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Slashdot Asks: Notes For Next Hallowe'en?
There are 364 more shopping days until next year's Hallowe'en. But while this year's is still fresh in the memory, I'd like to start gathering ideas for next year in the hopes of actually making my neighborhood worthwhile as a trick-or-treating destination, specifically for fun projects to actually give my yard a haunted-house feel. (For the second time in three years, there were zero candy-seekers, and I'd like to convince my neighbors to make the whole block more decorated and spooky, even if we never get all Alek Komarnitsky.) Did you create an animatronic zombie for your yard? Glowing eyes to appear from behind the bushes? Poltergist-style rising graves to frighten the children? Remote-controlled candy dispensers? If you used any kind of complex haunt technology at home, what things worked and what didn't? (I hear too many stories about fog machines leaking to make them sound like a good idea.)
Whats up with the '
"second time in three years, there were zero candy-seekers, and I'd like to convince my neighbors to make the whole block more decorated and spooky..."
Too late. The kids know you as creepy.
Seriously. Go down to costco. Buy 10 boxes of full sized candies. It will cost you $200. Much less than a lot of crappy Halloween decorations. I guarantee you, the kids will remember. Often into adulthood. "There was this one house that gave out full sized bars!"
For bonus points, keep your receipts, and return any box you didn't end up opening.
Not quite a home haunt, and unfortunately I didn't take pictures, but I saw a guy driving a tardis down the street. He was following his kids as they did their trick or treating. He had built it using an electric wheelchair as the base. I don't give a crap about Dr Who but even I thought it was awesome. At one point he got out, said his wife had called and the lasers weren't working at home, told the kids to drive the tardis, and ran home. Unfortunately I didn't catch where he lived and we didn't see the house on our rounds.
1 - download Vixen and start buying gear for lighting automation.
http://www.vixenlights.com/
2 - buy several 1000-3000 lumen projectors and buy pre-made projection mapping video loops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
or custom over the top....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
combine the two and you will own your city's halloween decoration destination. Buy everything in pieces as you are looking at probably $20G to do it right.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In my community, there were fliers left on every door requesting that people not hand out candy from their homes due to concerns about children with dietary restrictions and "safety."
Instead, organizers designated several areas around the community where residents could reserve a spot for a table (table not supplied) to hand out candy under supervision from local volunteers. If the tables were not suitable, families were instructed to take their kids to the mall for "an authentic trick or treating experience."
I happened to need something from the mall, so I got to see their idea of a fun Halloween first-hand. Those shops handing out candy had hung photocopies of a tiny bitmapped 1980s "The Print Shop" style picture of a pumpkin near their doorways. They weren't permitted to hand out anything with chocolate, peanut, dairy, etc. so it was basically nothing but hard candies, mostly peppermints. 'Didn't look like anyone was hanging around for very long.
Halloween: Sanitized for your protection.
Don't participate in the pagan druid traditions. Treat it like any other day and grow up.
Halloween nowadays is no more druidic than Christmas. Cultures love to overlap holidays. All Saints' Day, Samain and the modern day Halloween are simply three variants of the same thing. Christmas was set to overlap other winter solstice celebrations, and I wouldn't be surprised of Easter was put there to overlap some spring festivities.
Modern holidays live a life of their own, far from their religious origins.
Location and weather matters. We're close to a school and had mild weather this year, so we got a little over 500 (normally it's closer to 400). Currently we're in a young kid boom, and because there are lots of munchkins about, lots of families with young kids move in, so the kid density does perpetuate.
Still, neighbourhoods also age out. I remember that my parents got about 150 when I was a kid, but it had dropped to half that by the time my sister, who was 5 years younger, was doing the rounds. It then moved back up about a decade later.
There are 365 more shopping days. You can also shop on February 29th next year.
The sun doesn't set till 8pm on halloween. How are things supposed to be spooky in broad daylight?
Guy Fawkes is even worse.
Don't get me started on Christmas lights, 9pm sunset.
What in the holy hell are you doing living there?
Crack garage door 2 inches. Blast 2 hour looped ghost sounds. All the kids loved it that walked by. Cost zero dollars.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Seriously, fuck trick-or-treating. I didn't get any knocks on the door here in the UK and I'm happy about it. Why Americans are so obsessed with Halloween is beyond me.
Yes, I also answer to The Grinch.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
There is a time for each holiday.
