It’s that time of year again. Prepare yourself for another round of people dressed as visual gags among the vampires and witches. The best pun costumes make people look at you, think for a moment, and then laugh. Here are some that might make you laugh right now!

1. ASSAULT AND BATTERY

When Above the Law held a costume contest for legally-themed Halloween costumes in 2010, they likely weren’t surprised when they got submissions like a ninja warrior or Lady Justice with her scales—but they probably didn’t anticipate two NYU students dressing up as a box of salt and a D battery. The pair won first place, based on votes from the site’s readers. When asked to comment on his loss, the ninja lawyer could not be found.

2. GANDALF

GandALF. #DragonCon2016 pic.twitter.com/Jaa23W0jPF

— Foot Pound Force (@FootPoundForce) September 23, 2016

When a cat-eating alien from Melmac meets the Lord of the Rings, you get GandALF. This ingenious costume was spotted at DragonCon this year.

3. ASH WEDNESDAY

Combine main Pokémon hunter Ash Ketchum (as in “You’ve gotta ‘Ketchum’ all!”) with Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family, and you get this amazingly dour costume. Bahamet234 shared this picture of her boyfriend’s punny Halloween look, probably telling him, “The world should get a good peek-at-you.”

4. BLACK-EYED PEAS

 

Instagram user mad_irene and a friend got together to make themselves into Black-Eyed Peas for Halloween in 2014. Band, chain restaurant, or legume reference? You decide.

5. HAN SOLO CUP

 

Who poured the shot first? Our favorite smuggler from Star Wars gets the “before and after” treatment. Pamela Kemp Grabinski wore this costume to DragonCon in 2013. And here’s a guy who pulled off the same idea in 2015.

6. JON SNOW WHITE

This guy knows something about a good punny costume. Jon Snow White definitely has something to crow about. Redditor mankardo posted this picture of his sister’s co-worker dressed as both a Disney princess and the Game of Thrones hero for Halloween. A commenter took this one step further and gave us Jon Snow White Stripes by replacing the sword with a guitar in Photoshop. Things got out of hand with the suggestion of Jon Snow White Walker Texas Ranger, but if you can pull that look off, we might see you on next year’s list.

7. THE SECOND AMENDMENT

 

Here’s Instagram user Rebecca Jobe exercising her right to bear arms.

8. JACKIE O. LANTERN

 

Combine Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s iconic ’60s hairdo and pillbox hat with a Halloween pumpkin, and you get Jackie O’Lantern. Very clever, and easier to pull off than Patty O’Furniture. Be the first lady at your party to try this look.

9. HOMER AND MARGE

This is what happens when you tell your husband he should dress like Homer, but don’t explain you’re dressing up as Marge. A Greek tragedy? More like a modern classic. All puns aside, the bubble wrap hair is a clever move.

10. DEAD PAN

 

Peter Pan wearing Day of the Dead skull makeup? Oh, I get it … solid Dead Pan delivery. Beats dressing up as a skillet and carrying around a tombstone all night.

11. ZOMBEE

Zombies are everywhere on Halloween, so you need to up your zombie game if you want to stand out. Majorxerocom used his brains and created a lot of buzz at a costume contest by dressing as a Zombee. Be prepared to weather a hundred Blind Melon references if you recreate this costume, though.

12. CEREAL KILLER

 

What’s one of the scariest things in our spooky campfire tales? A cereal killer. A punny costume classic that still earns its fair share of laughs.

13. CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

 

Instagram member rbooboo could have been a Halloween hit with just the cat costume, but she went for the deep cut, referencing the old adage purrfectly.

Forget Instagram likes, there’s now a better reason to snap a picture of your food. Lose It, a weight loss and calorie tracking app from Boston-based FitNow, Inc., recently released a new feature called Snap It that makes it easier to log all of your meals—just by taking a photo of your food, Engadget reports.

The new app uses advanced machine learning and the company’s database to identify meals and their calorie count solely from a photo. It can also log items by way of the bar code on food packaging and suggest low-calorie menu items available at nearby restaurants.

The app, currently in beta, boasts about an 87 to 97 percent accuracy rate within its dataset and offers users a list of suggestions if it doesn’t get it right the first time. The company hopes that with more use, the app will be able to build a better database and eventually become more precise.

“Ultimately we want to make understanding your diet as simple as Fitbit made understanding your activity,” FitNow, Inc. CEO Charles Teague said. “Snap It is going to give us the opportunity to reach a whole new set of users that may have found tracking frustrating or might’ve never even tried it because it seemed too time consuming. When tracking is a simple as snapping a picture, it becomes accessible to nearly everyone.”

Lose It is free in the Apple App Store for iOS and Google Play Store for Android.

