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.
and hitting on girls a decade young than me in short skirts.
Try to take over the world
crazy dynamite monkey
and when little kids walk up, I'll leap out in my Conan the Mathematician costume and roar out the skull-splitting multiplication rules for Quaternions.
I walk around with an (unloaded) pistol on my hip.
Scaring little kids is easy, I go for scaring the adults.
Being Australian? I can go grumpy old man on those few kids that usually go trick or treating. It's always fun watching blank stairs of incomprehension as I tell them that their mums and dads are bad parents for indoctrinating their children with an Americanized handout mentality as well as bad neighbours for expecting me to cross-subsidize their efforts with candy.
Get off my lawn. Clean up those eggs and toilet rolls.
I have a few Smart Phones i am not using so i Downloaded a few apps and things to make the Cells make Spooky Noises when one ditects sounds. and another phone set closer to my door where it detects movement (using fishing line attached to the phone and the other side attached to a moving lawn spider i have, he is 8' and has moving legs but now when he moves it makes cool spooky noises ) My Sony Smart watch as a live view finder for my other non used Smart phone allows me to see kids coming up the drive way so i can be perpaird to make the fog machine spew out thick fog. I did make a Green Laser Vortext this year too.. Green Laser & small motor to make a mirror spin & Fog Machine & a small fan makes some of the coolest effects. So now i got Two green, two red, and two blue lasers for this halloween haunt going. FYI - blue lasers are great as Super Black Lights!!!!!!! man they make glow in the dark things bright!
... the kid in the LED suit on youtube has already won
Unless some dinky laboratory mice with modified DNA beat me to it. Poit!
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
The submitter is Timmeh himself. He does this every year trying to act pedantic by spelling it "Hallowe'en". He thinks he's being smart or something.
Guising...... but not "trick or treat" (Hey, you gotta earn your treats!)
Are you Scottish or Irish? I'm Scottish, and that's what we called it when I was growing up and celebrating Hallowe'en (*) in the early 1980s.
:-)
While that's undeniably a long time ago now in some ways (i.e. 30 years, a generation or so)- it actually seems bizarrely recent when one considers that in the era of the A-Team and Knight Rider, of Reagan and Thatcher, we still called it guising (and felt obliged to perform some sort of routine), dressed up in home-made costumes and went around with lanterns made out of turnips, not pumpkins.
This wasn't done with the intent of being "traditional" and I was never aware of it seeming forced- that's still how it was then. I'd probably heard of "trick or treat", but would definitely have been aware of that as being an American (i.e. foreign) thing. Ditto pumpkin lanterns- I knew of the association, but while I wouldn't swear that I never saw a real one growing up, the things me and my friends trawled around the streets *were* mainly turnip based. (**) And there definitely wasn't the associated hype or paraphenalia in the shops.
I say "bizarrely recent" because while one could have imagined the traditional Scottish Hallowe'en remaining relatively pure into the era of my Mum's childhood (i.e. early 1950s, most people didn't have TV, US culture was less influential), for it to have survived into the heyday of VHS, home computers et al is sweet, but also quite strangely anachronistic. I'd say I was probably lucky to have experienced that- 15 or so years later, I think the US influence on Hallowe'en *did* start becoming very influential to the point that the idea of a child today having a turnip lantern would seem unusual (and probably get strange looks from his/her friends).
Strangely, despite the fact that Scottish culture became increasingly Anglicised (as part of the UK) during the 20th century, one thing I didn't realise when I was growing up was that guising wasn't a UK-wide thing, and the English really didn't celebrate Hallowe'en at all then. In fact, I only found this out recently, and ironically that was because they *do* now celebrate it... but they view the increasing prominence of Hallowe'en and its customs as an example of the influence of *American* culture!
Which, of course, it is- but the "American" Hallowe'en was brought there by Scottish and Irish immigrants, and still retains some (if not all) of its original celtic form. I honestly can't see them going around with turnips though.
And that *might* be why guising and turnips lasted as long as they did- in the UK, and especially in the 20th century, mass culture came to the "provinces" (*cough*) through the London-centric, Anglo-centric media, and they didn't care about Hallowe'en. So in a sense we were insulated from both the US influence and commercialism and kept our individuality a bit longer. Now we've lost it for a related reason- we're getting the American model via the same Anglo-centric media and retailers who don't have their own traditional Hallowe'en anyway so don't moderate it in the same way they would if they had their own tradition to defend.
I think I said a lot more than I was originally planning to there...
(*) I'm so used to the apostrophe-less form nowadays- probably another example of increasing American influence- I'd almost forgotten that this was a quite common spelling when I was a kid. Anyway, any Slashdotter that gets so annoyed by that spelling *deserves* to be annoyed, so "Hallowe'en" it is
(**) I mentioned this to my Dad recently, in a nostalgic way, and he complained about the amount of work it took to hollow out a turnip(!)
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I dont live in america and all of my friends are not americans, yet they celebrated halloween by dressing in silly costumes, going to parties, and having fun.
it was HORRIBLE. the sooner people stop making excuses to have fun, the better. goddamn halloween