These types of photos are very much a Japanese internet meme — people showing their Christmas meal and female characters with whom they are eating. They're more a gag than anything else with each photo trying to outdo the others. Not entirely serious! Though, still, slightly bitter sweet.

One of the pictures might be NSFW. Guess which one.

ゲーマー達のクリスマスお祝い画像集 [オレ的ゲーム速報＠刃]

The Philco PC is pretty much a reimagined Philco Predicta—a short-lived but ridiculously iconic television. Then there are other fantastic touches as well, like a typewriter keyboard and a mouse that looks like some sort of repurposed handheld sander from an era when men in gray flannel suits didn't shave, but straight-up ground stubble into submission.

While the Philco PC may just be a concept, some faceless PC manufacturer should really hire designer Dave Schultze and acquire this design alongside him. Tame it a bit for the masses if you insist, but add the typewriter keyboard to some limited edition release. And if you don't make any money, you can return this free idea, no questions asked. [Yanko via Ubergizmo]

These pieces by Miguel Rivera, a systems administrator, require weekends of man hours and a massive amounts of old gear to complete (each layer of each wheel you see requires cracking the case on another hard drive, and the sculptures lack plastic or any "gluing [of] things together"). [Wired]

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher: Gates snowglobe?
Gawd:I have this somewhere, unfortunately it's somewhere where I don't know where it is.

rigtuitargod:@Gawd: I have one

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher: And of course the tree you guys featured before.
SaturdayMorning: Last year I decorated my tree with shitty old toys, including Goro and Gonzo.
kingbob337: This was referenced on kotaku actually.
knockers6: Done.
Dave on bass: I must endeavor to share a short video clip for this one.

My own nerd christmas; a couple years ago we wrapped all our gifts in Tetris shaped boxes. Video starts with the nerdly stuff on the tree, then the tetris stuff, then my Jesus action figure and circuitboard tree. Bonus - nerd music too.
wutlulzky: This "USB Christmas Decoration Kit"
is probably the worst i've seen...
cschweppe: My tree topper and favorite ornament this year
Rtarara: We opened presents under Christmas Buffy last year...true story.

Do not share food or love in front of a sad, injured man. He's in enough pain without you rubbing it in.

On a train, never, ever feed your shoe beer. Dude can't hold his liquor.

During fits of train hail, under no circumstances should you swing at the ice chunks. They will multiply and occasionally crap, a la bird, onto other passengers.

Don't dive into a train. Because if you get caught be the doors, people will stand idly by while your body is ripped into two. Save such carnage for the beach, where the blood is easily cleaned up due to copious amounts of sand.

Sticking your fingers into your headphones will not block the sound from your ears. And please conduct such experiments at home.

Women should never talk on the phone, no matter what emotion they exude. It's a known pervert fetish.

OK, this is the one shot where I kind of feel bad for the strange man in the glasses. WTF hikers!

If you are grasping a handle and find you forgot to wear deodorant, lift yourself above the crowd. Wait, no, keep your arms up and make people smell it. Wait, no, lift yourself. [Adme via copyranter via boingboing]

FF13のセラの服はしまむらで揃える事が出来るらしい [はちま起稿]

Over at Instructables, one young visionary has shared his technique for weaving a hoodie from these godly adhesive strips. He says the resulting garment is quite warm and impervious to rain. And, if we might add, it's quite handy if you ever need to half-assedly fix something and you're too lazy to grab a roll of tape. [Instructables]

As part of the 6th ROBO-ONE GATE competition, biped robots learned and performed routines in front of a live audience. That lead robot from the Doka Project? She didn't win. Instead, second place went to this guy from Black Tiger Neo, performing Thriller:

(Disregard the fact that Thriller is not a 1:1 choreographic interpretation.)

And the winner was Ryuki Ⅱ, performing Joyful, Ikimonogakari.
Personally, I think those big feet are cheating, but picking on any of these robots feels like jeering a preschool dance recital. See more entrants at: [Biped Robot News via HackaDay]

The official challenge: "Thanksgiving." As always, interpret the theme however you'd like to give us the best shot that you can. (Food shots are always great, but Thanksgiving can mean people, Black Friday trampling and more.)

Of course, if you decide to do food, check out this list of ways you can cheat a bit: Food Styling - Fun Tac, anyone?

The rules:

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.

Send your best entries by the end of SUNDAY at contests@gizmodo.com with "Thanksgiving" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs at 800 pixels wide, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email. [Image]

By Australian silversmith Polly van der Glas, this teeth jewelry, well...it's kind of like ivory with a touch of plaque—I mean—patina. And the "stones" make a fashionable defensive alternative to brass knuckles.

Look, we know this stuff is horrendous. But really, it's only just as offensive as Kay's latest heart crossed with lips cross with angels pendant. So there. [Van Der Glas via ecoutree via inhabitat]

For nearly the first year of her life, her parents and doctors were unaware of the NF, and the brittleness had contributed to multiple bone fractures of the lower leg, unbeknownst to anyone. These early bone breaks resulted in her left leg being seven centimeters shorter than the other, and as a bright, precocious and athletic child, she adapted to her leg imbalance incredibly well. I felt like I could have been looking at myself as a 5 year old. Unlike me, however, who didn't have a clue about an aesthetic style in outward appearance until college, she already had been bitten by the fashion bug, and was particularly excited by the prospect of a new holiday dress or her first day of school outfit. Her source of distress lay in the fact that the vast majority of little girls' shoes were off-limits for her, as there were only a few companies that made shoes that could be adapted with a special lift to even out her walking planes. These shoes had to work within the structure of the external leg brace she grew up wearing.

