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Nerdy Pyrrhic Victories: And the Winners Are…


34660 - artist_kawa oc pyrrhic_victory.jpg

?This contest was a tough one to judge. Basically, I tried to keep it to those stories where people had genuinely achieved something — no matter how ridiculous was — but then also genuinely lost something as a result. If you don’t see your entry in the HMs or winners, that might be why; since the entries were so long, I had to be kind of picky about which ones made it. Just try not to hate me.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that the image used here came from page 8 of the Google Image Search results for “pyrrhic victory,” and you bet your sweet ass I had no desire to investigate further. In fact, the image kind of scares me, and I already regret using it. Let’s just move on, shall we?


So these guys are getting an HM, but not winning a shirt? Is that a Pyrrhic victory? Nope, it’s just second place.


Paul F – SkullsForTots:

I used to work for a video game publisher as QA. Our VP was a big car nut, and loved to talk shit. So when he and the head of QA were playing Burnout 3, I asked what it was, and was promptly offered a controller and given a savage beating with a copious side helping of shit-talking.

After we were allowed to go home that night, I asked the head of QA if I could borrow the game. He allowed it, and I promptly pulled an all-nighter playing through most of the game and honing my skills.

The next day, more sleep-deprived than usual, he asked me if I wanted a rematch. In this rematch, I proceeded to absolutely destroy him, and was talking so much shit my mouth resembled a porta-potty. After the fourth or fifth match, he asked me:
“Do you like your job?”
“Yes.”
“Then shut up and get out.”
It was totally worth it to beat him down and I don’t regret it in the least.


Doc:

A few years ago I built myself a new computer and decided that no stock case, no matter how cool it looked, could measure up to the awesomeness in my head. I put over $2000 into the components of that machine and dammit if I was going to have something that powerful I was going to have a case worthy of showing off.

For days I reseached case modding and decided on a ridiculously complicated paint job that would take the better part of a week as I painted, then sanded, then painted, then sanded, then buffed, then waxed and so on and so forth until I had the kind of finish on it that a concept car would be envious of.

For the design itself I took days picking out the right colors I wanted on it.
I finally finished the whole thing at an additional cost of an extra hundred or so in paints, sanding paper and other crap and I thought it looked sweet as fuck. I took it to my first lan party and had to then explain to everyone for the rest of the goddamn night that the symbol on the side was for the house of Zod and the colors were traditional kryptonian (I was a big superman nerd back then).

For my effort I was rewarded with a bunch of raised eyebrows and more than one person just asking “Why didn’t you just slap a couple stickers on the side?”
To top it off, the next year said computer got destroyed while moving to a new apartment.


Brodie Searcy:

5th grade, new school, new classmates, ect. The teacher gives out a logic problem and tells the class that everybody who solves it correctly gets a candy bar. The next day, she gives the winners their candy bars. I was not one of them. When she goes over the answer, I point out that she was wrong. She argues the point, and even shows that the book agrees with her. I don’t back down and explain how the book is wrong, and how I am correct. She doesn’t back down either. The next day, the teacher hands me a candy bar and let’s me know in front of the class how I was actually correct, and the only one in the class to do it correctly. This did not make me popular with either the class (who hated intellectuals) or the teacher (who now expected much more from me and/or hated me for proving her wrong). That was not a fun year with the teacher, or years after with those kids. I got my candy bar, but at what price?

A year later, I pointed out an error in my math book (a book that the school had been using for a few years) to my 6th grade math teacher, an error that no one had caught before. A couple days later, she walked up to me and said, “I heard you were a troublemaker,” and threw me a bag of M&M’s. It appears that I was a little infamous with the staff in pointing out errors. It followed me through middle school. First day of class, my Pre-Algebra teacher calls me up to her desk before class really began and said something along the lines of, “Just so there’s no trouble…” handed me a roll of candy called Smarties, and winked at me. I changed schools halfway through the year, and the candy story didn’t follow me.

