David’s Ramblings

I must have been really tired last night to spew all that crap about dreams out onto my website. I’ll go with the safe option and opt not to write another article for my website when I’m too tired to think about how stupid it is. In the mean time, here’s some things that I plan on writing about so you can look forward to me never writing them:

Reviews:
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Adventure
Second Life
Hostage
GTA:SA
Windows Vista

Other Miscellanea
Why I bought a Mac
My first comment spammer
Artificial Intelligence
Identity Theft

I won’t even attempt to write any of these tonight, since last night’s late night writing was just short of a complete mess.

The other night, I got drunk off my ass. I then proceeded to wake up. Dreams can be interesting things. I’ve never seen liquor outside of a grocery store in my life, yet I dream that I’m drinking Vodka for the first time and get seriously wasted. Kinda eerie, as I’ve never had the desire to drink… what’s my subconscious up to?

Yeah, dreams can be crazy. I’ve had my fair share of them. I’m not sleeping much lately though, so I’ll substitute sleep with descriptions of some of my more bizarre/enjoyable dream experiences. Why? Because I own a blog and can post all the stupid crap I want.

If you want some sort of odd glance into my psyche, read on. Otherwise, I seriously suggest you just quit while you’re ahead.

Dream #1

I’m not sure if I can remember it exactly, but it stayed with me pretty well considering it was about a year ago.

*We’re in a fairly large parking lot, looking toward the quite large, fairly tall building in the background. My family is crowded around wishing me luck.*

“Work hard, and try to have some fun,” Mom says.

“Oh, I will,” I say, beaming with confidence.

Then I walk into the building, which I understand to be my new school. I vaguely remember that my parents and I had been walked around the school in my personal orientation a few weeks prior, but nervousness sets in anyway.

Filler: I don’t see any of this stuff first hand, but I just know it in my dream:
I’m attending a school for developing Psychics. Think a mix somewhat between Ender’s Game Battle School and Hogwarts without the robes. That’s something like what I’m attending – a school to train as a psychic warrior or something.

Flash forward through me going to intense courses of advanced math and science and such. I’m top of my class in everything.

*We’re in the courtyard in front of the tower. I’m rushing to get there in time.*

It’s our first venture into the training tower and I’m excited. I bump into my math teacher who wishes me luck. I find my place in the back of the crowd of students around the instructor taking us in. He’s giving us the standard warnings we’ve already heard several hundred times.

“The tower has real elements of danger in it, nothing we can’t handle, but we can get hurt if we’re not on top of our game…” blah blah blah. “Haslem! You just get here? Good thing! You can partner up with Eric here. You’re lucky I let you go in being late and all.”

Eric. (Not sure if that was his name in the dream, but it seems suitable) Some kid I really hate. Everyone hates him actually. He’s a jerk and a pansy. I wish I’d been able to hook up with Shaine or one of my other friends. I can see Nicole and Mal paired off as suspected. Shaine’s with some kid I don’t know. There’s several others paired up, so I’m left with Eric.

We go in. It’s a jungle environment, nothing too scary about it. We’re supposed to be retrieving one of five tokens in the room. I drag Eric the way I know one of them is. (Because I’m one of the better psychics in the room and can sense it.) He starts whining because we’re going through a dark, dense part of the forest.

“You sure it’s this way?”"Yes… you’re scared aren’t you?”"No! I just don’t think this is the way.”"Sure it is. Use your head. This is the fastest way.”

I stop. I sense something very, very deadly. A super tiger one steroids jumps out and mauls Eric, making quick work of him. I know this thing’s not supposed to be in here, but what am I gonna do about it now? I use super sweet sword moves and beat the crap out of the tiger thing till he runs away.

“What have you done to Eric?!?” comes a shout. I suddenly understand why the tiger was there, and I book it out through the forest to the elevators going to the higher, more dangerous levels.

