Spooky Portraits

There's something about old portraits, particularly in period frames, that gives me spooky vibes.  It's probably related to old movies and television shows where human eyes peered through the portraits:

The Andy Griffith Show "The Haunted House", season 4, episode 2

Or portraits of ladies that had gardening sheers stuck in their throat. IN THE THROAT!:

"The Ghost and Mr. Chicken"

AI is On to Me

 Last week, I made a post as an experiment to demonstrate AI's tendency to propagate inaccurate or completely false information by indiscriminately scraping whatever is posted on the internet.  Like the "Hog Waller Hollerer", it took the bait, but called me out.

This morning, I decided to follow up on my post by Googling: "The Hog Waller Hollerer Cryptid" and was presented with this:

Uncanny Finds -- Beich Brittle Brilliants

This is a fresh find from this past weekend. It's not exactly Halloween, but it's orange and black and it once contained candy, so fair game.

Halloween Revisited -- Don't Lose Your Head

Today we revisit 2016 again and this heady find.

When I saw this shrunken head hanging from a bar at an estate sale, I immediately grabbed it.  Well, first I made sure it wasn't real.

Halloween Revisited -- Wacky Memories

It's the weekend and you know what that means? That's right! Repeats!  It's time for another Halloween Revisited post.  This one is from 2017.

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These days for Halloween treats, people favor handing out pre-packaged candies; the treat you receive from one house indistinguishable from the next.  When I Trick or Treated as a kid, I might receive a candy bar at one house, a comic book at another, and wax Wowe-e Whistles, money, popcorn balls or apples at others. One of my earliest Trick or Treating memories when I was around 7 involved what I thought was an odd treat at the time, but in hindsight was pretty cool and appropriate. I received this Wacky Packages sticker.

Cat Nap(kin)

Today we have a napkin to go with our paper plate.  Another purchase from the same sale, this napkin predates the plate by at least 20 years.  While the witch interpretation is cuter than scary, the style of art dates it to no later than the 1950's.  I love the Jack O' Lantern and demonic cat. It leaps into the scene seemingly bowling our little witch over.

AI -- Now that's Scary

 One of my posts this season set off a flurry (okay a few comments) about the use of AI.

As I said, I have a love/hate relationship with it.  I mostly hate AI imagery and I don't like AI being used as a competent substitute for skilled workers because in its current state, it's not.  It does have its place and I've used it for humorous purposes as well as a lead when researching things.  But I don't stop at the AI overview like many people do.

Where I work, our managers actually encourage us to use AI and when I'm shown some "answer" to a complex question by a person who simply Googled it and relied on AI, I push back and explain how AI works, how anything on the internet can influence the answers and that you have to check sources.

One of my blog posts has proven my point.  A friend of mine, after reading that blog post about my memories of Bigfoot mania in 1977, Googled, looking for why there may have been an increase in attention in Bigfoot in the St. Louis area in 1977.  He found this: