In a world filled with many too many objects, nothing makes people want to use one of appropriate shape and size to gouge out their own eyes more than holiday shopping.
Fuck. You forgot to buy your Asian Friend a Christmas present. You didn't realize until recently that your Asian Friend even celebrated Christmas. You're really learning a lot about your friend...and yourself.
An unfortunate reality of the holiday season is that one must obtain gifts for those they don't necessarily like. One might even hate these people. For example, Uncle Tim's new wife Shea's daughter Melody, who once said you would be pretty if you had bangs. Or your boss, Mr. Man, who has never paid you back for the all lattes you have purchased for him. Or your ex-boyfriend, Carl, whose stunted progress on his novel—about you!—ended your relationship.
We all know someone who needs to relax. Whether they need to "relax" in the sense that they just need to chill out already, damn, or they need to "relax" in the sense that they truly deserve a break; be they a blogger who feels a base level of purposeless anxiety pretty much nonstop, or someone who has an actual reason to feel stressed. They are in our lives, my friends, and they need gifts.
To make sure everyone buys everyone the best gifts ever, this year Gawker has divided the universe of potential gift recipients into readers of our Gawker Media brother and sister sites.
To make sure everyone buys everyone the best gifts ever, this year Gawker has divided the universe of potential gift recipients into readers of our Gawker Media brother and sister sites.
Merry Christmas. Or not. Whatever winter holiday you celebrate, you probably do it by substituting love and kindness with cheap plastic garbage wrapped in pretty paper. And if you're like us, you find it distracting to put too much thought into what to buy your loved ones. Each year we try to solve that problem by HARNESSING THE AWESOME POWER OF GAWKER MEDIA'S PROPRIETARY PUBLISHING PLATFORM, KINJA, to gather the best gift suggestions the internet has to offer. This year, we've divided the universe of potential gift recipients into readers of our Gawker Media brother and sister sites—I mean, we're all surrounded by Jezebel and Deadspin and Lifehacker types, right? We begin with Kotaku: What should you buy for the nerd gaming person in your life?
In the words of Margaret Cho, you got a cool mommy. In the words of RuPaul, so don't fuck it up. Some of the best answers from last week's post about gifts for cool parents are below:
Last week we asked you to help us find gifts for the kind of people who spend most of their time trolling the internet for weird stuff: print-on-demand books about celebrity dick size, nonsensical custom-made t-shirts, and ill-advised search-engine-optimized gift results. As we expected, you returned a selection of complete and utter crap — but beautiful, weird crap. Some of the best:
Last week on Black Friday, we asked you to suggest gifts for cat caretakers who post their feline friends on Instagram, but aren't stereotypically sad lonely weirdos. Many of you were too busy buying cases of discounted Furbies or doing something stupid with your families and didn't bother to help us and I'll have you know my cat is seriously pissed. But those of you who did offer us help, here's a note of gratitude from my cat: ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc43df jmy6 RT n09t69.* nm2œΩ3yyyyyyyyy45 uyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. <—-That's real by the way.
Last week, we asked you to embark with us on a leisurely paddleboat ride down the river Nostalgia to help choose the best gifts who people who not only lived through, but, remember the 90s. You delivered like DOMINO'S (in under 30 minutes or it's free—until that guarantee was dropped in the '90s because harried deliverymen kept getting into car accidents).
Last week, we asked you how you reconcile the precarious position of having to buy a gift for someone you hate. This was a joke question that brought out a lot of truth, which was nice. Thank you for sharing your stories and suggestions. I do not hate you for that and would buy you a straightforwardly nice gift if I knew you. Our favorites are below.
We've already offered you a selection of highly annoying gift ideas for the parent you'd like to drive slowly insane, but now we up the ante every so slightly: Here is our guide to toys that will inflict actual injury upon children you absolutely can't stand, free from worry of prosecution. (Conversely, you may actually want to avoid these toys, many of which have been identified by consumer watch lists as the most dangerous of 2011.)
