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Dec. 7th, 2002 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo I just mailed my Christmas card/non-advent calendar/"wish I was in Wales with y'all" object off to my parents, having finished it between 1:30 and 4 am last night. Am pretty proud of it... some nice details including a Grinch sketch based on a screencap and a four-panel "Night Before Christmas (abridged)" comic. Think my family will love it, if it actually gets there... wimped out over the cost at the last minute and opted for priority mail instead of express. Priority *should* get it there on Tuesday or Wednesday, and they don't fly until Thursday afternoon, but I'm going to worry about it until then and feel like a huge dork if it doesn't make it. But, hey, got it *done*!
Also on the creativity front, the department holiday party featured a contest to decorate a hat using only materials from the lab (and then make your PI wear it in the contest). We're not *exactly* an independent lab, but I did one for my boss that was half tinfoil with paper snowflakes and half green with lab-tape flowers. He looked very pretty ::grin:: and it ended up being worn for a good chunk of the party by someone's enthralled three-year-old son. The best hat (not the winning hat, since it was applause voting and so the lab with the big loud guys won) had taped a plastic bag over the top of the hat and used one of those compressed-air cans (like to clean your keyboard) to inflate it and blow shreds of paper around in it, as snow, and there was a little Santa figure in there with a laser pointer aimed through colored agarose which I believe relates to their research somehow. It was awesome.
And, one of the best dream transitions ever: it's a sword-and-sorcery dream, and I'm fighting and casting and whatnot, and am outnumbered and scared... and then there's this slight shift, and it's not really happening, it's... a LARP. Which I can tell because suddenly we keep stopping to argue about the rules ::grin::. Also featured an interesting magic effect - I cast (in this dream) more-or-less a wall of force across a doorway, basically impenetrable to anything (objects, magic, sound), which was a *major* spell... except that it would only last as long as I kept my hands on either side of the doorjamb. So you could use it to give your friends behind you a chance to escape, or to treat wounds and get ready, but you'd be guaranteed to be right there when it came down. And then, of course, since I was to some extent *me* in the dream, immediately my nose started itching... anyways, I'd love to either write this up to be D&D usable, with the various Con and Will checks to see how long you manage not to move your hands, or work it into a HP fic somehow... I kind of picture it also working if multiple people cast it and hold hands in a circle around whatever, which is an interesting situation to be stuck in...
Also on the creativity front, the department holiday party featured a contest to decorate a hat using only materials from the lab (and then make your PI wear it in the contest). We're not *exactly* an independent lab, but I did one for my boss that was half tinfoil with paper snowflakes and half green with lab-tape flowers. He looked very pretty ::grin:: and it ended up being worn for a good chunk of the party by someone's enthralled three-year-old son. The best hat (not the winning hat, since it was applause voting and so the lab with the big loud guys won) had taped a plastic bag over the top of the hat and used one of those compressed-air cans (like to clean your keyboard) to inflate it and blow shreds of paper around in it, as snow, and there was a little Santa figure in there with a laser pointer aimed through colored agarose which I believe relates to their research somehow. It was awesome.
And, one of the best dream transitions ever: it's a sword-and-sorcery dream, and I'm fighting and casting and whatnot, and am outnumbered and scared... and then there's this slight shift, and it's not really happening, it's... a LARP. Which I can tell because suddenly we keep stopping to argue about the rules ::grin::. Also featured an interesting magic effect - I cast (in this dream) more-or-less a wall of force across a doorway, basically impenetrable to anything (objects, magic, sound), which was a *major* spell... except that it would only last as long as I kept my hands on either side of the doorjamb. So you could use it to give your friends behind you a chance to escape, or to treat wounds and get ready, but you'd be guaranteed to be right there when it came down. And then, of course, since I was to some extent *me* in the dream, immediately my nose started itching... anyways, I'd love to either write this up to be D&D usable, with the various Con and Will checks to see how long you manage not to move your hands, or work it into a HP fic somehow... I kind of picture it also working if multiple people cast it and hold hands in a circle around whatever, which is an interesting situation to be stuck in...
