Stupidest Nerdy Purchase: And the Winners Are…

?I used to wonder how much money I’d spent on useless nerd crap. I don’t mean stuff I enjoyed, like videogames or my Force FX Count Dooku lightsaber. I mean like the Marvel trading cards I bought instead of the school lunches in 7th grade, or the Star Wars figures I enjoyed but almost immediately put into a box in my closet because I didn’t want to have toys out in my apartment on the incredibly slim chance a girl might come over. How many thousands of dollars –possibly tens of thousands — have I spent on nerdy shit that I barely enjoyed, or were a total waste right from the beginning?

But after reading this weekend’s contest, now I wonder how much money we’ve all spent on stupid shit. Add up all the money blown by TR readers on awful nerdy crap we shouldn’t have bought, and I bet we could equal the GNP of a few of the smaller countries. Kind of terrifying, isn’t it?

Oh, one more thing — the pic used here is from Scooter Atreides’ entry.Scoot says:

The damn thing’s called “Sydot”, he’s from the short-lived 80s Power Lords action figure line and he looks like the offspring of a orange Giger Xenomorph and a T-Rex with Down’s Syndrome. His “cool action feature”? Push a button on his back, and he sticks his tongue out….
Even at six I knew this thing was royally fucktarded and felt like a colossal tool for wasting cash on it.

It’s not the most shameful entry by a long shot, but I wanted to include the pic because HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT FUCKING THING. Honorable mentions after the jump.

Here are the Honorable Mentions. There were a ton of great entries, so I tried to winnow them down by making sure 1) the items were actually purchased and 2) you were actually ashamed (many of you were not).

Cprl Kool said:

I have a exploding Peter patrelli figure from toys or us. He is bright orange and doesn’t explode. He sits next to my computer monitor and watches me, on the computer, sometimes our eyes meet in silent mutual shame. I wish I had gotten the Mohinder figure it had a messenger bag.

SlickWilly said:

Getting a subscription ($20 for one month) to a Hentai site so that I could read the last two chapters of an Evangelion doujin I found interesting. My old email account now contains a who’s who list of fetish porn site advertisements.

MasteroftheFresh said:

My nerdiest purchase that i will regret is about to be that tron legacy identity disc set.

-1 said:

I loved all things Godzilla in my youth. At one time I was buying everything related to the big green kaiju. I once bought a tiny can of King Ghidorah CORNED BEEF for an astounding $25 off ebay, thinking it was collectible. This was years and years ago and that can still sits on a shelf reminding me of my eternal shame. I think the worst part of it was that I broke into my dad’s ebay account to buy the damn thing. Gos I was a fool. Though I bet the corned beef is still good.

JD said:

I have brought this

?

I dont even know why I wanted it but it now sits on a shelf in my front room (still in packaging) as a warning about buying shit.

Matt C. said:

A $55 hand crafted dice rolling tray for my D&D game.

I did not know these things existed until this contest. Their existence absolutely blows my mind. 

gzcomics said:

The greatest movie ever is obviously Starship Troopers. This 500 dollar jackass hangs out with me all day in silent judgment. 

Banky said:

I still have in my possession an in the box Nick Van Owen figure from The Lost World. For those who don’t remember, that was the character Vince Vaughn played in the Jurassic Park sequel. We were such fans of the movie Swingers when I was in High School, that it made perfect sense to buy this figure and keep it in the box at the time. 15 years later they would probably charge me to take it off my hands.

Movie Meg said:

I made a glut of knee-jerk purchases when I lived in Japan but the stupidest, by far, was when I bought the first Saiyuki Reload: Burial OVA as soon as I laid eyes on it. The main detail I missed was that it was the first (of three) videos. I thought (without researching) the OVA encompassed the entire manga Burial arc (the second story being the one I was truly interested in). Basically, I bought a video that didn’t include the story I wanted. Not so bad, right? Well, I happened to buy the Collector’s Edition, thinking “it’s got to have cool extras!” I unboxed it at home to find: the DVD, a CD single, a flippin’ postcard, and a lame-ass picture frame. When I tried to return the set, they said limited editions could not be refunded (I failed to read the kanji-choked sign on the display). Long story short: I spent over $120 on a 45 minute OVA I didn’t actually want with the lamest “collector” goodies I have ever seen, all of which could have been easily avoided if I spent 2 minutes on the internet researching what the set contained 😐

spacecowboy said:

My most stupid nerd purchase is actually a lot like Rob’s. Anybody remember the ps1 game Fighting Force?? I remember in the ’90s I bought the 4 main character action figures from that game. Yep, that happened. Is that not the most random, stupid thing ever? They weren’t even cool.

