From MovieWeb:

The departure of Frank Darabont has seen The Walking Dead go in a whole new direction. This new intro for season 2.5 seems to shine a light on the character dynamics of this ragtag group of zombie survivors and the impending daddy issues that Laurie’s pregnancy is sure to bring.

It’s amazing what you can do with a little creative editing.

I was just going to stick this in a link dump, but the product description is so wonderfully coy that it makes me giggle.

Blk is spring water, “naturally” dyed black by “fulvic minerals:”

Blk Beverages Black Spring Water’s proprietary blend of Fulvic Minerals (a derivative of plant matter) are mined from a 70 million year old source deep within the earth. Naturally black in color, Blk Beverages Spring Water’s formula binds to the molecules of Blk Beverages pure Canadian Spring Water turning it naturally black, with no artificial dyes, coloring, or additives. Fulvic Minerals are critical in growth of plant life, helping the transportation and absorption of nutrients.

The strangely-vague “derivative of plant matter” and fact that it’s naturally black rang a faint bell, and a quick check reveals that “fulvic” is essentially another name for “humic,” and that’s peat moss. It’s rotting plant material. Yum!

It’s apparently not harmful, and indeed is occasionally used as a nutritional supplement. I’m just amused at the way all of their marketing literature carefully omits any mention of what the stuff really is.

Anyway, if you’re so frickin’ goth that you want the very water you drink to be black, it’s available on Amazon. Stick a few in the cooler at your next party and watch your guests’ reactions.

(via Neatorama)

Organ Trail – Remember the old video game Oregon Trail, where everybody tended to die of dysentery? That, but with zombies.

Bug Memorials – Teensy little art-installation “sidewalk shrines” commemorating dead insects.

Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King – Interesting “grown-up” take on the Tut burial, including lots of new information. BoingBoing has a capsule review here.

Edwardian Promenade – Site devoted to all things Edwardian.

Spider Web Garden Trellis – Interesting trellis made of salvaged barbed wire.

Steampunk – Cute little Flash-based Web game with a steampunky motif. (Hat tip to Kattie)

Chemicus – Splendid china tea set shaped like laboratory equipment.

Clown Art – A roundup of the “top 100 most disturbing” clown paintings. Don’t forget the eye bleach! (NSFW)

Urban Plant Tags – These art-installation “nursery tags” for things like stop signs and streetlights are adorable.

Evil Hot Gummi Bears – Habanero-infused gummi bears. Ostensibly imbued with their evil hotness by Beelzibear, the Antipooh.

One night Justin Johnson was chatting with his friend Delbert Shoopman, thusly:

I was regaling him with the tale of my previous night, in which I had been up very late watching Michael Jordan videos from 1996. It made me feel so awesome deep down inside … like it was Sunday afternoon, and I was 14, sipping on a milkshake and watching my fav team play. That Jordan-fest lurched into a 4 am search for Primal Rage videos, and countless other mid-90s stuff.

I realized then, that it wasn’t specifically Jordan or Primal Rage videos I was searching for … it was 1996 … the feeling of being in 1996 …the intangibles of that year fascinated me, but getting bogged down in the specifics and having to make CHOICES eventually spoiled my quest.

So they decided to build a Website where you can wallow in nostalgia without having to make those choices. YTTM.TV features thousands of YouTube videos, with a timeline reaching back to 1860 (the first sound ever recorded). You can find everything from the conference where Steve Jobs introduced Halo to a trailer for Heavy Metal. In addition to selecting a particular year, you can also choose the type of videos you’re interested in: Video Games, Movies, Current Events, and several others. Toggle the content, choose a year, and a matching video will play at random.

Choose your favorite year and in no time you can relive the Howdy Doody test pattern, a trailer for Cheech and Chong, or a news report about Hurricane Andrew. It’s really kind of eerie.

I know I gripe about the ubiquity of zombies in pop culture right now, but this is actually pretty cool. Middle-school teacher David Hunter is engaging his students in geography by teaching it in the context of surviving a zombie outbreak. He’s put up a Kickstarter project to help fund his curriculum design.

The narrative is what leads the learner through scenarios in the zombie apocalypse where geographic skills will need to be applied. This narrative has 5 different scenes:

Planning for the Outbreak
News of a zombie-like outbreak has reached your community. You are helping to plan in case the outbreak reaches your area.

Post Outbreak Survival
The outbreak has reached your area and chaos has followed. You use your skills to just try and survive and find other survivors.

Finding a Place to Settle
Through surviving you have met with other survivors, now you are trying to decide upon a safe place

Building a Community
With your group of survivors, you make decisions to build a safe and sustainable community.

Planning for the Future
Based on what you know about Geography, and based on a knowledge of the past, your community makes long term plans for survival and rebuilding a life.

I think this is a marvelous learning tool. One of the best ways to teach a subject is to help the students understand why it matters (even if the application to everyday life is somewhat…tenuous). Dry facts and figures are boring; information that’ll keep your face from being eaten off by zombies is something you’ll probably pay attention to.

