RKNet Blog... Thing

The dream log to follow really isn’t all that suprising to me. I’ve been re-reading The Dark Tower series (Stephen King, I’m on The Waste Lands) and quite frankly I’m probably crazy. The majority is unfortunately already disappearing into the fog of the waking world. A lot of what I do remember is NSFW in nature. That said, a handy cut tag will be employed for those more sensative of my gentle readers.
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Before you roll your eyes and groan over the concept of actually watching Yu-Gi-Oh - a show ostensibly created to SELL MORE CARDS GO GO GO! - let me assure you that The Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged Series will be well worth your time.

If you enjoy parody, obscure references, and goofy anime gags, this will be right up your alley. Even if you don’t, there’s a good chance you’ll still get a chuckle out of this.

The Abridged series creator, Little Kuriboh is doing a great job, trimming each episode down to five to ten minutes and then jam packing it with more gags and clever references than you could possibly be tempted to shake a stick at.

Go to the site and watch them. Or just watch the episode below the cut. I chose Episode 11 because that was the one which first got my attention.
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A short film about a young man who likes to draw. In the quivery, rich, hand-drawn art I see shades of Bill Plympton and Don Hertzfeldt, and Gerald Scarfe.

Yet the twin animators, Joy and Noelle, do exude a lot of unique character. The music fits like a well-oiled glove, and the voices are at once genuine and caricature of their intended characters.

If you enjoy this dilly of a pickle, and also maintain (for whatever reason) a MySpace account, I recommend popping by their MySpace Video spot and let them know how much you enjoyed it!

I went to bed rather early because I got up early and was a lot more active than normal.
At first I dreamt I was in a field and the stars over my head shone with a brilliance I have never seen before (not even in NM and the stars there were intense). At some point it became a stadium-like concert hall with a peculiar pattern of open roof. I sat down in a chair and continued to relax and look at the stars. I was there for a little while when I saw people coming in and sitting down. Then I realized that someone was setting up the stage area below. I thought to myself that since I was already here and no one stopped me before that I may as well stick around. At some point during all of this, I had company on either side of me, my father and a mystery person. As it turns out, the people setting up on stage were The Flaming Lips. They started to play (and it really was familiar songs, I was stunned almost in-dream by the accuracy) and it was really great but I got a little nervous because I didn’t know if I was allowed to be here or not. I turned around and looked, and there was a familiar looking young man. I asked if we’d gone to school together and he said yes. That was pretty much the end of that conversation. There were some fancy effects, one of which went wrong.

It had to do with a pattern of lasers over the crowd that would present the optical illusion represented above, and then had another image overlaid on that. (Looked sort of like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs if I recall correctly.) Of course to do all that, they needed smoke in the air. However, they couldn’t figure out how to keep the smoke from rising too quickly to the top and out of the open dome. I looked upward and saw that they attempted to “close” the dome but there was no fully closed setting and even still the ceiling was very high, causing the smoke to drift well out of laser range. I peeked through holes at the stars and longed for the way it was before. Though I was grateful to be sitting with my dad and grateful to be seeing the band perform. The nervousness of being discovered for my ignorant seat theft and the pang of longing for the peace field I had started out in were pretty overwhelming. I had gotten caught for my apparent trespass (despite having been there first) and was frantically trying to come up with some way to redeem myself. I stammered a suggestion to the large man towering above me that if they had linen sheets, lots of them, they could use it to create a canopy to blow the smoke under and contain it. I fled from the building, on a determined mission to find linen sheets. The open country had gone from field to urban while I wasn’t looking and there were a variety of stores, most of which were closed. I started out moving along by car but for some reason decided that was not the most efficient way to manage so I left the car in some parking lot and ran.
I wasn’t able to find linen sheets, so many places were closed and I returned to admit my defeat after the concert, despite the fact that I could have just run as my gut tried to tell me to. I lose the thread of the dream there. I may have woken up.
Later on, I dreamt of a video game. I believe it was called “Purple Valve: The Assisted Suicide Game”. Not sure why they called it that, other than it was remarkably easy to die. Player 1 was on a moving platform that was going down with a few other figures, but the idea was you needed to leap of and get power ups and hop from small block to small block to get the rest of the way down. After falling to my doom over and over again, I finally figured out how to grab power ups that made the fall less fatal, and finished level one. Some of those symbols made no sense. I don’t know why grabbing the baseball and then the baseball glove made an angel come and wing me part of the way down. Perhaps a manifestation of Saint Duh, the patron saint of obvious pattern recognition?
As level two began the whole dream pulled away from that. I was faced with something that was like a low budget cross between Transformers and John Carpenter’s Price of Darkness. There were these “symbiote” creatures created of wire that looked remarkably like CAT5. They informed us of their superiority and started taking people over one at a time. They did so by jabbing one of these wires down the throats of human victims. There was a lot of cautious reasoning with these monsters, trying to perhaps trick them into admitting a weakness while trying to establish the worth of the human race. This dream gets a bit hazy but I suspect that the humans did not survive. Incidentally I think Alec Baldwin was in that dream, portraying some manner of general.
And I wonder why I wake up tired.

