Halloween Mood Table 2012

Happy October! It's the 1st of the month, and I set up my Halloween mood table today. I got the idea from X-Entertainment several years back and last year was my first experience setting up my own. The Halloween mood table was also the post today on Dinosaur Dracula, the spiritual successor to X-Entertainment, which is in the middle of its first Halloween Countdown. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of a Halloween mood table, you can read about it there.

My table this year is a big improvement over last year's, and I imagine it will continue to get more awesome every year as I develop and hone my mood table skills. I again used the coffee table that I regularly have in my room, so during the Halloween season I am without a regular coffee table. As I'm sure you can see, it's clearly worth the temporary sacrifice.

I had the collectable LEGO minifigures on the table last year, but this year the Dracula is a Dinosaur Dracula. The Halloween takeout containers housed prizes I won for my GERTY costume 2 years ago, and I thought the containers were cool. Mmm, blog continuity...

There's a stack of season-appropriate DVD's, a skull candle holder, and Batman: Haunted Knight. I know Krang and Edward Scissorhands don't have anything to do with Halloween, but I knew they wanted to be in on the fun, and I think they fit right in. Pumpkin Pie and Spookylicious Pop-Tarts complete the ensemble. Oh, and there's the purple lights and the table cloth, which is actually a fancy scarf of mine.

A pretty special addition to the table this year is a pair of old computer speakers hidden underneath, which can be easily plugged into my iPod to play Halloween music like "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo,  "Halloween" by Glass Candy, and the All Hallow's EP by AFI.

UPDATE: Check out this entry to see a few more additions to the table.

Annual Halloween Party, Annual Todd

I wrote an entry about being excited about Halloween this year and trying to make it special. My cousin Megan is having her annual family Halloween party on the 30th, and this year I'm actually putting some effort into my costume. I've been working pretty hard on it, and it should be pretty cool, but for now I'm keeping it a secret. Look forward to seeing it though, because after the party (maybe even the day of Halloween) I'll definitely be writing an entry all about it, with photos!

This weekend I'm going over to my good friend Todd's house. I realized the other day that I haven't hungout with him in a year. The last time we hungout was the weekend of the AFI concert last year. In fact, when we hangout this weekend, it will be exactly a year after that concert, as it was on October 16th 2009, and October 16th 2010 is this Saturday. Time goes by really fast.

The NBC Thursday night shows are on tonight. I'm looking forward to the live episode of 30 Rock. Now I'm going to go take a nap until the shows are on. :)

I haven't updated in a long time...

So I guess I'll have to fill you in on what's been going on.

Patrick and Todd and I went to see AFI, and they were amazing. A photographer from the Rochester Insider took a photo of us and put it on the Rochester Insider website along with a couple other pictures of attendees and also of the bands playing. A band called Gallows opened up, but I didn't really like them.

Patrick and I decided to try to get closer to the stage before AFI started playing, because while Gallows was playing, we were leaning against the wall on the side of the room. I know it's rude to be getting in front of other people who were already standing there waiting for the band, but I don't really care. I'm rarely a rude person, and if I want to be closer to the stage to see one of my favorite bands, I'm going to get closer to the stage. Of course, if you can seem a bit less rude, why not try?

So I noticed two females making their way through the crowd of people to get closer to the stage too, so I made the decision to walk behind them. I believe it was a mother and her teenage daughter, and I figured people wouldn't get as annoyed at Patrick and I if we were following these two females. They would get very, very annoyed for other reasons though. One such person got very, very annoyed because as I was walking past her, I stepped on the toe of one of her boots. She was leaning against one of the big posts keeping the balcony up, and she had her feet sticking out really far, so it was her own fault really. I don't think you have any right to get mad at someone for stepping on your feet at a concert, especially when you have them sticking out. The problem was, as I stepped on the toe of her boot and she yelled at me, the mother and daughter I was following had stopped, and I couldn't move forward, so I was just standing on this poor girl's toe, unable to move. She kept yelling at me and there wasn't really anything I could do about it, but give her my "oh well, whatcha gonna do?" face and shrug my shoulders. After a few seconds the mother and daughter started moving again to get closer to the stage. When they found the place they wanted to stand, Patrick and I stopped next to them. I think I really freaked the mom out, because I had followed her all the way to their spot and stood right next to them. I understand how that might seem creepy, but I wasn't following her for a creepy reason, just to take advantage of the fact that she's a female. Okay, that still sounds creepy.

AFI started playing shortly after, and they were so good. Possibly the best I've ever seen them. If not, then the best I've seen them since the first time I saw them. I was very sick and had only just gotten my voice back the day before the show (I had lost my voice for about a week. Couldn't speak above a whisper.), and was concerned I wouldn't be able to sing along, and that if I did, that I'd lose my voice quickly. To my surprise, I sang along the whole show and, if I might say so myself, sounded quite good doing so.

