That's a pretty great TARDIS dress, but I'm really impressed by the girl in the background -I've never seen a Cassandra costume like this one. These aren't the only amazing Doctor Who costumes out there. In fact, Geek Sugar has a collection of 25 great Doctor Who costumes that are probably from conventions but would make epic Halloween costumes too. While there are tons of David Tennant costumes, and even though he's my favorite, it's actually quite refreshing to see people dressed as Christopher Eccleston or Peter Davidson. Also, I've never seen someone dressed as Donna Noble, which is also great -even if she just looks like a bride when not next to The Doctor.
Sandy Cramer of Knot Just Rope tack shop has a jet black horse named Raven. Raven is very patient and stood for 2.5 hours for her Halloween paint job as a skeleton. The ten-year-old horse was first painted for Halloween last year, and was such a hit that people came from miles around to see her! Raven looks good whether she's carrying the Headless Horseman or little kids in their costumes.
The paint is acrylic and comes off so easily that it needs to be touched up before appearances. A bath and a brush will take it all off, because it stays on the surface of the fur instead of soaking to the skin like dye. Read Raven's story at Facebook, and see many more pictures of the skeleton horse in this gallery. -via Everlasting Blort
There's no mistaking who's face is glowing in the dark on this Jack-o-lantern, unless you've never heard of Breaking Bad. Heisenberg is an ominous sight on a dark night! This pumpkin by Ed Seymour is one of 25 Cool Halloween Pumpkins Inspired By TV And Pop Culture Characters at Uproxx. They pay tribute in vegetable form to everything from Spider-Man to Game of Thrones, from classic art to Angry Birds, from Steve Jobs to Troll face. They're not all Jack-o-lanterns, either; some are painted pumpkins or pumpkin sculptures, but any of them wold look good on your porch this week!
Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt in 1922. On March 24, 1923, novelist Marie Corelli warned him in the press that bad things happen to those who desecrate tombs. Within two weeks, Lord Carnarvon was dead from an infection brought on by a mosquito bite he suffered just two days after Corelli's warning was published. The mummy's curse caused it, of course.
The idea of the mummy’s curse was already a popular story, but Carnarvon’s demise (and Corelli’s apparent prediction of it) turned it into one of the great legends of the age. Rumours quickly spread that Carter had found warnings in the tomb itself. There were reports of a clay tablet, allegedly found over the tomb’s entrance, that read: ‘Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of Pharaoh.’ According to the stories, Carter buried it in the sand in case it scared his labourers into stopping their work. The whole situation was a gift for journalists who, four months after the tomb’s discovery, were desperate for more Tutankhamun-related news. Once the curse story took off, they began running daily updates, roping in scholars to debate whether evil spirits were to blame for Carnarvon’s demise.
In the next twelve years, six of the people who were present when the tomb was opened were dead. The mummy's curse? Not when you consider there were forty people there, and they weren't all young and healthy. Curses against grave-robbing had been around for a long time, and they were particularly attached to mummies when modern archaeologist began to exhume them. How many other mummies were unearthed with no dramatic deaths? But the power of a good story propelled the mummy's curse into popular consciousness. Read how it happened at Aeon magazine.
The practice of wearing costumes or masks during this sort of end of Autumn celebration probably comes from a Celtic New Year’s Samhain tradition.
During Samhain, young men impersonated evil spirits by dressing up in white costumes with blackened faces or masks. It was believed that during the transition from one year to the next, the realms of the living and the dead would overlap, allowing the dead as well as evil spirits to roam the Earth. By dressing up as spirits, hopefully the real evil spirits would leave you alone, rather than rip out your entrails or otherwise harass you.
Your Halloween costume may be cool, but it's not Nicholas Cage cool. Like the actor once said about his movie Face/Off, "Without tooting my own horn - I think it's a masterpiece." We wholeheartedly agree, Nick.
Imgur user RubberDogTurdsGIFS (what a name) uploaded these photos of what is probably one of the strangest Halloween costumes we'll see this year. Behold, the Nicholas Cage themed Morphsuits.
You can't put that bunny of awesomeness back in the box!
Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed goes all out for Halloween costumes, and his homemade creations tend to win contests left and right. This year, he is Disneyland! He constructed a miniature replica of the theme park, made to wear at an angle, so people could see it. That's his face sticking out of Sleeping Beauty's castle.
You can also see Space Mountain, Star Tours, Pirates of the Caribbean, Autopia, the Mark Twain steamboat, Fantasyland Theater, the Innoventions building, the Astro Orbiter, the Jungle Cruise, and the Dumbo ride, among smaller details. The structures of the Matterhorn, Splash Mountain, and Thunder Mountain have moving animations. Can he walk around in it? Yes, but he cannot lift his own drink. Doorways may be a problem, too.
To see more pictures of the final costume, you'll want to skip to page 17 of Cockerham's tutorial. This is going to be in a costume contest Saturday. Wish him luck! -via Metafilter
Redditor Pontdepierre offered this Halloween costume idea, recreating the painting of Saint Sebastian by Peter Paul Rubens. A pretty decent likeness, huh? It's part of the list 17 Brilliant Art History-Inspired Halloween Costumes at Buzzfeed. See costumes by Warhol, Khalo, dali, and more. If you have to explain them, you know you're at the wrong party.
Collectors Weekly has an exclusive interview with Mad magazine illustrator Jack Davis. Davis drew for many of EC Comics' horror publications like Tales from the Crypt in the early 1950s. He talks about how EC publisher Bill Gaines gave him his start in comics in 1950.
“I wanted to be a cartoonist and get syndicated,” says Davis, who worked as an assistant to Ed Dodd, creator of the syndicated “Mark Trail” comic strip, while he was in college. “I figured I had to go to New York City because that was where everything in publishing was, including the comics syndicates. I took a year at the Art Students League in New York, and I’d look for work. I’d go up and down Madison Avenue, where I was rejected at the syndicates and at a lot of the publishers.”
But not all of them. “I saw a comic book one day and went down to the offices of Entertaining Comics, where I met the publisher, Bill Gaines. My work was bad, and they liked it,” he says, laughing. “They gave me some stuff to work on right away, and I was very excited about that.”
Soon, Davis, who was sick of being a starving artist, developed a reputation for speed, as an artist who could sketch and ink sometimes three pages in a day. “I’d have to be fast, because when you turned them in, that’s when you’d get your money,” Davis says. “The faster you drew, the faster the money came in.”
The interview coincides with the opening of an exhibit at Mondo Gallery in Austin entitled "It Didn't Rot Our Brains," featuring the Crypt Keeper and other art from EC horror comics. Davis created the illustration you see here just for the event. It shows publisher Bill Gaines with the Crypt Keeper himself. Read the rest of the interview at Collectors Weekly, and enjoy a gallery of Davis' magazine art.
TED Talks cover just about any subject you can imagine, with varying quality. And now they aren't just for humans! Zombie Tim Martin of Reawakening gives tips to other zombies about how to survive the humans who have the hare-brained idea they could survive the zombie apocalypse. Quite inspiring! -via Tastefully Offensive
What do you think of when you watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre? I'm no psychic, but I'm willing to be it has nothing to do with food. But if you go to the iconic house where the Leatherface resided in the film, you won't find a bunch of rotting body parts, but a dinner called the Grand Central Cafe. They do have Texas Chainsaw Massacre memorabilia on the second floor, so you can look at pictures of a family of cannibals enjoying their dinner before you enjoy yours.
Believe it or not, that's not the only weird transformation of past horror movie locations either. Cracked has four more you won't want to miss as well.
Visual Burrito (Royce Hutain) made a Halloween costume for his 22-month old daughter, using LED technology to make the child easy to see in the dark. I'm sure you'll agree that she shows up well in the dark -as a cartoon stick figure! I bet she can even draw herself. It's not the first LED stickmen that he's made: here is the adult version, made for nighttime snowboarding. -via reddit
Halloween greeting cards have been around for a long time, although it's not a holiday meant for sentiment. Not that it matters; people have always loved sharing funny pictures, even when those pictures had to be sent through the postal service. And funny cat pictures are universal.
