October 31, 2005
Rhode Island's haunted places: an interactive map
Mysteries of Rhode Island is "an interactive map and guide to mysterious locations and strange places in the smallest state."
You can zero in on separate maps of Providence and Newport.
Best of all, it invites you to add your own entries, and tag them with color-coded pushpins, the color depending on the nature of the mystery in residence there.
I learned of this from a comment added to last week's Halloween Events item. Reader Stephanie, who owns up to having created it with some friends, didn't offer a last name or a real email address, but there's a RISD connection here.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 09:28 AM
October 30, 2005
50 original printable pumpkin stencils
Nice stencils to enlarge, print, and carve, found at the Appleton (Wisc.) Post-Crescent.
Not your usual spooks. These are four of the 50 thumbnails on a single page.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 05:04 PM
October 28, 2005
Printable parodies of 'Star Wars' masks: Martha Stewart, Steve Jobs, Greenspan, Oprah, the Google guys ...
Forbes Magazine has parodied the real Star Wars masks in previous item.
You'll find Steve Jobs as Darth Vader, Martha Stewart as Padme Amidala, Alan Greenspan as Yoda, Oprah Winfrey as Princess Leia and Sergey Brin & Larry Page as R2-D2 & C-3P0.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 07:18 PM
October 27, 2005
17 printable 'Star Wars' masks for kids
Starwars.com is offering 17 full-color printable masks in two sizes -- 11 x 17 and 8 1/2 by 11 inches -- Revenge of the Sith masks by Star Wars illustrators and artists: General Grievous and Obi-Wan Kenobi by Cat Staggs, Tion Medon and Aayla Secura by Cynthia Cummens, C-3PO and Yoda by Chris Trevas, Padmé Amidala by Sarah Wilkinson, Chewbacca by Joe Corroney, The Emperor by Otis Frampton, Anakin Skywalker by Randy Martinez, R2-D2 by Brent Woodside, clone troopers by Tom Hodges, Boga by Amy Pronovost and Darth Vader by Matt Busch.
Thanks to BoingBoing for this gift.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 01:16 PM
Victorian Halloween site is several cuts above
Miss Mary's a hoot, and her Victorian Halloween site is really well done.
Besides Gothic tales, a gift shop largely of the Miss Mary's clipart, and Gothic games, there are costumes to make that assume you're intelligent and willing to improvise.
Check out the paper costume and the photo gallery.
I think I know how the Frightful Fashions got their name: Stunning thugh they all are, neither the The Flexible Giant, nor The Centaur nor The Wompus Cat(these require two people) nor the Woofus leave any hands free to carry a trick-or-treat bag. Be warned.
There's commerce here, but with a deft light touch. The fun continues at Miss Mary's LiveJournal site.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 12:02 AM
October 26, 2005
Horror Film Festival opens tomorrow
The sixth annual Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival opens tomorrow with The Manson Family and runs through Sunday. (Scroll past the press release to get to the schedule.)
There's a Halloween party for kids ($5) at the Columbus Theatre on Sunday at 2 p.m. with scary stories, cartoons, Bela Lugosi's reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s A Tell-Tale Heart and a costume competition with prizes.
But the rest of the festival looks much more adult. Screenings are largely in Providence -- at the Columbus, Cable Car and Chamber of Commerce theaters -- except for Cruel World, showing Friday at 8 p.m. at the Court House Center for the Arts in West Kingston. Tickets ($10) at arttixri.com or call 401-621-6123.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 01:17 PM
October 25, 2005
Creepy spiders
Creepy spiders is a Flash ad on earlyamerica.com, of all places, that my colleagues discovered while fact-checking a story that included a reference to the Louisiana Purchase.
When they left for the night, they left the page up on a big Mac used for making newspaper pages with QuarkXPress and, even at 300 by 250 pixels, its scurrying spiders drew a crowd.
I copied the page URL and brought it up on my PC, reloading the page a few times to get the same ad. Here it is, full screen.
(No, nobody clicked the ad, we don't know where it goes, but we love it.)
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 05:37 PM
October 24, 2005
Make your own fake blood
Blood Recipes is from Nightshade's Pain-in-the-Neck Vampire Page, part of a LARP (live action role playing game) site. Even better, the formulas are based on simple ingredients and food coloring.
Yummy: one of the blood forumulas is based on cocoa, thickened and sweetened with corn syrup. Tastes like chocolate.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 04:29 PM
October 23, 2005
Recipe: Unsweet Pumpkin Soup
I made this from a recipe for Cuban Pumpkin Soup today, and it's really good. I avoid sugar, so many pumpkin and squash soups taste like dessert to me, but the original recipe, which lacked the spices and called for just yogurt, was bland and too chickeny. I improvised, and we liked it.
Continue reading "Recipe: Unsweet Pumpkin Soup"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:11 PM
Inspiration; Extreme pumpkin photo gallery
Electrocution pumpkin
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 09:45 PM
October 20, 2005
Carve a virtual pumpkin
Carve your own pumpkin: Another interesting E-card, this one from Bloompetals. Pick a pumpkin shape, wield a knife by clicking points, return to the starting point and the shape falls out, with shadows.
Helps if you can draw, fun even if you can't.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:35 AM | Comments (1)
October 19, 2005
Bloody Finger Mail
Bloody Finger Mail ia a nice twist on an "E-Card": Draw your (very short) message in dripping blood and email it off. When the recipient picks it up, the finger will draw it again, just as you did the first time.
"For those times when ink just doesn't cut it."
