DescentBB

Halloween sucks. My least favorite holiday. Die, die, die.

Oi, it's Discount Candy Day, and that is an awesome holiday!

!?! How can you hate Halloween !?!
I love Halloween. All you need to buy is candy, no expensive gifts for people you rarely ever see...
And there's always some candy left over for you too.

Not even beginning to mention the spookfest...

Actually... tomorrow is discount candy day.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love the candy and the decorations and such, but I hate the fact that this holiday is just an excuse for adolescent brats to go out and trash your property if you don't pony up the best, most expensive treats one can buy. It's a holiday that worships extortion and wanton destruction as normal entertainment. One of my neighbors had the back of his van door caved in by someone who throw a pumpkin into it as a "prank".

On top of that, I live in a neighborhood that's perceived by half the city as having more wealth, and as such, must be able to give out bigger and more expensive candy. So the parents drive their kids here from all over town for that very reason, a bigger and better haul. We get hundreds of kids and I just can't afford it anymore.

i started at the bottom of this thread, scrolling up towards the OP slowly and carefully, as soon as i saw the edge of OP's pic i rightclicked and checked it wasn't a gif, then slowly scrolled it into full view.

heh.

BONUS:
Here's a video on howto make skin prosthetics (like for zombie bites) very quickly, in about a day.
(Honestly i was more interested in the technique as a promising method to quick prototype sex toy designs, but hey different strokes for different folks.)

tunnelcat wrote:...It's a holiday that worships extortion and wanton destruction as normal entertainment. One of my neighbors had the back of his van door caved in by someone who throw a pumpkin into it as a "prank"...

Doesn't sound anything like the kids I know. Or the Halloween I know for that matter. Maybe you should come to Winnipeg. It seems wherever you live is a far less friendly place.

As for the caving in of a van door, you should call the authorities to report it as vandalism TC -- or at least urge your neighbors to. Halloween or not; that's not a prank, it's a crime. And if the police don't share that opinion then go over their heads -- someone needs to wake them up.

when i was of that age, we didnt do that much ★■◆● like destroying property other than the occasional smoke or stink bomb in the pumpkin. but caving in a van door? now comon, that would issue a retaliation order on my part. or a 911 call after locally and non-violently detaining the said person.

It's stupid. I've never seen anything like that happen and I've spent Halloween in more than this one neighborhood (which is admittedly one of the friendlier ones of the city). And if they somehow think it will encourage people to give them nuts instead of kicking them in the nuts...

Pumpkin throwing and egging seem to be the vandalism of choice for young American adolescent males. Pumpkins smashed in the street is one thing, but quite a few seem to like to smash car windows and doors with them. As for catching them, good luck. They're gone in a flash. Same with throwing eggs. I may seem like innocent fun, but if you don't get the stuff off of car paint pretty quickly, it will etch it.

Maybe kids in Canada are more respectful of other people's property. But in America, some neighborhoods look like war zones after Halloween. But I will have to say that the kiddies were very nice this year. One year, a boy came to the door with a live rat on his shoulder. He probably thought he was going to scare the crap out of any woman who answered the door. Well, I surprised him by asking about his pet and how he trained it to stay on his shoulder. Bet I blew his little scare "trick" out the window.

Must be the city or state that you live in, TC, if that behavior is normal to you.

It certainly isn't normal to me. I abhor it. There's even a whole wikiHow site on how to protect your home from pranksters.

http://www.wikihow.com/Protect-Your-Hom ... -Vandalism

Maybe it evolved from this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_Night

It sounds like they're constantly pranking your area. That's not normal.

tunnelcat wrote:One year, a boy came to the door with a live rat on his shoulder. He probably thought he was going to scare the crap out of any woman who answered the door. Well, I surprised him by asking about his pet and how he trained it to stay on his shoulder. Bet I blew his little scare "trick" out the window.

True kitty ROWR.

tunnelcat wrote:...throwing eggs. I may seem like innocent fun...

