Short dream sequence:
I had recently attempted to zip-line across a great distance of water, via a rope connecting two separate islands. I had accidentally let go and dropped into open water. Now I was swimming backwards to try to get back to the island.
I turned around while swimming backwards and discovered that a large crocodile was waiting for me with its mouth open. It sprung forward to try to eat me. I remembered reading somewhere that it is impossible to hold a crocodile's jaws open, but possible to hold a crocodile's jaws closed. So I made sure to clamp my arms around its jaws before they had a chance to open again.
The crocodile struggled in my grasp, trying unsuccessfully to open its mouth and eat me. I realized that I had to kill the crocodile or it would continue to struggle. At first, I tried bending its snout/mouth. Surprisingly, its mouth gave way and folded in half. However, the flexible-mouth crocodile was not wounded or deterred at all.
Then, as we were drifting towards the island, I picked up a nearby piece of cooked beef (lying on the beach of the island) and attempted to stick the small piece of beef in the crocodile's eye. This was ineffective, so I opted instead to stick my bare thumbs into both of its eyes, a maneuver taken directly from a gory scene in "28 Days Later," a zombie movie. This not only destroyed the crocodile's eyes but also caused it to die from pain.
As the crocodile died, it rasped, "My intestines will find you and take revenge!" Then, numerous flat egg noodles sprung from its torso and wriggled towards me. They looked edible.
The end.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
My WoW bot got banned :(
Just thought I'd like to bitch about my problems here.
My friend claims to make 30-40 dollars per day running his bot* on World of Warcraft and selling the gold he earns for cash**. This inspired me to write my own bot, because I need money. My parents are always watching how much money I use via bank statements and they get suspicious when I buy too much food (they think I'm buying drugs with it or something).
*bot: a program that does shit for you automatically so you can go to class or sleep or have a life while your character does shit in the game.
**lots o' people like to buy gold (World of Warcraft currency) with real cash using techniques such as Paypal.
So I bought WoW for 20 bucks, wrote up a pixel-detection fishing bot, and started to make some money.
At first, business was slow and I only earned 5.50 US dollars worth of gold in 2 weeks. But I had GLORIOUS PLANS to improve my bot and automate even more tasks to earn up to 10 US dollars per day.
Unfortunately today I received an email from Blizzard Entertainment informing me that my account had been banned on the grounds of "manipulating the economy." I find it highly ironic that they banned me for flooding the game economy with little fishies, but not for botting, which is the more serious offense!
I got so depressed that I sent them this confession email as a small joke. I doubt I will get a response:
[Dear WoW account administration,
Today I discovered that my account (theguy126, US) was banned from World of Warcraft without prior notice, for "economy manipulation."
I know you do not condone botting or selling gold or any sort of that thing, but please realize that WoW is my only source of income. I am a UC Berkeley student with an inadequate mealplan, and I often need to buy food with my own money. As a student, I do not have the time to find a job or to work part-time. My parents provide me with cash, but they become suspicious that I am spending cash on other dubious things when they see the bill (even though I only buy food).
My bot on WoW earns me a very small amount of real-world cash below minimum wage (at best, 2 dollars per day). It is a pixel-detecting, intelligent fishing bot that I wrote by myself after hours of tedious hard work. It is self-sustainable and "learns" to adjust certain variables to reliably recognize the fishing bobber, and does not require specification of whether it is "night" or "day" or what color the bobber is. I was planning to improve its effectiveness by having it automatically auction the fish, and also automatically alternate between multiple realms -- this would earn maybe up to 10 dollars per day. I was very depressed when I discovered that my account was banned. The hours I spent working on my masterpiece Auto-it bot were wasted.
Please do not take away my only source of income for food. I am dead serious when I say that the only things I buy with my money are food, milk, and orange juice. Since my mealplan is inadequate, I have no cash to spare for extra things. I don't even play WoW for fun; in fact, I bought WoW for the sole reason of making cash. I was inspired by my friend who claims to earn 40 dollars per day botting on WoW.
