Trick or Treat!
(A little girl, maybe six, in a beautiful princess or fairy costume, complete with fuzzy pink wings)
"You're messy!"
Yes, I am. (I'll post pictures later, but let's say my theme this year is homicidal maniac)
"You should clean up!"
I will clean up before bed.
"Ooh! Is that a skeleton!", looking at Stewart.
Yes, it is!
"Is it scary?"
No, it's not scary anymore.
"Bye! Thank you!"
I love Halloween.
Wow, it's been a long time since my last entry. I've been in my October Funk, though, going into hibernation with the advent of cool weather and haunt-disrupted sleep schedules.
I was able to make a much larger nasty dog, which makes the guests get more up-close and personal with the nastiness, so that's fun. Otherwise, the recent couple of real run nights were much the same as first couple.
The Trail is simple this year -- a straight-forward scavenger hunt (which is what the Trail stories and most adventure games reduce to anyway), with some yuckiness and some solid scares tossed in here and there, plus a few festive "rides".
People really seem to be enjoying it, and we have good strong ticket sales as well.
October holds Halloween, my favorite holiday, and it is also the gateway to the holiday season, a special block of time where we take time for family and friends.
Fall is the time when the world begins to die. In most places, the air gets cold, the plants stop growing or actively die back, the leaves fall from the trees leaving only bare branches. Birds fly away, insects burrow out of site.
We have the harvest festivals, where the last of the planted foods are pulled in and stored. Often this is a time of harvesting the livestock as well; there is less food for the animals, so the animals become food themselves what is not not eaten is smoked, jerked, sausaged, and otherwise stored.
Of course, for almost all of us, "harvest season" means absolutely nothing. HEB still stocks all the food we need.
October is the gateway to the season of death, which is perversely also a season of celebrating life. Halloween itself can be seen as a time for acknowledging the dying of the world around us, taking part in it. In some traditions, it was a time when the ancestors were said to be visiting, ghosts walking the earth again, checking in on the families. A time to respect the past. As the world dies, we are closer to those who are already dead.
I think that perhaps Halloween would be a good time to go through personal deaths in preparation for rebirth -- a time to set aside bad habits, or to make peace with enemies. To clear the psyche, to let the leaves fall from our mental trees.
Passing through the Harvest, finding ourselves still alive though everything around us has ground to a stop, we celebrate our own life. In America, November's Thanksgiving is a time to recognize and be thankful for what we have. In my own structure of holidays, it is a time for adopted family; our closest friends.
December brings Christmas, a time for blood lineages. And, of course, gifts. It is also the dead of winter, a time when the cycle starts to edge back towards life. There are still hard months of cold ahead, but there will soon be signs of return.
January marks the European new year and is explicitly a time where we draw a line in the sand and look to how we want to live the next year.
I always feel better about my year when it has a sense of beginning, movement, and the ending and idling implicit in the last quarter of the year. And it is October, with Halloween, that connects me back to the cycle of nature, where I actually feel a part of the world again, if only for a brief moment.
Dress rehearsal, press night, and the free friends-and-family run was last night.
The trail assembled itself with great fuss and bustle and was quite presentable for the first run. We could certainly use more volunteers to fill out the experience, though -- really. Come play with us.
I only made a few new things this year. Squishy blobs for the spider eggs, these were cool. We put 'em in a bag of stretchy cloth, where they sat nestled in a solution of stringy slyme (www.fxsupply.com) thinned with glycerin.
Stringy Slyme is awesome. Really really nasty. And awesome. Buy a small tub to play with, you won't be disappointed.
Mmm, the mummified arm was mostly invisible last night, but may come to more prominence later. The hand, though, was popular.
The dead dogs were a bit too small to make the guests get yucky rummaging around inside them... we'll work on making them a bit yuckier though. And we may even get larger dogs to make it more challenging, but I'm not at all sure about that.
Hmmm... I built a water fountain, of sorts. I cobbled it together from several doors and some 3" PVC pipe I had laying around. Bought a nice water pump (for garde ponds, a largish pump I'll use next year in a water feature in my yard) and did some interesting painting on it, and it looks pretty cool. I'm popping chunks of dry-ice in the tube so the water runs over it before exiting, and I get a very nice continuous stream of fog out of it that pools in the catch basin. I will, of course, take pictures.
