper without being seen, avoid the gangsters.. sing the Blues before being allowed to leave a night club stage. ...attend a college party where Daryl makes out with someone's girl and almost gets killed. Chris meets a nice college Senior.. everyone mentions the centerfold and they get a ride to their car.... they don't have the money to pay. The owner looks like Thor and is touched when Sara gives him her Thor hat. They get the car and Brenda..zoom home only to come up behind the parents! Chris says duck .. they all do and speed by the parents. The mother comments.. "I am so glad our kids are not out on the road with dangerous people like that." They arrive home 5 minutes before the adults and the kids fake being asleep while Chris cleans up and jumps over the sofa and picks up a magazine. The college senior comes buy to return Sara's skate and the 3 kids open the window and yell "Kiss him".

• I remember it albeit not much of it. I couldn't even tell you the plot of any of the episodes. Hard to remember something you watched maybe once or twice about one or two decades ago.

• Ani-Mayhem: Dragon Ball Z ccg. No one I know remembers this ccg. It was an somewhat simple ccg where one could play solo or against others. I still have two starter decks locked away in my closet. From time to time I pull them out and bathe in their awesomeness. Who couldn't love a ccg based on both the action and comedic elements of the dragon ball z universe. With cards depicting a drunk child gohan, or a holo-foil adult Trunks card that so proudly displayed the stats passed down from bulma's charm and vegeta's strength. Ahh. To be young again. To this day none of my dbz enamored friends, nor ccg enthusiasts, claim to have heard of the cards.

• I loved that game! I've since tried to explain it to people, but I usually give up after trying to talk about the walking TV robot monsters that you had to shoot and then answer Math questions with to get help solving the code. I also loved the game "Treasure Mountain" by the same company.

• the Steve Jackson card game Car Wars. I was introduced to it back in college. and failed several classes because of the tournament play the Sci-Fi club i was in had set up. That and the Illuminati card game as well. Good times, Good times.....

• I think my obscure nerd love is the Muppet Family Christmas TV special. I can't remember when it aired, and I get a lot of blank looks when I start talking about it, but it's the only special that I know of that combines the excellent trifecta of The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock casts. I've tried to find it online, but so far it only exists as part of a VHS tape labelled "6 hours of Christmas Specials" in my parents' storage area. The finale of the show had all the Muppets singing Christmas carols, and I was introduced to several carols through the sing-a-long. I can even sing both parts of the duet "The Christmas Song" as sung by Big Bird and the Swedish Chef. The show has also created a lot of in-jokes within my family, and we get more than a few weird looks when, even to this day, we start quoting lines ("Careful of the icy patch!")

• thanks, Doc.

• i think i know this book, but i'll look it up anyway. thanks for the tip

• The Archon series of videogames: c64. Two player with joysticks you moved monsters on a terrain map. Once you had two on a square you had a real time battle in an arena based on the terrain. Each monster was stronger or weaker based on the battleground. Each side had five or six different monsters. So awesome. A spiritual remake came out for the ps1 by the same guys that made star control series ( another awesome obscure series too).

• Emma: A Victorian Romance it's probably my all time favorite Anime because it combines two my biggest interests The Victorian Era and Anime romances. But my friends have no idea what I am talking about when I mention it like one of my friends his favorite Anime Berserk another friend of mine's is Rurouni Kenshin so I am kind of the odd man out but tome Emma is what make's a good Romantic Anime and an superb storyline to this day it's the only Anime I have ever cried tears of joy over because of the ending

• Dave Attell's Insomniac. Great show about underground nightlife interspersed with good ol fashioned bar-crawling. The marriage of freaks, poets, lushes, burnouts, fetishists, hippies, frat boys, strip mall trappings, techno-adicts, gamers, geeks, and carnies. You would have loved it Rob. So much so that you'd turn Fan Fiction Friday into Fan Fiction Weekday just for an excuse to drown in booze while diving into nocturnal subcultures. Plus, I got a free drink in a bar featured in the show after referencing it to the bar tender.

• I also had the Standard Galactic Alphabet memorized at some point, although now it is long forgotten. Of course i Still have many different pieces of paper on which i transcribed the alphabet when i reached the secret level in episode three. After that, whenever I played Marooned on Mars and went into one of the earliest levels where the alien telepathic statue told me "too bad you cant understand the standard galactic alphabet" I would scream in protest that I <i>DID</i> in fact know the SGA!!!!

• They *always* brought him back without an explanation. There was never a continuity with the character, other than he was a magic shop owner who was snooty and pseudo-Quebecois about how to pronounce his last name. They never bothered explaining it because no storyteller would use him as a character the same way twice. They just kept the name and profession. That clown was scary as fuck, though.