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 03:56 AM | Comments (2)
Costume how-to: Lego Man
Laurence at xenomachina.com writes,
Two years ago, I decided to make a Lego minifig (ie: "Lego man") costume for Halloween. The hardest part was building the head. Here's how I did it:For the rest of my costume I wore a long-sleve baseball T-shirt (to get the effect of different colored arms from legs that many minifig have), wore yellow kitchen gloves, and put some rectangles of carboard in the bottom of my pant legs to make my legs seem "boxy".
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 03:48 AM
October 17, 2005
Free homemade costumes, makeup and crafts
Make Up, Bruises & Blood. Amazing what you can do with some food coloring and common household creams, soaps and powders.
Continue reading "Free homemade costumes, makeup and crafts"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 06:34 PM
October 16, 2005
Pumpkin patterns and software to make your own
Blogger Adam Kalsey pulls together an updated list of sites offering pumpkin-carving patterns.
While I can admire the art in these squash-art stencils, some depicting TV and movie characters, I still prefer well-done primitive jack-o-lanterns best. Software to draw your own could be interesting, too. (screenshot)
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:58 AM
October 15, 2005
Frugal and smart Halloween projects
Frugal projects: I like Derek Greenwood's attitude. He makes a glowing potion out of water and the inside sponge of a yellow highlighter, a creepy tube full of eyeballs from a plastic tube and this printout.
More goes on at his Halloween pages.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 12:02 PM
Southern ghost stories, text and audio
At The Moonit Road,
Ghost stories haunt the moonlit backroads of the American South. Their roots in Southern culture and folklore are deep. Each month, The Moonlit Road brings you these ghost stories and other strange Southern folktales, told by the region's best storytellers.
Our monthly feature stories are available in both text and streaming audio versions....
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:47 AM
October 14, 2005
Horror photos
At Flickr, the Halloween clusters come in scary and vegetable.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:49 PM
Halloween events
Organized Halloween events in Southern New England this weekend -- these listings are from the Journal's Live This Weekend section -- do not seem to include H.P. Lovecraft's grave in the Phillips family plot in Swan Point cemetery, but you could make a private visit...:
Continue reading "Halloween events"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 01:49 AM | Comments (1)
October 12, 2005
Games that spook and go bump
If you're having trouble getting into Halloween, some free online games might get the spirit moving.
Halloweeeen is a simple run, jump and collect the candy game. (You're a small ghost.)
You seem to be able to land on the mean jack-o-lantern and squash it, but if you walk into it, it eats you.
This is best for smaller kids. I got tired of just hopping and didn't take it too far, so I don't know if it gets more challenging on later levels.
Halloween Smash will be more interesting to older kids and grownups: Align three or more objects in a row horizontally or vertically by swapping its position with an adjacent object. When you do, they drop out, new ones come in and spontaneous matches rearrange the board.
(If you're familiar with the Elf Balls Christmas game, it's the same action.)
There are 16 other Flash games linked on this page, which is a mixture of French and English I found on a Japanese site. Some French pop-unders got through the Firefox block, but the games are worth having to close a window.
The House is not quite a game, it's an interactive horror story set in a dark spooky house with a few clickable items, some of which need to be clicked a few times or clicked again after you've clicked something else.
Mildly interesting, not really for kids.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 06:57 PM
October 11, 2005
How to turn a picture you like into a pumpkin pattern
Very useful. Step-by-step instructions for turning an image you like into a pumpkin-carving pattern:
We used Adobe Photoshop to create this pattern however, any graphics program with gray scale conversion and image resizing capabilities will work equally as well.
It's from The Pumpkin Lady, who has some downloadable patterns, too.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:19 PM
Free haunted-house soundtrack (mp3)
You gotta love it. drumnjazz, the site admin at sounds are active, offers a spooky new scene music as a free download:
So this past weekend Create (!) teamed up with with Chaos Theory (two teenagers from the neighborhood) and recorded a special soundtrack for the Haunted House that will be held at Martin Luther King Jr. Park (one of the many places that Create (!) conducts free music workshops for the community) in Long Beach.
Continue reading "Free haunted-house soundtrack (mp3)"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:14 PM
Free Martha patterns
Martha Stewart Halloween is what used to be called "camp." ("an ironic appreciation of that which might otherwise be considered corny") A costume "from the grocery store" includes mophead hula skirts, while the lead story is black-widow makeup.
For your goodie bag there are some pumpkin templates, silhouettes (pdf) for those who can paint but can't draw. The cat that probably just saw a giant dog would be fetching if enlarged on your own computer.
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:11 PM
October 10, 2005
Extreme Halloween baking: Thoracic Cavity and Zombie cakes
Thorax Cavity Cake
They're coming to get you Barbara is the site of a pair of serious horror-movie fans, and they're just as obsessive about their party fare. The thorax cake above is a lot like a train wreck, made entirely from scratch. (The ribs are lovingly shaped white chocolate.)
Continue reading "Extreme Halloween baking: Thoracic Cavity and Zombie cakes"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:46 AM | Comments (2)
October 09, 2005
Halloween recipes you might actually want to eat
At Perfect Entertaining, the Halloween recipes are real and appropriately decorative, developed in response to a gaping hole, an abyss, in the recipe canon:
Continue reading "Halloween recipes you might actually want to eat"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:06 AM
October 08, 2005
Haunted paper toys are just the takeaways
Artist Ray O'Bannon's RavensBlight is a strange and wonderful site, full of free Halloween goodies...
Continue reading "Haunted paper toys are just the takeaways"
Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:36 PM