TrapJaw:

Again, a similar story, this time in high school….
We were sitting around in Biology class killing time, as it was the last day before spring break and half of the class was gone for some kind of activity. Eventually the teacher decides that to pass the time we’ll play Hangman, so she goes up to the chalkboard and draws the gallows and the blank spots for the letters. After four or five words she warns us that she’s come up with a tough one. Somebody yells out, “E!” and on the chalkboard she fills in the following:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ E
Then someone offers an “N.”
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ N E
I (being a smart ass) yell out, “Z!” and she frowns and puts it on the board.
Z _ _ _ _ _ _ N E
And from there, the class is stumped. The poor stick figure grows closer and closer to being strangulated before someone finally gets another letter, “O.”
Z _ _ O _ _ O N E
After that, the next two guesses kill the poor two-dimensional bastard and our teacher then smiles smugly and fills in the rest of the word:
Z Y L O P H O N E
At that point I make a sound like a buzzer and shout “Wrong!” The teacher and I then get into an argument over how to spell the word “xylophone.” She insists that it has a “Z,” so she eventually gets a dictionary and finds that she is in fact wrong.
As the other kids are laughing, she says “Well, I’m not paid to teach English.”
To which I respond, “Xylophone isn’t an English word–it’s Greek. It comes from xylon, which means wood, and phone which means sound or voice.”
“Well, I don’t teach Greek, either” she retorts.
“No, but you should know some of it and Latin from their usage in scientific naming conventions.”
I got to spend the rest of the class period in the principal’s office….


Ellis Covington:

It’s a nerd tale as old as the world itself. You come into work one day and the world is awesome. The smile on your face is so big that people can’t help but notice.
“Hey” a bloke who you know quite well says. “You look happy, did you get some at the weekend?”
“I did indeed.” You happily reply.
“Weren’t you at that camping fighty thing?” (he means a LARP event).
“Erm… Yeah I was”
“Did you bang an Elf?”
“Kinda”
“Do you know her name?”
“Princess Silverleaf”
“I mean her real name? Or Number?”
“Erm… No.”
And thus what should have been a happy tale of hot elf love became mocking and somehow the acquisition of the name “Prince Silverleaf” around the office.

A lot of people “liked” this story, but Ellis here had sex with an attractive lady in elf ears at a LARP. That’s purely victory, nothing Pyrrhic about it..


Wrestling4ever2000:

One of many for me was when i bought the original Game Genie for the NES. It was a long weekend and I didnt have to work for 3 days. I was fliping through the book for codes and it said to try and find your own codes. So I picked a game that didnt have any codes and searched writing down each attempt. All weekend I focused on this game and at the end of the weekend I made the character blink.
Sad thing is I forgot what game it was.


MistressJera:

I made it my mission to steal every single object you could pick up from the towns in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and dropped them off inside a random cabin in the woods I had chosen as my dumping grounds. It took almost five minutes for all of the stuff to hit the ground at first, the lag was so bad, and then as I stole more and more items I could hardly open the door without causing an avalanche of lag and sweetrolls. It soon got so bad that even walking by the OUTSIDE of the cabin would make my game lag out. Soon the game was almost unplayable in that area of the world because of the lag, but I couldn’t go back and clean it up, I just had to avoid one part of the map. It was just outside of a town, too, so that really sucked.

And once the cabin was full I filled up a pirate ship…
All three decks…

Well, time to go play Skyrim!


Jacob Falkof:

I am an after school counselor that deals with children from grades K-8 (kindergarten to eighth grade) and have my fare shares of Pyrric victories. I’m the counselor who brings my DS and Pokemon games into work and absolutely demolishes the kids who just have level 100’s with a Sandstorm Team (I know, not too fair, is it?), and never goes easy, even when against the kid who will bawl his eyes out if he so much as misses with an attack.

Recently, Dragon Ball GT has started to re-air on Nick or something, and all the kids were arguing over what “GT” stood for. To give a clue about how much they know, they never heard of buu, and had no clue who Emperor Pilaf was. I was listening, laughing at the answers they put forth, until one kid, a 3rd grader who is like the leader of the group, came up with an answer. His answer was GT stood for “Goku Tiny”. I got up, and walked over, ready to give them the answer. They clued me in, knowing how big a nerd I was, and told me what GT stood for. I calmly informed them they were wrong.

They refused to believe their friend was wrong. I then explained how GT meant Grand Tour, referencing how they travel around, and how GT couldn’t mean “Goku Tiny” because no title like that would have existed when the show came out originally. The leader of the group said I was “stupid” and tried to say I didn’t know anything about “Dragon Ball” and I should stop trying to be cool. I then went on to explain every detail of GT, from beginning to end, talking about the back stories of Pilaf and gang, talking about the journey, why Goku was made tiny by it’s creator, the son of the original mangaka, Akira Toriyama, why the dragonballs became dragons, what each wish was in the series, with a climax of who Uub was, since none of them understood that Buu and Uub was once the same being. About 3 sentences in, I was yelling and at the end I was about to pass out with my face beat red. The whole thing ended with me yelling “Who doesn’t know anything about Dragon Ball, Huh?!?”

