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Last Night's Dream:
I'm at a picnic in a park, and have a little girl of about 1 with me. We go and have a play on some equipment, off behind a big stand of bamboo. After a while, I decide to take her back to the picnic and make it fun by sneaking around the trees, which she finds hilarious.
When we return to the picnic, it has become a huge, costumed affair, with hundreds of people. We are accosted for being out of costume, abd brought before the blue-clad Queen (Vanessa Owens). The court gets sidetracked by the question of who's baby this is, so the question of our punishment is forgotten. Turns out the little girl is Edwina and Matthew's daughter, Agnes. They are surprised that she was so interested in the swings and such, as usually all she wants to do is play a tablet game that's a cross between pinball, soccer and turn-based empire-building strategy. The music blared "Do you play again? PLAY AGAIN! Do you play again? PLAY AGAIN!"

Last Night's Dream:
Bleopy returns!
It's what prompted me to actually post the last one, for (dubious) context.

I am playing in a live action political strategy game which is an upside-down version of a "4X" game. We are leaders of incredibly advanced species/cultures who have decided that our cultures must pass away from the universe to clear the way for newer races, but we all have different ideas on what kind of universe we want to leave for those who come later. I am Jorph, a nacreous obelisk. jk_rockin is Bleopy, the Archimandrite of Sreeem, a gold and purple plush, flying, spiky fish sort of thing
The game is based around a "4 Fs" structure, of which I can now only remember three: Foster, Forget and Fade.
We have to manipulate universal conditions to be suitable to the kinds of sapient life we want to see thrive, but then we must also stop ourselves from meddling further by forgetting about areas of space (and time?) and then we must fade from the universe at large, whether by dying, uploading into virtual worlds, departing for other dimensions or ascending from our physical forms and becoming beings of pure psychic energy.

Last Sunday Night's Dream:

regency_rhi is a romance novelist. She's been publishing a linked series, set in the backstage of a kids' show, much like Play School.
The first one was only moderately successful, but the second - "Sinning in the kitchen" - was a huge hit, so hopes are high for this third volume.
Robin (Dichen Lachman) is one of the hosts of the show and is worried for her own sanity as she's rapidly falling in love with Bleopy (a gold and purple plush, flying, spiky (plush spikes) fish sort of thing).
It all works out in the end after Robin realises that she's not been imagining talking to Bleopy while off-camera and going nuts, she's been talking to the puppeteer who voices her,

jk_rockin.
And they live happily ever after.

Tuesday Night's Dream:

We are a musical theatre company, touring a production of an "Oliver!"-esque steampunk pickpockets and hucksters musical called "The Good Kind of Haunted".

Or, rather, this is a TV show about that company, a bit like "Smash". We jump back and forth between the world of the musical and our real lives. There's quite a lot of singing in the musical, but not in our real lives. We don't express our feelings through singing*, but through stealing things with,for or from each other in the various cities we tour through.
Strangeways Pizzadarts (Sarah Mason) is one of the chorus dancers in the show, but also an acrobatic catburglar. She's stealing a moon rock from a museum in Delaware (by flipping through lasers) for Ricky (Luke Lancaster), who she's worried has been losing interest in her and has been spending too much time with Yancy (Anna Autio).

*Except for Inspector LeChevre's (iamagoatgirl) song about how she knows we're up to no good and she's going to prove it, but that hardly counts, she's not part of the company.

Last Night's Dream:

Once again, I'm playing a boardgame (with Frances, Angela and Adam). It's sort of X-COM-like, and we're various higher-ups in a clandestine, worldwide defence organisation that's coordinating missions in response to mysterious terrorist acts, performed with weird, not-yet-understood tech.

Over the course of the game, through researching and retro-engineering tech seized from these terrorists, we figure out that they are from the future.

Then we figure out that they have been sent back from the (actually very near) future BY US.

Then the game becomes about sending agents back in time, to perform the missions we were previously opposing, and reframing those events as achieving secret goals that further our secret time-travel related ideologies (which we draft at the point that we figure out that WE'RE the ones behind the time travellers). Over the course of the rest of the game, unused ideology cards are gradually revealed, so we have a clearer picture of what the others might be working on.

At the end of the game, we shuffle up all the ideology cards that were used, so it's unclear who was working toward what goals, then those goals are assessed. The player with the winning ideology can claim credit, but can't decisively prove they were behind that faction, so ... yeah.