I bought a new AFI shirt, and while I was at the merch table, I had an interesting conversation with the merch guy. I asked him if they carry all of the merchandise with them the whole tour or if they somehow get new merch along the way to avoid having to carry it all over the country. He told me they sell out most of the stuff every few days, and they get new merch shipped to the venues, so it's waiting for them when they get there. They just keep track of what they have and what they've sold so that they get everything they need in the next shipment. I found the conversation to be very interesting, because I've wondered about that for a while. I found it unbelievable that they'd bring enough merch for the whole tour, but I also didn't know what other options there were.

A week before Halloween, my cousin Megan (Patrick's older sister) had a Halloween party. I was going with my mom, and we couldn't go until an hour after it had already started, and my mom wanted to leave early because she had to work in the morning, so I decided to stay for the whole party and then spend the rest of the weekend at the house Patrick is staying at. Right now he's living with his friend Aaron. Aaron also came to the Halloween party. I've met him a few times before, and he's pretty cool. He came to the party as The Red Hood, and as soon as he walked into the room I was blown away by the costume. He had a black pinstripe suit, a red mask, red cape, and purple gloves. He looked like he stepped right out of the pages of The Killing Joke, except his mask looked more like Jason Todd's Red Hood mask than the cylindrical mask Joker wears in The Killing Joke. There was a costume contest, and Aaron won. Interestingly, I was also the Joker, but I was wearing the mask he wore in the beginning of The Dark Knight to rob the bank. Patrick was Iggy Pop. He came to the party with a wig on and jeans, and with muscles painted on his shirtless torso.

The day after the Halloween party, Patrick and Aaron and I walked to Carousel Mall. Aaron decided to leave early to go to some gospel choir performance, but Patrick and I stayed at the mall until it closed. We love being at the mall, and could spend all day there. The next night we all went to Denny's and I had a Texican burger. It was a burger with cooked onions, jalapeno peppers, pepperjack cheese, and barbecue sauce. That thing was delicious. We got some crayons from the front and we each drew Halloween-themed pictures on the back of our paper placemats. Patrick drew a haunted house, Aaron drew a bunch of random stuff including a scarecrow, and I drew Frankenstein's monster. The waiter, who knew both Patrick and Aaron because they're regular customers there, declared me the winner of our drawing contest. We got some dessert to go (I got caramel apple crisp with vanilla ice cream), and we went back to Aaron's to watch some movies. We watched two movies I brought. Clue, and The Road Warrior. Patrick or Aaron hadn't seen either movie. Patrick and I have almost the same taste in movies so I like sharing movies with him.

Lately I've been really busy, because in addition to my part time job as a janitor, I've been painting my uncle's house in Syracuse so it's more presentable for him to sell. The best part of doing that is lunch. A couple different days I've been there, we went to the Green Hills grocery store and I got a couple slices of taco pizza from the deli and some bottles of soda. The first time I got grape soda, and the next time I got black cherry soda.

The music I've been working on recently is for my album. There's a jazzy song I have which has samples of rain and thunder in it. I've been working on a guitar solo for the climax of that song, and it's coming along great, but my fingers hurt from doing the tapping parts so much. I changed the structure of "We're All Lost In Autumn" and have been working on vocal melodies for it. I added this little bit to it (or more accurately took a bit out) so that everything drops out for a measure after the first chorus except for the guitar and then comes back in. It sounds cool, and adds a little more variety to the song. I've also been working on sort of a scrap book for my album. I am using one of my old binders from college, and I bought some dividers for it. I am making each song from my album a section in the binder. I've been putting things in there like pictures or artwork that go along with each song, and lyrical ideas, and also free-writes I do about the meaning or inspiration of each song. When I'm working on a song, I can have the binder open to that song so that I have those pictures and words right there, inspiring me. And I can keep adding more to the binder anytime I want.

So that's most everything I've been doing lately.

Yesterday was rather productive.

I'm changing the name of my music project, and over the past couple months I've been creating profiles for it on various different sites like Myspace, Facebook, Bandcamp... I've even made an Etsy page because I think it would make for an interesting store for my band's merchandise. I really dislike the various online stores made specifically for selling band merch. Having an Etsy account makes it so not only do I not have to deal with those other sites, but it will set me apart from everyone else. I'm very into the whole "do it yourself" or DIY attitude or approach, one of the things I really like about the punk. Unfortunately, many bands wanting to come off as punk do things like have very simple "punk" looking buttons and t-shirts made, but they're made by the big companies that make everyone else's merchandise too, and that punk aesthetic is just a facade, and is really contradictory to what the merchandise really is: simply merchandise made by a company to be sold to make money and that's it really.

