I am collecting Touhou gashapon figurines.

Gashapon are figurines dispensed from machines and are rather popular in Japan. They are not unlike the toy machines you see at the grocery store. The word gashapon comes from the sound the machine makes when it dispenses your prize (gasha-gasha.) I have, in fact, seen more than one real japanese-style gashapon machine in Toronto but generally they don't have anything more niche than Dragonball or Hello Kitty figurines, neither of which are really my thing.

Touhou is a series of games originally propagated for the japanese PC-98 platform and which continues to be popular on NT based windows platforms. They are what are known as curtain-fire shooters which basically means the enemies generally shoot large complex spreads of bullets that beg you to dodge between and graze while trying to stay under the enemy so that you can accurately shoot it. The characters are highly collectible because they are all cute anime girls with different abilities and relationships to each other.

One thing differentiates my collection with other people's useless obsessions.

My collection doesn't exist in the analog world.

Yes.. I am collecting virtual dolls that don't even have images associated with them. This is facillitated by an IRC bot which acts as the gashapon machine and also keeps track of who has what. There are currently 25 people in the channel that has this bot, so it's not just me who is absurdly bent on collecting these.. names.

My collection thus far..
Chiyuri x2,
Cirno x3,
Elis x2,
Ellen x1,
Gengetu x1,
Hourai x1,
Kana x1,
Keine x1,
Komachi x3,
Letty x1,
Lily x1,
Mai x1,
Medicine x1,
Merlin x1,
Orange x1,
Point Item x2,
Reisen x2,
Rikako x1,
Rika x2,
Rinnosuke x1,
Sakuya x4,
Sara x1,
Shinki x2,
Suika x1,
Youmu x1,
Yuka x2,
Yukari x1,
Yuyuko x1

Quite extensive? No, not nearly as large as some of the collections belonging to people who remember to set timers at night and when they go to work. To remember to do that is the key to getting 100 of a single figure so that you can trade those in for a single RARE figure. I am collecting Sakuya, the girl with control over time which she uses to create an infinite amount of knives out of a single blade that she can then hurl at infidels.

I feel like such a loser.