The White House Web Bat

October 26, 2022 11:07 PM

The White House logo currently has a bat flying around in anticipation of Halloween. What delightful and unexpected little nods to Halloween have you noticed - on the web or off?

(Via Letters from an American, by the always observant historian Heather Cox Richardson.)

posted by kristi (22 comments total)

My particular Brooklyn neighborhood goes totally bat-shit (no pun intended) for Halloween. People started putting up decorations the first week of October - lots of huge inflatable lawn displays, balanced on stoops or on roofs or in the tiny front lawns brownstones have sometimes. A ton of skeleton displays, "ghosts" made of fabric-draped Christmas tree baubles hanging in street trees. There's a really active dog-owners association, and every year they have an enormous dog costume contest, with people going all out and dressing their mutts up as everything from luchadoras to peacocks to entire buildings. (Collection of photos from several years past here - look for the "Great Pupkin" albums.) My five-minute walk to the bus passes by 6 lawn displays, flyers for this year's Zombie Band concert, lots of fake spider webs draped across stoops, another stoop with 3 different colored pumpkins on it, and a fence bedecked with ghosts made of ping-pong balls and napkins.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:15 AM on October 27, 2022 [8 favorites]

On Reddit desktop there is a tiny banana in the top navigation bar. When you click it, it launches a game called Spooky Bananas where you can control a sleepwalking (dead? zombie?) Snoo using the WASD keys to collect bananas before time runs out.

I don't see the banana on mobile.
posted by kimberussell at 4:23 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

The NYT Spelling Bee game has a little cartoon bee that pops up depending on where you are in the game. When you find all the words the bee wears a crown (Queen Bee). Last year on Halloween she wore a witch hat. Hopefully this year too!
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 5:15 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

EmpressCallipygos, thank you for that link. It brightened my morning seeing all those ridiculous dog costumes.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 5:22 AM on October 27, 2022

The Discord start-up logo is now a flaming pumpkin head.
posted by terrapin at 5:37 AM on October 27, 2022

All the McDonald’s golden arches signs are covered in a writhing mass of transparent snakes that you can see out of the corner of your eye.
posted by mubba at 6:04 AM on October 27, 2022 [12 favorites]

That whitehouse.gov link is about increasing funding and support of mental health services (Yay - more please) so it's kind of weird to see the white house at night with a bat flying over. It looks like a classic establishing shot of the haunted, dilapidated state mental hospital where everything is about to go very wrong on the late late show on UHF 41.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 6:09 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

After three days of rain and fog, it's sunny today, and I'm going out on my lunch hour to see the annual Halloween display that a Central CT State U. political science professor puts up on his lawn every year. This year he's got a skeletal commentary on the war in Ukraine. Last year he recreated the Capitol attack, with skeletons crawling up the wall in the back of the building, and the year before he featured racism and coronavirus. It's always stunning and I've made it a practice to go out and take pictures before Halloween.
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:41 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

So what’s MetaFilter doing to top that White House bat?
posted by beagle at 6:51 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's like April Fool's Day only not stupid and annoying! The White House logo thing in particular brings joy.
posted by Nelson at 6:52 AM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

Surprisingly the Whitehouse bat logo is not a gif or the like. It's inline SVG + CSS.
posted by jedicus at 7:00 AM on October 27, 2022 [11 favorites]

I can’t wait for super-evangelicals to take it as proof Biden is a satanist or something.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:00 AM on October 27, 2022 [8 favorites]

This is an Easter egg that's always there, but especially apropos at Halloween... On Letterboxd.com, if you filter any list to show only horror films, the site logo will drip blood.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:12 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

thank you for that link. It brightened my morning seeing all those ridiculous dog costumes.

Ironically, one of my favorite costumes from a couple years back wasn't in the photos!

It was a whole family costume - the judge announced that the family costume theme was "Thanksgiving Dinner". Mom walked out dressed as a chef, a 5-year-old was a box of Stovetop Stuffing, a 3-year-old was dressed as a pumpkin, and Dad walked out with a big box around him made up to look like an oven. When they were all on stage, Mom opened the "door" in Dad's "Oven" - and out jumped a pug dressed as a Butterball turkey.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:21 AM on October 27, 2022 [10 favorites]

Also, the still photos of this lab dressed as a Sour Patch Kid are missing the best bit - I went to that year's contest as a spectator, and at one point the lab broke into a trot and it made the costume go all flaily and it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:36 AM on October 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

For those who can't get enough of dogs in costumes, the Tompkins Square Park Howl-o-ween Parade (now slightly renamed) returned last weekend after a two-year hiatus.
posted by praemunire at 8:23 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

This Halloween season all Pokemon Go stops are orange, and all the gyms have a pumpkin at their feet.
(Now I wonder if they would do similar things for other holidays.)

Too bad I can't post a photo, but someone in our neighborhood wheeled out 5 giant (as in two-story high) skeletons in front of their house at the start of the month. The base of these skeletons is structured like a basketball hoop stand. Best Halloween deco ever.
posted by of strange foe at 10:44 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have a fun game on my phone, Haru Cats Slide (kinda like upside-down tetris), and a week or so ago, they changed the interface so it's more haunted. There are cobwebs all over, and some of the cats are mummies. It's all pretty cute.
posted by hydra77 at 1:16 PM on October 27, 2022

mubba, this thread is for things that aren't year round.
posted by dmd at 3:15 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

The T in the tumblr app icon has changed to a little spoopy skeleton guy
posted by slightlybewildered at 3:11 AM on October 28, 2022

Green Felt card games has Halloween-themed playing cards, with pumpkins and bats.
posted by kristi at 9:59 AM on October 31, 2022

My own photos are still being processed, but here's another more o-fficial reporter's coverage of the "Great Pupkin" dog costume contest. I also found another place had a video.

And Tish James was a surprise guest (she was promoting early voting in my neighborhood since it's also HER neighborhood), and I live a block away from the dog she posed with here.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:38 AM on October 31, 2022