Happy Halloween

We went for a walk to see the local decorations.

Inflatables are far less common this year, which I approve of since I find them a bit crass.

Skeletons remain a perennial favourite. I think we saw the above display last year as well? Spider webs have become a bit more common, and I think based on what we saw premade versions are being sold now as well.

One house had built an elaborate graveyard in their front yard, complete with a corpse in body bag! This had a lot of well-hidden lights, and I imagine looked creepy after dark.

The house down the street built a totem pole of skeletons holding up a pumpkin. A lot of work went into this, but I think they should have lit it as well.

As impressive as many of these are, it seems there were fewer displays than usual. We personally aren’t doing anything ourselves, and we bought no candy since it’s so expensive.

We saw lots of homes with bowls out the front like the photo above. Kids help themselves and when the bowl is empty I suppose that’s it. It means the owners don’t need to interact with the kids, which may become the norm in our changing society?

As it got dark we saw some children walking around, but fewer than we used to see in years past. Much less than what we saw at Jessica’s house the last two years.

The best decoration we saw was this animated Cerberus that lit up, growled and breathed ‘fire’ (actually smoke). I’m sure it cost a lot, but it was very effective in the dark!

We’re hiding at home now with all the lights off, about to watch a 1970s exploitation film. For us, that’s a fun Halloween 🙂

Steampunk Jelly

I bought the above construction kit (‘fake LEGO’) in NYC. It was only $40. Was it worth this price?

The above shows the contents. I didn’t look closely enough at the box to realize the extent of the lighting so I was surprised to see it comes with a rechargeable battery and three lights, one of which is a flexible strip:

The strip is triggered by sound and pulses. Like a steampunk jellyfish!

The quality of the pieces is very high and while most were identical to LEGO there was a good quantity of unique parts as well. Construction is done in two halves, each of which utilizes more pieces than is typical for a LEGO kit. The several dozen steps of the first half used almost entirely orange pieces.

And the above are all the pieces for step 2, which is a little excessive don’t you think? Assembly wasn’t difficult but felt more like a technic kit than a normal LEGO one. The grip of the pieces is extremely strong, and my ruined hands found removing incorrectly placed bricks a painful challenge.

The central support is well engineered and very sturdy but supports the jelly with just a single tiny axle which makes the kit surprisingly fragile. Things got worse with the arms attached, and while the finished jelly looks great you wouldn’t want to accidentally bump it!

At about a foot tall, it’s bigger than I expected. It looks better than I expected. It was more fun to build than I expected. And it looks fantastic in the dark:

At $40 this is an absolute steal. Lego would charge twice as much and they wouldn’t even include the light! I’d never heard of this company (Sembo) and likely will never see their products again but based on this alone I’d certainly buy another.

I’m Back!

As you see the blog is back, and with a new URL. The change was due to a critical internet issue (the PHP vulnerability) which needed to be patched immediately.

Thanks to Bernard for taking care of it quicksmart. Normal operation will resume now 🙂