X-E's 2004 Halloween Season is almost upon us, hooray. Been working around the clock to get it ready for launchage very, very soon. My only real concern was keeping the same level of spirit as last year's foray, while making it more manageable for this year's version of myself, who has about 1/10th the time to putz around as I did last year. All that said, I'm stoked with the progress. It's going to be a real test to keep the Halloween Countdown going strong everyday with everything else I got going; fortunately, I love doing this shit jussst enough to not balk and run repeats.

In fact, I've already done my part to scour the material world for virtually every Halloween thing I could find -- or at least, the stuff I didn't already write about last year. Sooo happy to see all the stores get down with their spooky selves this early in September. They haven't exactly gone balls out with the Dracula stuff yet, but there's more than enough to whet anyone's satanic whistle. Realizing that I've signed on to basically come up with some new Halloween topic for around 45 days straight, I may have spent a little too much dough on plastic werewolves and witch window clings. Got some neat stuff, tho.

Big thanks to the several readers who offered to send in videos and other Halloween goodies -- your help is most appreciated, even if I didn't happen to need what you had. I'm still on the lookout for more Halloween goodies, (most critically any kind of Halloween specials/tv episodes/commercials taped off television) so definitely shoot me an e-mail if you've got the goods, yo. Get ready to get sick of Halloween long before October rolls around, because we're getting pretty close to The Big Day.

In the sprit of all that jizz, a very general spooky survey: share some of your Halloween memories. Don't care what they have to do with -- costumes, parties, candy, movies, whatever. Oh, and if you're usually a lurker, don't be afraid to speak up. We aren't exactly elitist around these parts.