Please, reactivate my account so I won't have to go hungry. Like I said, my parents provide me with cash, but I need to earn some of my own money in order to eat as much as I want without feeling remorse or fearing suspicion from my parents. The amount that I earn is hardly worth anything to you, but it helps to keep me from starvation. I am very serious about this (I weigh only 140 pounds and need to gain weight).
Sincerely,
Max
P.S. despite the somewhat joking tone of my email, everything I say is completely true (my parents will still let me buy food, but I really do want to eat whatever I want without feeling remorse, and I only weigh 143 pounds), and I really would appreciate it if my account were reactivated.]
My friend claims to make 30-40 dollars per day running his bot* on World of Warcraft and selling the gold he earns for cash**. This inspired me to write my own bot, because I need money. My parents are always watching how much money I use via bank statements and they get suspicious when I buy too much food (they think I'm buying drugs with it or something).
*bot: a program that does shit for you automatically so you can go to class or sleep or have a life while your character does shit in the game.
**lots o' people like to buy gold (World of Warcraft currency) with real cash using techniques such as Paypal.
So I bought WoW for 20 bucks, wrote up a pixel-detection fishing bot, and started to make some money.
At first, business was slow and I only earned 5.50 US dollars worth of gold in 2 weeks. But I had GLORIOUS PLANS to improve my bot and automate even more tasks to earn up to 10 US dollars per day.
Unfortunately today I received an email from Blizzard Entertainment informing me that my account had been banned on the grounds of "manipulating the economy." I find it highly ironic that they banned me for flooding the game economy with little fishies, but not for botting, which is the more serious offense!
I got so depressed that I sent them this confession email as a small joke. I doubt I will get a response:
[Dear WoW account administration,
Today I discovered that my account (theguy126, US) was banned from World of Warcraft without prior notice, for "economy manipulation."
I know you do not condone botting or selling gold or any sort of that thing, but please realize that WoW is my only source of income. I am a UC Berkeley student with an inadequate mealplan, and I often need to buy food with my own money. As a student, I do not have the time to find a job or to work part-time. My parents provide me with cash, but they become suspicious that I am spending cash on other dubious things when they see the bill (even though I only buy food).
My bot on WoW earns me a very small amount of real-world cash below minimum wage (at best, 2 dollars per day). It is a pixel-detecting, intelligent fishing bot that I wrote by myself after hours of tedious hard work. It is self-sustainable and "learns" to adjust certain variables to reliably recognize the fishing bobber, and does not require specification of whether it is "night" or "day" or what color the bobber is. I was planning to improve its effectiveness by having it automatically auction the fish, and also automatically alternate between multiple realms -- this would earn maybe up to 10 dollars per day. I was very depressed when I discovered that my account was banned. The hours I spent working on my masterpiece Auto-it bot were wasted.
Please do not take away my only source of income for food. I am dead serious when I say that the only things I buy with my money are food, milk, and orange juice. Since my mealplan is inadequate, I have no cash to spare for extra things. I don't even play WoW for fun; in fact, I bought WoW for the sole reason of making cash. I was inspired by my friend who claims to earn 40 dollars per day botting on WoW.
Please, reactivate my account so I won't have to go hungry. Like I said, my parents provide me with cash, but I need to earn some of my own money in order to eat as much as I want without feeling remorse or fearing suspicion from my parents. The amount that I earn is hardly worth anything to you, but it helps to keep me from starvation. I am very serious about this (I weigh only 140 pounds and need to gain weight).
Sincerely,
Max
P.S. despite the somewhat joking tone of my email, everything I say is completely true (my parents will still let me buy food, but I really do want to eat whatever I want without feeling remorse, and I only weigh 143 pounds), and I really would appreciate it if my account were reactivated.]
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Evil men in black
I enter a dorm room, the room of Taylor Layne and Taylor Lane. Taylor Lane is out, but Taylor Layne is in the room and allows me to write a message for Taylor Lane. So I start to write a message for her, on a poster on her desk (I have no idea what it's about... most likely to thank her for playing violin in my songs.) Taylor Layne, however, becomes bitchy and annoyed at me for staying in her room for more than 5 seconds, since she does not know me. Suddenly Taylor Lane appears behind Taylor Layne; she had simply been hidden from view until now. We greet each other and talk for about 5 seconds; then, I exit the room.
