I keep running into entertaining Demotivational posters* and since I’m not sure what else to do with ’em I figured I’d just stick them all in one big post and amuse you guys too.

Peter Cushing

Coolness

Prayer in School

I Don’t See Anything**

Goth Chicks

Zombie Apocalypse

Halloween

Albus Dumbledore

*And I wonder how many younger readers have even encountered the motivational posters that these things parody; I haven’t seen one in years, but they used to infest every corporate office.

**I promise this is not one of those images where you stare at it for a few seconds and then it animates and becomes something scary; I hate those.

(No prizes, but if you can answer them all without googling you get bragging rights.)

1. What is the title of the classic Christmas episode of The Twilight Zone in which Art Carney is a drunken department-store Santa who finds a magic bag?
2. Sinterklaas, the Dutch equivalent of Santa, comes to town on a boat from his home in Madrid. He’s always accompanied by this dusky sidekick, who will scoop bad children into a bag and take them back to Spain.
3. “‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, a creature was stirring” was a tagline for what horror movie?
4. In the X-Files episode “Christmas Carol,” who does Scully originally suspect is the mother of Emily Sim?
   A) Scully’s sister
   B) Scully’s mother
   C) Mulder’s ex-girlfriend
   D) Mulder’s sister
   E) Sasquatch
5. This actress, who also starred in Beetlejuice, was the voice of Sally in A Nightmare Before Christmas.
6. During Christmas in this northern country, a horrible ogress named Gryla emerges from her cave to plague (and occasionally eat) naughty children.
7. In Futurama’s only Christmas episode, what does the 8-foot-tall Santa robot do if he finds you on Christmas Eve?
8. Instead of Santa Claus, Italian children try to stay on the good side of this broomstick-riding old lady.
9. In this 1964 movie “classic,” the Martians kidnap Santa because there is nobody on Mars to give their children presents.
10. Around Christmas in Austria this terrifying, hairy, horned monster keeps children in line by stealing their toys, smacking them with a birch rod, or tying them in a sack and throwing them in a river.

(Answers below the fold)

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Recently, author John Scalzi* watched a Lord of the Rings marathon and sort of inadvertently live-tweeted it.

Orcs vs. Stormtroopers. GO. On second thought, never mind. Neither side aims well enough for it to be interesting.

They could have just distracted the Wargs by throwing a bunch of red bouncy balls and yelling “fetch.”

I wonder what ents do when they come across a book. I imagine there’s a lot of screaming.

Sitcom proposal: Frodo and Sam are roommates, Gollum is their cranky landlord. Gandalf as the wacky neighbor with a cat.

He’s gathered them all up into one epic (no pun intended) post. And in response to his tweet, “Dear world: I am deeply disappointed there is not a dubstep version of the Smeagol Fish Battering Song.” one of his fans stepped up to the plate.

Heh.

*If you aren’t familiar with John Scalzi, go read Old Man’s War or The Android’s Dream right now. Now. Stop what you’re doing and go read them. Right now. Go.

Bat Plushies – Tutorial and free pattern for making adorable little stuffed bats.

Dearly, Departed – A young-adult steampunk love story with a zombie as the male protagonist. The author’s Big Idea makes it sound quite intriguing.

My Daguerrotype Boyfriend – “Where early photography meets extreme hotness.” (Hat tip to Beans)

Halloween Haunted Mirror – Neat half-silvered mirror with a faint “creepy child” in the background.

Jeweled Skulls – Interesting collection of jewel-encrusted skulls. pdq, who sent the link, suggests trying something similar with a cheap plastic skull and varicolored candies.

Apple Pie Cookies – These really aren’t cookies, just teensy little pies. I’m wondering if the same method could be applied to other fillings, such as pumpkin.

Genres – Surviving the World makes me giggle.

Bone Cathedral Chalkboard – Great tutorial for making a chalkboard decorated with bits of miniature skeletons. (Hat tip to Maven)

Cthulhu Christmas Calendar – Smartphone app that lets you “count down till the stars are right and presents can be opened from their evil slumber.”

Bloody Pumps – These look a little more “paint splatter” than “murder” to me, but they’re still rather pretty.

George R.R. Martin writes about food in his A Song of Ice and Fire books. A lot. A whooole lot. So the obvious thing to do is to re-create every dish mentioned in the series and then blog about it.*

The Inn at the Crossroads is taking a very scholarly approach to the subject, carefully reading the descriptions of the foods and then reverse-engineering them. They use a lot of Medieval cookbooks and techniques, so even if you don’t read Martin the site is worth a look as a period cooking resource.

They’ve also got recipes for interesting foodstuffs like grilled snake and honey-spiced crickets, which should appeal to the more adventurous. They generally provide information on their sources, so if you’ve ever wondered where to procure rattlesnake meat, you need look no further.

The site is wonderfully engaging, even if you never make any of the recipes. Food geeks should definitely check this one out.

(via BoingBoing)

*Y’know, before the Internet, people with weirdly obsessive hobbies toiled along in obscurity instead of being able to share the fruits of their labor with the world. Those were dark times.

We’ve been doing this virtual fake gift swap for a couple of years now, and darned if we aren’t going to do it again.

It’s easy (and free!) to participate: Between now and December 12, leave a comment on this post or email me saying that you want to be part of the swap. On the 16th I’ll tell you who your assigned “giftee” is, and some time before December 21 you post a picture on your blog of what you would have gotten that person if you had money and, y’know, cared.

Your “gift” can be as silly or serious as you like, and since you probably won’t know the recipient, feel free to make up whatever story you want about why the gift is appropriate. (If you don’t have a blog, you can arrange to have your gift posted here.)

