John Holdun

Week in Review #43: Here Comes Halloween

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:51:00 +0000

My yard has been spooky for almost two weeks! I've been adding more things, including the coolest thing I've ever made. The band is playing!

I did not predict how much this would look like a nativity scene so I've gotta do something about that. The twinkling lights are not helping the cause but I like them!

I still want to get more things wiggling in the jungle so I've made a few generic oscillating devices out of wiper motors and scrap wood:

These are pretty standard four-bar linkages that give me lots of predictable places to mount an eyelet and a length of fishing line. These will create some more suspicious head turns and lazy tail wags before Sunday.

When I first put these together and started them running, they accidentally destroyed themselves lol. I had made the joints around the ends of the motor arms too tight so they continued to tighten themselves so much that the wood split on one of them, another overloaded the control and stopped moving (best case scenario), and the head of a bolt on another just totally snapped off. Never seen that before. A scary amount of force if you ask me!

I am not sure where the bolt head even went. It pinged off somewhere into the depths of the garage.

Anyway Saturday is Halloween, it is supposed to rain, I have more stuff I want to do! I want to remake the whole soundtrack! Talk to you later!

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:55:00 +0000

For those of you who chart the weather by my watch band: I switched from nylon to leather today so now it is cold

Week in Review #42: Peril on Petite Court

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:40:00 +0000

My yard display is up!

All in all it came together pretty smoothly. I was feeling bad about it after I set everything out during the day, but once night fell and I turned on the lights, all the yuckiness dissolved and I am just quite pleased.

In past years I've waited to document my installations until the very end of their lives because I keep tweaking things throughout a show and it looks best just before it comes down. This year I realized I can take some photos right away and take new photos if I make anything better later! So here's a pretty empty page that will get more detailed in the weeks to come.

It was gratifying to take some things I made for past Halloweens that I never properly finished painting and give them new life. Every time I do something like this, since the very first time in 2016, I'm amazed at how much better things look and feel when they just have a little extra paint on them.

The toucan is doing great, although as I write this it is raining pretty hard for the first time in months and I had to cover it up. I haven't assessed the damage yet but I think some of the cardboard stuff has kinda melted. But a lot is doing totally fine. Acrylic paint is basically liquid plastic and it's shockingly good at preserving cardboard so long as there's a stronger structure keeping everything in place.

I've also made a lot of progress on the band and I'm feeling really good about them! On Sunday a friend came over so I could help him trim down some IKEA IVAR shelf uprigts. As payment I got to keep the offcuts, and in a lovely twist of fate those offcuts were the perfect size to make a really sturdy stage for the guys.

What is this, some kind of variable stage?

It's kind of hard to believe but this is my first time working with fishing line. It rocks! All the strings that won't move are secured to the stage, and each character has one loose string that'll be attached to a servo as soon as I strap those to the "catwalk" or whatever.

I finally wrote some music for them to play; you can hear the 14-minute track here. As with most of my installation soundtracks, it is pretty spare and repetitive, trying to find the right balance of setting a consistent tone with no fixed start or end point but also not being annoying to listen to for long durations.

A unique thing this year is that I've got to actually program movements to this soundtrack! I'll soon fire up Bottango to record some servo movements, basically acting out each character with a video game controller one at a time, then writing that all to an SD card and playing it back over and over and over.

This stage will be nestled in the back of my yard, upstage right (i.e. on your left side as you face the house), obscured by the backdrop that is just behind the toucan. The goal is for people on the sidewalk to be able to tell something is going on back there but not have a good line of sight to it, encouraging them to walk up the walkway, into the jungle, to check it out. I want it to feel like it's integrated into the space, rather than a stage that is incongruously plopped in the yard, so I'll have to figure out how to decorate the set after the mechanics are finished. I'm thinking that having some leafy bits flowing out and breaking up the shape of the stage will help.

That's all for now! Tomorrow is my brother's wedding and hopefully the rain stops. By next week the band will be on stage along with some more little surprises (I hope), just in time for Halloween! Halloween…

Week in Review #41: Fake Cardboard Trees

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 02:15:00 +0000

Something I didn't mention that made the last couple weeks even more annoying than I already mentioned is that our AC broke at the beginning of a heatwave! I kept trying to blow air past frozen cold packs and convincing myself it was making things better but it didn't. On Friday we got a new AC installed and now it feels like a proper Autumn outside. I don't even mind the irony because I love this weather so much!

