HOWTO make a terrifying specimen jar

Whoops I Think I Broke It has a quick HOWTO for making your own glowing, mysterious, revolting specimen jar filled with little bits of ick from the Elder Gods' plane of existence:

Now all we need is a "thing"
Here I've taken scraps of clay, wire, foil, wood bits, hot glue, and a cork to shape out the "thing". Basically I just took anything that was lying around on the floor of my workshop and fashioned it into whatever you'd call this shape.
Weird but not very menacing.
I then cover the thing in a mixture of liquid latex and coffee grinds (for texture).
OMG! IT SHOULD NOT BE! KILL IT WITH FIRE!
Now that this thing is sufficiently gross we're going to prime it and paint it a base color. Priming should help give us a clean slate in which to paint a fleshy pink base.
I've named this color "Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's Pink".
Now we add some shade, accents, and highlights to this monstrosity. To finish I glued on a few random strands of wig hair and painted on a creepy eyeball.

Project Thing In A Jar (via Super Punch)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Gadgets • Science

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Anonymous

Reminiscent of “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” production of Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar” starring Pat Buttram in 1964. A truly eerie and memorable tale about a man, a jar bought at a carnival, and a little town which became obsessed about it.
Art

Cool and monstrously repulsive.

But I’m still trying to get over the poor guy who was forced to eat his own beard :(
Anonymous

Reminds me of this: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/08/make_a_thing_in_a_jar.html
nixiebunny

I recommend just leaving a rusty can of some toxic, caustic home-improvement substance on an upper shelf in your shed for too many years, like I did. It will dribble stuff on anything below it and turn those objects into caustic green messes as well.
bugmaker

I love makin stuff like this!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bugmaker999/152627062/in/set-72157600285044499/
Miss Jess

Part of me wants to make several of these specimen jars, line them up in a forgotten old shed in a local park or place frequented by tween-agers, then wait to see what happens when they’re “discovered”. I know what my reaction would have been when I was a young after-school explorer type. Then again, part of me thinks it would be a bit cruel.