On December 22 I’ll post a list of everybody’s entries so we can all marvel at each other’s good taste. It’s a silly, fun way to take a short break from general holiday craziness, plus we can all discover new blogs we might not otherwise find. The more people who participate the more entertaining the gift list will be, so put your inner Scrooge in a corner and join in!

(Image Credit)

“Kitbashing” is a model-building term which refers to using pieces of commercial model kits to create a new custom design. More generally, it can be thought of as adapting a commercial pattern to one’s own ends: The pattern manufacturer does all of the heavy lifting with regard to measurements and construction details, so it’s much easier than designing something from scratch.

For those of us with darker sensibilities, it’s a splendid way to turn mainstream patterns into something a little more appealing.

A case in point is this quilt, McCall pattern M6096. I used it as-is to make a quilt for a co-worker’s baby shower. And then I used different fabric and slightly altered the appliques to make a Halloween version. Muuuch better.

The applique background fabrics and small quilt squares were all dug out of my absurdly large supply of novelty Halloween scraps; if you have better self-control than I and don’t buy far more Halloween-print fabric than you need, you can probably find the small amounts needed for this project in your local fabric store’s clearance bin.

The applique sea life shapes were turned spooky with just a few alterations (click to enlarge):

The fish became a Jack-o’-lantern by removing its fins and adding a stem, leaves, and some simple facial features. The stem, eyes, and nose were cut freehand, and the leaves were cut from the pattern meant for the crab’s claws.

The crab was turned into a bat by cutting the body and head as one piece and then cutting two more pieces from the head pattern and scalloping the bottoms.

I did wind up cheating on the octopus-to-spider transition a bit; the original octopus pattern was so blobby that adding extra legs just made it look weird and asymmetrical. I eventually drew spider legs until I got one I liked and then traced eight of them around a central circle to make a pattern. I also stitched a simple spiderweb on the background fabric before appliqueing the spider on top: Just a few straight spokes connected by parallel lines.

A couple of other changes I made were to use my sewing machine’s built-in zigzag stitch to attach the appliques instead of the hand-stitched blanket edging recommended in the instructions; it’s a lot faster and it anchors the fabric much more thoroughly. I also used buttons for the spider and bat’s pupils instead of the teensy little black circles in the original pattern; those things are insanely difficult to cut out neatly and even harder to attach smoothly (if you’re making this quilt for a child small enough to possibly choke on a nommed-upon button you’ll need to grit your teeth and use the fabric).

The rest of the construction was done according to the original pattern instructions, resulting in a wonderfully Halloweeny quilt with a fraction of the effort required to design a pattern from scratch.

The next time you’re browsing patterns, keep an eye out for designs that you can darken down; it’s a wonderful time-saver.

I like the “All celebrity voices are impersonated. Poorly.” disclaimer.

(Hat tip to Beth)

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

— T.S. Eliot

And the last entry in this month’s Saturday tale-telling nonsense is a popular Japanese ghost story, which I didn’t realize until looking up the details isn’t actually about a ghost at all. This thing is even sillier than I’d thought it was.

—————

this story starts right out with a major spoiler
in that it is narrated by the protagonist in the past tense
which means that
no matter how horrifying the events described may be
we already know the dude lives through them
inasmuch as he is here to describe them
this is a good way to reduce stress
I approve

so there’s this lonely road
that is very spooky after dark
and people go out of their way to avoid it
because it is reputedly haunted by a Mujina
and Mujina-avoidance sounds like a very prudent measure
until you find out that a Mujina is not
as one might suspect
one of those special ultra-freaky
demonic ghost monsters with extra squick on top and a side order of fangs
that the Japanese seem to excel in being haunted by
no
a Mujina is a magical shape-shifting badger
that likes to play pranks
and being afraid of badgers
shape-shifting or otherwise
is just kind of sad

although pranky the magical badger
would be an excellent saturday morning cartoon

so this merchant is hurrying down the spooky dark road
and he sees a young woman crouching by a moat
hiding her face in her sleeves
and sobbing loudly
which as you will see in a minute
would be harder than it sounds

and because he is a very kind man
the merchant approaches and asks what is wrong
but she ignores him and continues to cry
so he goes nearer
and asks if he can help her
and she stands up
but keeps her back to him
and continues to sob and moan and carry on

and this merchant has clearly never seen any Japanese horror movies
because instead of deciding that this whole scenario is way too creepy
and running like the wind
he goes up and touches her on the shoulder
and she whips around and drops her sleeves
to reveal a decided abundance of facelessness
with the front of her head as smooth as an egg
so you see how sobbing loudly could be a challenge

this would be the Mujina
pretending to be a crying woman
and repaying a kindly stranger’s offer of help
by scaring the shit out of him so hard
that his intestines unroll like a party streamer
so you can bet that the next crying woman
that the merchant comes across
will have to just keep on crying
thanks to the Mujina being a dick

so the merchant screams
and runs away down the road
afraid to look behind him
although I would be tempted to look
because if there was an eldritch horror somewhere behind me
I might be interested to know how close it was
and also would want to know
how it was following me if it didn’t have any eyes

but the merchant finally sees a light in the distance
and runs toward it
to find a noodle-seller who has set up a stand by the roadside
although a pitch-black road in the middle of nowhere
is perhaps not prime real estate for such an establishment

so the merchant runs up to the noodle-seller
who has his back to him
and here I am detecting a theme
and yells that he’s just seen something horrible

and the noodle-seller asks
was it something like this?
and turns around
to show that he also is entirely faceless
and then the lantern goes out
boogety-boogety

and that is where the story ends
with the protagonist in the dark with a faceless noodle-seller
which sounds like a bad place to be
for one thing he can’t taste his own cooking so the noodles are probably terrible
but
we know that the protagonist somehow manages to escape
because he is the one telling the story
so anticlimaxes all around

the moral of this story is that badgers are assholes.