Even a ghost can be traumatized by a scary experience and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This is from Boston band Hallelujah the Hills.

Case-in-point: over the course of 4 months in quarantine, lead singer Ryan Walsh decided to make a stop-motion music video for their song "The Memory Tree," from the band's recent album I'm You. He handcrafted little ghost puppets and tiny ghost houses and put together a whole elaborate world to tell a whimsical story of spirits and transdimensional discovery, in the style of a classic silent film.

-via Boing Boing

The West Coast rock poster art of the 1960s was a phenomena then, and are collector's items now. Poster designers became famous in the art world -or some of the men did. Women who designed and printed psychedelic op art posters were overlooked, considered eye candy who were obviously just assisting the men who really created art. One of these was Donna Wallace-Cohen, then named Donna Herrick, who couldn't even get her name in a photo caption about the art. In San Francisco, she created posters for concerts by the Grateful Dead and The Doors, commissioned by the Love Conspiracy Commune. She also painted topless waitresses at Whisky A-Go-Go. Not paintings of them, but the actual waitresses.    

Wallace-Cohen’s next poster for the Love Conspiracy Commune advertised an evening at Winterland with the Grateful Dead, billed as The First Annual Love Circus, hence the psychedelic circus tent and giraffes in the center of Wallace-Cohen’s complex composition. “I think you had to be stoned to see it,” she says. “The colors were printed wrong,” she adds, “which made the lettering harder to read, but that also made it better.”

Today, Wallace-Cohen’s poster for this show is probably her most prized. A copy of the poster is owned by the Achenbach Foundation, the print-collection and paper-conservation arm of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and it marks the first time the Grateful Dead performed at Winterland, making it a favorite of Deadheads and rock-poster collectors alike. But on the night of March 3, 1967, the show almost didn’t go on when a Haight-Ashbury group called the Diggers picketed the show over the then-high price of $3.50 per ticket. For a while, the Dead refused to take the stage until enough of the Diggers had been admitted into the former ice rink for free.

The Diggers were apparently onto something when it came to their distrust of the Love Conspiracy Commune. Two months later to the day, San Francisco’s finest arrested eight people associated with the commune at a home in the city’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood—it turned out to be a front for a meth lab.

Wallace-Cohen eventually left San Francisco, but kept making art, which evolved over time. Read the adventures of an underrated artist who deserves notice at Collectors Weekly.

Inverness Caledonian Thistle don’t employ a cameraman as their camera is programmed to follow the ball throughout the match. The commentator had to apologise today as the camera kept on mistaking the ball for the linesman’s head... pic.twitter.com/LeKsc2bEj7

— Tom Cox (@seagull81) October 24, 2020

The Scottish football team Inverness Caledonian Thistle decided to forego paying a cameraman and employed a robotic artificial intelligence algorithm to operate the camera for games. This is an important job, as spectators are banned from attending games due to the pandemic.  

The club announced a few weeks ago it was moving from using human camera operators to cameras controlled by AI. The club proudly announced at the time the new "Pixellot system uses cameras with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology" and would be used to capture HD footage of all home matches at Caledonian Stadium, which would be broadcast directly to season-ticket holders' homes.

Cut to last Saturday, when the robot cameras were given a new challenge that hadn't been foreseen: A linesman with a bald head.

The robotic camera operator couldn't help but focus on the referee's head, which is stunningly round and white, instead of the ball in play. While this kept the action on the sidelines for viewers, there were plenty of jokes about how this improved the broadcast, "given the usual quality of performance." You can see a highlight video of the game at IFLScience. -via Metafilter

Longtime Neatorama readers know that Josh Sundquist comes up with amazing Halloween costumes every year that utilize the fact that he has only one leg. He's also an athlete, so he can do some pretty amazing things with his ideas. This year, he is Baby Groot! If you've been keeping up over the years, you can skip ahead to 2:40 to see him walking around as Baby Groot, and how the costume was made. -via reddit

What remains of the band AC/DC have been doing some publicity for their new album Power Up, and in one of the interviews, singer Brian Johnson told a story involving the late guitarist Malcolm Young and the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, alcohol was involved, as you might guess. And fireworks.  

“We both had these Land Rovers and we’d taken them for a trip around Scotland – Malcolm loved his fireworks and he’d taken a big box with him," Johnson said, looking back at the humorous event.

"One night, we were four sheets to the wind and staying at this hotel right on the side of the loch," he continued. "Mal just said, 'C’mon, let’s go and find the Loch Ness monster! I’ve got fireworks and it might attract it!'"

In their inebriated state, this appeared to make perfect logical sense.

Read what happened that night at Loudwire. -via Strange Company

For the 35th anniversary celebration of Back to the Future, Universal Pictures put together a tribute from various artists and animators using widely varying styles. You'll be glad to know that unlike other "reimagined" projects, this one doesn't try to match the feature film shot-by-shot, so it's an enjoyable four minutes long. -via Boing Boing

Among the Akan people of West Africa, rules passed down from generation to generation show how to be respectful of the earth itself. One rule is that you do not go into the forest on Thursday. No hunting and no farming, because Thursday is a sacred day for the gods to find solitude. That day of rest is enforced by a deity called sasabonsam, a fierce being with glowing eyes and terrifying teeth who will destroy those who flout the rule, or maybe send them back traumatized and damaged as a warning to others.   

It is said that a sasabonsam immediately begins tracking a farmer or hunter who dares to venture into the forest on a Thursday. It’s been reported that the creature plays with its victims like a cat might play with a mouse, stalking prey as if by instinct, even when they’re not hungry. It might jump from tree to tree, or tap a victim’s shoulder with its tail. Once the sasabonsam has had its fill of taunting, it will stretch down to the forest floor to snatch up its prey, biting its neck, draining its blood, and gorging on its flesh and bone.

