Halloween Headstone Puns

WHERE IS IT?!?

I could not find answer in search, sorry if this is a duplicate question!

Typed up from the physical magazine, apologies for any errors.

>A typical night in Las Vegas' Gold Coast casino and hotel. Amid the echoing chorus of slot machines and roulette wheels nobody notices the scantily clad young hooker running for her life, nor her breathless male pursuer still buckling up his trousers and tripping over unlaced shoes. Only when he catches her do players turn their heads, drawn by the blood curdling yelps as she repeatedly jams him in the face with one of her high heels. It was, as a young bellhop eyewitness by the name of Brandon Flowers recalls, like something out of a movie. That same night Flowers was called to a hospital where his mother had been rushed with a heart complaint. Sat opposite him in the emergency room was the poor stiletto-bruised dupe, grimly inhaling through a breathing apparatus. "I mean, what are the odds of that?" he smiles. "The hooker took his wallet and tried to ditch him. He obviously had health problems. But that's..." he shakes his head, smirking. "That's Las Vegas."

>As Flowers is keen to emphasize, Sin City is deservedly nicknamed. It's July 2010 and we're driving down Las Vegas Boulevard in the singer's silver Audi sports car. He's pointing out his hometown's less salubrious landmarks. "These are a bit seedy," he sniggers as we cruise past a string of Bates-esque motels. "The kind of place where you can rent a room for half an hour."

>The Vegas skyline, Flowers explains, has changed dramatically since his youth, but not the brazen promotion of human vice. "It used to be more about families," he sighs ruefully. "Now it's just...sex! There's trucks driving up and down the strip carrying billboards with a number to call and have women come to your room. That always existed. But now their asses are in your face."

>It's this wicked underbelly to Vegas' dreamland glitz that Flowers scratches as never before on Flamingo, his debut solo offering recorded on hiatus from The Killers. While local pride has always played its part in his group's ethos - naming 2006 second album Sam's Town after the casino near his Aunt Joyce's house - on Flamingo (also titled after a local thoroughfare) Flowers all but nails himself in the heart of the city, an indie pop martyr symbolically purging its sins upon a neon cross: "Catalogs of concubines!" "Dreamers! Harlots!" "Cocaine and lady luck!" Is it really that bad?

>"Well, you know the slogan for the town is, What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," s

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

I know this sounds stupid but I have been really worried about being a bad mom to my son who passed away last month. I know he isn't here anymore and he only lived for a few hours, but he is still my baby and I want to be a good mom to him. I feel so guilty because I'll make plans to go to his grave to visit him and bring little gifts but lately stuff has been getting in the ways of my original plans.

Like for Halloween I wanted to go to his grave with my other kids and show him everyone's costumes. But I found out the changed the day they were doing trick or treating in town last minute. So instead I went on Halloween and showed him pictures, but that wasn't what I wanted. Then for my birthday I wanted to go sit and talk to him for a while while my other kids were at school. But I ended up having to go to the er because my c-section was showing sings of infection. So I didn't get to his grave until late and dark and only stayed long enough to put a reef I made him on his grave and tell him I loved and missed him. There have been other times like this as well.

I already feel super crappy because I can't afford a headstone. It makes me feel like such a failure as his mom. I made a gofundme but I haven't posted the link anywhere because part of me really feels like it should be my responsibility to come up with the money on my own. Another part knows I would just feel really upset if I didn't get any donations because I already worry about people thinking his life wasn't important because it was so short.

I really just want to be a good mom to my son, even though he is gone. If he is out there somewhere watching I want him to know he is loved and missed and important. I already feel so burned out trying to think of ways I can continue to honor him which is making me feel even more guilty. The truth is I feel like nothing I do is even going to be enough. I'll never find a way to make up for all the time and love I'll never be able to give him and it's killing me.

There are four or five school times in a school year when a boy wants to get out of bed, and this Monday morning is one of them. We’re going on the graveyard fieldtrip today. The school doesn’t take us there for the “here lyeth ye body of” inscriptions on the headstones, the winged skulls carved above by hands so severe that we wonder how our ancestors could have found the promise of eternal life in their hollow eye sockets, or the wounded relevance of the historical figures buried below. We go there to be initiated into the mysteries. We go there for the raw grave.

“It’s definitely a vampire,” says the kid sitting behind me on the bus. “That’s why nothing grows on it. He digs himself out every night and upsets the soil.”

“No one gets murdered in this town,” says his seatmate. “Where are all the bloodless bodies? Do you think he rises from the grave just to take lonely strolls around the pond? If there’s a vampire down there, he’s thirsty as hell.”

“So why do you think nothing grows on the raw gave?”

“A witch cursed it.”