The kids were in awe, my boss had come over to ask me something about half way through, so she was in awe, in fact, most of the kids had noticed, listened in, and were in awe, along with some of the kids’ parents. The kid I had specifically targeted with my last remark was about to cry. My boss pulled me over and I had a strong talking to. I was asked to leave for the day, and on my way out I walked by the kid and said, “Goku Tiny? Hah.” It was worth it. It always is.


Dr.:

I’m a graphic designer. a writer and and an anime fan, three states of being which formed a Pyrrhic trinity when I was in school, cranking out all sorts of design projects which students were generally given carte blanche to interpret as they would. Despite knowing better, I gave in to temptation when asked to design a four-page magazine spread incorporating both advertising and editorial content: I advertised the hell out of anime calendars and wall scrolls, then tapped a rather in-your-face piece I had penned for a faux expose on fanservice. It got me an A, but including it in my portfolio was a constant battle between “This is one of the best things I’ve ever done!” and “This is going to ruin my career if they find out I’m an anime geek who writes about breasts and panty shots in her spare time.”


Gallen_Dugall:

I finally completed my book… that I can’t get anyone to read.


ZaneJosh:

I was finally able to shed the label of virgin, but it was to a batshit crazy chick who I rather foolishly married, but who never had sex with me again through a variety of schemes, scams & generally bitchery. I wasn’t able to end the relationship until I was 27. So to tally, one night of amusingly brief nookie cost me the majority of my 20s.


DoctorSmashy:

I have one story like this (I once found the world’s largest cornflake, but immediately ate it on principle before I told people) but it isn’t that nerdy, so I’ll instead submit the story of one of my friends.

When I was around 12 my best friend loved Indiana Jones, and with his parents he created an awesome model of the ‘Opening The Ark’ scene out of Lego (long before the Lego Indy brand had come into being, of course). So he had these bitchin’ little figures of Toht and Beloq and the third unnamed Nazi who nobody remembers and it was bitchin’. But one day when his parents were out he called me over, nearly crying with frustration. I opened the door and went up to his room and saw a pile of soggy crumpled up shit where the amazing Indy diorama used to be. He tearfully explained to me how, to simulate the face melting, he had at first tried to colour in the Nazi’s faces with a marker, then used Playdough for fake gibs, then finally used his father’s lighter to achieve the look he wanted, and in doing so had ruined the whole model – simply because this was what had happened in the movie. So focused was he in getting the scene exactly accurate to the real thing that he literally destroyed his masterpiece because of his nerdery. And if the bollocking he got from his parents when they returned home doesn’t make this a Pyrrhic victory, I don’t know what will.


Geekandwife:

I guess mine would have to be when i finally beat my wife at Soul Caliber 3 in the arcade… and due to my gloating she withheld birthday sex….

Something along the lines of making her say that i was “greatest ever” and “master of all games”… Yes.. i was stupid.. i have learned from my mistakes… But she always use Tira and her supid hula hoop of death. She always annoyed me with her combo’s. It was the only game she could beat me in every time, and i finally had won… I just went a bit overboard… oh yeah.. making her announce it in the public food court didn’t help…


Lincoln Paradox:

Before I decided on a secondary career in science, I wanted to be a lawyer. I applied to a bunch of pre-law and legal track prgrams and I was denied by every one. Luckily, I applied to several science programs, as well, but I was still curious as to why I didn’t get in. So, I called the selection committee chair at one of them, and they informed me that my English scores were way too low. Now, I felt that the reason my English scores were low was because my Junior and Senior Eng teacher (same person) hated my guts and had given me nothing higher than a C.

So, I suggested a joint project between my History and English classes, that my History teacher sold to my English teacher (probably because she kept my name out of it). Both teachers graded on content and writing. I got an A in History, and a C in English. Feeling vindicated, I complained and my History teacher backed me up.

The principal made a note of the incident in my record, but that was all. My grade never got changed. BUT the project was later used by another student in a lawsuit against my school and the same English teacher. He was the only student who had failed Senior English, and this included a Polish exchange student. She lost her job, and the school paid out $40K (it was a Catholic school). I never went to law school, but I got all As in English, all through college.


