Trick or treat?

Nathan Pryor of Vancouver, Wash., delivered both when he decided to combine a pumpkin with the classic video game Tetris. "Pumpktris" is a complete and fully playable version of the game encased in a pumpkin with a "joystem" controller.

As one comment on YouTube noted: "Some people have way too much awesome on their hands."

Pryor wrote a detailed post about the construction of the game in his HaHa Bird blog. The idea came about as a result of a story he saw in 2011 about growing pumpkins in molds to give them a shape. "I thought it would be cool to force a bunch into Tetris shapes and stack them at Halloween," he told Playbook in an email interview Monday, "but by the time I remembered the idea this year it was too late to follow through, so it morphed into building an actual Tetris game into a pumpkin."

After the laborious task of building the LED matrix and obtaining the code needed to operate the game, Pryor had to find the perfectly sized pumpkin and turn it into a game cabinet. He then had to measure and drill 128 holes -- eventually cut into squares -- needed for the lights.

"It's fairly close to a regular game of Tetris," Pryor said. "It keeps score in the same way, and the speed accelerates as you get to higher and higher levels."

The game is powered by eight rechargeable AA batteries. Pryor, 37, used 256 pieces of tubing and 313 solder joints to connect the needed wiring.

"The biggest challenge was probably cutting all the wires and soldering them to the LEDs," he said. The project took 12 hours of work over a week and a half, and the high score as of Monday was 9,800.

Elsewhere:

• Not everyone in Los Angeles is completely focused on the start of the NBA season. The Lakers host the Mavericks at Staples Center on Tuesday night:

All my support to all the communities in the East Coast affected by this terrible hurricane. Stay strong and be safe! #Sandy

— Pau Gasol (@paugasol) October 30, 2012

Sandy's worst wrath spared some of the Baltimore-Washington area:

Prayers up for everyone who was affected by the storm....we lucked up on this end

— Torrey Smith (@TorreySmithWR) October 30, 2012

The storm and its aftermath may affect the regular-season opener scheduled between the Knicks and Nets at the Barclays Center on Thursday. One member of the Nets had other things on his mind Monday, thanks to Twitter:

Ok Dallas = Tornadoes and LA= Earthquakes....for all the people flooding my timeline with dumb comments my entertainment for 2nite

— Deron Williams (@DeronWilliams) October 30, 2012

If you see any offbeat links from your favorite sports site or catchy tweets that might be of interest to others, pass them along to me @billsperos or to bsperos1@gmail.com.