I was Incursionism.

I swear.

Last Night's Dream:
An open mike/karaoke party kind of thing, in a location that was reminiscent of Leigh's old place, but actually underground.

Memorable performances:
-A slender, sharp-featured, floppy-haired young man whom I don't recognise, singing Wicked's "I'm Not That Girl"
-Paige singing Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)"
-Rhiannon, doing Chicago's "Hard Habit To Break"
-Sparksman, with a country version of Adele's "Rolling In The Deep"
-Leigh's cover of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al"

If there was a plot beyond that, I don't remember it. Nice tunes though!

Last Night's Dream:
I have died. Because I didn't leave a will, there is doubt as to whether my estate will go to Rhiannon. To win it, she must play in the new gameshow "What Snack Is That?"
On a big screen, a video of a man in a hardhat, standing on the street in front of the pool at Sydney Uni, trying to solve a handheld sliding tile puzzle.
A duckling waddles toward him and he flees, screaming.
As the video fades, the quizmistress (Heli, in a spangly blue evening gown) explains that, to win this round, Rhi must sing a song that expresses the meaning of the video.
Rhi steps in front of the microphone and then I woke up.

Last Night's Dream:
My Facebook feed is in an uproar because of the latest changes:
-Most Recent is no longer an option at all
-New posts and notifications all generate annoying sounds, which cannot be muted
-The main options have changed from things like "Update Status" to "PaperWelsh", "Fight" and "Bloodwinter".

Last night's dream:
Nate (~14) is annoyed. His little sister (~8?) is in his room. Again. She's phased through the wall. Again. She's in a pink orange, semi-tangible, nine-legged pseudo-octopus form. Again.
And she's touching all his stuff.

Last night's dream:
Rhiannon has acquired a huge amount of gold bullion by some sort of illicit means and - by some manner of magic? - transformed it all into blocks of cheese. Our coffee table is covered in cheese, stacked in orderly piles more than a foot high.
A moustachioed man in a ten-gallon hat is leaning back in the chair in front of our DVD shelf, lazily pointing a huge revolver at Rhi while she puts blocks of cheese into sacks. He is the Sheriff or Marshal or something. Something he says makes it clear that he is planning to keep the gold for himself and that he's working alone. I pick up a block of cheese and throw it toward his face. As it sails through the air, Rhi snaps her fingers to reverse the change.

Last night's dream:
We (Hida,

iamagoatgirl,

agent_aubergine, Shannon and I) are playing a maritime trading game. There's a big, hex tile map of ocean and islands, and we have little plastic ships sailing around. Mine are purple.
Each island has a marketplace and the values of the various resources in a given market are based on the current Market Demand card for that market. The card tells you how much each kind of resource is worth there. If you sell more than a little of the current most-valuable resource, the Market Demand card gets shuffled into the deck and a new one comes out. If you sell a large amount, you keep the card as a trophy and diminish the demand for that resource for the rest of the game.
The resources are:
-Black Rainbows
-Echoes (which come from a bell that's shaped like (is?) a melting heart)
-Verisimilitude
-5
-Bananas

The game has an elaborate mechanism to prevent kingmaking; the player with the most victory points is the winner, but the player with the 2nd most chooses one of the other players (apart from the winner) to be fed into the whirlpool of scorpions that the map becomes at the end of the game. This also packs the game away. Which is handy.

Sorry, Shannon.

Last Night's Dream:
Another 3D printing-based roleplaying dream! Here, the players are elite operatives in a paramilitary/spy agency (which didn't get named within the dream), tasked with thwarting the dastardly misdeeds of M.E.N.A.C.E.: Mercenary Espionage Network A-something C-something E-something (possibly A-something Chaos Extreme, based on the way M.E.N.A.C.E. operatives would salute with the phrase "Chaos Extreme!"), in a cyber-futuristic setting that reminds me of a cross between C.O.P.S. and Syndicate.
Jack is a broad Aussie stereotype in an slouch hat, who wields “Holo-Blades”- big knives with blue, translucent plastic blades (and are certainly never used on people)– and has a cybernetic right arm, which he uses to unleash a power punch attack that seems to be referencing the boxing kangaroo cliché.
Paige is a ninja-y, sniper-y kind of character with cybernetic legs and a huge laser rifle, which she uses to blow out vehicle tyres, blow up robots and collapse things on people. For some reason, she’s Italian. Or at least she talks in a terrible “It’s-a me! Mario! Mama-mia, what a pizza!” kind of voice. She always has a big cigar that’s faintly smouldering, but she never actually smokes it.
Paul is a moustachioed “Pip-pip! Right-o, chaps!”-British demolitions expert. I don’t know what Paul’s real fake British accent is like, but dream-Paul’s efforts are hilariously woeful. He doesn’t seem to have any cybernetics (unless one counts a cup and saucer).
Kristen is cybernetically interfaced with an amphibious tank named “The Hippo”. She has big electronic goggles that let her drive The Hippo and do some kind of nebulous computer-y hacking thing. Whenever she’s not wearing the goggles, they’re propped up on her head in a way that’s reminiscent of Princess Leia hair (I blame her Facebook picture). She is, mercifully, not an ethnic stereotype.

