Crickets Chirping

Last night’s dream:

I adopted a wild baby fox. I left it at home and went to work, but then got a call from my roommate saying animal control was there to confiscate the fox. So I went back home, planning to fight for custody until I saw that the fox had shredded my couch cushions.

I told the animal control officer “Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s probably best for me and the fox if you to take it away.”

I believe this was symbolic, but not of my relationship with my dog.

I have strange dreams about machines that duplicate things. Here are two examples.

The Octoplier

I dreamt that I was working on a machine that could duplicate objects, but it was still in the early stages and didn’t work completely. The first limitation was that it only worked on watermelons. The second limitation was that it always made eight copies of the watermelon.

The more frequently it was used, the lower the quality of the inside of the watermelons. If you used it a few times a day, the watermelons would look fine on the outside, but when opened they’d be pale and sort of dry.

If you used it many more times in one day, the watermelons would still look fine on the outside but when opened would contain coffee grounds, food wrappers and other garbage.

Newton’s Apple

I had this one saturday night. My friend showed me a really old looking, dusty apple. “Can you believe it? This is the actual apple that fell on Newton’s head!” he said excitedly, “I borrowed it from some collectors I know.”

“But what I really want to show you is my new device!” He opened a metal box with some buttons on it, and placed the ancient apple gently inside. He closed the box, hit some of the buttons and zap- an apple just like the one he put into the box appeared on the table next to it.

He took the original Newton apple out of the box and held it up to the duplicate. “See, they’re identical!”

I was intrigued, but suspicious of his ability to duplicate fruit due to my previous experience with watermelons. So I picked up the duplicate and took a small bite out of it.

“Dude, what the fuck are you doing?!” he screamed. I thought what I was doing was pretty obvious (and harmless), “It’s just the duplicate. I didn’t even touch the original.”

“Yeah I know, but look at the original.”

Sure enough, there was a bite now missing from the original (In programming, we call this a shallow copy). I woke up before we figured out how to explain the Newton apple damage to the collectors.

Saw The Science of Sleep friday night. I highly recommend this movie. Great premise: a guy who has dreams and reality inverted. Great story with lots of hilarious dialog (“It’s like Noah’s Ark, but for Vegetables!!!”) and some (for me at least) unexpected twists. Michel Gondry is a friggin genius, in case I haven’t said it before.

Been listening to Mason Proper. I highly recommend this band. Listen to the MP3s linked from 3hive, then check out this live recording at WOXY. I’m really impressed that they pull all that shit off live. I figured it was AutoTune and a bunch of other Studio Magic (TM), but it sounds like they’re the real deal. I would love to see this band play here in Austin.

Steve Yegge’s Blogger’s Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp is a stream of concsiousness post that hits on a lot of things that I think about: programmers’ (often snobby, and frankly shortsighted) attitudes towards new languages, how dreams affect your creativity, the social side effects of working with people who know you blog, the recent ascention of JavaScript, and AJAX hype vs. utitlity.

I hate to post two dreams in a row, but damnit this one I had last night has been cracking me up all day.

I’m in the desert at a truck stop. It’s night time and very dark. There are lots of 18 wheelers in the parking lot. Two of them suddenly transform into giant robots and start fighting.

A third truck, hauling gas in one of those cylindrical tanks, decides it wants to transform too. But it’s not really set up for that. It strains as hard as it can and with all its might manages to stand upright, with its rear wheels as its feet and the cab as its head. It has no arms though, it’s just kind of awkwardly standing there looking all suprised that it got that far. A real feat, but pathetic none the less.

The two trucks who had transformed into actual robots stop fighting and turn to stare at the gas truck as it wobbles back and forth in its new configuration. They both erupt into robot laughter, snickering at this pathetic attempt the gas truck has made at transforming into a robot.

One of them walks over to the gas truck quasi-robot, grabs it by its head and starts pushing it back and forth like a vacuum cleaner which makes the other robot laugh even harder.

Some people I have told this to think the vacuum cleaner is me. I guess I could see that.

I think those Old Navy commercials are getting to me.  I dreamt I was watching the Brady Bunch.  Everything was just like the real show, except the two youngest kids were aliens.  Green, scaly, leathery skinned, yellow eyed, aliens with claws and lots of sharp pointy teeth.  The episode revolved around Bobby, who got caught playing with dolls when Greg barged into his room looking for something.  I should clarify: the aliens dressed just like the normal Brady kids, and even had the same hair cuts.  Cindy Alien had the normal Cindy curly hair.  Bobby Alien had the perm.  They looked like they were wearing wigs.

The dolls that Bobby was playing with were little aliens too and Greg was teasing Bobby about how they looked stupid just like him.