Plaidophile

Last night's dreams:

• For some reason they made a feature-length movie of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. For some reason my family dragged me to see it. For some reason I actually enjoyed it. (Scary!) The plot centered around there being some ancient evil unkillable spirit that was held in very deep cryostorage and which one of the responsible ponies had to check on it once a month; then one of the stupid ponies (who didn't know about it) accidentally unleashed it on the world.
• For some reason I had parked my car on the NMSU campus, but forgot where I'd parked it. The "keep locking the doors and hear the horn honk" trick wasn't working, but then I noticed my key had a headphone jack and a "map" button. Pressing this button would cause a synthesized voice to tell me how far away I was from the car — but in units of how much longer I had to walk at my current rate assuming I was walking straight for it. So the value kept on fluctuating between "ten minutes" and "two weeks," making it useless. As I woke up I wondered how hard it would be to add this feature to a car for real (using active transponders or whatever) until I realized that I already have this.

1. This week on Malcolm in the MIddle of Adulthood: Malcolm develops a crippling case of irritable bowel syndrome and refuses to leave his (very smelly) camper van
2. Scott Pilgrim was originally a poorly-drawn philosophical furry webcomic set in a featureless wasteland and which had nothing to do with video games
3. New Life in the Analog Age: Remember when we all had to flee the scramble jets as they turned us all into instant refugees? That was pretty great.

1

"Portal of Evil" TV figured out how to make the portal real, and we were able to visit the site where videos were created. So of course we all decided that we'd enter into the living rooms of the worse vloggers. Some did it to harass them, but I did it to set up impromptu social events in their homes so they wouldn't feel so lonely. I couldn't get anyone else to join in on the LAN party though.

2

An epidemic swept Hawaii, in which people would get a virus which would give them a particular mania. This mania manifested itself as feelings of being incredibly hot, which would lead them to become Realtors so that they could get clients who were selling homes that had cool, dark spaces to sleep in overnight, so they'd have somewhere to nest. There were physical signs of the infection, as well; peoples' noses would get very soft and flatten, which initially led people to think it was just a widespread cocaine problem. The later stages of the disease included seizure and sprouting butterfly wings.

I was at yet another pizza bar which was trying to cash in on the math craze. This one had "log pizza." The first slice was free, the second slice cost 69 cents, the third slice cost $1.10...

The pizza, incidentally, was terrible.

So, the other day I had another dream about the person I had a rather spectacular failure of a relationship with 10 years ago. I ended up posting to Twitter about it, and got a couple responses about how obviously my subconscious hadn't let go yet. But really I think it was just the usual random nerve firings that lead to me dreaming about this stuff.

Anyway, today they sent me a message out of the blue: "Had a feeling I'd find you here. Um. Just wanted to drop a note and say that I'm very much enjoying Unity." I thanked them for reading, and they replied, "Keep up the good work. It's a bizarre train of coincidences I followed to stumble across it, and I'm glad I did. Anyhow, that's the last I'll say so I don't start seeming stalkery or anything. Take it easy!"

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I'm using a different pseudonym than I did back when we were together, and the way they were talking I can't quite tell if they were aware of who I am. But the most likely explanation I can think of is that they saw my post to Twitter and decided to just say "hi" in a non-committal way.

Anyway I'm sure I'm just going to keep feeling uncomfortable about this. It seems like this sort of thing always happens right when I'm at the peak of feeling good about myself and how things are going for me in all the things they consistently made me feel a failure in so long ago.

Last night I dreamt that I was completely unprepared for my Japanese class final next week, and that I'd completely forgotten to go all semester. This was a dream I would often have in the time running up to finals in college and grad school, probably as a way for my subconscious to remind me not to miss a final exam.

Of course, the stupid thing is I'm not even taking a Japanese class — many of my coworkers are, though, and their final is of course next week.

I didn't die. I did have a strange dream about Muni though — due to a miscommunication with a couple friends I ended up in a part of town where it would have taken me 15 hours to get to the place I was supposed to be in half an hour. The place being some sort of "beneficial mad science" convention.

I still feel a little queasy but not like I'm going to make a mess all over the place (on either end), so I guess my lunch plans are unaffected.

