What Not To Wear: Halloween Edition

Well it’s the first of October, y’all. And you know what that means, right? Time to start doing something you should have been doing for the past twelve months: planning your Halloween costume. And while I don’t know what the perfect costume is (and if I did I wouldn’t give it away), I can tell you what to avoid this season.

   1)   Bulky Costumes. It’s Halloween weekend, people. This is the weekend when even those who don’t party, party. Kitchens, living rooms, hallways, and creepy murky basements are going to be jam-PACKED with literally everyone. So don’t be the douche who goes as a centaur and has a whole horse sticking out his ass. You’ll make some enemies.

   2)   “I’m a nudist on strike”. This one is just lazy, unoriginal, and trivializing to the Nudist Strike efforts. 

   3)   Costumes that are too cold. The end of October signals the end of temperatures where you can wear nothing but a strapless mini dress and live to tell the tale. And while you may look smoking hot in a backless halter and Daisy Dukes, your hypothermia-blackened fingers and the deluge of snot flowing out your nose will drastically lessen your appeal.

   4)   Costumes that are too hot. Yes, this goes against number 3, but think about it. Houses will be absolutely crammed with hundreds of dancing, jumping, excited college students. It’s gonna get toasty. How to balance between the freezing tundra of the outdoors and the uncomfortably moist sauna that is a party basement? LAYERS.

   5)   “Slutty” versions of specific people. Take any occupation, make it slutty, and you have yourself a perfect Halloween costume. It’s when you get specific that you get into trouble. Going as “slutty Helen Keller” won’t make you any friends.

And on a related note…

   6)   Costumes that will get you punched. See above.

   7)   Group costumes that don’t make sense by themselves. My friends and I once went as one potato two potato three potato four. We each wore big brown t-shirts filled with stuffing, bearing the numbers one through four. Inevitably, at many moments during the night we were not directly next to each other, and I just looked like a giant third base. Not what I was going for.

   8)   Expensive costumes. Chances are, you will not find another context to wear your Halloween costume until next Halloween, and you don’t want to be the loser who wears the same costume every year. So do yourself a favor and don’t empty your bank account buying yourself a boa constrictor so that you can be Britney Spears. This is Vermont. Go into the woods and catch your own snake. It’s free!

But worst of all…

   9)   No costume. “Dressing up is so immature.” Ok, buzzkill, you can stay home with a vinyl of Bach’s symphonies on the record player, while reading Hawthorne novels and sipping a glass of scotch. The rest of us will be acting like five year olds and having a fucking great time. 

YE OLDE BABBLES OF BEAST

Beautyful portraits of ye olde majestique animals, desecrated with nonsense.

Flirty Bertie tries to get laid: Issue II

Flirty Bertie is back! Enjoy.

By Shannon Ward

I now present.... BEAST BABBLE!!!

Beautiful pictures of majestic creatures....
desecrated by inane babble!




(click on the expand button in the right hand corner to see the comic in it's full glory!)

3 (and a half) BLOGS TO CHECK OUT

1. MITT AND ROB: This tumblr takes the spleen sprainingly hilarious @MittRomney tweets of stand up comedian and twitter overlord Rob Delaney and makes corresponding illustrations. The comedic genius of this blog is many faceted. First, the tweets themselves are prime material for hilarious imagery. Like, how can you read this:

without picturing something so bizarre and off-putting as to make you laugh through the queasiness?

Every picture shows Delaney (with only a green speedo on his outrageously hairy body, of course!) tagging along with Mitt on his campaign trail. The pictures sometimes correspond directly with the content of his tweet, for example this is the picture for the aforementioned tweet:

What I like about this artist is that they don’t always concern themselves with drawing literal interpretations of Delaney’s bizarre thoughts. Sometimes the tweets are just set to random pictures of the two of them together on the campaign trail, such as this one:

I like this because it’s funny to think of Delaney, a very funny yet very progressive and intellectual human being, wandering through the clusterfuck that is Romney’s campaign alongside him.

(Actually, upon reflection, Romney getting advice from an irreverent weirdo with a liberal agenda may actually explain a shitton about his campaign strategy. I mean, how else would he have thought getting a spray tan to meet Latino voters was anything other than a seriously misguided decision? Think about it.)