As with the previous dream, all the figures and accessories and vehicles and stuff comes out of a central playset building, but this building is like an office block or military headquarters.

The leader of M.E.N.A.C.E. is played by Nick, who appears to be the same cackling sorcerer as in the other dream, but there’s a sense that his magic is actually technological? Certainly his magical schemes are revealed (in Scooby Doo-like fashion) to be convoluted techno-trickery, but he’s also hinted as being literally the same character as in the other game, so is he from another dimension? Is this the chrome future of the other setting? Is the other setting the distant, post-apocalypse future of this one? All of these things seem possible.

Last Night's Dream:
The aliens have finally come. Our cabal has been waiting, making preparations to greet them.
But our interpretation of the signs were wrong. They didn't want us to change the sky. They didn't want us to give everyone the implants. They wanted to meet the human race as free-willed, sapient beings, not the biddable slaves we've made them.
We thought we'd be rewarded for our work, and in a way, we have. We live in idle comfort, in our palatial prison on the moon. Those of us who are still alive, anyway; two of the other eleven have already killed themselves. But the aliens want to keep us alive. We're the only conscious humans left.
Our mind control satellites have been tasked to return things to how they were, to get people to go back to their lives, to make a credible facsimile of life as it was. Sometimes, they ask us for advice on whether something seems reasonable. We are consultants for the largest museum in the universe.

Last Night's Dream:
We're in a sunny, white-painted tea room, on a balcony overlooking rolling, grassy hills. We're eating some kind of pastry things kind of like scones, but more ... briochey? They're slathered with cream and this champagne, pepper, orange and strawberry jam (marmalade? I'm not sure of the difference), served from a curvy jar that's shaped a bit like a parfait glass, sitting in a silver ice bucket.
I have Nate on my knee and I'm feeding him a small dollop of cream and jam from a small, elaborate brass spoon. Nate is wearing a little top hat.
Rhiannon is sitting to my left, wearing a bustly Victorian kind of dress, with a wide-brimmed, feather-festooned hat that has Linette's (very much alive, cheerful and talkative) head in the top, at a jaunty angle.
Seated to my right is a translucent white creature shaped a bit like a big bean, with 6 eyes (arranged in three pairs, one atop the next). It is not partaking of the briochey, scone-y things , as it has no mouth. It has a name, but I've forgotten it and I'm feeling too embarassed to confess the fact.

Last Night's Dream:
I'm playing (playtesting?) a mod for GTA V which gives you superpowers: faster running, shooting energy blasts instead of picking up guns, etc. The powers get better as you get a higher Wanted level; while you're "unWanted", you can run at bicycle speeds, jump about 5 metres up, shoot single blasts that are about as good as a handgun, that sort of thing. Once the police are after you, your running is motorcycle speed, you can leap more like 50 metres and can blast in constant streams like a firehose. Once the SWAT teams are broken out, you can fly like a jumpjet, hurl cars about telekinetically and gout devastating explosive balls of energy. The trick is to balance causing terrible devastation (so that you get more power) with not getting killed by the authorities.
There's a fair bit of bleed back and forth between the game and "real life". Sometimes I'm literally sitting in my living room in front of the TV, playing the game and occasionally pausing to make notes; sometimes I'm the character in the game. There's a fairly strong correlation between Wanted level/power and my "presence" in the game.

There is some sort of plot involving rescuing the victims of a people smuggling scam; a sinister boat captain is conning parasol-clutching Regency ladies into coming to 21st century America (with the promise of ... ?), only to sell them into sex slavery. I'm rescuing them in order to get them to teach prostitutes elocution and ... profit? Or something.