This playlist has all but one part (part 7) of the BBC’s Walking With Monsters: Life Before Dinosaurs. It’s one of those fascinating historical exploration films with gorgeous CG animals and environments.

I’m watching it right now on the Discovery channel (commercials and all! GADS!), and I came in at the part with the brontoscorpio. Too cool.

Here’s part 7, sorry for missing it earlier!

I dreamt about a lot of things. I dreamt about being interrupted during what was ostensibly my high school graduation by a flirty boy who was also graduating by some kind of satellite deal so he was there/not there. The majority of my “class” was people I work with. Some strangers. Some people I actually went to school with. I kept getting distracted by that boy, and by thoughts of Zelda 2 for whatever reason. There was some EXTREMELY awkward joke about some kid with terrible hair being gay and I told him his back hair wasn't that bad at all. (Although it was pretty fuzzy.)

In another dream I was partly an observer and partly behind the eyes of a blond assassin woman who had Athena, Inc type abilities including hiding a sword in her throat! She said it was encased in a tube of that “movie glass” stuff, apparently after drawing the sword from her throat, she'd then shatter the “glass”. Since it was movie glass, her stomach would dissolve it since it's some kind of sugar and corn syrup mix or something. She was laying behind some kind of barrier with a wide crack between it and the ground. Sidling forward, she pulled out some kind of blade, she was going to ham string one of many soldiers just for the hell of it and something held her back. What it was I don't rightly remember, probably the vulnerability of her position. At any rate, she kidnaps Patton, who was played by some guy I know from work (so, assassin is fictional girl on the outside, me on the inside, this person is fictional on the inside and real on the outside), and proceeds to hold him captive for days, during which time they become lovers. She reveals to him that she's been successfully cloned many times, each clone being taught enough unique personality traits to be planted in subversive roles throughout the US without too much of a fuss. Yet she advises Patton not to worry because while her side has terrifying technology, they are also insane at their core and will fall apart. She eventually lets him go, with some story about defeating some large number of attackers and whatnot. With the excuse of completing her mission to eliminate him, she returns to where he is stationed. Some alarm is sounded at this stranger in their midst but “Patton” makes an excuse for her, including in front of his wife who appears obviously dismayed. Yet some joke was made of it that instantly mollified the situation. There was more canoodling and fretting and then the last I remember of it was she was leaping about through some kind of warehouse or some place with pipes.

The last dream I remember was quite a doozy. It actually takes place after the high school dream. Outside, sitting on the ground, some moderately heavy-set woman in a very loose knit red fuzzy body suit (and various other whatnots) made a bunch of awkward comments to me. Then I or someone was studying a bunch of paintings. 3 large panes, 2 of which had many of smaller images within the main frame, coming up with this insane theories and running into this building next to him/her/me yelling at some woman who was supposed to be a clarvoiant or something in regards to the meaning of the paintings. Then the paintings started to shift, and things got real meta, since it became the memory of a dream within a dream itself. There wer adorable colorful monsters in a crowd, and something else with an equally fat-lined drawing style. It was all moving and shifting colors a wash at a time. Then there was some business with me being in charge of some magical soda machine, which appeared to have gotten mixed up with reality since there was frozen corn and whatnot in it. Things started to fall apart right about then.