Enough Cake:

I have a pretty decent video game collection that I am always looking to expand. I regularly hit e-bay up for some obscure gem that happens to hit my fancy at the given moment. In this case it was a Turbo grafix 16 with the CD attachment and 10 games. I didn’t care what the games were, I just knew it must be mine. I think the starting bid was around 60 or 70 dollars so I threw done 100. After 3 or 4 days the bid was up to around 230, I was in the lead and no new bids were put in for at least 4 hours. Anyone who has used e-bay on a regular bases knows that when it comes down to the final seconds thats when the hard bids come flooding in. This time was no different. I’m not going to say how much the final bid was, because it is a constent source of shame for me, bit I did win. I aso could not afford rent, got kicked out of my apartment, had to crash on a friends couch. I put all my games in a storage unit (with some monetary help from said friends) and my games were, of course, promptly stolen. So.. yay me.

All this for Fighting Street? I am an idiot.


Scelerific:

I can’t recall my most epic pyrrhic victory, so I’ll simply share my most recent.
I became somewhat engrossed in Adventure Time recently, thanks mostly due to the vitriolic lesbian subtext in the episode “What Was Missing”. One day, while discussing a piece of Marceline/Bubblegum fanart, I got into a lighthearted and overall innocuous discussion over whether it’s ‘face’ or ‘veins’ in the lyric “I’m gonna drink the red from your pretty pink [face],” sung by Marceline the Vampire Queen. Myself initially (and incorrectly) in favor of ‘veins’ over ‘face’, I was countered by a girl who swore that ‘veins’ wouldn’t make sense because Princess Bubblegum is ‘made of bubblegum and doesn’t have veins.’

In not one, not two, but five lengthy paragraphs I explained in great detail not only how an organism as complex as Princess Bubblegum would require some sort of vascular system, but also cited several instances within the show supporting the fact–including her apparently humanoid digestive system–before moving on to detail my own theories involving Candy People biology, right down to Candy genetics and the concept of a DNA equivalent with a complex sugar backbone as opposed to a nucleotide backbone.

The argument was ceded to me, but at the end of the day, I was still the woman ranting in the dA comments section of slash fanart about the complex, detailed biology of fictional, candy-themed characters. And honestly, if that isn’t a loss for winning, I don’t know what is.


Mittens:

I won a Topless Robot shirt a few months back, and was very excited when it came in the mail (Ladies size M). Unfortunately I can’t wear it that often because although it fits me perfectly around the waist and arms and almost everywhere else, my cleavage is too big.
My boobs are too big to wear shirts that fit the rest of me perfectly (34E in American sizing). That is the most Pyrrhic of Pyrrhic victories.

/suffers in silence


363511:

I (31 years old at the time) got into a huge argument with my incredibly hot, horny, young, and nerdy girlfriend (19 years old at the time) over whether Avatar: The Last Airbender was really all that or just another action cartoon. I showed her episodes of older action cartoons from the 70s, 80s, and 90s (Western and anime alike) to make my point. In the end, she said that her eyes had been opened. She still thought Avatar was good but not really all that original. She also realized that I was way, way too old for her and broke up with me.

And she stole my He-Man and my Galaxy Rangers sets when she moved. Bitch.


TheLastStarfighter:

When I was in high school I wrote a screenplay in proper script formatting.
I even went to Chapters and bought a fucking book on how to write a proper screenplay.
I went to work on it for over 6 months and I FINISHED the whole 120 page
properly formatted screenplay. I could even submit this thing to a bloody movie
studio. So after 6 months of work and 5 major revisions I had an Underworld/Blade/Terminator
1 sort of hybrid screen play that features major lesbian overtones ready to
pitch. The saddest part was I even wrote a director’s cut that featured an alternative
ending (I liked both my endings too much to only pick one).

It took me over 400 hours of my life to make this. I could have been
having a life but I was busy writing this abomination .
I still have it in its fully completed form…and I won’t delete it as a
piece of my soul is in it and deleting it would crush what little soul I have
left :((((


Rotciv:

Back in 2006, on the way to comic con from Tucson, me and my friends stopped by in Yuma to pick up another person. While we were waiting in the house, his little sister challenge me to a game of Dance Dance Revolution. She destroyed me. I should note that she was about 6 or 7 years old at the time. I was 26. It pissed me off so bad that after comic con, I went out and bought the game myself. I’m freaking awesome at it now but the only problem is nobody cares and when I brought up a challenge her entire family laughed at me. It also turns out that it’s not a skill that impresses the ladies, so it falls under the category of “waste of time things that doesn’t impress the ladies” with my origami skills.


