#19 Shows Cancelled Before The Third Season

There is nothing more delightful to a nerd than to be one of those people who discovered a good show just before the big bad network cancelled it. Not only is there a thrill to being one of the few people who truly understands just how good a show is, but the small fan base means that the love often flows back to the audience, like current though a zener diode.  But I think the greatest thing of all about these shows is that they end before they have a chance to disappoint, like the last season of Babylon 5.

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#18 Stuff Used for Breadboarding

Apparently also unnecessary alliteration.  The EE nerd is always willing to spend an immense amount of time building custom electronic gadgets by hand.  In our dorm there were a number of people who had built themselves Gandalf staffs that glowed on command; other people I've heard of built a fake bomb solely for others to defuse.  Partly it's that writing assembly code is a great break from Lisp.  Partly it's just cool to build a personal little power grid, even if it wasn't very hard.  Partly it's that they had to find something to do after Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was cancelled.  But a bigger part of it is that the bits and pieces are just so fun.  Labs are stocked with bins of components, thus being in lab is fun; it's the penny arcade of the modern era.

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#17 Trivial Games

Games which can be won instantly and yet played forever are a category of game of which the world seems largely unaware.  That's... probably for the best actually.  The world doesn't need the ugly arguments that ensue when trying to determine whether Puerto Rico counts as a country or an unincorporated territory, or the amount of paper wasted when playing one of these games through the mail over thirteen years.

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#16 Webcomics

At some point some clever individual realized that while many people are on the internet, nerds spend far more time on it than the average individual does, or indeed than perhaps is healthy.  Thus the internet is the perfect conduit for more than watching bootleg Red Dwarf videos; it can also deliver to these individuals targeted humor that the wider world might not find enjoyable.  As a side benefit it also allows bizarre humor from other parts of the world to be available, which is always a positive from the nerd's perspective.

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#15 Anything by Joss Whedon

I have a confession.  I have never watched any show about vampires.  I'm pretty sure every single one of my friends has, which occasionally makes me feel persona non grata at parties.  When one of his shows was described to me as 'a western set in space,' I was completely uninterested (though I was wrong; I was also wrong when I thought Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was going to be awesome, so maybe I just have terrible predictive powers).  Yet by the time the writers went on strike and a viral musical blog starring the amazingly talented Neil Patrick Harris (side note: how many of us were jealous of the fact that Doogie Howser got to go to medical school that young?  Show of hands), I was perched at my computer awaiting each release.

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#14 British Humour

I have this belief that all nerd children spent their entire childhood glued to PBS watching British comedies that they could not possibly understand and yet somehow still enjoyed, because I did. Pinpointing why is difficult--is it that men are inherently more dashing in a fedora? The rampant cross-dressing? Over time that childhood delight ripens into a true understanding and belief that people in the UK are just funnier than anyone in the United States could ever be.

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#13 Board Game Geek's Top 35 Ranked Games

Remember Life? Clue? Monopoly? Yeah, nerds don't play those (exception: Solar Quest is awesome, no matter that it is a Monopoly clone with even less interesting gameplay). Nerds enjoy games that cost at least $41, have lots of little wooden pieces that must be guarded carefully so as to not end up inside the nearest cat or child, and whose rules take many hours to explain. I will also note that although I call them board games, many do not in fact involve a board at all. There may be a randomization element that creates some amount of chance in the game, but it can almost always be won by good strategy over luck. New players may be stumped when a lengthy recitation of rules provides little illumination, and their condescending companions tell them "don't worry, you'll figure it out." Such games provide a necessary social outlet, in that they are a great deal like computer games, but usually require other people in order to play. Plus they encourage such mature and witty jokes as "I've got wood for your sheep" (which sadly is a step up from the "three physicists walk into a bar" style jokes).

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