Her parents were impressive in their own right, first by not imposing labels or limits on her, and then making this medical journey of decisions for their child a collaborative process that included her, appraising her of new options in technology that had arisen as they became aware of them. Unfortunately, technology in her case—a successive series of operations to try and stretch the brittle leg using internal rods and pins to fuse the bone—hadn't progressed as fast they would have hoped. After the first two of what they knew would be many surgeries, her parents and doctors had made the decision to proceed with this rod approach until she reached five years of age. Then they would re-evaluate the process, considering any advancements in technology. If it hadn't advanced past this type of treatment, they would consider "other options."

Amazingly, because of technological progress in prosthetics, amputation was now an attractive option for this family. Amputation and subsequent fittings with prosthetics was simply seen as liberation from a leg that didn't function. Shortly after her sixth birthday, her mother told me, "She downloaded all these images of you off of the internet, and she's always asking ‘when, when can I get rid of my bad leg, when can I get a new leg?'" She even did her show-and-tell at school about prosthetics!

That is decidedly not what I would have expected a six-year-old to do.

After a few months, the child's mother called me, telling me that she, her spouse, and the doctors collectively made the decision to amputate, and that they would be telling the child this news that very night. My reaction was visceral and very surprising to me: I felt my breath grow short and my heart pounded, and I felt ill as waves of stress and worry pummeled me. I panicked at what role I might have played in this chain of events, and how I couldn't guarantee that this child would have anywhere near the same experiences I had had as an amputee. I found myself having doubts I had never had about myself or, indeed, most any amputee: "Would she be okay? Would her life be happy and full of opportunity?"

I spoke to the mother one last time before the surgery, and she informed me of the surgeon's decision to do an amputation through the ankle, the common thinking to be to "save as much of the flesh and bone leg" as possible. I couldn't be sure about this and hesitated even mentioning it, but I asked the mother if she had consulted with the child's would-be prosthetist about this "Syme's" style amputation, because I had heard reports of resulting limitations in people being able to obtain the latest prosthetic technology.

Ironically, by keeping more of the residual limb, you negate more options for different prosthetics, as there is no physical room to put the components (think of the shock-absorber and spring leg). An incredible facet of this story for me was learning that, at no time before this rather momentous surgery of this child, did the pediatric surgeon and the prosthetist ever have even one conversation.

Her mother investigated with the prosthetist who confirmed that, by leaving as much of the limb as possible, the child wouldn't be able to get any of the legs in the images she downloaded from the web. The surgeon was shocked to learn this, and had never considered that it might actually be better to amputate a few inches higher, increasing the future mobility options of the child.

This past April, while walking through a street fair hosted by the Tribeca Film Festival, I felt a tug on my shirt. It was this little girl, 6 months after her amputation, with colored paints on her face and in her hair, and a plastic tee-ball bat in her hand. She was jumping up and down (post-cotton candy) and she wanted to show me her new High School Musical 3 "tattooed" leg. She asked me if I knew Zac Efron and "could I get him to autograph her leg?" (I don't, but I'm working on hooking this up.)

She pulled me a few meters over to the batting cage stand, where she deftly used her prosthetic leg to press the foot pedal, launching a whiffle ball pitch that she smacked as hard as she could. On her feet, she proudly sported Mary Janes covered with red sequins. Seven months ago, she was as active as a child could be with a leg brace and tremendous pain; here, she ran and jumped and cartwheeled and tackled her little brother, who tackled her back. Even I, who rarely doubts the incredible ability of human beings to adapt to their adversity, was awe-struck.

I wondered how her childhood, her adolescence, her college years would collude to shape how she saw herself. Would she struggle through various identities, wanting to be "normal" as I did, only to find eventual freedom of self-expression in the absence of normalcy? Barring puberty, which is probably awful for everyone, I think this girl is going to skip over ever wanting to be "normal." Why be normal when you can have Zac Efron and Friends staring up at you everyday from your ankle?

The generation of children growing up today has a distinct advantage in this realm of identity, thanks to their daily interaction with the internet and video games. It's commonplace for them to create avatars and parallel representations of themselves, and they see their ability to change, transform, and augment those bodies to best suit their surroundings as beneficial.
That kind of fluid thinking was once solely the domain of those whose imaginations were heavily influenced by both technology and science fiction. Talk about seeing evolution speed up before your eyes. My being able to embrace the art in my artifice, to change my identities—how I perceive myself and how others respond to that perception — has profoundly changed the way I see the world and my opportunities in it. But I didn't possess that ability at age six.