Agent 0range said:

So I like the movie Dark City. A fair amount. I’d consider it one of my favorite live-action films. Quite a while ago, as I was wandering through a used media store, I happened to see a copy of Dark City on DVD and snatched it up without much thought.
When I got home, I realized two important things: one, the condition of the item was ass to the point where the flimsy cardboard case could barely close, let alone hold the DVD in place; two, there existed a superior Director’s Cut that probably wouldn’t have been much more expensive.
Today, wandering through a different used media store, I found the Director’s Cut on DVD cheap. Once again, I snatched it up without much thought.
As soon as I got home, I realized I have a Blu-Ray player and the Dark City Director’s Cut Blu-Ray could be found new on many clearance shelves.
I like Dark City, but not as much as my number of copies of this movie would lead you to believe.

Daikaiju said:

A Kekko Kamen action figure with malleable chest and endoskeletal joints. I pre-ordered it on a whim from the comic shop and forgot about it. Then three months later it appeared like a smoking gun in my pull box. I quietly paid for it and and have never removed it from the packaging. I still wonder what I was thinking…

Skip said:

One word: Neocash.
Allow me to explain. Neopets is, in simplest terms, a virtual pet website. You can dress up your pets in clothing that you can purchase with Neopoints, which you earn from playing games…
Or you can spend real-person money and get Neocash, which will earn you rare fake clothing… And all-too-common real shame.
(I have spent almost 50 dollars to date. End my suffering. END IT)

Bill Binder said:

After collecting all the 1988 McDonald Olympic Cups and displaying them on my shelf (below Ultra Magnus), I decided to invest for the future.
When Batman Returns hit theaters, I decided to collect as many collectible cups as I could to sell later. McDonald’s wouldn’t sell me the cups by themselves. So every day after school for three months I bought three 32oz. Cokes and drank them on the way home. I collected hundreds of Batman Returns cups. I still have them. Let’s see what they’re going for on eBay these days.
$0.99 almost what I paid for them. I’m rich!

rosewater said:

back in the fall of ’92, i had left springfield, ohio to move back home and figure out what i wanted to do with my life. i had ordered this set of 8 kenner rotj figures on foreign cards from diamond, i think, and i had left $180 with my roommate for when they came in. well a couple months go by, and he calls me to tell me they’re in. but then he also tells be that the guy at hawkeye’s comics has gotten ahold of valiant comics’ harbinger #0, and he wants $180 for it. well i had been scouring the earth all year to get those freaking coupons to get the free issue and sunk a shit ton of money into it. needless to say, i wasn’t about to butcher those comics, and i chose the harbinger over the star wars figures. nearly 20 years later, i still have a huge,pristine collection of worthless valiant titles and am an avid star wars collector who never got those perfect, mint vintage toys. that was the nerdiest purchase, with the craziest consequences i’ve made thus far.

jolly bitch said:

its been a long time since i entered one of these but here is my story…
when the return of the jedi opened in 1983 i was in high school in new york. 3 friends an i pretended to sleep over each others houses and stayed out all night in line, cut school and saw the 1st show. flash forward to 1999.
i get a call from one of those “friends” he is still in nyc. there are charity tickets to see an early premiere of the phantom menace, and he says we should all go like a reunion. the 4 of us spent SEVERAL hundred dollars for a ticket, plus plane tickets, a hotel room and pocket cash. all told going to that crap cost me over a grand and the only consolation i have from it is that as i squirmed in my seat waiting for it to be over, i looked next to me and realized that i knew the names of 3 other assholes that felt just as stupid as i did.

Tyler S said:

Not only was I an avid Star Wars Prequel Trading Card Game consumer in 7th grade, I saved all my money to buy one of those larger box packs that had between 15-36 packs per box (it was a long time ago so I can’t remember the right number), but all I remember is that they typically cost around $50-60 US. When I took a trip to England, the only thing I ended up buying while I was there was one of those big Phantom Menace box Packs (the only time I bought one) for ?55, which converted back then would probably be around $70-80 US. Not only did I spend more money thinking I might have a better chance to get an awesome foil card from another country, but I must reiterate that they were Phantom Menace Trading Cards. I still cannot live that down to this day. Sigh.

