So Halloween's here. If you've been following me long enough, you know that it's close to my favorite holiday. For the last two years I've done The Graveyard Shift, an internet... thingy. The first year it started out strictly as an audio-based webcast, live, all day on October 31st. The first year was a rousing success - I averaged a good 60 listeners or so. The second year, last year, is when I added a video component via Livestream.com. I spent a good two months adding a ton of old hard-to-find Halloween TV specials to it - most of which aren't even on DVD. In addition to that, I also did the audio webcast. Unfortunately, compared to the first year, it was a total failure - I was lucky to get 10 listeners at any one time, which was probably limited to just my friends. This year, I'm going to do The Graveyard Shift one last time - and if it fails again, I'm gonna give up. 
 
All told, things haven't been going to well this Halloween. The Graveyard Shift's Livestream.com account had all of its content deleted - a good 30 hours or so. As I said, it was primarily full of public domain content or out of print TV specials, but I guess Livestream didn't care. The stream was also technically set to be private; Livestream allows you to put whatever you want on your stream, it just won't show up publicly on the channel listing. This, in theory, allows you to create streams of pretty much anything that are only accessible by you and your friends, in a shady "don't ask, don't tell" sort of way. Why all my stuff got deleted is anybody's guess - I could have been pulling too much bandwidth, some self-righteous crusader could have taken a "better safe than sorry" route and reported it, or it could have been a server glitch. The channel itself wasn't shut down (which is typically the case if it gets reported), so who actually knows. I have most of it all backed up on DVD, but I don't think I'll re-upload it.  Maybe I'll just go exclusively public domain as to avoid the gray-area stuff. You'd be surprised what's public domain these days.
 
But I'm still trying to keep my chin up. I've got a new Halloween-themed game in the works, which would have been made and completed in a single weekend, but I hit a snag and it's taken longer than I expected. No, it's not Sonic-related. I've also started uploading Halloween-themed game videos to my Youtube channel, most notably clips of a Half-Life 1 mod called " Afraid of Monsters". Check it out:
 
    
And, as always, there's the requisite viewing of certain movies. I've already gotten " The Monster Squad" and " Monster House" out of the way, but I've also been branching out a little bit - I just got done watching a movie called " Trick 'r Treat". 
 
I'm not too big in to horror movies. A few years ago, gore and gratuitous violence really began to bother me - you can say that I wussed out if you want, and maybe I'll even agree with you. But it's for this very reason I approached "Trick 'r Treat" with a bit of trepidation. Though the movie opens with a disgusting bit of shock schlock, the rest of the movie is a delightfully twisted (and mostly non-gruesome) look at a number of different interconnected stories, all featuring a single overarching theme: If you do not respect Halloween or its legends and traditions, you will pay. The movie is remarkably good at building tension, and as it progresses, it only gets better and better until its thrilling and frightening conclusion.

If you're like me and don't have much tolerance for blood and vomit, it's worth stomaching the first 20-30 minutes of this movie for what is to follow. Happy Halloween, indeed. Maybe next, I'll move on to movies like "John Carpenter's Halloween" - never seen that. I don't think I'm ready for "Friday the 13th" or "Nightmare on Elmstreet" just yet. At this point, though, I think I might be done with "scary" stuff for this season - between "Afraid of Monsters" and now "Trick 'r Treat", the warm fuzzy glow of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" sure looks inviting. 
 
So that's it, I guess. Stay tuned or whenever I get that game done, and please, tune in to the Graveyard Shift's audio webcast on October 31st - it'll be chocked full of your usual blend of Halloween-themed music with the occasional ghost story inbetween songs. You can even listen to it on your PS3 or Wii!