I keep thinking of how long it takes for most of us to go through the process of first accepting ourselves as we are, strengths and weaknesses, then celebrating that self and starting to have fun with your strengths and weaknesses, then transforming ourselves as architects of own our identities, redefining what our strengths and weaknesses actually are. I think kids today are able to do this faster than previous generations.

I've noticed a progression from how kids used to respond to my wooden legs to responses toward a prosthetic limb today. Quite simply, the fear-as-first-response has all but disappeared; I do not experience children who are afraid to meet me and in fact, I haven't recently met any child who, when I'm sporting obvious prosthetics like the RoboCop legs, wasn't drawn like a magnet to them, accompanied by a list of very astute questions.

For the most part, it's adults who rein kids in, in an attempt to not have them stare or offend with their natural curiosity.

But curiosity is necessary; it is the foundation of imagination and innovation. It's tremendously important to allow children to see the diversities of human experience and understand how their own lives relate to it, so we can acknowledge how much more similar we are as human beings than different…even if what makes us different is where we discover and engage our rare and valuable qualities, offering them to society.

When I was a child, I watched plenty of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Where some see Professor Xavier, I secretly know he's Captain Jean-Luc Picard. And thanks to airport security, I admit that I often daydream of being able to be molecularly transported around the world. I think about that other little girl and wonder to what extent her ability—and that of her peers—to google the word "prosthetic" and come up with tons of imagery to inspire their imaginations marks a marvelous shift in our society.

There's plenty of evidence that connects our visualization of what we dream to be possible to what we eventually create as a new reality. Gene Rodenberry's imagination in Star Trek and that of Arthur Clarke's, Marvin Minsky's and Stanley Kubrick's in 2001: A Space Odyssey had a direct impact on funding certain projects at NASA because scientists and researchers had "seen" this whole imaginary world, and they sought to make it real.

For my own childhood inspiration, I had the Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man (to this day, the somber phrase "we can rebuild him" makes my heart pound wildly!), and even Inspector Gadget cartoons made me draw third grade pictures of legs with rocket jet packs flaming from the heels.
This "entertainment" not only asks questions but encourages more of them, replete with inherent timelines for answers: "When are we going to do molecular transport? We've been seeing it for forty years on Star Trek!" It's within the scope of our imagination.

I remember in high school seeing Forrest Gump when they convincingly transformed Lt. Dan—Gary Sinise, an actor with two flesh and bone legs—into an amputee. A budding actress, I thought "Oh my God, if they can do this with CGI, couldn't they do the opposite? Could they create an image of me on screen with full flesh and bone legs?" I was intrigued by the imaginary visual of a different version of myself, and I suspect it provided something tangible when asked if now, at this point in my life, I would trade my prosthetics for flesh and bone legs. (I wouldn't.)

The transformative power of films lay in engaging how I imagined myself and my "realities," giving me license to re-imagine them as I desire. Now that many people, starting from an early age, are creating and choosing their own identities in a virtual world—or in multiple virtual worlds—this self-malleable perspective has a lot of power. People can align themselves with global groups of their own choosing, and see themselves as their ideal selves without many of the social constraints present just a generation ago.

Although it took surviving junior high, I evolved myself to the point where I decided against measuring myself to "normalcy," deciding instead to self-determine what was cool, who was cool, and the transformation subsequently happened in how other people treated me. "Cogito, ergo sum." It's one of the simplest truths we revealed for ourselves, right? "I think, therefore I am." If you think you can pull it off, you can. Or as Henry Ford put it, "whether you think you ‘can' or you think you ‘can't': either way, you're right."

I'd postulate that technology is innately teaching today's children that very same lesson, and they're learning it much earlier.

This confident perspective, one perpetually shifting from imagination to invention—be it a personality, a human figure or a new technology—would not have happened a hundred years ago. If I had been born back then, I doubt I would have been enabled by society to do much, even with a self-ignited fire of human spirit, as being a woman was as much of a disability as anything.

Today, I'm grateful for all of my strengths and weaknesses, changing and morphing as they are, and I'm especially grateful for technology's advancements to prosthetics, as my life has been successful because of having had them, not in spite of having had them.

Aimee Mullins is an athlete, speaker, actress and model we met at TEDMED. She's also the guest editor for our theme week This Cyborg Life. Read her bio here.

[Lead Image:
Matthew Barney
CREMASTER 3, 2002
©2002 Matthew Barney
Photo: Chris Winget
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery]

Here is the complete list of costumes, in order of awesomeness. Thanks to everyone for participating and congrats to mdg357!

UPDATE: We've added a bonus late entry at the end of the list from our old friend Nick McGlynn—a truly kick ass Inspector Gadget. The contest may be over, but given that many of you might also be arriving late to the party, feel free to add your costume in the comments of this post. We would still love to see 'em.

All you need to do is drop a photo in the comments of you actually wearing the costume. And let me just say, if it's Star Wars, it had dammed well better be unique somehow (like the Lego Star Wars costumes pictured above). And no, we don't need to see a pic of you as a kid in the '80's dressed like your favorite Ghostbuster—keep it recent. Show us a truly creative geeky costume and you could win that extra large pizza with toppings of your choosing. Better get on it as soon as you get home though—we'll be posting the best ones tomorrow. Good luck!

[Image via WTF Costumes]