white nøise

Here it is, a full two weeks since our party, and one since Halloween, and I haven’t posted a peep. Needless to say the 10th annual Nightmare Before Halloween was great.

Lots of folks came out (about 40 altogether) including a few who hadn’t made it in years. The theme was “The Ghost of Halloween Past”, so we relived themes and costumes of the past and gave out awards for some of the most memorable contributions.

Joe and Carol won the costume contest with a film-worthy rendition of characters from Hellboy 2. But it was only a narrow win over John and Kelly’s costumes from the upcoming Alice in Wonderland remake.

As for D and I, we revisited an old costume with a new twist – the ghosts of Willy Wonka and Oompa Loompa.

And just to start things off, we helped set a World Record for the largest, simultaneous dance to “Thriller”. Nearly 23,000 people around the world grooved together for nearly 6 minutes as we participated in Thrill The World 2009.

The invitation for the Tenth Annual Nightmare Before Halloween has been posted. Actually, I don’t think the word “invitation” cuts it anymore. This baby is over 5 minutes long. It pays homage to all the hard work and great times we’ve had over the years.

This year’s theme, “The Ghost of Halloween Past”, is all about celebrating our tradition of insanity. With any luck we’ll see plenty of callbacks to old themes and costumes along with a few new surprises.

We’re also quite excited about our Thrill the World dance which will kick things off. I know most people are awfully reluctant to dance – especially when it takes time to learn the full routine, but this is a pretty unique event. For five minutes or so, our little corner of chaos will join over 300 sites around the world in celebrating the best horror song of all time. I’m hoping that most people remember how reluctant they once were to get in full costume with a bunch of adults, and give this a shot, too.

Oh well, one month to go!

Danny Elfman – This is Halloween

I’m pleased to announce that the Powerloader has won the Instructables.com DIY Halloween Contest! We were awarded the Craft Grand Prize and the Core77 Editors’ Choice Award (Core77 is a design website/zine). There were a bunch of prizes and different categories, and I’m sure the Instructables editors wanted to spread the wealth a bit, so we’re not mentioned under the costume category which is sort of humorous.

In all there were 328 contest entries including some projects that were really ingenious and complicated. After entering and losing three other online contests it’s sweet to have nabbed some of the top honors in this one (this site, after all, is near and dear to the DIY geek community and was the one I was really gunning for). The swag we should be receiving is quite generous – over $900 worth if you can believe that! While the hourly rate spent on the costume doesn’t even match up to minimum wage, the prizes easily pay for the materials of the costume several times over.

I really encourage those of you who routinely blow us away with your Halloween creativity to document your efforts next year…it very well may pay off!