This excerpt from a DisneyNature documentary on winged creatures focuses on bats pollinating cacti in Mexico. They’re such lovely creatures.

Epic Bunny’s Adventure – Short film with a standard fantasy-quest storyline, except the hero is a bunny.

Lost Souls Skull Shawl – Attractive lacy skull pattern for a crocheted shawl. Free download. (via Burning Prairie)

Funko Fifth Element Figures – Funko is adding vinyl figures including Zorg, Diva Plavalaguna, Leeloo, and several others to its Pop! line.

Ghost-Loving Castaway Required – If you speak English and Welsh, you can apply to be the caretaker of a remote island reputed to be haunted by 20,000 ghosts.

The Doll Collection – Anthology of horror featuring dolls. Commenter Jan, who brought this to my attention, reviewed it thusly: “Each of the stories has a different flavor of horror to serve and all are extremely well written. I think you’ll find ‘Word Doll’ with its taste of coffee and smell of cigarettes is as nearly perfect as a short story can be. But then there’s the feel of mildew, untanned leather and cooling blood to help your skin crawl when you read ‘Ambitious Boys Like You’. Get it.” (Commenter Jan has a way with words.)

Raven Skull Necklace – Dramatic piece featuring a cast-resin skull.

An Introduction to Black Metal Yoga – Clearly there are a variety of ways to find inner peace. (Hat tip to Bruno)

Tales from the eBay Crypt – A look at the purportedly-haunted items that some people sell there.

Avoid Humans – Web app which aggregates Foursquare and Instagram check-ins and displays places nearby with the fewest number of humans. (via Cat)

Jurassic Park: High Heels Edition – XVP Comedy noticed Jurassic World‘s endless “heroine runs in high heels” scenes and decided to apply the same logic to the rest of the movies. Favorite comment from YouTube: “Style found a way.”

Oh, I think I’m about to make a few readers very happy: There’s a brand-new movie streaming service devoted entirely to horror.

Shudder is an all-horror service backed by AMC. It’s currently in browser-only beta, but will soon be available as iPhone and Android apps and also as a Roku channel. Right now you can sign up for a 14-day free trial and stream as many horror movies as you want. After that, the service is $4.99 per month or $49.99 for a year.

Of particular interest is the curated collections, which lets you pick your favorite poison: Categories include things like “Haunted Habitations,” “Romantic Bloodsuckers,” “The Unraveling Mind,” “Comedy of Terrors,” and dozens more.

If you don’t feel like browsing the catalog, the service also has a Shudder.tv feature which streams movies from its library 24/7 and you can just tune in and watch whatever they’re playing. It’s the modern equivalent of flipping through channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon and stumbling on a random horror movie.

At the moment Shudder is available only for US users, but their FAQ says that they plan to go global in the near future. (If you can’t wait, it may be possible to get around the country restrictions with anonymizing software.)

Most reviews seem quite positive, noting that the library has more depth than services like Netflix and should continue to build. If you can’t get enough horror, this is definitely worth looking into.

(via Burgeoning Lads of Science)

I can’t begin to imagine how much pressure there must be within the skeleton community to know how to play the xylophone
— bridger_w

When people stay in a horrific relationship instead of breaking up, I assume they killed someone together.
— Sassafrantz

Right now, there are millions of formally dressed skeletons in our ground.
— icandodge

If you were at a party with a vampire and drew on his face, he would never find out.
— jfader2

Kids today are so coddled- Elf on the Shelf, Toy Story. In my day, if dolls magically came to life, they murdered you and everyone you loved
— behindyourback

If someone says they’re gonna open up a can of whoop ass, that means someone out there is canning whoop ass…I’d be more afraid of that second guy.
— ChrisTaliaferro

The 1840’s called. Mostly ghosts.
— david8hughes

My parents are always pestering me to have kids. “Who will carry on the ancient family curse?” they say.
— undeadmolly

what if the spider I killed in my home has spent his entire life thinking he was my room-mate and that suddenly I had some sort of psychotic break
— TheGamingDame

A heart shape with initials cut into the tree bark means someone went on a date with a knife.
— ashley76

benedictcumberreichenbach:

ninepulse:

Did you know that you actually can never forget a face? Every single face you’ve ever seen during your life gets stored into your memories, and gets used up later. For example, in dreams your brain can’t just make up a face. Every single face you’ve seen in your dream, you’ve seen somewhere once in your life.