Meekrat said:

Many years ago, I was browsing the Adult Swim store. These days, they only have regular merchandise (with the occasional hot air balloon or fountain) but back in those days, they had random items like ugly paintings and stuffed animals. Not in the sense of a fluff-filled teddy bear, mind you, but actual dead animals that had gone through the taxidermy process. I found it utterly unbelievable that they would sell such things, but rather than email them to ask if these items were really for sale, I happened upon a taxidermied turtle (listed under Dead Turtle) and went through the check-out process, expecting all the time for something to pop up and laugh at me for being silly.
Nothing popped up.
I spent nearly one hundred dollars on a dead turtle.

Amauriel said:

I was in high school when Phantom Menace came out and thought that those prequels were going to be a defining moment in my generation. Therefore, before I had even seen the movie, I started to collect Amidala things, thinking she’d be way cool. I have pillows, shower gel, ornaments, action figures, etc.
The thing I still regret to this day is the Queen Amidala Compact Phone. It was a big flip phone that had the Queen on the outside and Padme on the inside. The quality was awful and the jack wouldn’t stay plugged in.
The most amazing thing about it was that it had buttons you could press to insert sound clips of the movie into your conversation…and they were super easy to press by mistake. So there I am, an awkward nerdy girl teenager, talking with friends/boys, and Padme would randomly start telling us random crap. I think I can blame my lack of boyfriends in high school on that phone…we usually only survived one conversation and they wouldn’t call back.

theholyfx said:

This is a take of shame and a warning to always check what your buying. While in college i was dating a girl with a younger sister who was into anything manga/Japanese pop culture related. Well here it is a week before her birthday and i am at a yardsale. And what do i find, a box of manga. On the top of the box i see a couple of Bleach and the rest i didnt recognize. I end up buying a diaper box full of books for $4. I seal up the box and wrap it and expect to get some great brownie points with my GF’s family for my thoughtful purchase. Yeah.. the box was full of yaoi. If you dont know what that is, i do not recommend doing a Google search for it. So here i was giving a 14 year old girl boy love henti… Lets just say her dad, a deacon at a large local church was not happy with her sharing her new books at school, and that basically ended my relationship with his daughter

Box of manga? $4. Giving your girlfriend’s 14-year-old sister gay cartoon porn for her birthday? Priceless. Also, who the hell sells yaoi at a yardsale? Nine to 10 the mom just stole her kid’s manga collection without her knowing and sold it.
 

Zortt1 said:

A two VHS tape set of how awesome it is to play the Pokemon trading card game and how to collect the cards and the second tape is on how awesome it is to go to Pokemon trading card game conventions.
There isn’t any explanations on how to play the game or how tournaments are set up. Just basically a tape set on how awesome Pokemon cards are. Actually the whole point of the video is to make money from poor saps like me who bought the two tape set.
Hey, I was 13 and loved Pokemon cards. I thought this would make me cooler.
How wrong I was.

Trevor John said:

I bought RPG Maker for the PlayStation back in the late nineties (I think). I spent approximately fifty-bazillion hours creating what I thought was my ultimate masterpiece RPG of all eternity.
When it was done, there was no fanfare. No interviews. No dedicated fans waiting for the sequel. No stacks of royalty checks. No groupies.
Just me and shame, together again. I played through my game once, which basically felt like a ten hour marathon masturbation episode after drinking twenty beers: you never climax, and you feel both pain and depression afterwards. I pretty much quit playing video games for like two years out of spite.

Maximum Rebo said:

Two years ago I was at Disneyland with my family. Being the Star Wars nerd I am, I (of course) had to ride the Star Tours ride over and over. It was just as I remembered it from last time I rode it the late 80’s, only now there is a huge Star Wars shop you walk into leaving the ride. In the shop there was an $80, full size Boba Fett helmet. All day I lusted after it and at the end of the day I gave in and purchased it. The kicker? I am of Mexican heritage. This means I have a huge damn head.
It doesn’t fit.
I discovered this after leaving the park, trying, to the point of serious pain in the temples, to cram the $80 hunk of plastic onto my huge frickin 30 year old Mexican head. My only desire is to see the world through that grim, dark slit (Whoa, channeled some FFF there…my bad) of bounty hunter visor, but, alas, there are no Space Mexicans, thus the small helmets.
Sometimes I want to punch my Asian room mate out of jealousy when he puts it on and dances around the house.