Let's take a closer look at this odd piece of art. We have a cat playing a bass drum. The drum does not look happy about it. Another cat is carrying the drum, but he's got a bandage around his face. Did the other cat put his eye out with a drumstick? And their audience is made of mice! Who came up with this? The poem says Fee, fo, fi, fum. Am I remembering it wrong, or did the line from Jack and the Beanstalk actually say Fee FI, FO, fum?
What's more romantic than a stroll in the country with your fiance? Well, if you're this couple who was photographed by Brandon Gray, apparently getting murdered by Jason is the epitome of romance. At least, I assume that's why they chose to include the serial killer striking down and killing them in their engagement photo series.
While I tease, I actually think this is pretty cool. Part of being a geek couple is celebrating your shared interests and I wholly support doing this during your wedding and all the preparation you put into your wedding and these kinds of photos are just this. Besides, you can always send the pre-murder photos to your grandma and other relatives that just "wouldn't get" the whole serial killer photo series thing.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Wadim Strielkowski (Charles University, Prague), Evgeny Lisin (MPEI, Moscow), and Emily Welkins (University of Strasbourg)
Our paper describes intertemporal interactions between vampires and humans based on several types of vampire behavior described in popular fiction, films, and television series. Our main research question is: If vampires were real and lived among us, would their existence be possible? We draw several scenarios of vampire–human equilibria and use models with differential equations to test under what provisions vampires could have existed amongst humans. Mathematical modeling reveals that several popular culture sources outline the models describing plausible and peaceful coexistence.
Recent Research About Vampires
Since the 1980s, such topics as behavior of vampires, economic significance of vampirism, and optimal bloodsucking strategies (e.g. preventing the depletion of renewable human resources) have found their way into the research literature, becoming an inspiration for several academic papers (Hart and Mehlmann, 1982, 1983; Hartl, Mehlmann and Novak, 1992; Neocleus, 2003; Efthimiou and Gandhi, 2007).
Vampires are often described in legends and folklore. The word "vampire" comes from the Hungarian language. The first myths and legends about vampires can be found in Mesopotamian texts dating back to 4000 B.C.E. (Campbell Thompson, 1904).
Consider introducing vampires into the model of population growth denoted by dx/dt = kx. The vampire population is denoted by the function y(t), y0=1. Vampires act as natural predators for humans. The human population dynamics can therefore be presented as the following function: dx/dt = kx-v(x)y, where v(x) is the rate at which humans are killed by vampires.
Assume that the number of any vampire's victims is growing proportionally. Thence, the function v(x) can be presented as the following: v(x)=ax, where a > 0 is the coefficient of the human's lethal interaction with a vampire (a human is either killed by a vampire or is turned into a vampire). As a result, the differential equation describing the growth rate of human population can be formulated as the following: dx/dt = x(k-ay). Assume the dynamics of vampire's population change to be y(t). The growth of vampire population will be determined by the quality and quantity of interactions with humans.
After selecting its victim, any vampire can kill it by draining its blood, turn it into a new vampire, or feed on it but leave it to live.
Let us also introduce vampire slayers into the model. The slayers regulate the population of vampires by periodically killing vampires. The equation will then be modified to be dy/dt = baxy-cy, where 0 < b ≤ 1 is the coefficient reflecting the rate with which humans are turned into vampires and c ≥ 0 is the coefficient of lethal outcome of the interaction between a vampire and vampire slayer.
In order to solve this, we need to consider a Lotka-Volterra system, or a "predator–prey" type model (Volterra, 1931). The system allows for the stationary solution, meaning that there is a pair of solutions for the system that creates a state when human and vampire populations can coexist in time without any change in numbers. The size of human population is determined by the effectiveness of slaying vampires by vampire hunters c and the number of cases when the humans are turned into vampires ba. The size of vampire population depends on the growth rate of human population k and vampires' thirst for human blood a. The stationary solution shows that when vampires are capable of restraining their blood thirst, the size of both populations can be rather high in mutual co-existence. The system is held in balance by the existence of vampire slayers.