Both are leading theories. Both are wrong. There’s something here beyond witches and vampires. This is my first Halloween too old for trick-or-treating, and, as much as I’ll miss them, the holiday is going to be about more than peanut butter cups this year. The crack of every dead leaf under my sneakers is a death poem, and there are mysteries written up the steps of every porch legible only by jack o’ lantern.

When we get off the bus, a kid asks Mr. Carver how old the gravekeeper is while we wait for him to come unlock the gate with astronomical precision at exactly 9:00:00. The ceremony is purely ceremonial; the wall is waist-high. “He’s been old since before I was born,” says Mr. Carver. “When I was in high school, there was an article in the paper about his hundredth birthday.”

The tour hasn’t changed a word or step since I was in first grade. We walk between the rows of headstones and footstones that face outwards from the graves to facilitate reading without treading on them. The gravekeeper tells us in that way that the living can’t help but find a bit reductionist how man and woman, slave and master, and rich and poor all rot in the same dirt. He tells us how the Puritans were buried with their feet facing east to meet the dawn when they sit up on Judgment Day. At the end of the tour, we’re at the raw grave, a perfect rectangle where nothing grows.

The headstone is completely devoid of biographical information or any other

I was reading the monster manual in CoS last night and decided that what this campaign is missing is a scarecrow.

So a few years back I made up kind of a Halloween short story. I know I tried to write it all out on a Google Drive file somewhere. But I wrote a short story about a Lich who is kidnapping children and using them fuel a dark ritual, animating pumpkin golems and with the goal of growing a clone inside a giant pumpkin so he can leave the scarecrow and migrate his soul into the clone.

This campaign and D&D in general gives me different verbiage (pumpkin blights) to work with and I hope someone else can use this encounter to throw your players a curve ball, especially if they are too familiar with the module and need to be thrown off their expectations with a non-canonical encounter.

Rather than a Lich I would say now that a solitary Scarecrow golem is a construct of the local Hags from old bonegrindr and watches over this area with a squad of pumpkin blights. The scarecrow poses as any one of five scarecrows on the scene. And helps along with the blights abduct vulnerable children and travelers for the hags. Any pumpkin blights that are created in the graveyard hide in the nearby forest behind the scarecrow. The hags can scry through the eyes of the scarecrow and see what it sees. In this way, if a battle commences, the scarecrow will use its gaze attack to magically frighten a player character closely inspecting it and then attack any characters that stand their ground. As this occurs a small army of pumpkin blights swarms from the nearby tree line. The Scarecrow wants to give the frightened condition to as many player characters as it can (giving them disadvantage) before the pumpkin blights set upon them. As cautious as the players are the scarecrow will likely surprise them and the blights should need maybe one round to set upon the players.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Traveling along the road You come across a strange sight as the mists of Barovia ominously part revealing a scene of a pumpkin patch interspersed with a graveyard... Slanted Tombstones and popping Pumpkins dot the yard. The pumpkin vines dig greedily into the disturbed soil and beyond, their vines coil about the headstones and black wrought iron gates

>a player who inspects the pumpkin plants will need a 15 perception check to notice odd red coloration concentrating near the venation of the leaves

This thank you post is very much overdue... but thank you so much for the cards I received in October! Listed in chronological order with linked images:

Branch_Comfortable WOW thank you so much for showing me a part of Korea with all the goodies and food map and brochure of Jang Seung-eop's stamps. I really like the stamps on the envelope, stickers, memo sheets and green tea too. Where did you get the SG-KR flag badge from? 😮 It looks old but very special and I'll treasure it! The last two months I have been binge watching 영국남자 and I really learnt quite a bit more about Korea (mainly the food 😋) that I didn't know before. I hope you are enjoying your winter vacation thoroughly!

kinkyzilly3018 You are so kind to send a card just to check in 😊. I have been busy the last few months but I'm grateful to receive a steady stream of happy mail from RAoC to make everything better! I absolutely love the colourful surgical masks washi tape you used!

Work_n_Depression Thanks for checking in :). How many snarky cards have you sent this year? You are on my list for new year cards and I'll write to you soon!

bleuest Thanks for writing back (regarding my museum trip) and huge congrats on your MSc acceptance! 🎉 Wishing you the best in your next steps moving forward! If you do move to SG, good news is postcard stamps are relatively affordable so you can continue the hobby 😂. I love the amorphophallus gigas stamp. It's such a weird plant haha!

wabisabi_sf & ninajyang Thanks for the surprise Chocolate Milkshake Day postcard and backyard games stamps I'm seeing for the first time! u/ninajyang didn't leave a username but I think I recognise that handwriting? Did you have a milkshake during your meetup 😁?