In the hallway I run into a short Asian kid. Perhaps "little kid" is more descriptive; he looks like he's in middle school, and he is dressed in a tall tee and other gangsta-like apparel. To be polite, I assume he is a student.
"Hey, uh... what year are you?" I ask.
"Actually... I don't really go here. I'm not even in the Cal band."
I am not perplexed as to why he mentioned the Cal band, since, according to my faulty dream-logic, most people who live in the dorms are non-students who happen to be in the Cal marching band.
Suddenly the little Asian kid is taken forcefully by a group of men dressed in black armed with revolvers. I look at my watch: 8:02pm. Damn, for some reason I knew that evil people would be here at 8:00pm, but I didn't think they'd be so timely! I run away, towards my room. The man holding the Asian kid backs up the other way down the hallway, towards the stairs, and fires a couple of rounds at me with his revolver. Fortunately, Jeff has propped open the door with our magnet door-holder so I quickly slip into my room safely.
I take out the magnet and slam the door shut. I get this vague feeling that Jeff may or may not be in the room with me, but under all of the adrenaline I can't really tell for sure. Jeff may or may not have asked, "what's going on?" When I hear a knock on the door, I know the evil men dressed in black are after me, so I jump out of the window and wrap my arms around a diagonal support beam on the exterior wall of the dorm building, just as the door bursts open. Jeff may or may not have been killed.
I slide down the diagonal beam. About one story above the ground, I land smoothly on a narrow very ledge that protrudes from the exterior wall by about 12 inches. I am lying on my side to meld with the wall and avoid being seen, propped up on my left elbow and watching carefully for hostiles. I see nothing but a couple of people taking their dogs for a stroll.
At this point I am aware that I am dreaming, and thus become bored. I decide to do a little test; I zoom my mind out of the dream and try to move my muscles in real life. I discover that although I can feel myself moving in bed, the movements are very uncontrolled and spastic; I am still mostly asleep and do not have very much control over my muscles. This discovery reassures me that my subconscious is still very dominant, since I am more asleep than awake. In other words, I can still continue to dream up a decently interesting dream without exerting very much conscious control over it. Encouraged, I zoom back into the dream before it fades away.
So I'm propped up on my left elbow lying on my side, on a ledge in the wall of Unit 1 Cheney. By some whim, I decide that I should go back to my dorm room, get all my stuff, and move it somewhere else so I can live safely in a secret location without being bothered by evil people dressed in black.
I make my way to the front entrance of the lobby. A girl sits in the security monitor booth. I fish inside my wallet for my ID card, so she can swipe me in, but I discover that it has been taken. The security monitor girl reassures me that she has been keeping it locked inside a safe box ever since I'd gone missing. Apparently, in the several seconds I spent trying to wake up, I was absent from the dream world for several dream years.
She takes out a beige metal box, opens it, and hands me my ID card. Closer examination reveals that the card has been tampered with: there is a giant red arrow pointing to my chin and a block of printed text that makes a silly joke about my face and maybe has the word "Muslim" in it (alas, I forget the exact wording). Noticing that my ID card has been vandalized, she offers to print a new card for me on the spot. Little do we know, the evil people were the ones who vandalized my ID card, and they have been monitoring the ID card printing device for years, waiting for this exact moment. Now, as my new ID card is being printed, our coordinates are already being sent to the team designated to assassinate me (I know this because of dream omniscience).
I quickly run up six flights of stairs towards my room (because I still want to get my stuff), but I can already hear them climbing up the elevator shaft. When I reach the second floor, I am but halfway down the hallway when the first evil guy pops out from the elevator shaft and begins firing at me. I decide that maybe going to my room is not such a good idea, and dive for the emergency exit, tumbling down some stairs, and performing a judo-style breakfall on the ground (side note: I am a white belt in judo, in real life).
"Someone is playing piano," I notice. While running away from this guy shooting at me, I begin to conjecture that maybe the piano sounds are not coming from the dream world, but from real life. Perhaps my sister is playing piano downstairs, and I am asleep in my bed at home (But I was disoriented in my sleep: I was actually asleep in my bed in Berkeley, and it must have been a student playing piano in another building with the window open).