20. 20′s three higher levels than any of the teacher has ever been able to get into and live to tell about it, I say reminding myself of the history of the school. I’m shaking in fright as I go up through the levels. The teacher had set me up. This teacher had nearly killed me twice, but I had thought those accidents.

He’d been trying to get rid of me. Why? I don’t know, but for some reason he had. I’d read his mind and known for certain that he was going to come out of the tower that day pointing his finger at me for murder. He’d probably planned on the tiger finishing me off, but he’d easily twist the plans.

So I stepped off on the twentieth level. The tower had long before become a self-regulating system where the creatures and environments simply stayed where they had been originally designated. There were no formal controls to turn off the training environments or anything, just the elevators that went through the levels. There was no way they could get me in there unless they came in after me.

Never mind the fact that no person had survived on level 20 since it had been designed, I couldn’t bother myself with such trivial things.

Anyway… the dream continued on a while yet. It was wonderfully complex and fun to dream. I wish I had more dreams that pulled me into the story so much rather than just brushes with a semi-storyline…

Dream #2

Me years after the school. I’d survived. This dream occurred several weeks after the first. It was also one of those dreams that was very complicated and had what seemed to be a plot. These kind of dreams are so fun, you should try ‘em some time.

I land my hover craft in some half-destroyed building and hop out. I’m a futuristic soldier with all sorts of fancy stuff. I’m inside some sort of communist country attempting some sort of guerilla warfare. I won’t go into this dream a whole lot, but holy cow, I was doing street battles and stealthy sneaking around, all sorts of fun stuff.

Seemed like I experienced several days worth of the mission in the short time I was asleep. I was about to my objective when I woke up. This dream was so much different from most other dreams though. Absolutely crazy in detail, not the typical, fuzzy, “I can barely tell what that blob is I’m running from” kind of dream.

Other Dreams

I’ve learned to fly in my dreams. Most of my dreams are totally unrelated to any of the others, but the one constant is that I can fly. I spent several dreams trying to learn how, practicing. Seriously, I remember dreams where I’d take a running jump off the hill and try to lift off. When I finally got it down in one of my dreams, it stuck. Every dream I need to fly now, I can. It’s so odd.

Another fun feature of dreams I’m sure many people experience. I always know super kung fu, weapons skills, etc, when I need it. Like in your dream you’re sitting there with a guy pointing a gun to your face and suddenly your like “I know kung fu.” Then, with cat-like reflexes you snap his wrist and have his gun pointed to his face before he knows what’s happening. It never works in the nightmares though. You’re thinking “I wish I knew kung fu” at all the wrong times. Odd how dreams work.

And hey, I’m finally feeling tired after all this crap I typed. Now I can go try to have an entertaining dream.

I just thought I’d let my infrequent readers (both of them) that I have not died. I’ve just not been posting because I tend to be extremely lazy. I’ll try to stop doing that. Now go read the posts I just put added. All three of them, even if they suck. Go go go.

Dumbledore dies, Snape killed him. If you’ve not read the book yet, you should probably not read that last sentence because it’s what’s known as a spoiler; however if you just want to forgo the book and wait for the seventh one, you can read that sentence and have the entire plot.

I read this book in two days, depriving myself of sleep. I obviously enjoyed this book. It was a very good book, even if was a Harry Potter book. Yet, no matter how much I liked it, I find I cannot deny the simple fact that the only thing resembling a climax was killing Dumbledore. The book had no other end goal it seems, making us feel cheated when we finish and find that Harry had accomplished absolutely nothing.

It set us up a bit for finishing off the last book, but almost all of that setting up could have been contained in a prologue to the actual seventh book.

