Meta StuffRandom Asides

AI: Have A Very Geeky Halloween

Happy Halloween, Skepchick friends! A few weeks ago I (watched as my friend Adam) carved an awesome pumpkin featuring the best Futurama character ever: Robot Devil, aka Beelzebot!

Robot Devil

What’s the geekiest thing you’ve done for Halloween this year? Or in years past?

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

Related Articles

35 Comments

  1. Joining the Duke CS grad students in dressing up like the cast of Futurama. I was Zapp Brannigan, my costume was custom-made from real velour, and it went all the way up.

  2. This year: I shaved off my beard for my costume. 1950’s patriarch to @Ksavage’s 1950’s subjugated wife who wants to take a class at the local college. (You’d probably have to know us to find this funny, but we looked geeky as Hell).

    Last Halloween: Music geeks (Me: Krist Novoselic KSav: Kurt Cobain

    Year before that: We got married. 1920’s theme. That’s geeky, right?

  3. My siblings and I went as Lemmings one year: a Blocker, a Builder, and a Floater. This year time caught up with me, so I’ll probably dust off my paragoomba costume.

  4. I’ve avoided Halloween every year since I was 10. I’m not sure this counts as “geekiest” as the sentiment seems pretty common among geeks. Oddly enough I have been to a couple of Samhain parties after being assured that no particular state of dress or undress was expected.

  5. @Ali Marie: or letters – I think you mean Ecclestone.

    Halloween is something that’s passed me by – it was never particularly big in the UK when I was growing up, mostly due to the fact that we have Bonfire Night five days later.

    It’s now become more popular, no doubt due to the influence of US culture, and Bonfire Night has become less popular as a result, which the sentimental part of me finds rather sad.

    Despite its increased popularity, I still leave it well alone. I fail to see the point – I can dress like a fool and get drunk any day of the year.

  6. @rachaelk: Good stuff! I’m doing the music nerd thing today and going to a music library fund raiser concert. The WWU orchestra is playing a number of fun Halloween pieces including an overture from Psycho.

  7. Umm… I’m currently in the middle of ~12 hours of labwork. Very nerdy, but not high on the fun list. Especially because one of my hotplates broke…. grrr….

  8. @Evelyn: At least it wasn’t the coffee machine, which almost happened to me during a system upgrade last night… Fortunately, someone had just put too much water in it, after drain and refill to the right level and power cycle, it started working again. :-) :-)

  9. I dressed Moose up as Captain Hammer. I spent months trying to teach him to say, “And these are not the hammer.” Which I did in hopes that he would say it to some old lady while grabbing her Fun Size candy (not a euphemism) (but it should be).

  10. Despite my above mention of not liking Halloween, I have just read a very geeky Halloween joke: What do you get when you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter? Pumpkin pi.

  11. @Skept-artist: actually, the wedding thing is VERY cool, not geeky!

    As for me, I was the guy in the coffin, the vampire, in my college days.

    I loved being that vampire, but I hated the fake teeth.

    So the coolest, i.e., geekist thing I’ve ever done is I asked my dentist for real fangs and the cooler thing about this is they my dentist loved the idea so much that he made them ( they slip over my own incisors with a little dental fixative ) for FREE!

  12. If attending w00tstock isn’t the geekiest thing I’ve ever done, period, I don’t know what is.

    Once again I had a close encounter with a RiffTrax member. At Dragon*Con, Kevin Murphy captured me in a Twitpic during the infamous Skepchick panel. Last night, Bill Corbett called out my husband and me in our chicken costumes. “Don’t f*** with the chickens!”

  13. I took my telescope out onto the sidewalk and showed Jupiter and its moons to the passing kids, who all seemed pretty excited by it.
    My wife handed out the mini chocolate bars, because we never wanted to be the kind of people who hand out education instead of candy. Not when you can have both.

  14. I don’t really do Halloween, or encourage its spread in Norway, but last year I went to a costume party the weekend after as a mad scientist (lab coat, safety goggles, red wine in an erlenmeyer flask), and yesterday I celebrated the successful Norwegian skeptic conference and got flipped off by Rebecca for leaving without paying her sufficient homage. Is that geeky?

  15. I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity wearing my “If I am not better, at least I am different — Jean-Jacques Rousseau” t-shirt…and there was that one time I dressed as a Starfleet Captain…but that’s hardly unusual in geekdom.

  16. Okay I have now unintentionally spent my geekiest Halloween night ever: tech support for a bunch of people getting a jump start on NaNoWriMo. There were 30 writers packed into the lobby of the St. Julien hotel at midnight. It was awesome. Code monkey is now very tired.

  17. @Andrew Nixon: “or letters – I think you mean Ecclestone.”

    And I think you mean “Eccleston” – no final “e”.

    I’d say my geekiest Halloween costume was when I was Arthur Dent – easy: pajamas, bathrobe, towel – while my girlfriend at the time was the Guide – all black, with “Don’t Panic” written in large, friendly letters on her shirt.

  18. It depends on your flavor of geek. Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday. For the last three years hubby and I have had tickets to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party at Magic Kingdom.
    There’s nothing like going Trick or Treating and then eating your candy while riding Haunted Mansion.

    During the parade I totally geek out over the full tilt galloping ride of the Headless Horseman through the streets. Then there is the Grave Digger’s Dance. At one point they all drop down and spin around, dragging their shovels in a circle and throwing up sparks. It’s SO friggin COOL!
    And as an added bonus, riding on the Pirates float is none other than Johnny Depp, playing Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s done it every year for the last four years.

    So, yeah. Total geekgasm for me.

  19. @Buzz Parsec: Yes, I had the honor of sitting next to Liz and Squatchy (though Squatchy later went roaming among the Skepchicks). I just saw Liz last night, as a matter of fact, at Boston Skeptics in the Pub.

  20. @Buzz Parsec: We had just seen Marian the night before at w00tstock. We weren’t originally planning to come to SitP, but we liked her music a lot and also wanted to catch up with some friends we hadn’t seen in a while. But now I’ve been out late two weeknights in a row and I’m trying to keep from nodding off at work.

  21. Hmm, I dressed up as “prince charming” for a Halloween event for kids called the “Grimm Halloween” tour. A sort of night walk with entertainment along the way.

    But then again, that also gave me the opportunity to kiss Sleeping beauty awake about half a dozen times, so perhaps not quite as geeky …

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button