The Sand Sub (Remix)

Many years ago, I used Adventure Game Studio to design and develop a point-and-click adventure game called The Bunker. It wasn't especially good, but if you're interested for some reason, it is once again available on Mediafire: Here. I can't guarantee that it will run on your computer, but I'm not sure of any particular reason why it wouldn't.

Anyway, one thing that I really liked about the game was... well... some of the music. But the game only made use of MIDI for that, and so its quality depended upon the soundcard in the player's computer, and thus it wasn't always particularly fantastic.

Well, to make a short story even shorter, I created a remix of one of my favorite numbers from The Bunker, namely the theme that plays when you meet the crew of the Sand Sub. That is, a submarine-like vehicle that travels under the sand. The remix can be heard at my Soundcloud profile, along with a few other tracks that I've written.

There is a guitar solo in it that isn't particularly great. I recorded it in like half an hour and with only a handful of full takes. If this were a more serious endeavor, I'd have spent far more time with it, but meh...

Me Vs. The Mom -and- The Most Perilous Jungle in the World

Okay, so... a number of things:

Last night I dreamed that my whole family and I were participating in a family game show in which we had to compete against another family in a number of physical challenges. The first of the two that I remember involved all of us strapped up to a big apparatus kind of like a giant version of a mobile that you'd put over a baby's crib. We were all swinging around, slowly descending, and we had inflatable plastic hoops attached by velcro to our backs. We had to try to remove these hoops from the backs of the members of the other family. By the time we reached the ground, there were only two of us left: Me and the mom of the other family.

So they devised a tiebreaker for us: They separated us and gave us different tasks. To test my resolve, they were going to pour hot water mixed with fiberglass over me, and I would be required to endure this for a full five minutes. I put my hands over my mouth in shock, and the host of the show asked me if I was vomiting. He'd asked me this same question several times before, so I said, "No, I'm not vomiting! Why are you obsessed with vomit?"

I refused to do this ridiculous task, instead going over to the other wing of the building to see what they were forcing the other family's mom to do. Turns out they were forcing her to wrestle a wild beast. It appeared to be the missing link between killer whales and pit bulls.

The night before that, I dreamed that I was travelling through a jungle. At some point I came across two girls, one probably about four years old, the other probably about seven, who needed an escort through the next particularly dangerous stretch of jungle path.

As a matter of fact, it was the most dangerous part of any jungle in the world. As we progressed along the path, I constantly had to swing my sword around us alternately in virtually every direction in order to make it through alive. There was a neverending flow of red snakes trying to sneak up behind us. I decapitated these as they approached. There were also swarms of bugs that occasionally tried to descend upon us. I swiped my sword so quickly that these were reduced to piles of mush. We slowly but surely pressed forward towards a door through which we could see only a blinding light. Reaching this door, we knew, meant safety.

Unfortunately, I awoke before we got there, so I don't know what was on the other side.

~  ~  ~

The other thing is that I'm toying with the idea of making a blog post every Friday no matter what (unless I'm out of town and can't get to a computer or something). So if I happen to have a dream to report, I'll report it. Otherwise, I'll make some post about music or computers or something that I'm working on. Don't know. We'll see...

GOBLET

Ordinarily, when I come home to my little apartment on Wednesday nights, everything is quiet. The television is off, no one is using the computer, and my wife is in bed. Last night, however, I came home to the biggest party I'd ever been to.

As it happened, the biggest night in bowling was last night. The Grand Olympian Bowling League Empire Tournament (GOBLET), in which anyone who is anyone participates. It is the single most prestigious bowling event in the galaxy (it turns out that Andromeda is really the place to be for bowling, but we do our best). In any case, the afterparty was held in my apartment. Whether my wife organized it and didn't tell me or I organized it and forgot about it, I'm not really sure. Anyway, never mind about that.

Everyone participates in this tournament. I don't even know how many celebrities I ran into at this party. At one point I was talking to Shaquille O'Neal, who told me about how being as tall as he is makes him a target for projectile vomit and that it ends up drying in his hair, whereupon the smell makes him feel sick himself. I expressed surprise that this would happen often enough to warrant complaining about it, and he insisted that it happens all the time. Most people simply aren't tall enough to notice it.

This party and all the people crammed into my little apartment, including Shaq, strangely made the place look much larger. There was so much food spread out across the bar between my kitchen and living room that it seemed somewhere between two and three times longer than it really is. And you might think that it was professional caterers who worked the magic, but it turns out that according to tradition the food at these GOBLET parties are provided 100% via the old potluck approach. It just goes to show that in general celebrities are far from being the snobs that they are often purported to be. By the way, John Mayer's peanut butter bars were really good.