Some of my old work is making a re-appearance there, too. Mostly a pile of skeletons and yucky things. A few of the foam tombstones.
Anyway, my contributions to this trail are smaller than usual. Next year, though, I hope to hook up with something interesting... or maybe start something at home. We'll see.
Ahh, I have 80 glow in the dark squishy spider egg blobs! Woo. I did the hot-pour PVC differently this time.
When I did the first batches, I made a full pot of the stuff and left it on while I poured... but through a sequence of events it did get kinda chunky... and it started to "cook" and get a bit brown... and the resulting blobs were a bit more firm.
So when I went to make blobs Saturday I did two things differently. First, I only filled the pot up part-way, enough to make 11 blobs (the number of molds slots I have) with not much left over.
And the other is I decided to actually heat the stuff up to the full temperature. I normally use it at 250' -- it's cooked, but still a little bit thick. This is a good temp. for corpsing, but it doesn't pour into molds very well.
The instructions say to pour at 350 or so, so I did! Well, I hotted it up to about 325 to pour. This made the stuff very thin and easy to pour, and the resultin blobs seemed to be even softer than usual.
I "borrowed" a nice metal measuring cup from the kitchen to use. I stuck this in the squish when it reached about 300' so the cup would be hot... so I didn't get lumps.
The downside to all of this was two-fold. One, I needed to chill the molds after a pour, so the stupid squish would cool enough to remove. The center blobs in the mold cooled very slowly, too.
And the second problem was the water itself. It would not all shake out, and the remnants would boil and steam when I poured the next set of blobs.
So a bunch of the blobs have weird steamed texture on one side. But heck, it will be dark, and the guests aren't going to be really looking at these. They are more of a... tactile... treat. And the glow is actually there to help us _find_ them when they are dropped on the trail. Heh.
It takes about an hour round-trip to heat and cast a set of blobs, which isn't so bad since it takes at least that long for them to cool in their bath of ice-water.
While I was doing this I modified two adorable stuffed dogs to make them less adorable. I took the top four ribs (and vertebras) of two of my Bucky skeletons, cut them short, heated them with a heat gun, and formed them into a smaller ribcage.
These went into the dogs.
Then, on the other burner, I heated a bunch of squish that I then cast into sausage casings. The casings deep-fried to a crunchy texture so I crumbled it off... and had PVC intestines! Woo! These I then put into the dogs and squished 'em into place.
Adding some stage blood and tada! Dead dogs.
They are fairly creepy. I'll take picturs once I'm sure I'm done dressing them.
On site Sunday I built a big blue box that will be the ice-water fountain. It's not terribly clever or pretty, but it should do. I'm hoping the silicon I used to seal the pipes together will stay waterproof.
Just in case it doesn't work, I'm going out Tuesday (if at all possible) and check for leaks and to heavily re-caulk if needed. Oh, and to paint my box.
The press night is Thursday.
First run is Saturday.
There is some small chance we'll be ready and have the manpower to do this.
Oooh, I put up more pictures in the Haunt section:
http://www.simreal.com/twiki/bin/view.pl/Simreal/HandOfSomeone
At the very bottom. I made another cast of the hand, this one to give to the actor whose hand it is (well, give for the material cost). He hasn't written back yet, so I assume he's busy... I hope I sent the e-mail to the right Robert.. hmmm.
Though the hand still looks a bit dusty from the powdering (which removes the plasticy gloss the silicon overcoat gives it), I love the coloring and details in this model.
Okay, there are mold flaws -- some bubbles, a seam line where the mold had torn from the previous castings... and the overcoat is a bit darker than I wanted (the black silicon tint is powerful)... but it's still a beautiful job, I think.
Of course, once I get to buy that vacuum de-bubbler... my molds will be PERFECT! Perfect! Bwa-ha-haaa! And they said I was mad!
Now I need to find new excuses to make these things... new venues for my art. Maybe I could be a mad artist as well as a mad scientist...
I really love making stuff. Too bad I'm so busy that I don't get into the lab much these days.... work interferes so...
More pictures and news later.