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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!
What’s the geekiest thing you’ve done for Halloween this year? Or in years past?
Hey I also did the robot devil this year!
http://twitpic.com/31xiq8
Nerdiest thing this year: Ninth Doctor Pumpkin
http://picasaweb.google.com/scientifica.admin/Halloween#
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.
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?
@Ali Marie: Ack. Correction. That’s the Tenth Doctor (Tennant), not the Ninth (Eggleston). I apparently can’t type numbers correctly.
Dressed up as a Blue Screen of Death.
I demand more pictures!
@rachaelk: What are the chances?? Great job!
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
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….
@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. :-) :-)
Well, I didn’t participate, but earlier today my husband carved a pumpkin with a Fresnel lens. I thought that was pretty geeky.
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).
@Elyse: And one can only hope the old lady says, “you can’t touch this!”
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.
Geekiest thing I did was to re-arrange my home theater system so my pillow was leaning up against my subwoofer. But it did make watching Predator SOOO much more epic.
@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!
@Ali Marie: That is an awesome pumpkin!
@trepto: I <3 you. That was probably my favorite game from ages 7 – 19
Last year my group of friends dressed up in full steampunk costumes http://www.flickr.com/photos/thirystheory/5089827169/ The one with the awesome head tattoo is my PhD adviser!
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!”
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.
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?
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.
@aiabx: Cool idea -I wish I had done that.@Kaboobie: Is that you sitting next ot my friend Liz?
One year I dressed up as Salvador Dali’s “woman with drawers”.
Another year, I carved nothing but the words “The BRAINS Igor, the BRAINS!” into my pumpkin. You could hear all of the kids coming up the driveway mumbling. “the… brains? Igor? the brains? huh?”
This year, I carved a raven on a branch silhouetted by the moon with the word “Nevermore” down the side.
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.
I dressed my daughter as Trogdor. She was 2.
@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.
@MarlowePI: Quite right – made myself look like a bit of an idiot there!
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.
@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.
@Kaboobie: Oh, I was sitting in the next booth.. small world!
Marian Call was AWESOME and seemed so happy we got her nerd jokes!
@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.
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 …