Tag: halloween

Is trick-or-treating dead?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I moved into my house, I often noticed the sheer volume of children in my subdivision.  Riding around on bicycles, and dragging their feet shuffling home after getting off of the school bus that clogs the road at 4:30 every day.  I thought to myself that, all i-hate-kids nihilism aside, that it was still a pleasing atmosphere to see, especially in contrast to the warzone that my previous home’s subdivision was devolving to.

All this said, I would have wagered money that come Halloween, my neighborhood would be a veritable hotbed for trick-or-treaters, since there were already a lot of children in the neighborhood, and that my subdivision seemed kind of tailor-made for trick-or-treating since it was relatively flat, homes moderately spaced out and looked affluent enough to attract children into thinking good candy were abundantly available.  With such in mind, my home was very well stocked for the freeloaders, with the hopes that maybe a fistful of the stuff would be left for us afterwards.

Which brings us to this morning, where I’ve got a bowl still practically overflowing with candy, and Halloween saw less than like, 30 kids coming to my door.  And we had jack-o-lanterns, fake tombstones and a decorated door with blinking lights to indicate that my home was game for the kids.

So I have to ask now, is trick-or-treating pretty much dead these days?

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The serious business of pumpkin carving

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of my friends throws a pumpkin carving party every year, and for the most part, I try to participate in it every year I can. The impetus of the party is the belief that it’s simply nice to have traditions; and I for one could not agree any further. That being said, regardless of who, or how many people actually participate in the act of carving pumpkins, I have always taken it pretty seriously; probably to a magnitude where my effort can make up for the lack of effort on someone else’s part (I’ve carved two pumpkins a few times now).

Because I’ve had a difficult time of finding content as well as motivation of things to write in the absence of my brog, I figured I would write a little bit about my process when it comes to preparing for pumpkin carving.

For starters, I am a tryhard, and I do not care to use any generic stencils or ideas that come available in a commercially available book or website. I prefer to strive for unique ideas, or things that really hit home to my personal preferences.

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Photos: Annual Pumpkin Carving

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m the kind of person who believes in the importance of having traditions and annual occurrences.  Without them, sometimes there aren’t always things to look forward to, and sometimes it’s just nice to know that there are going to be times when you know you’re going be in good company and have a good time.

Pumpkin carving at Stu and Allison’s is one of those traditions that I look forward to every year, and every year, I like to put a little bit of effort into carving out something unique and not necessarily easy.  This year, I decided to parlay my fandom of LoL into my pumpkin and carve out the most important things in the world – wards.  And since I’m apparently a try-hard overachiever, I decided to do two wards, so it didn’t seem like I was just doing it to say I placed one.

The green lights are LED lights and not actual flame, because I think burning copper or mercury or whatever it takes to generate green flame would have been somewhat of a hazard, for just pumpkin carving.  Maybe another year.

Anyway, I took a few pictures, and here they are for us to all admire the creativity and an enjoyable annual tradition.

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Vacation, in brief

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My Disney vacation was a great time.  I’m sure I’ll elaborate on several aspects of it in future posts as I comb through the litany of pictures taken during the trip, but I just wanted to artificially inflate my own brog post count by posting something fluffy and inconsequential, not to mention that I’ve got a little bit of downtime at work, and it seems like a good idea at the time.

I can’t really say that there was anything bad about the trip, so by default it means that it was a very good vacation as a whole.  Staying on Disney property was interesting and a somewhat educational experience, at the Wilderness Lodge, and I loved the idea of being privy to Magic Hours as resort guests, even if the one time we were at Epcot during a Magic Hour, we hardly got much privilege out of it, but it means something to look forward to in future years.

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Photos: HALLOWEEN TIME

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For a Halloween party this year, my friends and I decided to bust out some ADVENTURE TIME costumes.  In this case, I am in the perfect costume, being a giant obnoxious-sized BMO, because I’m almost completely physically hidden, and I’m a walking hiding place.

Inside my BMO box, I can make whatever faces I want, collect my thoughts, and more or less hide from the rest of the world if I don’t feel like dealing with it.  But at the same time, I can hardly see shit, I bump into pretty much everything, and my arms eventually get tired from being re-re length, sticking out of two arm holes.  Plus, it totally inhibited how much I actually drank that night, because drinking was a far larger chore than it ever really should be.

No matter, the company was awesome, although I have to say the party was a little lackluster.  Being on a Friday night, where lots of people worked all through the day prior, getting into costumes and going out in public apparently wasn’t on a whole lot of peoples’ agendas on this night.

Pardon the crappy quality of these pictures.  These were all taken on my old shitty Sony CyberShot that’s pretty much dead.  Another disadvantage to being in BMO is the fact that I can’t exactly have my good camera with me for photos, let alone the physical ability to really take pictures.  By no fault of the good graces of those who took these photos is the quality compromised; the camera itself is dated, and dying.  Overexposure, blur and redeye for all!

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What you get when you polish a turd

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s an old saying that goes: “It doesn’t matter how much you polish a turd, because in the end it’s still a turd.”

Well, to update such a wise and clever saying, if you polish a turd, it’s no longer a turd – it becomes this.

An airsoft shotgun.  But not just any airsoft shotgun, but a Chinese knockoff airsoft shotgun.  That surprisingly, did not work at all as soon as I opened it up and gave it a go.

It was 50% off, so in the end it was $26.  Now I can think of several other ways to drop $26, but I couldn’t resist having a cool looking toy shotgun that didn’t look like the kind of crap they sell at the Halloween stores.  I kind of knew it was going to be a piece of shit when I bought it; it was obviously a Chinese knockoff, being sold by Chinese guys, at the sad shell of what was once a Borders, but even I didn’t think it was literally going to break, or was already broken when I took it out of the box.  Another subconscious reminder was the obvious declining of plastic BBs for the gun; I had little belief that I was actually going to use it for shooting of physical matter, but it’s like I knew that this was going to be a piece of shit, and couldn’t justify the necessity for 5,000 pellets.

In the end, despite it breaking as soon as I opened it up, and taking about almost two hours to fix it back up, it’s still a cool looking prop, which would go great with the Gay Chris Redfield costume if I ever decide to bust it out again in the future.  But man, does shit like this really sour me to even the most counterfeit of Chinese knockoff merchandise.