2. MEME-Y BLOGS

This next recommendation is not actually a single blog but a number of blogs with a similar concept. The internet is nothing if not redundant, and these blogs all show there is beauty and humor to be found in repetition. There is a genre of blogs that devote themselves to a single meme by adding a single picture (or gif) in other pictures. While it might seem silly, there is a tremendous amount of creativity in choosing a picture that would be an appropriate background.

Some of my favorites of these include these two:

• Mo Farah Running Away From Things
• Lana Del Rey Dancing

But my all time favorite of these HAS to be One Tiny Hand.

Such finesse! A concept that is truly elegant in it’s simplicity! Take photos of celebrities and shrink one of their hands! It creates pictures that are just the perfect amount of WTF that you may not immediately notice what’s wrong with the pictures. It has the added bonus of making even the most cool, beautiful, and graceful celebrities look totally ridiculous. Look at this picture of the president:

Although the concept is always the same (it’s never a tiny foot or tiny nose) the altered pictures throw me off guard and make me giggle every time.

3. I TOUCHED YOUR DRIFTWOOD

Before you freak out, that’s not a link to a marine themed porn blog. The creator of ITYD started this blog when they found a lost digital camera on the beach of Montauk NY. There were a bunch of pictures of a group of 20 something’s aquatic vacation. The pictures themselves were a banal combination of group selfies, but the author of this blog decided to invent characters for each of the members of the photos (with ridiculous names like “Peaches” and “Sarlaac”) and label each photo with rather lengthy descriptions. The camera had a ton of photos, of which the author added several per day.

Don’t get too excited though. The blog exploded in popularity, and someone was able to locate whom the camera belonged to. Unfortunately for us, the owner of the camera was less then enamored with their pictures being made fun of by a stranger and viewed by over 50000 other strangers on the internet (who knew?). The original photos are not up anymore, but you can see the remnants of the blogs former glory. Someone sent the author a SD card of another lost digital camera to have them help find its owner. I’m hoping this becomes a trend and the creative and funny author is given even more material to work with. If you or anyone you know found a lost camera that you don’t know what to do with, this is a viable solution! If not, enjoy what the blog offers and spread the word.

AND THE HALF

I did not really feel right including this website as an actual entry on this list, because I’m not sure the format constitutes a blog. It’s a compilation video site called Wimp that is updated with 5 new videos every day. The videos vary in length from seconds to 30 minutes, but they are all AWESOME and fairly obscure (yay hipsters!). But seriously, these videos come from all over the world, and range in content from hilarious and inane to breathtakingly beautiful. There are videos about all topics, including clips from really informative science/technology documentaries or just cute videos of cats.

There have been many videos I’ve seen on Wimp that I can’t even find on Youtube or Google video (but all the videos are embedded on Wimp itself so it’s not taking you to sketchy/dangerous websites). It’s a great site to check everyday or to just go on once in a while and watch a ton at once (it keeps everything all former posts archived). It also has a search bar to find videos from a specific topic or to find one you saw before. This may seem like a basic aspect of any website, but I frequent some websites where finding something you saw on the site hours ago is an impossible task (I’M LOOKING AT YOU REDDIT!)

So blog or not, definitely worth checking out.

THE ONLY THING

more off-putting then having to constantly degrade myself by proving I'm a human when commenting on blogs is knowing that it is someones job to write/code them (and presumably photograph random numbers). My deepest sympathies.

GRANT ME YOUR WISDOM, INTERWEB FOLK

So I am also creating a webcomic, but unfortunately I lack any of Shannon's artistic skill. Luckily opportunity presented itself in the form of about 600 fantastic and beautiful photographs of animals taken by a friend of mine while she was studying abroad in Botswana. Thus, Beast Babble was created.

This is a very rough first draft of my first comic. It certainly needs a lot of improvement but being as aesthetically hindered as I am, I would greatly appreciate some advice as to how to go about editing it!

Please don't hold back. Make me cry if you have to. tell me it's stupid. tell me it's ugly. tell me it looks like I vomited all over pictures of beautiful creatures. My grades on the line for this.




For some reason Pixton changed altered the format and I can't figure out how to have it publish correctly at this time so here's the link.