Our old busted AC getting lifted off the roof

I probably already mentioned that I wanted to make some tree trunks and that I bought some very bright fabric from Remainders to do so. They turned out pretty good! I made eight in total and tried three different techniques, and by the end I feel like I really had it figured out. They are pretty flimsy but between the 1x2 wooden armature, the glued-together curved cardboard, the spray-adhesived paper skins, and the sewn fabric sleeves, I think they'll last two weeks outdoors in LA. If they don't, I'll try something better next year.

Mid-way through building the trees I finally bought some electric scissors. It's like a rotary cutter but battery-powered, and it cuts clean straight lines through corrugated cardboard in no time with no effort. I weep for the hours and hours I spent ten years ago, crouched on the ground, carefully measuring and cutting strips of cardboard with a ruler and a box cutter. This thing was $30 at Harbor Freight. I should have bought it then! I am trying to be less frugal when it comes to tools and art supplies because I am making my life harder for no reason, but it's really hard. Even when I was making the trees, which are made entirely of scraps I already had (apart from the $6 of fabric I bought at Remainders), I was setting aside the "good" cardboard and wood for some theoretical future project. I gotta quit it!

Part of the frugal compulsion is that I keep everything. It's not quite hoarding, but it does mean there are half a dozen boxes in the garage full of things that I've never used and never will use. But sometimes I do use some of those things, you know? I ventured into the loft in the garage and pulled out all the pieces from past Halloweens that I couldn't bear to throw away, and there's a lot I didn't know I still had.

This is all going in the yard this year! Since I dropped my arbitary requirement that I start from scratch on a new installation every year this year, I have also given myself the freedom to mix things together. Some of these are very different art styles from each other but that probably doesn't matter! Let's fill the dang thing up and see what happens!

And so I've started setting up the yard for Halloween. I've given myself a few days to put things in place, rather than trying to transform the yard overnight for no reason. Currently, the backdrop supports and the batten-hung canvases are set up and weighed down, and all the extension cords and half the lights are in place. Tomorrow, the stretched canvases and the new trees go in place. Friday and Saturday I install all the critters and creatures and do some touch-up painting, and then we're live for the season!

Amy and I observed the reason for the season this week when we went to our friends' house and we spent some time carving pumpkins together. It was a lot of fun! I gave mine eyebrows.

This time next week, things will be up and running and I'll be hopefully a little more relaxed. I gave myself some grace on finishing the little musician guys, so I'm leaving room for them in the yard to be installed some time between Saturday and Halloween. More on them soon I sure hope!

Week in Review #40: Scream Squad

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 01:47:00 +0000

"Scream Squad" is a term that Universal Studios has half-heartedly try to get people to use organically to describe the friends they attend Halloween Horror Nights with. They also frequently use the tagline "Never go alone." I get that it's playing into horror movie tropes but it also feels so desperate to me. It reminds me of this ad campaign for this scary/ridiculous movie I won't be seeing called Whalefall, which implores its audience to see it "on the biggest screen possible."

Anyway I am hard-pressed to pass up ironic use of a tortured marketing phrase, and on Friday I met up with my #ScreamSquad for Halloween Horror Nights™ at Universal Studios® Hollywood. We had a great time! This was my third or fourth time going and it was my favorite edition yet. I've learned how to not get too anxious walking into a maze, and to use the extremely dense traffic to my advantage to avoid being too close to any of the jumpscares, so I can focus on the set design. It makes the times when they really get me all the more satisfying. The highlight this year was their adaption of Sinners, which did some interesting stuff with LED light eyeballs that I haven't seen before and I'm still not sure how they pulled it off. There were also a couple original-IP houses whose designs were as excited as their names were cringey: Dead Deader Deadest and Killcenañera. Big puppets! Cool sound design! Intricate sets you can touch if you're slick about it! I love this stuff!

