I enjoyed experimenting, with individual mini-lamps, although I didn't consider the issue of self-shorting types...(Yikes!).
One curious phenomina that occured was a variation of lamp 'HALO' visual trick; Somebody had built a room decoration where a little red bulb was positioned precisely in front of a blue mini-bulb. The trick effect was that the red mini-lamps appeared to have a BLUE aura! You had to move your head around a bit, to discover what was going on.
Wouldn't hurt to downgrade the volts, some, using 2.0 volts vs. 2.4 standard. Don't forget that's AC rms, in those 'old days' (1992). I think the current was somewhere around 40 to 100 mA each, which is a fairly fast drain, on small battery...certainly won't last more than one night.
Some guitar effects, such as Fender amp tremolo have used the softer response of a filament lamp / with LDR (light dependant resistor), for modulating volume.