Colin said:

Hi, my name is Colin and I’m a bargain-hunting completionist. The worst manifestation of these impulses was when I snapped up 6 volumes of the Eiken manga (Anime Works ed. 🙁 ) for a pound each. Yes, Eiken. The anime was terrible, but I’d heard the manga was better. It was… but only in the way amputation is better than beheading. Unwilling to admit to myself that they were bad and wanting to complete the set, I bought the rest of the series full-price off Amazon, only to discover that the last few vols had yet to be released. Now I have 10 volumes of poorly-drawn, badly-translated and cropped-to-buggery big-boob manga on my shelf, taunting me with its incompleteness.
*checks* v.s 11-13 are out, but not the final 14th. Someone stop me.

Eiken? Dude. Dude.

palabradot said:

People comment about the massive CD collection my husband and I have. It’s random as hell, spanning pretty much every music type.
We smile and nod, and refrain from saying that at least 40% of the CDs we have were not bought because we liked the music – no, it was because we were trying to unlock Rare monsters in Monster Rancher.
I think we still have the massive three-ring binder of our unlock discoveries in the basement somewhere.

Stuntman Mike said:

I bought “The Lawnmower Man” on LaserDisc. Don’t own a LaserDisc player.

Krystal said:

So, I like to collect cutesy statues and when I went to this anime convention a few years back my boyfriend pointed out this little statue of a naked girl popping out of a pastry with the icing “tastefully” placed. I bought it and later went upstairs to the room to drop off my various purchases, but I wanted to see what she looked like outside the box.
As I’m putting her up a package falls out of these little pegs and I’m like “Where the hell is there a place to put candles…. oh wait, these are nipples!” and of course my curiosity got the better of me. So, I changed out the “tasteful” icing pegs for the nipple pegs, but after feeling sufficiently creeped out I tried to take the nipple pegs out, only to find that they were stuck. Long story short I go threw many methods to try and remove the pegs before anyone came back to the room and now she is back to her icing covered state and resides in my kitchen, with the nipple pegs still in the box in the back of the closet.

zombies8myballs said:

I’ve had so many stupid nerd purchases over the years I don’t even want to think about how much money I’ve got tied up in shit I’ll never see again because it’s packed away forever to hide my shame.
I guess I’ll have to go with Jim Lee’s X-Men, not only did I buy 10 copies each of all 5 variants of issue 1 I also bought 10 copies each of issues 2 – 10 as well, I too was going to be rich. Yes 140 copies of 10 different books, what a fucking asshole.

Greg said:

I was an asshole as a kid. I found 80 bucks stuffed in my mother’s recipe card box … and of course I took it.
I went to the arcade with the amazing plan of playing, and being SO GOOD at all the games that I would have approx. a million tickets and would be able to get anything from the prize wall I wanted.
Long story short, I was good at none of the games except Street Fighter. Street fighter does not give tickets. I drank two pitchers of mountain dew, got 300 tickets … and ended up with a set of those little Chinese balls that you roll around in your hand and they jingle. 80 dollar jingly Chinese balls.
On the way home, I rode my bike so hard and awesome over jumps and shit – that I threw up all over my pants, and my new box of jingly China balls.
The worst part? My mother was saving that 80 dollars to buy tickets for our family to Cedar Point amusement park. Three weeks later, I was made to tell our family how we could no longer go to Cedar point.
because I wasted the money on the arcade, and a set of shiny jingly balls.
lamest. kid. ever.

K.L. Droscha said:

I have collected Dragonball Z t-shirts for the past 10 years. They run about $20 each. I have over 72. I have spent ~$1440.00 on Dragonball Z t-shirts. 😀
…. D:

Baltin said:

In 1991, I was 11 years old and my uncle let me watch Terminator 2. I loved the movie so much, I spent money collecting T2 trading cards at $2 a pack to get a complete set (didn’t succeed). I must have spent at least a hundred scrapping money with neighborhood jobs to trying to complete the card set, but this isn’t my shame. One of the T2 cards was an advertisement for a ‘high quality leather limited edition T2 flight jacket signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger’ for $80. I begged my parents to get it for my birthday, they agreed and I mailed away for the jacket. 8 weeks later, what arrived was a paper thin plastic jacket (it might as well have been a grocery bag) with a grainy picture of the Exoskeleton/Arnold Skull on the back with a sticker with Schwarzenegger’s signature on it. I never paid to see a Schwarzenegger film since that day.