And those strange nightmares you’ve had of those terrible demon like creatures?

You’ve seen them around too, you just cant remember. You don’t want to remember.

this post started off as a John Green novel and ended as a Stephen King.

TPF Faerie Wear created this adorable octopus hat with long fleecy tentacles; it clings to your head and keeps you snuggly warm. The hat is available in different colors, sizes, and tentacle lengths in their Etsy shop (and also check out their dragon scarves for an extra hit of cuteness).

Although I love some of this design’s features (particularly the realistic-looking eyes and curvy tentacles), I have to admit that $160 is more than I’d probably spend on a fleece hat. Fortunately, there are some other options.

There’s a basic pattern for a squid hat on Instructables. The tentacles could be combined with a slouch hat pattern like this one for a softer octopus-body look.

Fabrics and Chopsticks has a great tutorial on a more complicated squid hat with longer tentacles.

Grains of Earth has a roundup of crocheted octopus hat patterns; there’s a simple knit pattern here, and a pattern for a stuffed octopus here that could probably be converted into a hat.

Although there are no instructions, I quite like this cloche octopus hat; it seems to be felted tentacles attached to a hat of the same color. The suckers are pearly beads, which makes it rather elegant.

If you want realistic-looking eyes, you could use the plastic eyes sold for plush toys or even taxidermy eyes (you could go quite realistic with slit pupils or choose a red iris and make it a vampire squid). Suckers could be beads, buttons, appliqued fabric, or even puffy paint.

There are lots of ways to create an octopus hat, but the point is that you need an octopus on your head.

This faux trailer for the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Zombies and the Killer Plants on Some Serious Acid definitely looks like the next summer blockbuster.

(via The Presurfer)

Notes from a Totally Lame Vampire – YA book about a teenage vampire doomed to be 15 forever.

Look Behind You – Fun Halloween song by The Gaslight Troubadours. (Hat tip to pdq)

Final Girls – Web-based conversation game which imagines a group therapy session for Final Girls from various popular horror movies. (Their therapist is “Ellen,” who may look oddly familiar.)

ABCDisgusting – Kickstarter for a children’s alphabet book about gross things, from the same group who did “The Princess Who Saved Herself.”

Tattoos Inspired by Books – Each photo is captioned with a short description of why the owner chose that particular illustration or quote.

Walker Stalker – Walking Dead-themed cruise scheduled for next January, with several actors from the series attending. The ship has no scheduled stop at Haiti, which seems like a terrible missed opportunity.

Made From History – Neat educational site devoted to making history more accessible. You can browse short articles on the Roman diet, Dark Age funerals, and propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War. There are also sister sites devoted to science and media.

Period Thoughts – Tumblr discussion which started out about maxi-pad design and ended as a comic pitch that I would totally read.

Pinterest, You Are Drunk – Some things should remain unpinned.

Kay’s Fudge – This is one of the most useful epitaphs I’ve ever seen. (Hat tip to xJane, and special mention of Cat’s comment, “And look, right there is a marble slab.”)

J. Oswald was a German company which started making novelty clocks in the mid-1920s. Their most popular models were clocks with rotating eyeballs, one eye displaying the hours and the other the minutes.

They had a number of designs, including dogs, genies, and apes, but their cross-eyed skulls are particularly awesome. You can occasionally find original Oswald clocks on eBay (the ones in good shape run around $1,000US), and there have also been a few knockoffs from other companies. However, there are several ways you could DIY something similar.

There’s a short Instructables guide for installing a watch face in a plastic prop skull; just install one in the other eye too. After setting the correct time on both, remove the minute hand from the one on the left and the hour hand from the one on the right. A bit crude, but it’d work.