This technique could be expanded to many other subjects and a wide variety of monstrous threats, from studying disease vectors in the context of vampirism to using Oceanography for finding R’lyeh. If you’ve got a kid who’s reluctant to study, this might be a useful way to engage their interest.

(via BoingBoing)

The fabulous JoAsakura pointed me to these splendid “bloody rose” cupcakes inspired by the “painting the roses red” bit from Alice in Wonderland. There’s another photo at the artist’s deviantART page, where she notes in a comment that the roses were made of buttercream piped with a #104 tip.

Even though icing roses look complicated, they’re actually fairly straightforward to make. Wilton (which also sells the tip) has tutorials for two separate methods: Roses, made of individual petals, and Ribbon Roses, which use one long ribbon of icing. You can also find dozens of other tutorials with different techniques and different finished shapes by googling “how to make frosting roses:” This one creates a fairly detailed rose and this one results in a more impressionistic, freeform shape.

The roses in most examples are a bit more upright than the ones in the photo, so to cover an entire cupcake you’d either need to make a lot more rows of petals and thus use a lot more icing (a cupcake with more icing? The horror!) or ease the petals outward so they lie more flatly against the surface. Most tutorials also suggest the use of a rose nail, but I expect you could make ’em right on the cupcake instead.

The “blood” appears to simply be red food coloring, although it might be red with a drop or two of black mixed in to darken it a touch. (The scarlet baking cups are a nice detail, too.)

These would be a lovely addition to a party table. Instead of cupcakes you could also do a rose-covered cake, such as the one in the tutorial mentioned above, or one like Wilton’s Row of Roses.

(Thanks, JoAsakura!)

The short version (click to embiggen):

The long version (spoilers abound, so beware):

I was dimly aware of the Dark Shadows soap opera in the 70s, but never watched it. I knew that it was simply chock-full of supernatural elements, and although possibly campy in the way that 70s soap operas tended to be, it wasn’t really played for laughs. So when the trailer for the new movie suggested that it was largely a dark comedy, I was unsurprised at the outpouring of displeasure from fans of the series.

Brothers and sisters, if this turkey had been a dark comedy, it would have been much better than what it actually turned out to be.

The trailer also indicates a more-or-less cohesive storyline: Vampire is cursed by witch, returns after 200 years to restore his family to prominence, amusingly encounters culture shock along the way. In reality, this was about six separate and only-tangentially related movies that were all trying to occupy the same space in direct contravention of physics. The result was a confusing tangle of storylines that left me not caring much about any of them.

The story begins with a prologue set in the late 1700s, with Barnabas Collins as the scion of a wealthy family in Maine who made their fortune in the fishing industry. He “spurns” (if politely stating that he can’t tell her he loves her “because that would be a lie” qualifies as “spurning”) a maid who happens to be a witch. She avenges herself by first dropping a gargoyle on his parents and then forcing the woman he does love to fling herself dramatically off a cliff. He throws himself after her, only to find himself still alive at the bottom, cursed by the witch to become a vampire. (It is not explored why this woman, who clearly has hella magical powers, is working as a chambermaid instead of ruling a small country somewhere.) She follows up by turning all of the townspeople against him, and they lock him in an iron coffin and bury him.

…and cut to the “present day” of 1972, to a young woman who is a dead ringer for Barnabas’ lost love–now there’s an unexpected and shocking development–riding alone on a train (as I understand it, this is how the original series began, so that’s a nice nod to the soap). She is practicing introducing herself, saying something along the lines of, “Pleased to meet you, my name is [something that I don’t recall].” Then she glances at a poster on the wall advertising ski vacations in Victoria, B.C., and reintroduces herself, “Pleased to meet you, my name is Victoria Winters.” Aha! She wishes to conceal her identity. A plot twist!…Which is lovely, but the reason she’s traveling is because she’s been hired as a governess by the Collins family, and since the woman who hired her specifically mentions her application in the very next scene, I’m wondering how she managed to get hired without ever supplying her name. This is the kind of, “Wha?” moment that is repeated throughout the movie.

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Marley’s Ghost Scarf – Instructions for knitting an awesome scarf that looks like a big iron chain.

1887 Ladies – Lovely pinup-style drawings of fictional superheroines reimagined in a steampunk past.

Skeleton Foot – Fantastic trompe-l’oeil tattoo.

Lovely Monster – Odd little faux-documentary about a “young woman dealing with a rare and very dangerous condition.”

Grandpa Won’t Wake Up – Amusing parody of a Little Golden Book.

Map of the Dead – Enter your address (U.S. loads by default, but it apparently works internationally) and the site displays nearby locations that will help you survive a zombie apocalypse: Hardware stores, gas stations, hospitals, and so forth.

Caught in the Web – Macrophotograph gallery of spiders and their prey.