The Very Model of a Modern Major General said:

As soon as I graduated from college, I moved to Japan and got a job as an English teacher. I was living in an isolated town and my job consisted of warming my desk for 8 hours each day. The monotony was sometimes broken up by the teachers asking me to read the textbook aloud. The weather sucked, the town was depressing, and I had a lot of money.
I had heard about ‘Super Dollfie’ back when I was an exchange student in Osaka. They were these huge ass customizable resin dolls that creeped the bejeezus out of most everyone. I accompanied two of my classmates to their central location in Kyoto- a small store hidden away in the touristy suburb of Arashiyama where you could order a very rare doll made exactly to your specifications. Depending on the size, these things go from anywhere between $500 to over $1000 a pop. I thought these girls were nuts because they believed these dolls had souls and spent the kind of money most people spend on rent on motherfucking DOLLS.
I was adamant about going back to America after my contract was over and I found myself in the Kyoto/Osaka area to take the GRE to hopefully enter graduate school. After my test was over, I found myself on the train to Arashiyama and before I new it I was describing to the ‘doll specialist’ my main RP character down to the tiniest detail. My hands were shaking as I handed over one grand in cash.
This opened the floodgates. I now have ten of these fucking things, though admittedly some of them were “only” two hundred dollars that I have customized myself. These fucking dolls have taken over my life. I am leaving grad school with an MA rather than the full PhD… because it will be easier to find a job to finance this really creepy addiction.
And before you ask, I am female.

I’ve seen Super Dollfies before, and they are insanely creepy looking. Now that I know that they cost up to $1000, I’m creeped out even more. With Honorable Mentions like this, who can the Winners possibly be?

WINNERS

telezombie said:

I’ve done some batshit insane things with my money over the years. I went on a ryomo shimei figure binge which included a 300$ topless statue. The silliest purchase was when I bought a force feedback vest in college for about 75$ I’m guessing. It was going to compliment the sega 32x that sat on top of the sega genesis that sat on top of the sega cd. All of my friends were invited over and my girlfriend at the time lived with me so she had to be there. We were all going to take turns wearing it while playing MK2. When they had all arrived I unboxed it only to realize it was made for someone very small, like a 5 year old. I still tried to wear it. My girlfriend was laughing so hard and so were my friends. I couldn’t breathe and my ribs were being crushed. They had to cut me out of it. To this day they still joke saying, “remember that time you almost died just so you could feel what lu kangs bicycle kick felt Like?”

That last sentence sums up exactly why telezombie wins.

Clockwork Smurf said:

I like Smurfs. I’m a Marvel and G. I. Joe nerd too, but Smurfs is my biggest obsession. When I found a bootleg Papa Smurf sitting in a Denny’s grabber machine, I had to have it. It didn’t matter that it cost probably 20 cents to make, that the Smurf was green instead of blue, that the grabber machine was right by the front door so many people watched me getting more and more desperate for the claw to carry it more than an inch, or that I made my girlfriend at the time stand by and lend me money. I had to have it. I questioned Denny’s employees if they had the key so I could bribe them, but they assured me that if they had the key, the thing would be empty. They also gave me the dreaded look of pity for being a twenty-five year old in desperation for a miscolored worthless toy. A look of pity from a Denny’s waitress is not a highlight in my life. Finally, it dropped out, my thirty dollar bootleg Papa Smurf, captured one quarter at a time, and it’s now proudly stored in my attic with so many other Smurf purchases.
Now, of course, with the movie coming up, I know the pull of the Smurf will get me again.

There is so much shame here. The fact that the Smurf is actually miscolored. That it was in a crane machine. That it was in a crane machine at Denny’s. That Clockwork Smurf borrowed money from his girlfriend for this thing. That he tried to bribe Denny’s employees. That he spent $30 in quarters getting a toy that probably cost a nickel to make (20 cents? I sincerely doubt it). The cost — financially, socially, emotionally — is so, so high compared to the object’s worth. A TR shirt won’t mitigate that, but maybe it’ll help him from repeating his mistakes in the future.

Wilxy-X said:

Stupidest nerd purchase:
DnD 3.5 The book of erotic fantasies.

?40 Euro’s at the time, just so i could pretend to have better sex in
DnD. worst part of it all, my friends keep using it in the campaign we
are running. (insert melting nazi here) fucking mermaids is amateur
stuff compared to what these clowns do with it, hell, i’ve read fanfics
here that have disgusted me less.

I… I have no words. Truly, it’s the purchase that keeps on costing, and costing, and costing. Wilxy-X gets a shirt, and let’s never speak of this again. Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who entered; I’ll try and think up something creative for this Friday’s contest.