Turning my attention away from the piano music, I shove open a pair of glass double doors, veer left, and run in a line parallel to the glass wall of the building. The evil guy has caught up and now begins firing at me from inside the building. Each bullet shatters the weak glass, passing through easily and missing me by inches.
At this point, I decide that the glass wall should instead be a concrete wall, so that I don't die.
But the double doors can still be made of glass.
Ok, resume. Now he can't hit me with his revolver, because the bullets can't pass through concrete, haha.
Okay, too much control; this dream is getting boring. The visuals are starting to fade away, anyways. Time to wake up. I zoom out and feel myself in bed, trying to move my muscles -- still spastic like before, but I am already quickly waking up. In just a couple of seconds I have already completed a full "normal" arm movement and completely woken myself up.
In the hallway I run into a short Asian kid. Perhaps "little kid" is more descriptive; he looks like he's in middle school, and he is dressed in a tall tee and other gangsta-like apparel. To be polite, I assume he is a student.
"Hey, uh... what year are you?" I ask.
"Actually... I don't really go here. I'm not even in the Cal band."
I am not perplexed as to why he mentioned the Cal band, since, according to my faulty dream-logic, most people who live in the dorms are non-students who happen to be in the Cal marching band.
Suddenly the little Asian kid is taken forcefully by a group of men dressed in black armed with revolvers. I look at my watch: 8:02pm. Damn, for some reason I knew that evil people would be here at 8:00pm, but I didn't think they'd be so timely! I run away, towards my room. The man holding the Asian kid backs up the other way down the hallway, towards the stairs, and fires a couple of rounds at me with his revolver. Fortunately, Jeff has propped open the door with our magnet door-holder so I quickly slip into my room safely.
I take out the magnet and slam the door shut. I get this vague feeling that Jeff may or may not be in the room with me, but under all of the adrenaline I can't really tell for sure. Jeff may or may not have asked, "what's going on?" When I hear a knock on the door, I know the evil men dressed in black are after me, so I jump out of the window and wrap my arms around a diagonal support beam on the exterior wall of the dorm building, just as the door bursts open. Jeff may or may not have been killed.
I slide down the diagonal beam. About one story above the ground, I land smoothly on a narrow very ledge that protrudes from the exterior wall by about 12 inches. I am lying on my side to meld with the wall and avoid being seen, propped up on my left elbow and watching carefully for hostiles. I see nothing but a couple of people taking their dogs for a stroll.
At this point I am aware that I am dreaming, and thus become bored. I decide to do a little test; I zoom my mind out of the dream and try to move my muscles in real life. I discover that although I can feel myself moving in bed, the movements are very uncontrolled and spastic; I am still mostly asleep and do not have very much control over my muscles. This discovery reassures me that my subconscious is still very dominant, since I am more asleep than awake. In other words, I can still continue to dream up a decently interesting dream without exerting very much conscious control over it. Encouraged, I zoom back into the dream before it fades away.
So I'm propped up on my left elbow lying on my side, on a ledge in the wall of Unit 1 Cheney. By some whim, I decide that I should go back to my dorm room, get all my stuff, and move it somewhere else so I can live safely in a secret location without being bothered by evil people dressed in black.
I make my way to the front entrance of the lobby. A girl sits in the security monitor booth. I fish inside my wallet for my ID card, so she can swipe me in, but I discover that it has been taken. The security monitor girl reassures me that she has been keeping it locked inside a safe box ever since I'd gone missing. Apparently, in the several seconds I spent trying to wake up, I was absent from the dream world for several dream years.
She takes out a beige metal box, opens it, and hands me my ID card. Closer examination reveals that the card has been tampered with: there is a giant red arrow pointing to my chin and a block of printed text that makes a silly joke about my face and maybe has the word "Muslim" in it (alas, I forget the exact wording). Noticing that my ID card has been vandalized, she offers to print a new card for me on the spot. Little do we know, the evil people were the ones who vandalized my ID card, and they have been monitoring the ID card printing device for years, waiting for this exact moment. Now, as my new ID card is being printed, our coordinates are already being sent to the team designated to assassinate me (I know this because of dream omniscience).