Live in the country so no neighbors really. Took our kids to the big event at a local zoo and then at dark we hit our small towns main street event. Between the two about 10k kids under 10, plus the older kids and parents/grand parents etc
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
The day after Halloween is a special day. It's the day the Halloween candy and Halloween chocolate is on sale.
Fight for your bitcoins!
That's first world evil right there, people!
Fight for your bitcoins!
What Halloween looks like today.
Fight for your bitcoins!
This year I added some interactive sound effects to the porch using some synths and a Theremin.
For the base soundscape, I used two synths running loops that were out of sync to create a basic gloom-and-doom texture. The first synth (Korg Kaos Pad, using SYN-9 with Pad Motion for the loop) had a low-frequency sound that moved around a bit to create the sonic floor. The other synth (Korg Monotribe) was looping at at the lowest temp setting (maybe 1 Hz?) with a simple noise-based sound with the LFO set to sweep both pitch and filter to create a knocking sound. It was creepy.
For the interactive element, I placed a plastic skeleton on the vertical antenna of a Theremin (Moog Theremini) and set it so it would start "screaming" when kids were about 2 feet away (I initially set a larger radius, but that led to it constantly sounding when kids were on the porch and diluted the effect). A note on the skeleton invited kids to shake its hand
I placed my studio monitors under the table with the Theremin. They had enough bass to let the synth effects sound spooky (rather than hollow). Combined with some lights and the fog machine (fog machines work fine - I just have the cheap one from Walmart), the effect was pretty good. Some kids refused to get near the skeleton after they heard it the first time, but others would play around with it and try to figure it out (the Theremin was covered in a blanket, so it wasn't obvious how it worked).
Next year I plan to expand the set up a bit and add some additional speakers and proximity effects around the walkway.
Fun stuff.
-Chris
I tried to go all high-tech this year. What a disaster! First, let me tell you that when the manual for the revivification table says it needs a bolt of lightning, you can't just substitute wall current. You need real lightning or you don't jump-start the corpse, you just end up charring the internal organs. Right away that puts a requirement on the weather and limits you to working during thunderstorms. And you don't want to deal with a thunderstorm on Halloween night. That keeps all the trick-or-treaters home. It's getting harder and harder these days to lure kids into your basement. Halloween's the one time of year when kids are *supposed* to accept candy from creepy guys in poorly-lit houses! You don't want a little thing like the weather screwing up that chance or you might not harvest enough test subjects to last through the year.
Next year I'm going back to good old-fashioned necromancy, just like we did when I was a kid. Sure, it takes a little longer and the entrails really make a mess, but you know you're going to get an unliving minion out of it instead of just a charred corpse that's too burned even to bother to eat. With necromancy, even if the ritual goes wrong the worst that could happen is you'll end up with an unholy abomination that will try to turn on its creator. Anyone who can't handle that once in a while doesn't deserve to call himself "mad".
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
... a sheet, a black marker, some string, a weight and a LED flashlight.
I think that would make a great levitating, enlightened ghost in the evening.
Because X-10.
SRSLY X-10?
I have a home full of Insteon, and I am feeling the obsolescence. But... X-10? (I Z-Wave the future!)
Had so many kids this year, many were bused in via Minivan... started at 5:30... I was cleaned out by 6:15... probably 100 kids. Though, lucky for the kids at around 6:30, because I had just pulled a fresh tray of lasagna out of the oven... ..one slice... right in the bag...
In my community, there were fliers left on every door requesting that people not hand out candy from their homes due to concerns about children with dietary restrictions and "safety."
Flyers left by whom? The police, acting under the authority of a newly enacted bylaw regarding candy distribution on Halloween, or a busy-body neighbor who thinks he or she gets to decide how people celebrate Halloween? If its the former, you might want to remember this next time you vote in municipal elections; if it's the latter, send him/her a kindly worded flyer suggesting what he/she can do with the original flyers.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I would suggest using drones for trick-or-treating. You can send out several at a time and cover a lot more houses that way.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You can always ignore the busybodies and do what you like, you know.
In my community, there were fliers left on every door requesting that people not hand out candy from their homes due to concerns about children with dietary restrictions and "safety."
Hopefully, not everyone obeyed that flyer.
Trick or Treating has just changed since when we were all younger. A lot of parents don't like the idea of kids going up to strangers houses anymore, much less in unknown areas or communities. I've noticed that in a lot of places I lived, most parents seem to prefer community events as opposed to the classic Trick or Treating, and you might just be losing all the kids to organized events instead. For better or for worse this just seems to be the trend, and you can try to buck it, but ultimately the kids are going to go where their parents let them.