Cichytichy:

When I was in about 4th grade (about 1998-9), both of my brothers had Pokemon for the gameboy color and I was super jealous, so they set me up with an emulator. I had the option of playing Green, which was in Japanese but supposedly worked very well, or Blue, which was in English but had a few “issues.” I chose Blue. Turns out the issues were that the game froze if all your pokemon faint or if you use a pokemon center, escape rope, flash or fly and all the dialogue was mixed up (almost every item you encountered said “It’s a pokemon report!” and random trainers would have some interesting non-sequiturs, including one in the tower in Lavender town that gave a schizophrenic rendering of the final dialogue between Professor Oak and your rival after you beat the game.)

Instead of giving up, I proceeded to run back to eat soup in Pallet Town at every opportunity because it was the only thing that fully healed my pokemon (thank god for the Diglett tunnel.) I got through caves by looking at each screen in the Prima strategy guide and trying to follow a path to each ladder in the dark. Because I was always in danger of my pokemon running out of moves (the biggest problem with no pokemon centers,) I avoided fights like the plague and when I finally got to the elite four, all of my pokemon were super low level. When I beat the 1st one I was so pumped that I saved the game, which was really stupid because the door was locked and I couldn’t die without the game freezing, so I had to win with the pokemon I had on me or be stuck forever. Somehow, I did it. It took me a few years, but I beat the whole game without using a single pokemon center, flash, fly and a host of other things.

This has yet to impress a single other human being I’ve come into contact with. Worse, I can’t even imagine a situation where it would make sense to just mention this achievement to most people I know- forget expecting them to appreciate it. Forever a lonely Pokemon master.


White Lightnin’:

I entered almost all of the Topless Robot contests for which my nerdity was high, but only won the t-shirt for the one about pyrrhic victory.
-Shirt for creativity?

No, but you get an E for effort.


Sean Seger:

Back in the 90s when the first edition of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit came out (just had questions about the original trilogy), my buddy picked it up. He lived a couple hours away so I would go spend the weekend with him and his wife every now and then. The first weekend I went up after he bought it, his wife had a friend over too in a blatant attempt to play matchmaker. However nothing happened when she saw the depths of my nerdiness. My buddy pulled out the Trivial Pursuit game. We set it up. I went first, and no one ever went. I answered every question, got all the pie pieces, and made it to the middle without missing a question and letting anybody else go. It was a victory that I am still proud of to this day, BUT it completely turned the friend off to me (of course my complete lack of social graces and self confidence didn’t help either). But I blame that awesome game of Trivial Pursuit for me not getting any that weekend.


Ross:

When I was around 7 years old and my brother was 5 we got the original Nintendo Entertainment System for Hanukkah one night. We were given specific instructions that this was a gift for the both of us and we were to be nice and share. Well that did not happen. We argued for what seemed like hours for who got the right to play it first. It got to the point where my parents were about to box the thing back up and return it, they were so tired of listening to us. Finally I convinced my younger brother that as the older brother I had the right to go first and he should back down and live with. So we finally stopped fighting and my dad setup the NES on the basement TV. I was so excited, I couldn’t contain myself. We turned on Super Mario Brothers and I made sure I was first player. I walked right into the first goomba of the game, killing myself instantly. My brother went on to play Luigi for 30 minutes after seeing my stupid mistake. All that fighting and I only got to play for 10 seconds.


Jc:

When I was in third grade, my family moved to a new area and I ended up in a new school. Being the nerdy borderline Aspergers kid that I was, I was not so much into the fairer sex at the time. I was far more interested in my denim jacket with sewn on Nintendo patches and my gameboy holster that held a gameboy and 6 games which fit perfectly on to my belt. I remember this vividly, first day of school, I am trying to play my gameboy on the playground when this female comes up to me and tells me she “likes” me. I decide instantly that I want nothing to do with this girl and need to get her to leave me alone immediately. My prepubescent genius brain comes up with the following plan… PICK NOSE AND WIPE ON HER.

VICTORY! She went away.

skip to middle school……. people still remember this single incident….awesome.
I attribute all my later failings in the social realm to this individual moment.


Neptune:

When I was in high school, I had a crazy fangirl crush on Elijah Wood thanks to LOTR. In typical crazy fangirl fashion, I had to make my crush known to others. So, on his birthday one year, I put a sign on my backpack that said, “Elijah Wood is [age]today! Happy Birthday!” with pictures of him/Frodo. (I’m actually relieved to have forgotten the age.) Some girl saw it while I was washing my hands in the restroom and said, “I’m going to marry him. I’m his biggest fan.” So I looked at her and said, sweetly, “Oh, really? Do you have a backpack sign?” She just mumbled as she opened the door to leave.