Two members of my #screamsquad are getting married in a couple weeks which makes it more complicated for us to visit other haunts, but I'm planning to try to make time for Knott's Scary Farm and maybe also maybe the LA Haunted Hayride and also FrightFest at Six Flags Magic Mountain. One of those is in Griffith Park and I could basically walk to it, but the other two are an hour's drive away, but I gotta do it! Even if I gotta go alone! #NeverGoAlone! Whalefall!

The rest of this week has been eaten alive by the same project that devoured last week, but I did finally get started on my spooky colorful trees for the yard. They look like shit so far but I think I might be able to salvage them. No photos yet because they look like shit.

Per my Southern California Haunt List listing, my haunt premieres ten days from today. I am so nervous about it lol I have so much to do lol smh

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:33:00 +0000

I like this essay from Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay

Week in Review #39: Time Warp 2

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 01:36:00 +0000

It's been a week since the end of the week I'm reviewing. That stinks! I've been too busy! I wish I could say I've been busy with fun stuff, like building my Halloween show, but no.

On Sunday night we went to Palm Springs. The Ace Hotel put on a big promotion and we are easy marks for that shit. It was kind of gloomy weather which is probably why their rates were so discounted, but I sat by the pool and read some Instapaper articles and then had a mai tai at Bootlegger, so I am not complaining.

And then the next few days were just absolutely devoured by some work that I can't even talk about goddamn. Bye!

Week in Review #38: Time warp

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:10:00 +0000

It's been almost a week since the week that I'm reviewing ended. I've been busy for annoying and not-blog-relevant reasons!

Once cool thing I can share is this toucan:

It still needs more paint, I'm not convinced that these are the colors yet, and some parts that are flapping around need to be glued down, but I'm quite pleased with it. I think it is maybe the best thing I have made.

Trying to remember what else happened a fortnight ago…I rode the LA Metro for the second time! (The first time was almost twenty years ago wow). I went to a screening of The King of Comedy at the Academy Museum, and to avoid the unpredictable parking in that area I drove to Union Station and took the D from there. It was cool! Not as cool as the Minneapolis metro unfortunately.

I also went to Bob Baker Day with the fam and had a great time. It's the biggest and most crowded I've ever seen it. The Halloween show at the Bob Baker Marionette theater is completely sold out for the season, and their last show completely sold out as well. Nice problems to have! I'm still sore that I missed my opportunity to see the new train show though.

I saw two shows at the Elysian theater this weekend: Bizarre Bazaar and Famous People Improv. The latter is a long-form improv show as you might imagine (this time featuring stories from Fiona Dourif of The Pitt, which was a draw tbh); the former is a clown-focused variety show I've seen a few times that always gets me excited about performance afterwards. I've thrown a few new ideas at the live show idea I started really thinking about in January and keep alluding to. This is vague but none of it is really worthy of explication right now I think.

Wednesday night we saw Robyn at the Forum! She put on a really great show but the highlight for me was an introduction to her opener, who is a DJ/producer/performer called horsegiirL who is a horse and writes horse music. Big recommend.

Week in Review #37: Minneapolis and a marching band

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:37:00 +0000

Last Wednesday we flew from Paris to Minneapolis via Amsterdam. It was a during-the-day flight traveling West so I (attempted to) stay awake for (most of) the whole flight. Neither of us really had too much trouble with jet lag this whole trip! A blessing.

I frankly didn't have high hopes for Minneapolis—we were headed there for an event Amy was invited to attend, it was convenient to attach it to the end of this Europe trip, and we figured we'd make the most of it. But it was kinda great!

A strong introduction: the Minneapolis/St. Paul transit system is terrific. We got on a train from the terminal that took us to right outside our hotel in downtown Minneapolis. It was clean and fast and well-lit and well-used! We never ended up on a bus but used the train for like half a dozen trips in the three days we were there.

Some highlights included excellent food at Diane's Place and Billy Sushi; an excellent curation and presentation of art at the The Walker Art Center (sans an exhibit that made use of AI for some fucking reason but at least they admitted it); a quick stroll past the remains of the Third Precinct station en route to Moon Palace Books; and live jazz at Berlin. We had fully set Minneapolis up for failure by setting it next to Paris, but it held its own. Good job!