Last Night's Dream:
I am watching/playing a game show called "Roy Or Bison", where contestants guess whether things relate to Roy Orbison or a bison. Or sometimes to other Roys. Or Kings.
The show is hosted by Charlie Sheen.
An ad comes on, selling Simioplex "The perfect combination of monkey and hedge fund. All the fun of a Capuchin, with the security and stability of a fine fiscal instrument. Ideal gift!"

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Last Night’s Dream (actually Saturday night, but I didn’t find time to post yesterday):

More time travel, although this time I’m a native. The first time travellers arrive on vehicles somewhere between a Tron lightbike and a spokeless Penny-farthing. They leave trails of luminous rings in their wake, like a larger, parallel version of the perpendicular rings that Jetsons cars leave. Glowing clock hands sweep in the front wheel.
Silver-jumpsuited, the travellers come as researchers, intending to quietly observe and record our culture. They overestimate their ability to keep their presence unknown and their peers’ dedication to their goals of secrecy. Someone among them decides to profit by their knowledge of the future, makes some investments, gambles on some sporting events, gets too much attention, gets into trouble, makes some changes to deal with their problems. Others catch wind, decide to profit by taking on tourist passengers.
Now, and tomorrow, and yesterday, our culture and economy continues to adapt, warps to meet the needs of the tourists. More and more resources come from them, more and more jobs serve their needs. Many of them are just tourists, but enough of them have an agenda that things are changed. They didn’t come back with the intention to make a change, but when they see that people are living with poverty, living with disease, they decide they have to do something. They bring back medicine, but they also keep coming with diseases that haven’t evolved yet. They’re immune and we’re not. Every time they come back to try to wipe out the common cold, they bring back a virus we haven’t even imagined yet.

Richard and I are “zookeepers”. We take care of people who host the last samples of viruses that have been all but wiped out. It would be wrong to destroy them, and people come to see them in their “native habitat”, inside a human body. They look at the hosts and observe their symptoms and look at slides and listen to lectures about the history of these once-noble diseases, now on the brink of extinction.

The time machines continue to get bigger, their designs redone across cycles of invention, travel and pre-emptive acquisition. They bear thousands at a time and are vast as cruise liners now, and always have been.

The 22nd century will never be the same and never was. History is written by the visitors.

Last Night's Dream:
I'm in a windswept field, building a dry stone wall. A giant ant comes stomping across the field, stepping over me. I'm not worried about it stepping on me, but I reflect on how they've got to be something a menace since the government repealed the square-cube law.

Last night's dream:
I'm at a street festival and evening is rolling in. High above, trapeze artists flip back and forth between the office blocks.
People are crowded against the fence around an abandoned lot where a performance is beginning. Dozens of dancers whirl. A tall, thin, bearded man with dreads down to his waist emerges. He introduces himself as "James Bond 007".
A crewmember comes up to me and asks me if I'll do the puppetry for Catwoman. I agree and he takes me to a long trestle table covered in stuffed toys. He tells me to choose all the cats I can carry. There are no cats at all. I settle on a wombat, an owl and a bear.
Catwoman faces off with James Bond 007. At her signal, I tickle him with stuffed animals.
Afterward, Niccola is pounced on by a huge dog, so black that it dims the electric lights nearby. They play happily for a while.
I'm feeling frustrated, trying to remember a word. Leigh and Lisa are trying to help. Eventually, I just describe the thing I'm thinking of: how when most humans are born, another animal is born with them. And why doesn't anyone else think that's weird?

Last Night's Dream:
DC is having a competition to decide the flavours of their new red, blue and yellow Metropolitan ice cream. The boy or girl with the winning suggestion gets rocketed from our dying and decadent planet, their family gets a lifetime supply of ice cream.

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The Benj

Pants In A Can

October 2015

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Everyone has won, and all must have prizes.

Recent Entries

Do you play again?

Bleopy returns!

HEAs, all 'round

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In which we are our own undoing

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What Snack Is That?

It's all there in the terms of service

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There's cheese in them thar hills!

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Chaos EXTREME!

Cabals and curators

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unWanted

It's time to play ... ROY! ... OR! ... BISON!

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James Bond 007 vs Catwoman

Fatter than a speeding bullet!

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