• Re: Ronin Warriors- Anubis was scary as shit with that kusarigama.

• DUDE i totally have that game!!! Like i just looked in an old box and put my hand on it. I was terrible at it when i was young so i never played it again, but it may be time to dust off the old genesis and give it a proper go.

• Mine? Pirates of Dark Water....Because who doesn't love an annoying, talking monkey-bird, A busty, fun-loving eco-friendly bar wench, and curse-words that center around "chunga lunga" and "noy jitat." Curse you Hanah-Barbara for never finishing it...Curse You!

• Tamagotchi's. The old, original ones. The little pocket sized creatures you carried around and picked up their poop and fed them and mated them and stuff. They were really fun. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who remembers them though...

• Mine is especially obscure to me, not because it wasn't popular at all (it wasn't) but because I like a very specific version. It's an anime called Teknoman, now the japanese version Tekkaman Blade has a modicum of popularity. However the dubbed version is ten times better mainly because the original context was slowly raped by Haim Saban. You may remember him as "the power rangers guy" but Saban had an awesome career of wrecking anime. And with Teknoman he did a real number. His power rangers-esque intro to the series gives me geeky shivers any time I watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bS765funp0 I love this intro more than I love the show, so much that it makes the intro my most obscure nerd love. I love this intro so much I bought the entire series on DVD (a paltry $13 brand new) ONLY to have the intro...which they cut and replaced with the japanese one. Not even the people making the DVD liked the intro as much as I did. That's obscure.

• I'm not sure how nerdy this is but my personal hero is Matthew Lesko. You may know him as the FREE MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT!!! infomercial guy. His optimism and joy at sharing the secrets of success with droppy-eyed nightowls is infectious. Never fails to make me smile. One Part V (of V for Vendetta)+ Six Parts Robin Hood + Three Parts The Riddler + 10 Parts Spongebob Squarepants = MAKING THE STIMULUS PACKAGE WORK FOR YOU (in the most endearingly awesome way imaginable)

• Not only does issue #2 haunt me.... but I still get scared from the "drug" episode when Berserker falls into the vat of "crystal twist" ooohhhh...still freaks me out.

• Interesting to note that little Nemo was originally an American newspaper comic strip.(Winsor McCay 1905-1914 & 1924-1927)

• Joe Camel and Bananaman: First class pimps.

• Okay so mines both obscure and something I hardly admit to anymore: long ago, there was a show called Big Wolf on Campus that aired on Fox Family (what we now call ABC Family). It was about a teenager who got bitten by a werewolf in American Werewolf like style but used his powers for good (like Angel and his whole vamp w/ a soul thing). I loved this show far more than I ever should have and the only people I knew who also enjoyed it were friends that I made watch it (that is until I found the internet) I think it really holds a place in my heart because it was my first intro into the world of fandom and now 10 or so years later I find myself a very self aware nerd because of that stupid random TV show. So thanks BWOC, I miss you *goes to find old VHS tapes*

• THE MAXX, I AM THE MAXX I WILL PROTECT MY JUNGLE QUEEN, super cool cartoon from mtv in the 90s, it was a comic to but i never read it, basicly i turned into the maxx for about 3 weeks maybee 5 years ago, i only stopped talking like him after close friends started not talking to me (true story), i still watch the series about about 5/6 times a year frikin love that cartoon,

• awsome game, i played it through again the other month, i knew i was hooked is when the caricter i was given was dressed exactly like me, red jumper, combat tousers and brown dreds. good times

• I would have to say my "Stretch-Armstrong Stretch Monster". And the funny things is that he's filled with some sweet, jelly-like goo that oozed out once when he got a pinhole in him. I don't know what's worse - the fact that I know it tasted sweet or the fact that the toy was self healing! If you don't remember this toy, take a jump to here and see the cheesy TV add (compliments of Plaid Stallions website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTYEslLMZjE

• Ooh damn -- I take it back. I take it back! One greater nerd love than this. Please disregard the above -- I can't delete it (damn)... Compute's Gazette magazine. This magazine listed tedious, long lists of BASIC files that you had to manually enter into your Commodore 64 or VIC-20 in order to come up with simple, often extremely stupid applications (anyone remember "Balloon Blitz," for example?). If there was one typo in your data entry, the entire program would be screwed up. This didn't stop me from pouring hours into that mind-numbing process of typing the data in, though. Ah, the satisfaction of commands like "GOSUB."

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