…And I think anytime you win at being the crazier fangirl, it’s a Pyyrhic Victory.


Louieatrest:

I got my bachelors in Communication Studies.

And now for the winners. First up:


Taranaich:

This may be more of a confessional than an entry, but…

Since July 2010, I’ve been the site runner for the Conan
Movie Blog. I’m also a very devoted Robert E. Howard fan. In November 2009, I
read the character sheet and script for the film, and dismissed it as worthless
garbage. Why, then, did I take over the site? Because this film was going to be
the biggest widespread exposure of Conan in a long time, the first new film in
almost 30 years, and already the vast majority of the internet seemed content
to believe this was a remake of the 1982 film, blissfully unaware of the
franchise’s literary pedigree. I felt somebody had to make sure there was a
voice in the wilderness spreading the word of Robert E. Howard.

So over the course of 2010 and 2011, I wrote an obscene
amount of material on the upcoming film and it’s, at times, completely
nonexistent relationship with the source material. Every screen cap, every
behind-the-scenes photo, every magazine cutting went over with a fine-toothed
comb. All for a film that would end up one of the biggest critical and
commercial flops of 2011 – and I knew it would be since 2009. It all culminated
in a 20,000 word critique of the film written shortly after my initial viewing,
though I dread to make a word count of my hundreds of other posts.

The Phyrric victory? I knew that no matter how terrible the film ended up, no
matter how poorly received it was, I know that I did my best to promote Robert
E. Howard on a wide platform, to educate the masses who thought this was just
another ’80s remake, and to provide the most information possible. Many news
sites linked to my posts, journalists and crew members involved in the film
contacted me to clarify reports, I got a press pass to the London premiere, and
I made new friends. All for a film I predicted would fail in 2009.

Wow. Devoting four years of your life to running a mostly negative website based on film that no one else ever cared about, or will ever care about, and in fact most people have probably already forgotten? That’s quite an accomplishment — and certainly a victory in the sense that you were doing as right as possible for your favorite nerd franchise — but one that accomplished absolutely nothing. Your hard, meaningless work shall no longer go unrewarded, sir, although I don’t believe winning this t-shirt will upgrade your act from “Pyrrhic victory” to “regular victory.”


SocksArgyle:

I’m a huge Magic the Gathering nerd, and have most of the cards all the way from Alpha to the current set, Innistrad. Anyway, I made myself a goal to collect 10,000 copies of the card “Hurloon Minotaur”, which is practically useless but has really cool art. Anyway, early last year, I managed to complete this goal, and as I sat down to admire five dual-trayed boxes of this one card, my wife came in and asked what I was doing.
“Going through cards,” I said. “See these boxes? All the same card.”
“You’re kidding,” she said.
I grinned. “Nope,” I said. “It’s the truth.”
She then took some out and began to flip through them, shaking her head.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’.”
Took the wind out of my sails a bit.

I can’t tell you how much this entry made me laugh. Of all the “victories” discussed in the week’s contest, SocksArgyle is easily the most insane. Oh, it’s a victory — acquiring 10,000 of pretty much anything takes some effort — but for fuck’s sake, it’s not even an accomplishment in Magic: The Gathering terms. In terms of who worked hard for the most meaningless goal, SocksArgyle is the big winner. At least Tanaraich had copies of what he wrote afterwards. And last, but certainly not least.


DogOfThunder:

I joined a WOW guild in late 2005, ended up getting into a flame war with someone right away that was already in the guild. I wound up “winning” a pointless Internet flame war and gained some “cred” with my fellow guildies.

Flashforward to May 2006, at my bachelor party inside the local gaming store, I get surprised by a nerdy stripper dressed as a Catholic Schoolgirl. It was awesome as she danced to such things as the Zelda theme and then pulled off the Night Elf /dance. I asked if she was a WOW player, and well, she was!

She was the exact same person I “won” the flame war against!

…..and that meant no more lap dance, at my very own bachelor party….

No other entry more perfectly encapsulated a Pyrrhic victory more than this entry. Yes, he won the battle, but he lost the hot nerd stripper lap-dances; that is truly worse — hundreds of times worse — than if he’d lost flame war. I bestow upon him a TR shirt, not just in compensation for his loss, but also to remind him of it, and to remind us of the golden rule to do unto others as you would have done unto you. Because maybe one of those others is a hot WoW-playing nerd stripper.

And that is that. Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who entered. Hopefully dredging up these memories wasn’t too painful for any of you. Meanwhile, if anyone has any contest ideas, feel free to let me know. I could use ’em.