If you're in a fairly tight knit community, it may be worth trying to organize something with the other members so that you too can participate a bit in the spooky festivities. For example, once place I was at had the main street shut down for about an hour or two and all the shops participated in Trick or Treating. A few neighborhoods also decided to do their own Trick or Treating as well, but no clue how well that went over. My apartment complex at the time made the pronouncement that the building was "opting out of" Trick or Treating, but someone just wedged the security door open and kids came anyways.
Wait, what happened to "Ask Slashdot"?
And if Slashdot is asking, who is it asking?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The day after Halloween is a special day.
Yes, it is All Hallows Day. Its almost like we have forgotten what comes after Christmas Eve or New Years Eve.
All three were considered important holidays (as in "holy days") once.
Oh god I'm conflicted.
On the one hand I'm sick of the slow adoption of Halloween in my non-American homeland primarily driven by corporations promoting the idea that little shits should come knock on my door and expect candy just because. I'm all for killing that idea before it even starts.
On the other hand I'm equally for collecting all those fliers, finding out which local idiotic busy-body created them and setting them all on fire right in front of their house to prove the point.
> Flyers left by whom?
This part of town is mostly multi-family town-homes serviced by a management company.
The fliers came from the management company.
Zero decorations, one porchlight, a commercial mixing bowl full of candy, and ran out before the evening was over. The Church across the street was doing Trunk Or Treat, and there was a steady stream of kids coming from there and hitting up my house. I feel like I should ask the Church to donate some candy to me next year so that I can meet the demand since my house literally becomes part of their festivity. I'm right outside of a neighborhood, and I used to get maybe one or two kids, but then they built the Church across the street and I got inundated this year. I literally couldn't close the door or sit down.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I wonder if the rumors about full sized candy bars are true? I've never tried it, but I find that a better definition of "poor" is "inability to give", which often describes people with a lot of money and not people with little money. Our neighborhood is poor compared to the average in the U.S. and my kids made a pretty good haul. They didn't get any full size candy bars, but what is so good about getting that much candy when it is just going to go bad before you are done eating it anyway.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Walmart is open 364 days per year, 365 on leap years. It's closed on Christmas.
Sat in the entryway with a mask on that had red light eyes. Growled and grumbled into a mic with hidden speakers as the kids walked by. Only highschoolers came up the walk. :-) Little ones walked on the other side of the street. Could hear them talking about me 4 doors away. ðY
as an adult we can dress up in costumes and eat candy regardless of what day it is
Except owners of public places will tend to treat a costumed adult differently on Halloween compared to any other day.
Funny, I'm actually just completing my X10 to zwave conversion! Anyone want to buy a lot of X10 gear cheap? ;)
I thought it was:
Boxing Day - Last minute shopping
Christmas - Presents
Boxing Day - Shopping for deals
There's a pretty bunch of social engineering involved with trick or treaters and one is they go where they go. So the places they go and the people who go there basically is the result of a chaotic process. If you want to prime the pump you need to not only have the houses done up, but on the day get people based on there being people. It's like seeding your case with money while busking or having extra produce while selling produce for the illusion of choice. It's not simply get decorations get destinations, it's actually kind of hard, people tend to go out of their neighborhood to get to the apt places and as such they often go to the same place year after year, so if you got nobody this year, you can't turn it around in a single year. Getting everybody on board isn't enough, you also need to be seen as a place to trick or treat, which means you need people there to get people there.
You might want to give up.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
What I saw this year was if you were giving away something for kids with dietary restrictions then you painted your pumpkin green.
1) Take a garbage bag. Stuff it with loosely crumpled newspapers. Glue streamers to the bottom so it resembles a large spider. Hang it right over the door the kids will be ringing, in such a way that you can raise or lower it. While you're handing candy to kids, release it.
2) Get a cardboard coffin. (I found one at Johnnie Brock's.) Put the coffin out in front of your door (make a platform for it, if needed). Put a small board across the top of the coffin, and put your bowl of candy on top of that board. Put out a sign saying "Take One", and carefully enter the coffin. Whenever somebody tries to take a candy, moan and reach for them, then give out everything. (Hand out the candy if you have to wait too long. Give extra candy to anyone brave enough to try to take candy.) I've had kids give me candy when I do this.
