[via PS3 Fanboy]

Picked by you the peanut gallery, here are the Sam & Max contest winners! Note: Votes that did not include three choices were disqualified, and the Kotaku editors also voted. Secretly. Anyway, onto the winners:

• Finalist Number 1
• Finalist Number 2
• Finalist Number 5

Winning people shoot us an email at kotakucontest@gmail.com to claim your loot. Brian Ashcraft

Please feel free to move about the cabin, and come up with new acronyms. Joystiq is live at the scene of the crime:

As we opened up this month's Wired magazine and flipped through the various pages, something interesting suddenly popped up and caught our eye. It wasn't some new gadget, but instead an ad for Dell's gaming PC lineup. Hijacking the 1337 speak of gamers everywhere, Dell has adopted "FTW" (For the win) to push their PC gaming rigs.

And while we're cleaning house, please shut up about: snakes, bases, chuck norris, and especially any negative connotations stemming from homosexuality. In case you're out of the loop, George Takei just made gaybashing obsolete.

Optimum catchphrase ripeness occurs when about 40-60% of the audience is in on the joke. After that it becomes stale, and before that you just get a lot of blank looks.

I proffer that it's still okay to say "owned" and various derivations thereof, because Leo LaPorte says it on every TWiT. And it's adorable. How old is he? In his fifties, yeah?

Catchphrases that haven't quite hit the mainstream yet and still could use a little exploitin': NEDM (not even doom music), TWAJS (that was a joke, son), and the term "old meme", which seems to have had its heyday on Jameth's LiveJournal without really making the rounds elsewhere.

"Series of tubes" riffs are okay only as long as they show some creativity. I mean, just look at how much mileage we got out of ROFL and LOL. The best I've seen so far is "AROFLYPSE LMAO", but Bashy and Crecente are still chugging along with plain old "lol" in place of quotation marks, commas, semicolons and full stops. Me, I never touch the stuff.

"Internets" is encouraged as long as Dubya is in office.

I would like to see a return of the Fifty Hitler Post.

"POOLS CLOSED DUE TO AIDS" needs a few minutes in the sun.

But back to the gaybashing thing for a sec. My second-favorite webcomic, Jerkcity, has a vast lexicon of nearly untapped, dong-related material that, like NEDM, has seen little use outside of its home territories (namely IRC). I would like to see HUAGALHGUAH, T (name of addressee), and a good deal more dick jokes start making the rounds. You can start in the comments. Ready? Go. Eliza Gauger

Dell Goes FTW [Joystiq]