Also of course there was the Mall of America. I spent a whole day there while Amy had other stuff to do and I loved it. Taking a nice train to a huge mall? What could be better? To be honest I thought it would be bigger but I still think they did a good job. Good job, Mall of America.

The second half of the week we were back at home and I did not work on Halloween at all, which felt extremely bad, but I have been catching up on other things I shirked during our excursion. Also, I had to practice some music to participate in Freak March, a giant puppet parade hosted by Freak Nature Puppets on the USC campus.

I played trumpet in a little marching band! We were not good but we all had a lot of fun. I was one of I think four winds (including two clarinets and a flute), and all of us had the same experience where this was basically the first time we were playing our instruments in twenty years. I am so eager to get back in to music after Halloween!

But now we're back to life, back to reality, and I need to finish that animatronic parrot I started building two weeks ago. Do you remember that? I barely do!

Week in Review #36: London and Paris

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:46:00 +0000

London! It was my first time in the UK and Amy's too; we spent a couple days here. We stayed in Shoreditch, which seemed cool before we arrived and felt like it was swarming with tech people once we were there. I did not care for that, though I did find points north quite lovely. I bought a 7" single of "I'm a Cuckoo" at a used record shop in Hackney, and now I ought to buy a record player so I can listen to it.

We saw theater every night of our London stay:

The Oresteia, a modern adaptation by Simon Stone, had a lot of very impressive performances and an excellent fish bowl-like rotating set but was too long. I understand you're adapting a trilogy; you don't not need to make it three acts in three hours.
My Neighbor Totoro was conversely a perfect adaptation. Every choice, every moment felt like exactly what a staged version of that film should be, like there were zero compromises in adjusting from screen to stage. I would see this again and I'm eager to see what else this creative team can do. There's a Spirited Away stage show that I think is coming to the US next year, and if that's put on by the same people I will be there!
The Story, a re-staging of a 2003 American play, felt irresponsible. I'm not really sure what point the playwright nor the director were trying to make in staging this. I won't dwell on my criticisms of this because it made me angry! The one saving grace is that I bought a bunch of books on puppetry and immersive theater in the bookshop at the National Theater after the show.

We also learned that every theater in London serves ice cream? That is just a thing they do? It's nice. On our last day in the city I had fish and chips at a pub and it was exactly what I hoped it would be.

Then we took the Eurostar to Paris! This was our third time in Paris and it's just…I fuckin love Paris. It's probably my favorite city in the world. I feel so nice there, and the buildings and streets are so nice, and everybody is so pretty.

I took half a day from the Paris part of our trip to visit Disneyland Paris, obviously. This was my second time at les parcs Disneyland. The first time, a couple years ago, was during a time when the second gate was under intense redevelopment and the few available attractions were caked with temporary construction walls. Those walls are down now, and the newly-renamed Disney Adventure World is "open," but it's still largely open space? I walked maybe half an hour past towering cranes to catch a glimpse of robotic Olaf.

But Disneyland Paris, the original/primary park, the castle park, is great. It's lacking on paper compared to Disneyland Anaheim, but it's a really nice hang. I don't think it ever gets terribly crowded, and it offers so many spaces to sit and linger and take in the environment, which is my favorite thing to do in a carefully-planned space like this. It certainly takes a cue from Paris in that regard.

I also realized that I think Paris's version of Pirates of the Caribbean is my favorite version. I have no idea if a person with a normal understanding of this ride and its versions around the world would actually notice the differences—I think they would if they rode them back-to-back—but the big change is that they tell the story in order, starting with the pirates sacking the village and ending with them as skeletons amid their treasures. It's a little less poetic than the looping/time-travel morality play design of the original, but I have come to think that it is a lot more successful and thrilling. I'm as shocked as you are about this.

This is a bit abbreviated because I'm writing it a few days in the future. I think the only time I pulled my laptop out of my bag on this whole trip was to watch Taskmaster in the hotel room. On Wednesday we flew back to the states, specifically to Minneapolis for a few days. I'll leave this entry here as is the law of blogging but I'll give you a little preview of what's to come: Minneapolis rocks?