For Halloween 2013 I decided to be the Dread Pirate Roberts from the movie The Princess Bride:
I even grew a slight moustache to help make the character believable:
But to be clear, I wasn’t just any old Dread Pirate Roberts. I decided to be the Silk Road Dread Pirate Roberts. So if you want to buy some Iocaine powder, it’ll cost you five bitcoins:
By the way, I did have a couple Penguin masks and a tuxedo. I thought about doing a Penguin costume, but decided not to. Maybe next year?
My fellow Americans, I’d like to introduce my latest Halloween costume: Matt Romney!
My five-point plan for the Mitt Romney Halloween costume went like this:
This was a fun, easy, comfortable costume. I practiced a few of Mitt Romney’s catchphrases and I think people really enjoyed seeing “Matt Romney” around the Googleplex.
My wife and I are also trying something new for Halloween. I remember as a kid when I got a full-size candy bar for Halloween–it blew me away! I still remember those neighbors as really cool. Recently someone reminded me of that experience.
So this year, the first couple dozen kids who stop by our house are in for a nice treat:
Happy Halloween, everyone! You might also enjoy seeing some of my other Halloween costumes.
For Halloween this year I asked people on Google+ what I should be for Halloween, and someone suggested going as the blackhat stick man from xkcd. You know, this guy:
That sounded like a good challenge. I finished the costume and taped a video, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to get the video to the quality level that I wanted. Here’s the video:
A couple quick things: 1) I know the video is cheesy and lo-fi, but that’s what I was going for. 2) With a little more time and more work on the video (e.g. better lighting, turning off automatic brightness on the video camera, a little more time spent on the greenscreen key) I think it could have been pretty great. But sometimes you run out of time, and October was a busy month. 🙂
Maybe I’ll write a bit more about the costume and the video later. Happy Halloween everyone!
I made a Portal turret for my Halloween pumpkin! I was trying to think of things to carve: vampire Android? R2-D2? Zoidberg? Then I thought: I could do a character from Portal 2! I was going to carve something like GLaDOS or Wheatley, but then I realized that a portal turret would be perfect:
To make the glowing red eye, I punched a small hole in the pumpkin, taped an LED to a battery, and pushed the LED from the center of the pumpkin through the small hole. I thought about doing an actual red laser, but 1) I don’t want to blind any kids walking by my pumpkin, and 2) laser beams aren’t visible unless there’s fog or smoke or something for the beam to hit.
To make the side “gun” sections of the pumpkin, I had a small dowel rod lying around, so I just cut two small stakes from the dowel rod and jammed them into the pumpkin sides. It’s a bit rickety, but it works. For the video, I played some turret sound effects and moved my red laser over the pumpkin as if another turret was locking onto it.
I didn’t want to take long to carve my pumpkin. I finished it in maybe an hour, but check out this really elaborate pumpkin that someone else did. And it turns out that they work at Google too!
I like how my pumpkin came out overall:
Happy Halloween, and I hope you’re getting creative with your pumpkin carving!
I got the inspiration for this year’s Halloween costume from a parade in Modesto, California. I’ve dressed up as some silly stuff in previous years, so I wanted something cool this year. And there’s not much cooler than a ninja! Here I am showing off my ninja costume:
(Click to see a full-size image.)
I tried to be authentic. Check out the details of my costume and shuriken:
(Click to see a full-size image.)
The best part about this costume is that when kids ring our doorbell, I’ll go into stealth mode. They’ll never even notice as I silently drop to the ground behind them, pad up on split-toe tabi boots to drop candy in their bags, then fade into the shadows. I’m looking forward to trick-or-treaters this year. And I can even use the costume after Halloween to slip up behind spammers.
Thanks to the ninja parade for inspiring my ninja costume this year!
