Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: What Are You Doing For Hallowe'en?
Hallowe'en is my favorite holiday: I like seeing costumes (and walking around in my own), and seeing what people do to decorate their houses, yards, etc. For the second year in a row though, I've failed to come up with a really good scheme for making my own place appropriately spooky. So, in hopes of loosing some inspiration for myself and others, I ask today what you're doing to spookify your surroundings (or your person) tomorrow, especially if it means using technology in interesting ways. Sensor-activated scary sounds or lights? An Arduino or Raspberry Pi-controlled costume? Elaborate trap-door? Infrasonic hackle-raising subwoofer install? Maybe one year Alek Komarnitsky will switch to Hallowe'en instead of Christmas, and offer a webcam-equipped remote-controllable haunt.
It might be considered "acceptable", but it still manages to annoy me. I don't speak Gaelic dialects, you see, so I don't see a reason in English to stick a seemingly-random apostrophe in the middle of the word. They also completely leave out the word "all" and drop the "s". "Halloween" makes sense as an English word that can trace it roots to other words, but I don't see a reason to alter the spelling to necessarily reflect that. It seems pompous to insist on the apostrophe.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
FFS, load the thing.