The general attitude seems to be "We need to make a shirt to sell, let's just take a black shirt and slap a logo or picture on it. And if we make it look like someone made it with a stencil and spraypaint, it will look very punk!" One of my favorite bands is AFI, and I wish the band members themselves actually put some work into the design of their t-shirts and other items they sell. One of the new t-shirts they're selling in a package with their new album has an octopus on it. Octopi are cool and all, but what does that have to do with the album? Nothing. So since Etsy is all hand-made items, I'm going to be making a lot of really creative items people can buy, things I'd actually find interesting if one of my favorite bands were making it. This includes t-shirts that I will personally print with stencils (designed by me) as opposed to getting them printed by a company or by using cheap iron-on's. I think that would really set me apart from all the other musicians out there who just pay other people to print their shirts for them or use cheap iron-on's. And it would be something I wouldn't feel bad about selling. I'd feel like a terrible person selling someone a t-shirt when I know the graphic on it is going to fade or peel off the first time through the washing machine.

Anyway, that wasn't even the point of this blog entry. I just totally went off on a tangent. One reason yesterday was productive was because I finally have the url www.facebook.com/jacobsshadow on Facebook. They have a lot of ridiculous rules like you have to have a certain amount of fans before you can have a url, and you have to have been on facebook for a certain amount of time. If you have a newer account, it has to be verified. I actually had to get back my old account so I could make it an admin of the page so I could use it to change the url, because my new account isn't verified. So anyway, I finally got the url I want. That's important to me. The url's for all my various sites match.

The other way in which yesterday was productive was the recording I did, which I talked about in my last entry. I didn't know if any of it was usable at the time I wrote the entry, but last night I spent some trying out the clips I recorded, putting them into the song. The first one I did actually had airplane sounds in it. I don't remember there being an airplane when I was recording that one, but apparently there was, because it was loud in the recording. I used two of the six takes in the song, layered over each other, each one slightly panned to a different side. I think it sounds pretty good, and will sound even better when I record the guitar parts for real. For now it's just the demo, which has softsynth guitar sounds filling in for the real guitar parts I am going to record when I'm done writing the song. The recordings of the leaves are a little bit tinny sounding from my camera microphone, but it doesn't bother me. And I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to my music, so if it's good enough for me, it's good enough.

To me it sounds like someone walking in leaves on the recording, but maybe that's because I recorded it so I know what it is. I'm not quite sure if just anyone listening to the song when I release it will be able to tell it's someone walking in dead leaves. Maybe I'll let a few people hear it and see what they think.

Anyway, I'm going to be seeing AFI tonight with Todd and my cousin Patrick. It's hard to believe for some reason. I'm sitting here in my room right now, and sometime this evening I'll be standing in front of a stage watching AFI. Should be a good time.

First post ever!

Some people I think are awesome, like Collin and Austin, have blogs. I felt left out.

I feel like my first post should be something special, but I can't think of anything special, so it's just going to be ordinary. Speaking of ordinary, the word "extraordinary" never sat right with me. I know what it means, but it always seems to me like it should mean "more ordinary", describing something that is exceptionally ordinary. Something so ordinary that it couldn't simply be described as being ordinary. "That's so ordinary that it's extraordinary." You know how sometimes when you say a word a bunch of times it suddenly looks like it isn't even a word anymore, because it just sounds silly. That's happening with "ordinary" right now. Who would read this blog? Seriously.

I like making popsicles out of Jell-O. Jell-O popsicles. It started out with me just using Jell-O. I made some Jell-O, but instead of putting it in the fridge to chill and solidify that way, I poured the colorful liquid into a popsicle mold and put it into the freezer to freeze and solidify that way. It's slimy and delicious, and when it melts, it doesn't drip. It just becomes Jell-O. After a few successful batches, I decided to start getting really creative. Frozen Jell-O has a really interesting texture and consistency, which reminds me of frozen banana, so I got some strawberry banana flavored Jell-O, and cut up a banana, and put it all into the popsicle mold. It was amazing. The banana and Jell-O basically became one entity when they froze. Next I tried "melon fusion" flavored Jell-O and I cut up pieces of watermelon to put in it. When I cut up the watermelon, there was a lot of excess watermelon juice, so I actually used that in place of some of the water in the making of the Jell-O. The frozen watermelon had a really strange texture, but again, it was a total success. After that, I don't know what happened. I tried mixing grape Jell-O with grape Gatorade and freezing it. Terrible. Then the other day I tried this:


One of the worst ideas I've ever had. For some reason, the Jell-O mix didn't even dissolve in the sparkling iced tea. It's too bad too, because I bet it would have tasted amazing. I wasn't feeling very confident before starting either, so I consulted my Oblique Strategies cards.


Interestingly, that was randomly picked from the deck, and it was about recipes. Probably the only card in the deck about recipes. Of course, I still didn't really know how to interpret it, so I don't think it even helped me.

Anyway, in other news, my A Fire Inside tickets came in the mail yesterday. My cousin Patrick, and my friend Todd, and I are going to see AFI on October 16th, and it's going to be a good time. It will be my fourth time seeing AFI live. It will be Patrick's second time, and Todd's second time.


I saw AFI for the first time in 2003 after Sing The Sorrow came out, and then twice again in 2006 after DecemberUnderground came out. Of the two times I saw them in 2006, one time I went with Patrick, and the other time was with Todd.