Sophistique Noir – “Dark Fashion for the Mature.” Great fashion suggestions for the over-30 set (or for the under-30s who want to look profesionally goth for job interviews and suchlike).

Adam Hosmer – Artist whose digitally-altered photographs are strange and unsettling.

H.P. Lovecraft Answers Your Relationship Questions – Lovecraft as advice columnist.

A Fox PR flack dropped me a line about a “new Werewolf Mini Series comedy from FOX,” saying that he thought it might interest my readers. Well it might, but not necessarily in the manner intended.

Wolfpack of Reseda follows the story of a car insurance-selling nebbish who gets bitten by a werewolf and develops loads of self-confidence. Remember Teen Wolf? Yeah, that.

Allow me to quote from the news article supplied to me:

Ben March (Tate Ellington) is struggling to sell car insurance amid the alpha males who rule the office. A mysterious animal bite changes his outlook, however, granting him enhanced senses and a wicked pair of mutton chops. Ben’s nice guy demeanor soon gives way to cockiness.

“Being a werewolf is like being a [tool], which I thought was really funny,” Leone [the director] explained when reached by phone. “It’s kind of a funny way to look at it, in an office environment. I like the collision between the mundane and this classic monster. When we talked about this project, we talked about ‘Office Space’ and ‘Fight Club’ and then werewolves.”

And now, the “additional story” blurb from the official Myspace site (Myspace? Really?):

In 1810, Padre Garcia, a Spanish missionary at the Rancho San Fernando, wrote of a strange howling out in the Valley. It would be the last entry in his diary…

Padre Garcia’s untimely death came after he had succumbed to temptation and fallen in love with a young, Eastern European gypsy girl who, with her clan, was camped on the banks of the LA river. Her father, furious at the thought of their union, called upon an old witch to put a curse on the Padre. Her black magic called upon the spirit of the wolf.

The next night, as Padre Garcia and his young love met, his outpost was attacked by a pack of wild, blood-thirsty beasts. He fought back valiantly, enough to save his lover, but he himself was bitten badly. In time, his wounds would heal, but in the process, he began to take on traits of his attackers. As the time of the full moon approached, he feared that he would lose all control and pose a threat to his beloved. As night fell, the Padre took his own life by falling on a large cross.

Padre Garcia was buried by his fellow missionaries in an unmarked grave, in what is now Reseda Park. In 2009, a young man jogging through the park under the cover of night fell on a tree root and badly cut his leg. His open wounds were exposed to the earth that was infused with the blood of the tragic priest. Nearly two centuries later, there are werewolves in Reseda.

I will allow a short break for vigorous eye-rolling.

You guys, I am genuinely pissed off by this. Finally, somebody decides to jump off the zombie bandwagon and explore a different classic monster, and they go about it in the most ham-fisted way imaginable. If you programmed a computer with every 50’s B-movie monster trope and told it to produce a werewolf backstory, it would spit out something that looked remarkably like this. If you then input a montage of “ordinary guy gains unusual ability, becomes self-confident and/or a dick,” I assume the computer could write the whole series. (Also, nearly every review of the series I’ve found specifically mentions the laughably-conspicuous product placement for Kia, the show’s sponsor.) The site itself appears to be trying for “hip,” but mainly looks like “trying for ‘hip’.” I am disappoint.

Anyway, the series is free to watch online. Reviews are reasonably favorable, and since each episode is only 15 minutes in length giving it a try should be fairly painless. Probably.

Do you have a stack of books that you aren’t likely to re-read? You can do something a lot more interesting than just sending them to the local thrift store.

BookCrossing is essentially a catch-and-release library. The site’s stated aim is simply “to connect people through books,” although reviewers have described it as both “a modern-day message in a bottle” and “an unlikely global sociology experiment.”

Participation is simple: Register a book (it’s free), print out a label with a unique ID, and stick it inside the book. Then release it into the wild: You can check if other site members are looking for your particular book and send it to them. You can give it to a friend. Or you can just leave it on the table in a coffee shop. Whomever finds it can enter the label ID at the site to track the book’s progress, and you will also be alerted as to where your book has turned up.

The site also supports “hunting,” where users who release books into the wild can enter field notes describing the general location where the book was left. Other members can then go looking for it; it’s sort of like geocaching but with less math. You can also register your place of business as a BookCrossing-friendly “Zone,” meaning that site members know they’re allowed to release and/or hunt for books there (which may be an interesting way to drum up extra clientele).

The site offers a lively community of bibliophiles, and has a truly worldwide reach, so you can connect with other bookish locals. It’s also interesting to browse their stats: The top book at the moment is one in Germany that’s made 575 hops so far.

I learned about this site from a comment someone left on an article about the death of Maurice Sendak; the commenter said he would honor Sendak by purchasing a number of his titles and releasing them into the wild via BookCrossing. I think that’s a lovely way to pay tribute to an author.