A larger version could be made by stenciling a skull on a wall and using two round wall clocks for eyes. Remove the hour/minute hands as above, and cut a circular piece of thin black acrylic to fit over the remaining clock hands (see the eyeball clock sold by SUCK UK to see how to position them). That would give you the true rotating-googly-eyes effect but would still be fairly straightforward to do.

If you’re feeling a bit more ambitious, pick up a couple of small clock movements from your local craft store, insert them in the eye sockets of a plastic skull, and use small plastic hemispheres (perhaps a ping pong ball cut in half, depending on the skull size) to represent the eyes. Paint on pupils for the hour/minute markers. Be sure to fit the movements in so that you can change the batteries as necessary.

(via Shellhawk’s Nest)

It’s time for another bunch of random stuff I want to share but can’t hang a whole post on. Some of them have no attribution, so if you happen to know the source for any of these please leave a note in the comments. (Click to view larger.)

	Halloween Vest This is a secondhand vest described on The Rusty Zipper as “ugly” by someone who obviously meant to type “awesome.” What I like about it is how easy it would be to DIY: Simple applique outlines, straightforward beading and/or embroidery, and blanket-stitched edges. You could use a plain thrifted vest as a base and gussy it up in an afternoon.
	Sally Pinup Tattoo Artist Tim Shumate did a series of Disney characters as pinup models for tattoos; you can see that set here, and buy prints of those and other work at Society 6.
	Bat Wing Cup This is by the Sami Rinne Design Shop, which sells them in cappuccino and espresso sizes. I don’t speak Finnish, so I don’t know if they ship elsewhere.
	Ian Curtis Cushion He’s…he’s looking at me. No idea where this originated; it was found at I Have Seen the Whole of the Internet, but it’s unclear where it came from. TinEye is no help. Oh, well; it’s easy to custom-print photos on fabric so if you always dreamed of sitting on Ian Curtis’ face, now’s your chance.
	Wayne Family Cosplay I love everything about this. You know there’ll be plenty of Batman cosplayers, so play off of them instead. Bonus for leaving a trail of mildly-perplexed Batmen in your wake.
	Porcelain Skull This is one of several porcelain skull designs by artist NooN in collaboration with the French ceramics company K.olin tribu. Something similar could be DIYd with a plaster skull and decoupage.
	Exorcist Prank This is such a simple joke, but it made me giggle. A lot.
	POLYPODIS This Lovecraftian shoe is by Kermit Tesoro. Although not terribly practical to walk in, you have to admit that it can’t be beaten for style. (As one commenter put it, “Your poor unfortunate soles.”)
	Pizza Ouija As soon as I saw this I figured it was probably a Hell Pizza item. It was a limited-edition box created for an advertising campaign. Hell Pizza is the same company that offered hell cross buns for Easter a few years ago.
	Window Picture Frame The watermark on this credits Cheerios and Lattes, but I didn’t see a post referencing it. Regardless, it’s a neat way to repurpose an old window frame: Place little shadowboxes behind each pane and use them to display small items. I like the shabby, peeling-paint look; this would be great with a spooky thing in each pane, all trying to get inside….

Artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz have been working with snow scenes a lot lately: Their recent works all seem to involve snow and miniature figures.

In a series that they called Travelers, they created snow globes featuring miniature people being chased by wolves, menaced by giant spiders, or threatened by even more miniature people. (Although, to be honest, my favorite of the series isn’t macabre and simply features a moose helping with the laundry.)

The artists only made a limited number of snow globes and they’ve long since been sold, but they can still serve as inspiration for weird little DIY versions. Empty snow globes are available at craft stores and online, and miniature figures for use in model railroad layouts can be found in all sorts of styles. Create a tiny, snow-covered cemetery with an open grave, or replicate the entrance to the hedge maze from The Shining.

This would be a fun group activity: Set up a supply of empty snow globes, various miniatures, and tools like glue and tweezers. Give a prize for the most creative miniature mayhem.

(via Dangerous Minds)