It doesn't seem like fun and it definitely isn't innocent.

And it just supports the assertation that you should go to the police. I think you'd be surprised at the tools they have in their arsenal and the things they can do to deter the vandalism before it even starts. It's not your job to figure out how they're going to catch the vandals or how they'll prevent it from happening again -- that's their job. But if they're not doing anything then someone needs to give them a wake up call. And if they are doing something about it then it's not working and someone needs to give them a wake up call anyway. And if they refuse to do anything about it because it's "normal", or it's "just one night of the year", or any other reason, then something needs to be done about them as well. To put it in jack@** terms, your taxes pay their salary so you're entitled to their help.

This isn't something you should just let happen.

tunnelcat wrote:One of my neighbors had the back of his van door caved in by someone who throw a pumpkin into it as a "prank"...

A lifetime of Hollywood slapstick (foodfights, piefights, etcetc) has given many people the impression that anything made of food is unable to kineticly damage anything else. People also tend to think of a lot of common objects as practically indestructible unless 2 of them crash into eachother, cars are one of them, houses can be another. I'd bet they thought the pumpkin would just explode against the mighty car making a mess of pumpkin gore.

it's kinda interesting why kids instinctively like to destroy things, why we have a near pornographic attraction to watching destruction (either in progress, or just rubbernecking at the aftermath of a crash scene). It's coz we want to gain an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us. It's what almost all "Play" is, why we do it, and inherently why it's fun (and yeah adults keep doing it too). Take things apart to see what's inside, throw things at other things to see what happens, bend dent and snap things to learn how strong things are. etcetc. It's just so cool how we don't even have to think about it, we just do it, it's instinctual to destructively test your environment until you learn enough


i guess what i'm sayin... is that this situation could perhaps have been avoided if these kids were allowed to (no... ENCOURAGED) to destroy things and blow ★■◆● up their whole childhood in a safe(ish) environment. Not just let "boys be boys", but outright encourage and celebrate it.
Get it outof their system, learn the intuitive lessons their brains are instinctually trying to learn, "pumpkins are heavy" and "Cars are quite destructible" are in there.

[youtube]23Uuehgmd14[/youtube]

i guess i could throw some Lenore Skenazy in there too for extra rah rah rah .

Nah, "Play" is training for being predator or prey later in life.

Hey roid, I think in most older societies, young, testosterone soaked males were the ones who were sent off to fight and pillage in war as warriors. The reasoning was that they needed to find an outlet for those usual coming-of-age violent urges and that going to war would help sublimate those urges, far from home. At the very least, it would wear them out so that they eventually settled down to farm, hunt and raise families like peaceful members of society. Maybe we should bring back the draft for all young males, so as to get all that unfocused testosterone-laced mayhem burned out of their systems by playing war. It would sure save on property damages.

Or maybe we could just stop taking away everything that is fun…like mini-bikes, and build more recreation facilities. (sadly lacking in many cities)

whenever my cat makes a face like that, he goes right for my face.

Spidey wrote:Or maybe we could just stop taking away everything that is fun…like mini-bikes, and build more recreation facilities. (sadly lacking in many cities)

Are you saying that destroying people's property is a "fun" activity? I'm certainly not advocating taking away "fun things", even if they are dangerous. If kids want to hurt themselves, go ahead. It's no skin off my back, even though it raises my insurance rates. I'm saying we need to take away fun things that involve trashing other people's things. There's a difference.

Ferno wrote:whenever my cat makes a face like that, he goes right for my face.

Especially the one on the left in the picture with it's ears laid back. That's cat speak for: "I'm gonna mess you up bad if you don't get outta my face dude".

Ferno wrote:whenever my cat makes a face like that, he goes right for my face.

When my cat makes this face



it means my cat has gone for my face to take a nap.

EWWWWW! Cat drool!

Carrrrrnivore...
carrrnivooooore...

No I don't get me either.