[LaCuntessa](https://www.reddit.com/user/LeeElla/comments/rd

Basically, things that either weren't considered during filming, or would be hilarious to imagine as outtakes/deleted scenes/etc.

A couple that come to mind:

1. OG Halloween, when Michael's driving back home with a broken passenger side window and wearing nothing but his hospital gown. I imagine people passing him asking if he needs help and he just shrugs with perfect comedic timing so he can keep going
2. Also OG Halloween, watching him arrange Annie on the bed with Judith's headstone, constantly stepping back and framing the shot with his hands until he gets it right

Do your worst!

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

Halloween was always his favorite holiday. Grandpa would go all out, decorating the front yard and leading the neighborhood kids to the back of the house and down through the storm door for a trip into the “haunted basement”. It wasn’t much more than a dime tour of a dirt floor cellar, but the kids loved it. He didn’t have much, but he gave his all on his favorite holiday.

 

Most of the haunted basement was cheeky fun, skeletons posed as a band or headless horsemen racing each other, nothing overly scary, but there was one exception. He had the cellar laid out with these plywood temporary walls to guide the guests around, complete with bead door dividers to give each section its own little roomfeel. The whole thing formed a loop that led back outside. When I was a kid, I tried going in more than once, but I never got to finish the tour. I was always too scared of the last stop on the tour, where the really frightening exhibit was placed. I can’t remember what it was exactly, since the only time I saw it I was maybe four or five. I just knew I had to back my way out of the basement and promised I would never go back. I recently asked my brother about it, and my cousins, but they just remembered the whole thing being silly stuff, nothing scary or terrifying. They did mention that a lot of the exhibits moved, like there were some little motors pushing the skeleton band. They all think it was my overactive child’s mind convincing me there was something bad down there.

 

The last few years haven’t been fun. My mom left us when I was barely a baby, and my dad got caught up in a money laundering scheme. His co-conspirators hung him out to dry, so he has spent the better part of ten years locked up. I was the only one still living at home, so it has fallen to me to be Grandpa’s caregiver. It’s not so bad since he’s still got most of his marbles. He dresses himself well enough, and he usually remembers to take care of his hygiene, though he does get a little forgetful about new information. Every once in a while he calls me by my dad’s name, but it’s not that big of a deal. I look a lot like him, especially back when my hair matched his.

 

A few weeks before Halloween, Grandpa started talking about the haunted basement. The last two years, we haven’t held the tour. I wasn’t sure he could handle it - he gets really worked up over it and I was worried about his health. Part of the reason was it seemed like his fo

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

There are four or five school times in a school year when a boy wants to get out of bed, and this Monday morning is one of them. We’re going on the graveyard fieldtrip today. The school doesn’t take us there for the “here lyeth ye body of” inscriptions on the headstones, the winged skulls carved above by hands so severe that we wonder how our ancestors could have found the promise of eternal life in their hollow eye sockets, or the wounded relevance of the historical figures buried below. We go there to be initiated into the mysteries. We go there for the raw grave.

“It’s definitely a vampire,” says the kid sitting behind me on the bus. “That’s why nothing grows on it. He digs himself out every night and upsets the soil.”

“No one gets murdered in this town,” says his seatmate. “Where are all the bloodless bodies? Do you think he rises from the grave just to take lonely strolls around the pond? If there’s a vampire down there, he’s thirsty as hell.”

“So why do you think nothing grows on the raw gave?”

“A witch cursed it.”

Both are leading theories. Both are wrong. There’s something here beyond witches and vampires. This is my first Halloween too old for trick-or-treating, and, as much as I’ll miss them, the holiday is going to be about more than peanut butter cups this year. The crack of every dead leaf under my sneakers is a death poem, and there are mysteries written up the steps of every porch legible only by jack o’ lantern.

When we get off the bus, a kid asks Mr. Carver how old the gravekeeper is while we wait for him to come unlock the gate with astronomical precision at exactly 9:00:00. The ceremony is purely ceremonial; the wall is waist-high. “He’s been old since before I was born,” says Mr. Carver. “When I was in high school, there was an article in the paper about his hundredth birthday.”

The tour hasn’t changed a word or step since I was in first grade. We walk between the rows of headstones and footstones that face outwards from the graves to facilitate reading without treading on them. The gravekeeper tells us in that way that the living can’t help but find a bit reductionist how man and woman, slave and master, and rich and poor all rot in the same dirt. He tells us how the Puritans were buried with their feet facing east to meet the dawn when they sit up on Judgment Day. At the end of the tour, we’re at the raw grave, a perfect rectangle where nothing grows.

The headstone is completely devoid of biographical information or any other