Allow me to rewrite the entire book in a form that doesn’t require us to lose sleep or kill an entire tree in making it:

Harry once again doesn’t enjoy staying at the Dursley’s, and then spends the rest of the summer at the Weasley’s. They then go to school, where Harry continues to believe everyone is staring at him, displaying the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Hermione and Ron play a game where continuously pretend that they don’t have crushes on each other, and then get together for a small emotional payoff that makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Harry has to have a crush too, so he feels like part of the ‘in’ crowd. He decides to have one on his best friend’s little sister, who’s like 6, making him a pedophile. Harry’s crush actually turns into an rare form of Wizarding heartburn that is described by the author to act like an animal in his chest or something stupid like that. In the original book, it bursts out and starts killing everything, like in the movie “Alien”, but JK Rowling decided at the last minute to cut this part out because it was so cool it made the rest of the book seem dull.

They find out that Voldemort has seven part-souls and they have to kill them all. They don’t find any of them, because that would accomplish something. They do, however, all decide to agree that Voldemort is not a very nice guy and will have to start allowing the other wizards to inspect his country for weapons of mass destruction.

Dumbledore then dies a pointless death at the hand of the obviously evil Severus Snape (after Draco Malfoy shows himself to be a nancy who’d much rather fiddle around with his wand then use magic for its real purpose of killing). Dumbledore’s dying thought is recorded as “Damn, with a head as big as I constantly claim mine to be, I should have realized that the evil-acting guy is, for all intents and purposes, actually evil, though I continuously refused to deny it.”

This is then the point where we realize that the book is over and we want to know what happened to the real ending. Harry waves his wand and then drinks his lucky potion to try to find it. He then trips over a drunken Dumbledore sitting in the grass, and they find that it was just a bum off the streets they had buried. Everyone’s happy and then Harry wakes up sad to find he was dreaming again. A horrible ending to resort to the “wake up” cliché, of course, but no worse than the one we were handed in the real book.

In the end, I rate it 4.5π. It was a good book, just one I had to rant about because I liked it so much. The ending wasn’t so horrible. Go read it, even if you’ve never read a Harry Potter book before. It’s good.

Review for “Fantastic Four”
Score: 3.9π out of 900º

Yesterday I went and saw the movie “Fantastic Four”. The story revolves around a group of 5 people who went up into space to conduct an experiment and ended up getting freakishly mutated.

Obviously, the not-quite-so-fantastic five should have realized the chances of something going horribly wrong and them being mutated into super-heroes, as it happens to so many scientists on a day to day basis. Spiderman, the Hulk… Why can’t the scientists just figure out that if you do a science experiment you’re bound to be stuck serving the cause of justice?

Anyway, all-in-all, this was a decent movie. The movie was able to pass off the mutations in a believable (for movie standards) way. It wasn’t like we were just supposed to accept that this thing just happened in space and that changed them, but they tried to make us feel like there were scientific principles at work or something like that. I respect movies that try to make up science to explain themselves rather than just saying to me “ignore the hows and whys — this person can just do this, okay!?!”

I recommend you go and see this one, if you’ve liked any of the Marvel movies to come out so far. If not, this may not be your cup of tea.

Well, while I’m at it, I’d also like to review the kid sitting behind me in the theater. He gets a solid 0π score. The kid just wouldn’t shut up.

Example:
Man goes to kiss lady, lady turns invisible…
Kid behind me: “Ha! She went invisible, he can’t see her face because she’s invisible.”
Me (muttering): Thank you, Captain Obvious!

Example 2:
Fire Guy: “Flame on!”
Kid behind me: “Look! He said flame on and burst into flames!”

Example 3:
Evil Dude in Movie: “You know what happens when rubber is super-cooled, don’t you?”
Kid behind me: “What does happen when you super-cool rubber?”
Evil Dude in Movie, snapping Rubber Dude’s finger in two
Kid behind me (oblivious to the answers onscreen): “What happens mom?”
The Mom: “Shut the hell up! *Slap!*”
The Mom not in my imagination: “I don’t know honey…”

[All of these were actually said. He had like thirty to forty comments - I'm not exaggerating.]

It was awful. He had to commentate every little thing, ask a billion questions that the movie was promising to answer in two seconds anyway, and just generally remind me how much I hate children.