I started with 6 bags - ended up having to rush out and buy 6 more, went through 11 total! Dang there are a lot of kids around here...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In 2002 I moved into a newly developed neighborhood. We actually did our closing on Halloween. The following year I realized rather quickly that the participation in my neighborhood was rather dismal. At the time, my daughter was born just a little over a month after we closed on our house. A few years later, we found ourselves trick-or-treating in other well-established neighborhoods just to give our daughter the real experiences. I took note that this older neighborhood really went to great extent to give the kids that spooky halloween feel. Some things I noticed were that one person put one of those metal outdoor fire pits in their driveway and burned wood to give it that campfire smell all throughout the neighborhood. The adults handing out treats took the time to also dress up in costumes. There were houses that decorated in full fledged themes with live actors of things link a mad scientist laboratory, etc.
It has taken more than 10yrs to get my neighborhood to come around, but it seems like its on the right track. There are several stuck up retired old people that still screw up the process. Imagine going house to house and seeing a home with yard decorations for Halloween, porch lights on, garage lights lit on either side, sometimes even interior lights lit, only to discover that there's no one home. These people are so stuck on their lights being on to show off their home they don't even realize its implication for Halloween. Honestly, if toilet paper hadn't become so expensive, a healthy dose of eggs and TP would easily rectify the situation.
Just like a neighborhood association, a group of people dedicated to making a kickass neighborhood for halloween requires a community to coordinate. I would recommend mailing everyone in your neighborhood a good 45 days in advance and explain what you want to achieve, where it has gone wrong in the past, and what you think can be implemented to bring about that change. Make sure you ask for ideas to help get to where the neighborhood should be. My advice is to treat halloween like coordinating a big part, wedding, block party, etc. You need lots of other neighbors to decide to do it up too. Once you think you've got something worth going to (if you build it, they will come), contact your local paper to see if they will run a story. Once word gets around, your neighborhood could become one that other kids import themselves to.
You're incorrect, which is bad form when you're being a pedant, which you were.
It's "correct", because while English tolerates rapid and radical changes in common usage, the old uses don't become wrong just because there are newer forms that are also correct. "Thee" and "thou" are still fairly cromulent English, even though you probably say "you" (and you probably use "you" correctly, even if you get "thee" and "thou" and their corresponding verb forms wrong.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Fuck that. Here, have some lactose laden gluten rich crayfish flavoured peanuts.
If you're stupid enough to eat any shit some fuckwit gives you then that's not my problem.
But Halloween wasn't the day before All Hallows Day, it was the first part of it. The English started days at sundown, just as most of the western world did before clocks, and Jewish holidays still do start at sundown.
And All Hallows was an important holiday primarily because it was trying to distract the pagans away from celebrating Samhain.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have a spider on my front door which drops down when it hears a noise. Can't remember where I got it, but it is great for the little kids - they love to be able to knock and have it fall and scare them. Some even remember it from year to year. It's just a cheapo toy, but it's been the best bang for the buck of any of my stuff.
The other hit I have is a cauldron with fake flames made with silk triangles blown by a fan underneath and a couple of orange lights - like what they do here: http://www.themebuilders.com/e.... Again the younger kids are fascinated with it; it really does look pretty realistic.
Martha Stewart's Creepy Halloween sounds through a bluetooth speaker in a bush adds a bit of atmosphere.
Probably can't legally just block vehicular traffic in many neighborhoods, but IMO one of the biggest annoyances and detractors of Halloween fun is a bunch of SUVs carrying Trick'R'Treaters around house-to-house. Discourage driving and encourage walking in the neighborhood. Those wanting to visit a neighborhood with more activity need to go there, park, and walk around.
That said, for a couple of years a neighbor with a tractor and flat trailer loaded it with straw bales and carted a dozen or so kids on the street around house-to-house (at a very slow speed). Aside from the crowds ringing the doorbells all at once, it went very well and those kids, now around 20, still recall how much fun they had.
This year a number of neighbors dragged their metal firepits around to the front and built fires in them, then sat nearby in lawn chairs handing out candy. I plan to do the same next year (include some decorations/costumes, of course). It really encouraged escorts as well as the kids to socialize and have a good time.
No it's not. It's properly called Pascha or Passover, and is a Hebrew tradition. Get it right.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
...and celebrate Guy Fawkes Day instead.
Seriously. Yeah, some kids prefer candy to explosives, but not the cool kids.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
We had that happen one year.
We setup our big tesla coil in the yard but it was not the 2 foot sparks coming off of the top which scared them. The design used a very loud spark gap and it was so bright it was lighting up the entire street. We were watching and turning in on from inside the house when we saw kids coming up the path and several times, they just dropped their candy and ran screaming and crying down the street.