[h/t Engadget]

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If you’re looking to be enthralled and creeped out at the same time, look no further than this timelapse of the Great Barrier Reef by Antonio Rodríguez Canto. The filmmaker took over 25,000 photos over the course of a year, which are stitched together to create this four-minute video. With music from Cedric Baravaglio, Jonathan Ochmann and Zdravko Djordjevic, you can enjoy a number of different types of coral as they shift and change.

The footage is really stunning, if perhaps a little disturbing; While the montage offers incredible and vibrant colors, the pulsing of the coral can be a bit unsettling. Some of the coral shown includes Acanthophyllia, Trachyphyllia, Heteropsammia, Physogyra, Fungia, Zoanthus, Duncanopsammia, Goniopora, Plerogyra and Scolimia, all in their creepy glory. Still, the dazzling patterns and bursting colors will make you forget about the coral’s strange throbbing, at least for a moment.

[h/t SPLOID]

Primary image courtesy of Vimeo.

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Patrick Schoenmaker produced an awesome opening sequence for an animated Indiana Jones TV series. There is no animated Indiana Jones TV series, but if this was real, we’d sure watch.
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A Canadian Bride’s Broken Zipper Was Fixed By A Syrian Refugee Staying Next Door. The master tailor didn’t speak any English, but saved the wedding with his skills.
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Horses Can Be Taught to Communicate With Us Using Symbols. Particularly if it gets them a nice warm blanket.
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Flavorwire’s Guide to Independent Movies You Need to See in October. Call your local art house to request they be booked.
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We Wore The Same Outfits To Work All Week. It was Thursday before anyone noticed.  
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The Mystical Early Pennsylvania Settler Who Lived in a Cave. Johannes Kelpius was a devout Protestant who also practiced astrology, numerology, and alchemy.
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How an L.A. Printer Kept the Art of the Album Cover Alive. Read about the history and the art of record jacket printing.
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How the ‘war on drugs’ actually encourages drug addiction. And fills all our prisons.

Ever wonder why an open bag of chips gets mushy, or why day-old bread feels hard? Scientists haven’t figured out the entire process of staling quite yet, but the American Chemical Society’s latest Reactions video explains the chemical processes that make these tasty snacks grow stiff or soggy. It also provides tips for storing food items for optimal freshness, and explains how to rescue them using an oven or microwave.

[h/t Reactions]

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Facebook doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to keeping your information private. When the company bought the messaging app WhatsApp in 2014, the company promised there wouldn’t be any sharing of private info like phone numbers and profile data between the two; but this year, Facebook started sharing and storing those WhatsApp phone numbers anyway—prompting Germany to issue a regulatory challenge to the practice.

Even seemingly simple practices like allowing users to choose who they share certain profile updates with gets complicated when the company is constantly tweaking its settings, often in the service of making things more and more public. Facebook has, at times, used users’ location data to offer suggestions, though the company quickly said that that was a temporary test feature and no longer in use when the practice was reported in the media.  

Furthermore, most of us don’t know what information we’re giving up when we agree to those long privacy agreements. Thanks to cookies, the social media giant can essentially follow you anywhere you go on the web, whether it’s on the Facebook site or not. So just what does Facebook know about you, and what is it telling other companies about you?

The watchdog reporters at ProPublica want to help you find the answers. They’ve developed a Chrome plugin that allows you to see what information Facebook has about you, from what the company thinks you’ll be interested in to which other companies have your contact information. 

ProPublica’s reporters have spent a year investigating algorithms like those used by Facebook, and here’s how they describe the vast world of how the company creeps on you:

Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than 2 billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it. When they browse the Web, Facebook collects information about pages they visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons. When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier.

And in case that wasn’t enough, Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers.

Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.

Eek. Isn’t social media fun? According to my results, Facebook knows that Zipcar, The New York Times, and Zillow—whose app I’ve downloaded on my phone but never created an account with—all have my contact info, because those companies have apparently uploaded a contact list to Facebook with my information in it. It thinks that I will like Farmville. (Please, Facebook, don’t make me play Farmville!) I don’t tend to “like” that many pages, nor do I put information like where I work on my profile, but the company still knows a startling amount about me, and can predict the movies I want to watch, the music I like to listen to, and how often I travel. 

You can download the Chrome plugin here, and explore the rest of the “black box” series at ProPublica.

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Calculating your car’s carbon footprint just got a lot easier, thanks to a new interactive tool created by MIT researchers. As The New York Times reports, CarbonCounter uses new data to determine how 125 car types currently for sale in the U.S. impact the environment.

