Last year's April-Fools joke became a real product, and this year was no exception. Behold, the mighty Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt!

There's deep, dark, perhaps embarrassing connection that all us geeks share. It's that first moment when we realized just how special we really were, and that only a handful of people would ever understand our irrational love of sci-fi and boot floppies.

So, with the launch of our new Geek Kids category, we thought we'd ask our Twitter friends for their best geeky childhood moment in a single @thinkgeek tweet. Originally the prize was a single $25 gift certificate, but the response was so overwhelming (and wonderful) that we expanded the field to 4 winners.

We received a total of 170 entries, all of them unique and beautiful snowflakes; Timmy had his judging work cut out for him. The top four winners are below, followed by runners-up that are too good spin out in the Twitter vortex unloved:

Winners:

Best first geek moment
firepile: When I was a wee babe, my parents waited for my first word. My sister's was "Daddy."  Mine? "Batman." That's when they knew.

Geekiest parent
shaebay: My mom was playing Mario when she went into labor with me, and didn't go to the hospital until she had completed the level

Best Mario + fire moment
benjamingeiger: Playing Super Mario Brothers at age 6-ish. House catches on fire. I keep playing until my dad picks me up and carries me out.

Most ridiculously sublime
angiek42: I wrote a Star Trek: The Next Generation musical when I was 13. I still have the book and audiotape of music I made.

Runners-up who won warm fuzzies and our admiration, but no actual prize:

Evilest use of geekitry
xpatch: got my 486 to page me via 14.4 a random 4 digit code when the mouse moved and play the CD over 15" sub's My sister was so mad

Cutest geekitry
Wiggly: I remember my dad bringing the Intellivision computer module home one night. I spent all night coding a pic of my cat in BASIC.

Geekiest parent no. 2
heatherirvin: My dad and I made coffee table size maps of all the dungeons in NES: Deadly Towers w/ full detail of what was inside every room.

Should be embarrassed (but probably isn't)
Xial: TRS-80 on last legs, friend+me put out of misery w/bb guns. bb to monitor bounces, nails me in junk, knocks wind out of me. Ow.

If you want in on our next Twitter contest, follow @thinkgeek (or @thinkgeekspam, for product updates only). Got a contest idea or hints on how to share without retweeting 40 times during the day? Don't be shy!

And if you have a geekling in your life that needs a little reinforcement on this most special of life's paths, we actually have kid-centric stuff now. If you can't find what you're looking for, or want to suggest ideas for mini-geek products, we'd lurve to hear from you.

Like a lot of geeks, we've been following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter. Among the mass of telemetry and science data the lander has been sending, JPL media director Veronica McGregor decoded the little guy's voice and has faithfully given us its story. We refreshed madly during its exhilarating descent, and we saw what it saw as its cameras came on for the first time. We were the first outside JPL to see the tiny white ice cubes it unearthed, looking ready to chill a nice glass of Bawls. For the past six months, Phoenix's tweets have made us feel like the red planet was right there under our collective robotic feet. So it's made us a little sad this week that winter finally arrived and plunged Phoenix's solar cells into a deep freeze from which it will most likely never wake.

We'll miss you, Phoenix. Thank you, and rest in peace.

So we know how relieved you must feel now that we are protecting you from the dangers of  bizarre products. You're welcome.

Like many of you, we celebrated All Hallows Eve this past Friday at the ThinkGeek Megaplex. Though we ended up forgoing the bowl of cold spaghetti and grapes as well as bobbing for cake (because after all, the cake is a lie), we did have apple cider and a costume contest, so hooray for tradition!

There was a nice array of costume contest entries from both human and canine alike, but the winner by far was our T-Shirt gal, Regan whose rendition of The Stig brought down the house. Check out some of the costumes that graced the halls of TG HQ last week:

Did you dress up? Any cool geeky costumes out there? Tell us in the comments, mmmkay?