My comments in [] and italics. ~G

Subject: I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom.
[how romantic is that?!]

It is open to any interested individual. [death? love? What is?]
Das Ende der Parteien 1933.
F1, F2, F3, -. F-Prot for Windows 8. [Word association game? I'm down]
To build a single sample, run the build.
But in a few minutes there were so many dolls that they filled up the yard, their little street, two big avenues and half the square. [The "Boil, little pot, boil" story, doll style?]
In some instances, these files will perform functions that necessarily require the program file to change. [Sounds like the kind of tech dialogue I read every day.]
Frequently agents go as far as deliberately damaging secret arms and equipment so that they can be written off and then sold.[National arms smuggling secrets revealed in junk mail!]
Remember that the description should explain the effect of clicking on the button. [Usability is very important, afterall.]
They turn around and head for Grand Central Station. Those who hold that this growth is essential to gain full employment are fully entitled to their opinion. [Those two sentences don't pair together at all!!]
Remember that the monsters don't like water (that goes for Ice too). [So they're fire-type, then?] Not for prophecy or. [...or what? How about: Not for prophecy or pontificiation, this product may not apply to all philosophies. Consult your local theologist before applying Rando-mail Brand Email. Side effects may include confusion, dysphoria, and mild irritation.]

You want to know why I don't take the time to write out my dreams? Because if I did that, all I would do is sleep and write. It would take that long.

Here are some highlights, though!
A journey between an painted, huge, old school building type place, and a mountain.
Exploring hallways with monsters and going the basement to find the spiral stairs unstable and the man at the bottom becoming a less-than-friendly/stable willy wonka. (Gene Wilder style, adulterated tragically.)
Brainwashing of various persons (the reason for the journey away from the painted place monsters aside).
Verbal child abuse.
Observing various persons' and groups' flights from the painted place.
One girl was dressed in so many layers of stuff she looked like a flapper crossed with a gypsy spraypainted with the neon palette from the 80's, and had this blond, Brittany Murphy air about her.
She fled late in the game, panicing, and got pinned in some corner by a bunch of black dogs and one big wolf thing.
She should have had a goat, it was another dog, being flayed alive and turning insane and viscious.
I remember standing with someone in some kind of post or ticket office remarking how unsettling it was that Todd from work seemed to be programed to look snooty, but that it didn't take entirely, because sometimes he'd smile and be a whole different person.

The golden dagger!!!!
This was one of my favorite parts. The golden dagger was pilfered from a camp of male witches. They all had dark clothes (like a deep grey wool) with light trim, and muskateer sort of hats with pentacles on them. (Just the star, actually, no circle to be had.) We (the party and the individual whose head I rode in - it wasn't me) were scrambling by there, still fleeing the painted place as fast as we could. The mountain was known to be dangerous, full of monsters and crazies and the like. The witch-men didn't really seem to notice our presence all that much. Stumbling about in the grass, SWIM noticed something shiny and snatched it up with a furtive backward glance. Cut to the old man. He's behind a counter, and on it he places a small golden box. He pries the lid open with the golden dagger - which SWIM had found - and inside are a bunch of gold coins. I think there was another demonstration of really bendy gold, but I can't remember. Anyway, I notice the tip of the daggar isn't really pointed at all. The little old man pushes a button and from the plateaued top of the daggar comes a tiny silvery key which is pushed up by two smaller telescopic levels of the deep yellow gold. Another trigger and a small, silvery keyhole appears in the side of the thing. Dreams assume a lot sometimes, and from this inferrence, a panel opened in the broad side of the dagger. It was a camera! There was an appeture on one side and a view square on the other. (They lined up perfectly, but no matter… or does it?) Ah, but above the view square was a line of tiny pictures, like slide pictures, backlit, of the painted town, the painted old building, some other things relating to this vast, spooky conspiracy. There was a camera pan moment, because at one moment they were too small to really see much of, and then next not only were the 4-5 times that small size, but moving! Each picture in the line (6 or 7 of those) starting moving, displaying life in short, repeating segments.

It all flowed together from there and moved on to other things. Lots and lots of other, weird things.

See what I mean? Sleep and write, that'd be it. I'd never maked it through a week!