CarbonCounter’s calculations are based on findings from a recent study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Meeting global climate change mitigation goals will require drivers to reduce transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, so researchers wanted to find out which cars will help us achieve that goal. The study looked at the carbon intensities (a.k.a. carbon emissions per mile) of each vehicle; and to see if green living is really that expensive, it also calculated how much the cars cost to own and operate based on vehicle, fuel, and maintenance costs per mile.

Want to find out how harmful your ride is for the environment, and how much an environmentally-friendly vehicle will set you back financially? Go to CarbonCounter’s website and enter your vehicle model and location (the carbon intensity of the electricity supply is higher in some places than others, Vox explains). The results will pop up in the grid in front of you. You can also see how your vehicle stacks up against U.S. emission-reduction targets for 2030, 2040, and 2050 (the end goal being to limit mean global temperature rise to 2°C above preindustrial levels).

Here are a few main takeaways: Hybrid and battery vehicles may have a high initial sticker price, but they actually save you money in the long run because they cost less to fuel up and maintain. (Not surprisingly, most of these “clean” cars also meet the emission-reduction target for 2030.) Meanwhile, no cars with internal combustion engines meet the 2030 standard, and the average carbon intensity of vehicles sold in 2014 exceeds the climate target for 2030 by more than 50 percent. Clearly, auto manufacturers (and policymakers) have their work cut out for them.

[h/t The New York Times]

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Charles Dickens captured Victorian society from the finest drawing rooms to the filthiest gutters, and his primary tool was language. As Bryan Kozlowski, author and member of the Dickens Fellowship puts it in his new book What the Dickens?!: Distinctly Dickensian Words and How to Use Them, “Dickens wallowed in words like no other.” Kozlowski has collected 200 words used by Dickens, some of them drawn from the life around him, some of his own invention, and puts them in the context of 19th century England and Dickens’s body of work. Here are just a few of the delightful offerings discussed in the book.

1. MARPLOT

“A meddlesome, though well-meaning, person who unwittingly spoils the plans of others.” This word, used in Our Mutual Friend, was based on the name of a character from an 18th century play who exemplified those “meddlesome” qualities.

2. SASSIGASSITY

This word for “audacity with attitude,” which was coined by Dickens for the short story “A Christmas Tree,” never caught on. Which is a shame.

3. CONNUBIALITIES

This “polite euphemism for marital arguments” comes up in Nicholas Nickelby when Nicholas changes the subject “in view of stopping some slight connubialities which had begun to pass between Mr. and Mrs. Browdie.”

4. JOG-TROTTY

This word for boring was used in Bleak House to call something “jog-trotty and humdrum.” Kozlowski explains that it comes from “jog-trot, the slow and steady trot of a horse.”

5. UGSOME

Already an old fashioned word for “horrible and frightening” when Dickens used it in his literary periodical All the Year Round, ugsome goes back to Old Norse ugga for “to dread.”

6. CAG-MAGGERS

Cagmag was slang for rotten meat. Hence this term Dickens used in Great Expectations for “unscrupulous butchers.”

7. SLANGULAR

A perfect invention of Dickens’s own, it shows up in Bleak House in discussing one character’s verbal “strength lying in a slangular direction” or leaning (at an angle) toward slang.

Get a more comprehensive tour through linguistic Dickensiana in What the Dickens?! including specific sections on Words for Making Merry, Words for Bleak Days and Bad Company, Street Words and Slang, Words for the Rich and Ridiculous, and Vocabulary for the Smart-Sounding Victorian.

Alfred Hitchcock fans, rejoice: A new TV series, inspired by The Master of Suspense, is in the works, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The late director’s estate has forged a deal with Universal Cable Productions to create an anthology series titled Welcome to Hitchcock. Each season will feature a single ongoing mystery or crime, inspired by iconic films like The Birds (1963) and Psycho (1960).

“Long after his death, Alfred Hitchcock continues to be one of the most celebrated directors and visionaries in the world, a master manipulator of the macabre,” Dawn Olmstead, executive vice president of development at Universal Cable Productions, said in a statement quoted by THR. “We’re honored that the Hitchcock Estate has put its trust in our studio to pay homage to his work.”

Chris Columbus’s production company, 1492 Pictures/Ocean Blue Entertainment, will join the project, along with TV production company Vermilion Entertainment. Columbus, who wrote The Goonies and Gremlins, will direct Welcome to Hitchcock and serve as one of its executive producers. His past directing efforts include the first two Harry Potter movies, as well as Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Home Alone (1990).

This isn’t the first time a Hitchcock-themed TV show has hit the small screen: In 2013, the drama Bates Motel—which features characters based on figures from Hitchcock’s most famous film, Psycho (1960)—premiered on cable channel A&E. Produced by Universal Television, it’s slated to enter its fifth and final season in 2017. 

[h/t The Hollywood Reporter]

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