I dreamed that for some reason I bought an apartment in an old Victorian building with a cake shop. The cake shop owner would constantly take liberties with my personal space and stuff, such as coming into my apartment and disconnecting my laptop so she could hook hers up to my monitor. She thought this was okay because she was working on an elaborate tangerine cake for me.

The previous owners had decided to partially renovate the bathrooms, and put up ugly paper-backed photo-laminate paneling, which had to go. Dr. Beverly Crusher beamed down from the Enterprise to help me assess the situation.

Also I think the cake shop owner turned out to be Dr. Crusher's mom or something.

I dreamt I was in a team cooking reality show (along the lines of Hell's Kitchen or Chopped). There were several teams of 5. Our challenge was to taste several sandwiches and then to perfectly reproduce one of them within a time limit. The one we selected was pretty easy because its contents were along a theme (red rye, red onions, beets, red lettuce, and so on). While my teammates happily accepted my input, when it came to actually doing anything, every task was so trivial that I kept getting pushed out of the way, and I ended up spending the whole challenge working on something completely unrelated. So of course, both the presiding chef and myself were concerned about me not doing anything, and I felt that my position on the show was in peril.

I had an angsty dream about work last night. That's often a bad sign.

I had a fairly disturbing dream that I'd had a stroke. As a result, I could no longer draw any of my characters anymore (specifically I kept trying to draw Tamu but he kept on coming out like Homer Simpson). So I tried going down to the liquor store to buy some gin and instead I ended up paying $40 for a 6-pack of Tequiza, and when I got back to my apartment I couldn't remember what floor I lived on and the elevator had been turned into some sort of cable car which made a circuitous path through nearby office spaces and it was all very confusing. Then I thought someone had drank all the Tequiza and I couldn't really comprehend if the bottles had any contents or not, so I went back to the liquor store and the salesman was all, "No, see, that's a bottle of Tanqueray, and it's full!" and it was. And then I somehow got back home and my roommate drank it all anyway.

A young alcoholic developed diabetes. He needed to get an insulin pump, but this was stolen by an escaped convict who had recently become a pirate after coming across a derelict airship. Somehow I got caught up in the middle.

At first I was apparently friends with the pirate (who, incidentally, had a wooden leg and an eyepatch, but he was still wearing his orange prison jumper) because I thought the young alcoholic was a bit of a dick. But then I realized he was dying and couldn't get another insulin pump. I pursued him (mostly by hovertrain) until we both ended up at my parents' house. There was a long negotiation involving much cannon fire and me hiding behind a scrawny tree, but I appealed to his humanity (with the help of a friendly neighborhood sniper), and asked him (via SMS) to please give up the insulin pump; "consider it a charitable contribution, although I don't think you can take a tax deduction on it."

He realized the error of his ways, and left the insulin pump behind as he flew off to plunder loot from those who deserved a good plundering.

In the new Star Trek movie, the crew of the Enterprise lands on a cartoon planet, which turns them into cartoon characters. In particular, Chekov becomes Timon (from The Lion King) and starts singing the hook to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, badly. This attracts the attention of the local predators, and a swarm of raptors converges on them. (Of course they are feathered, and driving in off-road vehicles.)

I watched it on TV, and due to broadcast licensing issues with the music, Chekov/Timon couldn't even sing the actual Lion Sleeps Tonight hook which made it even funnier, somehow.

I had these dreams last night:

1. I was at a dinner party somewhere in California with several of my friends from Seattle, including Libbie, Will, and Jenn. For some reason Will was going through my luggage and he found some gray-market estrogen, which he proceeded to do lines of (cocaine-style), and then he licked the mirror when he was done. Then I went back to the hotel (which was based on the one I was staying in), and in my room someone had left a two-piece bikini. It was too small for me, though, and the housekeeping staff (played by my friend Allison back in Las Cruces!) said it wasn't mine anyway. I looked in the bathroom and it was entirely filled with various clothes, mostly in a big pile on the floor, some hung up on hooks, some on partial-body mannequins, and more and more kept on piling in and was about to bury me, so I ran out of the bathroom. The other side of the bathroom wall was a gigantic wall-sized control panel for the air conditioner, which was really loud.
2. I was wandering around downtown San Francisco, and saw some guys fooling around with a payphone, attaching stuff to it. I recognized them and what they were doing from the current (in-dream) cover story of Make Magazine — they were hooking up a pre-paid cellphone to it so that people could make calls to it, as a work of interactive art. They had put one cellphone (some low-end Nokia) into a pedestal in an illuminated cut-out on the top of the phone with an instruction panel, and they had another cellphone (a Samsung) in a Commodore DS-10 VoIP Gateway Box, which looked a lot like a C64GS. Hooked up to it was a slimline version of the Amiga 1200, which the main artist (who was Finnish) was using to reprogram the phone. I chatted with them about the DS-10 VoIP Gateway and asked if it only worked with the Samsung ("no, it's a generic connector that works with all Korean phones, Samsung and LG") and we lamented about how it never actually existed, since Commodore went out of business several years before VoIP was even invented.

I dreamt I was living in a piece of "edutainment" software. My job was to help the two young goldfish (who were living in a deep river) keep their ecosystem in balance. Apparently they liked burying the Chaos Emeralds (which they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog) under giant planks of plywood which they couldn't lift and so I had to solve their dumb puzzles to know where to position this specialized plywood-sheet-lifter. Also I lost the clues for how to unlock the padlocks they put on the last plank, but fortunately the locks were cheap and/or there was a bug in the game so I could force them open by just putting the key into the second hole first.

Apparently, when goldfish get all seven Chaos Emeralds, they are rewarded with electric guitars. Their electric guitars are tiny and hard to play and have built-in cheap reverbs which you can't turn off.

I dreamt that I was poking around on the Dreamhost control panel and found a little tutorial about how to make a metallic bezel for tables on your webpage. They had a little table-design applet and an accompanying video to explain the process — after designing the table, which involved manually coming up with a connectivity graph, they would use this graph to set up an electroplating rig (by hand) and lovingly plate the table bezel by hand and then take a digital photograph for you to use.

Snake was in a convenience store with his retarded pal Goro (who was working in the sanitation department) to buy some ice cream, when Superfly Johnson and CJ held the convenience store up. So it was up to Snake to sneak around the shelves of overpriced candy and bust heads.

(Goro like ice cream.)

Last night I had a dream that someone (my identical twin sister, I think) was lecturing me that dreams were meaningless.

Then I got a haircut at the community college. It was terrible. Then I got to the house that I had just bought and discovered I had an infestation of informational pamphlet droppers.

Last night I had a dream which was pretty convoluted and I don't remember much of it, but one salient plot-point was that for whatever reason, the ACM kept on sending me SIGGRAPH proceedings even though I was no longer an ACM member.

The bizarre thing was when I got home today, I had a large padded envelope from the ACM: which had the latest SIGGRAPH proceedings in it! (Specifically the "full conference DVD-ROM" set with all the papers, sketches, art gallery, and who knows what else on it.)

I haven't been an ACM member for two years and when I was a member it was pretty unreliable as to whether I got the proceedings or not (sometimes I wouldn't get them at all, sometimes I'd get two or three sets). Now that I haven't been sending them money for a while, I'm actually getting this stuff that I don't care about anymore. And having a dream about it before it happens. Peculiar.

I was up a bit early and so I decided to watch cartoons. The cartoon which came up was some version of Superman, except Superman's voice was that of Brock's (from Venture Bros.). He was building a flying cage platform to capture the active-resistance hippie robot drones (with laser beams) which were about to wreak havoc on Republican City, with the assistance of about 12 army men who he had flown up to the flying platform personally. In some brilliant move, Superman decided that sitting inside the cage trap was the best place for him and the army men when the robot drones arrived, and started shooting at everything.

"Oh no, now I'm going to be depressed," said Superman. "I should fax in a prescription with my SUPER FAX POWERS." He closed his eyes and put his fingers to his temples, and Aquaman-style 'thought waves' came out. Then the robot drones were in the cage and powering up to shoot everything, and he flew out the escape hatch above.

"Hey, wait!!!" shouted an army man.