The Hand that 30 Rocks the Cradle

Several nights ago, I dreamed that the final season of 30 Rock found the show reinvented as a "Political Intrigue/Science Fiction Thriller Serial Drama." The secret behind Jack Donaghy's success was revealed to be the fact that he is actually a set of identical triplets posing as a single person. Each Jack's personality, of course, was fashioned according to the treatment he received from his dear old mother, who for some reason deemed it appropriate to pick favorites. At the beginning of the final sequence of episodes, Liz Lemon and Good Jack were on the run from Evil Jack, who presumably intended to take over the world or destroy it or something along those lines. I cannot recall whether I knew the whereabouts of the third Jack or whether he was good or evil, but I have an inkling that Evil Jack killed him. Of course, this means he's probably going to do the old deus ex machina thing and turn up alive and well in the final episode so he can help Liz and Good Jack save the day.

I can't decide if I actually want this version of the show to exist or not.

The Gospel According to Virginia Woolf

Last night I dreamed that Virginia Woolf wrote a set of four novels, referred to as companion novels, that all depicted the same set of events from the perspectives of four different people. Two of them were titled Virginia and Ophelia. I cannot remember the titles of the other two books. Within the dream, my father remarked that the first scene was very accurate between the four books.

New Year's Resolution

I am thinking of making a commitment to composing a new piece of music, however short, and posting it to the Internet every two weeks. Perhaps the time frame may need to be adjusted, but If I make this resolution, I believe I will try every two weeks to begin with and then adjust accordingly.

I have been posting my music to my soundcloud profile: soundcloud.com/erenan

This is the source of inspiration for this resolution.

Car Crash Hill

Last night I dreamed that there was a hill with a particularly dangerous road upon which many cars have crashed on account of the drivers misjudging how fast they could go. People would actually come to this hill in order to watch the cars crash. Most of these people were attorneys who intended to represent the drivers in court.

You see, the road was so incredibly dangerous that there was actually a local law explicitly stating that the driver could not be held legally accountable for crashing on it. The city would be at fault in all cases.

I also dreamed that there was a giant tortoise at the San Diego Zoo or the Wild Animal Park on top of which babies could ride around. The babies seemed to like it a lot.

Bad Movie Better Butter

A couple nights ago I dreamed that there was a brand of butter called Bad Movie Better Butter, the claim made in their advertising being that the spreading of Bad Movie Better Butter upon bad movies would make the bad movies better. The product's slogan was "We make the bad movies better!"

A Dead Stag

A stag fell dead, for the ebb of ethereal grief tis quicksilvered blood.

The sea rolled back upon its rearward edge
and pressed against a hidden one as you
eftsoon cut to the quick a quickthorn hedge
to form the stormcloud's silver lining true

Elf Motors Inc.

I made a blog entry about a week ago about a point-and-click adventure game that I made with Adventure Game Studio called The Bunker. Well anyway, I had also made another one called Elf Motors Inc. Like The Bunker, it is not the greatest game ever made. However, I played it through again this evening, and I actually liked it a lot more after all this time than I expected to. It's actually better than I remember. If you want to play it, the link is here. If you do play it, you'll probably need to run the setup program and choose "run in a window." There's also a walkthrough online that I didn't write, so I know somebody played it other than me.

More Mass Effect 2 DLC: The Arrival

So I was worried that I wouldn't have anything to say this Friday to meet my arbitrary "always blog on Friday" rule that I applied to myself a week or two ago.

I needed some dumb thing to blog about.

So when I realized that Bioware has released yet another package of downloadable content for Mass Effect 2, I decided that would be my dumb thing for the evening.

It is called "The Arrival."

I do not really have enough time to play it right now.

I will post more interesting stuff later when I actually have some interesting dreams.

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...