“These stories and legends [of the sasabonsam] are used to educate and socialize people,” Nrenzah says, something she has honored in her own life. “The same stories I heard as a kid are the same stories I tell my children.” They are cautionary tales carrying moral lessons about the necessity to respect the land.

The legend of sasabonsam has gone through some changes, particularly when Christian missionaries needed an understandable stand-in for the devil. Read about sasabonsam as he was originally conceived at Atlas Obscura.

The article is part of a series called Monster Mythology, which looks at lesser-known but scary legendary figures from around the world.

(Image credit: Staehle/Unusual Co.)

While artificial intelligence is getting better all the time, its bizarre shortcomings still can make us laugh. Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) attempted to train a neural network to generate Halloween costumes before, with mostly disappointing results, because the concept is quite broad. This year, she added a 2020 dimension to the experiment to include social distancing, meaning the costumes must be designed to be seen at a distance. While the algorithm kind of "got" what she was going for, the results are still quite odd.

These are only a small sampling of the strange Halloween costume ideas generated by AI that you can read about at AI Weirdness.

If 1994 was an important year in your life, you will love The Hood Internet's new mashup of 60 songs from that year. If not, you'll enjoy revisiting at least some of the songs. As for me, video clues made me listen carefully for certain NSFW lyrics, which did not show up. I wish they had included more of "Black Hole Sun." Even if you don't recognize any of the songs, the groove is nice to listen to.

Now that audiences are used to state-of-the-art effects and high quality film delivery, movies that are decades older suffer by comparison. Watching a horror film from the 1970s today, we are distracted by the obviously fake blood that doesn't look at all like the real thing. To understand what filmmakers got away with back then, we need to run through the history of fake blood. The most popular formula was that of Nextel Simulated Blood, developed by 3M and sold by the gallon.   

The distance between Nextel’s blood and the real stuff didn’t go unnoticed. Reviewing Argento’s Deep Red for The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film “an English-dubbed Italian-made bucket of ax-murder-movie clichés thoroughly soaked in red paint that seems intended to represent fake blood. I don’t think that Dario Argento, the director, meant to distance us from the action in this way. He’s simply a director of incomparable incompetence.” History has largely sided with Argento over Canby, at least when it comes to the overall quality of the director’s classic films. Argento’s blood, however, is another matter. “I was watching clips of Deep Red last night,” Shostrom says, “and it was the same thing. … Even as a kid, I’m thinking, ‘God, didn’t these people ever cut themselves and try to make something that matched?’” If you’re wondering whether Shostrom is joking, he’s not—Smith’s guide actually advises doing this very thing.

Filmmakers will argue over whether realistic blood is necessary or even desirable for a horror film, but you have to admit it looks more real in newer movies. Read the history of fake blood and the cost of authenticity at the Ringer. -via Digg

Presenting: a new Homestar Runner cartoon! Sadly, this will be the only one this year. In this Halloween special, familiar characters solve a Scooby-Doo-esque mystery -with no dog, which highlights how superfluous the dog was. Then they show off their Halloween costumes. Longtime fans will catch all kinds of self-references, while everyone else can just enjoy the chaos. -via Metafilter

Scientists have grown human brain tissue from stem cells, producing tiny clumps of tissue called organoids. Neuroscientist Alysson Muotri is among many scientists who have used such organoids for all kinds of research.

But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies1. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

Now ethicists are trying to create guidelines for lab-grown brain organoids. Some scientists would welcome the possibility of producing a conscious brain from stem cells, while others shudder at the moral implications. How developed can a brain get before it is unethical to use it for experiments? And how do you measure consciousness when a brain has no way to communicate? How do we even define consciousness for this purpose? Read some deep thoughts about lab-grown brains that may or may not have their own deep thoughts at Nature. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Fabio Buonocore)

The winners have been announced in the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards for 2020! The overall winner is the picture above, in which Terry the turtle flips the bird. Is he sending a message to the photographer? That would be Mark Fitzpatrick, who caught this image at Lady Elliot Island along the Great Barrier Reef. It also won the "creatures of the sea" category. The "creatures on the land" award went to Charlie Davidson for this picture of a raccoon waking up and having a stretch.

See all the winners and some hilarious highly commended photos in the winner's gallery. -via Bored Panda

Steven Novak of Dallas, Texas, went all out with his Halloween decorations this year, turning his front yard into the scene of a gruesome multiple murder. Several bodies plus disembodied parts are laid out among puddles of blood and gore, while zombies are at the window, trying to get out.

“I’m most proud of the wheelbarrow tipped over by the street full of Hefty bags, looking like a failed attempt to dispose of the dismembered bodies in the middle of the night.” Novak says. “A kid walked by and asked me what happened to them; I said they ate too many Skittles.”

Officers from the Dallas Police Department have gone to the home numerous times, responding to calls from those who drive or walk by. He said the cops are cool with it, but they have to respond to each call. Read more at the Dallas Observer. You can see additional pictures at Facebook here and here. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Steven Novak)

When the climate gets warm enough, we may have to turn to desperate measures, like altering our own atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong? Putting stuff up in the stratosphere to block the sun's rays might work, but that has happened before, like in 1816, the year without a summer. Besides, we'd probably need solar energy just to launch the scheme, which is akin to biting off our noses to spite our faces. Or it might work. Kurzgesagt has some details. -via Damn Interesting