At one point I was walking along this magnificent spread of food, and by coincidence, Tom Cruise was doing the same just a few steps ahead of me. I think he thought I was stalking him or something, because he kept looking back at me with this anxious look on his face. I just wanted to see what kinds of cookies there were. I liked the dark chocolate ones with double size white chocolate chips.

The Tom Cruise incident kind of reminded me of the time I went to a Tony Levin Band concert at Brick by Brick in San Diego. Before the show, the members of the band were mingling at a table near my own. For some reason, I needed a pen, and so I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled one out. I guess at that moment I was looking right at Jesse Gress, and the whole band scattered and scurried off in different directions. I guess they thought I was going to demand autographs or something.

So I thought maybe I should look around to see if Tony Levin and company were at the party so that I could apologize for that incident. I understand that he probably wouldn't even remember it, but somewhere deep down I secretly assume that celebrities keep a book of mug shots of people that only want autographs and are therefore to be avoided at all costs.

I just want Tony to take me out of that book. Is that too much to ask?

At any rate, I suppose it really shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the team who actually won this year's GOBLET Goblet didn't have any celebrities as members. Well, at least not any celebrities who weren't famous for their bowling abilities. I didn't know who any of the winners were, but then again, I can't really think of any famous professional bowlers at all. I didn't mention this to anyone at the party, of course.

That could have been really embarrassing.

Ghost Tag

I was trapped inside some kind of haunted mansion or castle or something. Trapped there with me were a small number of others with whom I had not been acquainted prior to my present predicament.

One of these others was some kind of military soldier. I can't remember his name now, so we'll just call him Smith. In any case, he seemed a very well seasoned soldier, potentially a valuable ally to me, and so I tried to remain on his good side.

There was also a young lady named Miss Laverne, who turned out to be an experienced lawyer. For some reason that I can no longer remember, she was helping me with some important paperwork that I needed to finish. I was very happy for the help, and she wasn't unpleasant company by any means.

As she was a lawyer, I can't help but compare her appearance to that of Ellen Parsons from the TV series Damages. But she wore glasses, maybe kind of like Gemma Taylor from The Rage in Placid Lake.

Miss Laverne looked kind of like this...

...but with these glasses. Ignore the guy on the right. He wasn't in this scene.

There were a number of others, but their details are all shrouded by the ether now.

The layout of the mansion itself was vaguely like that of my grandmother's house, but its actual features were more like the interior of Hogwarts. That is, there were portraits on the wall that moved and talked, just like regular people. The people depicted in these portraits were, in fact, spirits of some import.

For instance, one of them was a blonde-haired young lady in a dress. The label on this portrait read, "Satan."

The others and I systematically approached these portraits one by one and spoke with the spirits contained within them. Each time we did so, an apparition of some kind appeared and chased us around for a little while before vanishing without having done any real harm.

Well, after one such little chase, we noticed that one of our companions had disappeared. Soon thereafter, we received an anonymous letter informing us that he had been kidnapped and that the kidnapper was demanding four million dollars.

After we approached the Satan portrait, a ghost of a tall, old, balding man in a white shirt and jeans chased us around. After a while, I realized that one of those old-timey telephones that you see in cartoons was sitting on the dining room table, and it was ringing.

It's for you.

I ignored the ghost as it chased the others. I answered the phone. It was Miss Laverne.

"Hello?" I said.

"This is Miss Laverne," she said.

I looked around and noticed that both Laverne and Smith were gone.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"I have kidnapped Smith," she said.

"Why?"

"I will return him in exchange for four hundred thousand dollars."

"What?"

She hung up.

The ghost had disappeared by this time, and so I informed the others that the kidnapper had turned out to be Miss Laverne.

But then I started thinking about this little development.

Why would she kidnap somebody and ask for four million, only to turn around and kidnap another somebody and ask for four hundred thousand?

Also, why would she tell us who she was, especially considering that the first note was anonymous? It seemed the sort of stupid move that might be made by some thick-headed high school gym coach, not a sexy lawyerbrarian. Something strange was afoot, and I was going to get to the bottom of it.

~  ~  ~

Actually, I never got to the bottom of it. Sadly, I woke up from the dream. I like to think that Miss Laverne was actually being framed by the ghosts of the mansion. Actually, now that I think about it, it might have been one of those Scooby-Doo villains masquerading as a ghost who had tried to frame her. But I guess I'll never know unless I dream up a sequel.

As for whether or not Rose Byrne actually played the role of Miss Laverne in this dream, I don't believe she did. I believe it was just someone who looked kind of like her. A Rose Byrne lookalike, sort of in the same sense that Carly Foulkes might be considered an Anne Hathaway lookalike.

I mention this only because on occasion some of the characters in my dreams actually are portrayed by particular movie stars. For instance, once when I was in high school, I had a dream about the lost empire of Atlantis, and as it happened, the top ranking Atlantean general was played by Sam Neill. He had golden armor and wings and could fly.