I quickly run up six flights of stairs towards my room (because I still want to get my stuff), but I can already hear them climbing up the elevator shaft. When I reach the second floor, I am but halfway down the hallway when the first evil guy pops out from the elevator shaft and begins firing at me. I decide that maybe going to my room is not such a good idea, and dive for the emergency exit, tumbling down some stairs, and performing a judo-style breakfall on the ground (side note: I am a white belt in judo, in real life).
"Someone is playing piano," I notice. While running away from this guy shooting at me, I begin to conjecture that maybe the piano sounds are not coming from the dream world, but from real life. Perhaps my sister is playing piano downstairs, and I am asleep in my bed at home (But I was disoriented in my sleep: I was actually asleep in my bed in Berkeley, and it must have been a student playing piano in another building with the window open).
Turning my attention away from the piano music, I shove open a pair of glass double doors, veer left, and run in a line parallel to the glass wall of the building. The evil guy has caught up and now begins firing at me from inside the building. Each bullet shatters the weak glass, passing through easily and missing me by inches.
At this point, I decide that the glass wall should instead be a concrete wall, so that I don't die.
But the double doors can still be made of glass.
Ok, resume. Now he can't hit me with his revolver, because the bullets can't pass through concrete, haha.
Okay, too much control; this dream is getting boring. The visuals are starting to fade away, anyways. Time to wake up. I zoom out and feel myself in bed, trying to move my muscles -- still spastic like before, but I am already quickly waking up. In just a couple of seconds I have already completed a full "normal" arm movement and completely woken myself up.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Zombies vs Nerf guns
Late at night, when there are almost no cars on the streets, I find myself driving my way up Bancroft Way (which is odd in itself, because Bancroft is a one-way street going downhill). Ahead of me, two police cars are driving in the same direction. They are carefully escorting what appears to be two cars of gangsters. One of the police cars drives ahead, ushering the two cars onwards, while the second police car trails behind, with a police officer looking backwards (at me), waving in my direction, and telling me to back off and stay away from the volatile situation.
In an act of spontaneity, instead of staying away from the situation I gun the throttle and drive at full speed past the convoy, swerving and hitting multiple walls, before finally reaching my destination: a gathering of multiple police cars at some sort of crime scene. At this point I realize that my car happens to be a police car. As I get out of my car, I also realize that I just so happen to be a police officer. The "crime" had taken place at a lower, underground level in the city, which could be accessed via some flights of stairs leading downwards.
A girl tells me she has to pee. This is bad news, because the only bathroom in the vicinity just so happens to be inside this lower level, where the crime took place. Since we don't know what happened down there, and it could still very well be dangerous, my job is to escort the girl down the stairs, to the bathroom, and bring her back.
As we descend down the stairs together, some normal-looking people -- crime scene investigators, perhaps -- pass us by. As each person passes by, I jump nervously, half-expecting some sort of dangerous killer, only to realize a moment later that the person is normal.
As we progress deeper into the area, however, the atmosphere becomes drastically more frightening. It's late at night, everything is deserted, and I feel like I am walking in an underground ghost town. I draw my standard-issue 6-shooter revolver and hold it in my hands for reassurance. I ask the girl if she wants me to follow her inside the bathroom and wait just outside the stall, to make sure no one attacks her inside the bathroom. She says she'll be fine.
All the while, I have this nagging feeling that something is wrong. As we approach the bathroom, men and women can be seen sitting on office chairs, lying on the floor... dead, bloody, and pale.
The girl I am escorting is now frightened. "What happened here?" she breathes.
The dead man sitting in the office chair starts to move. We begin to run away, but soon, zombies are all around us. I have a fleeting thought of the girl, but it seems to be a lost cause to save her, since she was already inside the bathroom by the time the zombies came to life. So I run towards the narrow escalator leading upwards (but turned off and not moving, of course). A zombie woman who is blocking the escalator runs at me. I bring up my 6-shooter and fire one shot, which seems to kill her just as she is about to bite me.
As soon as she dies, her body continues to drift behind me, in the direction she had been moving, in zero gravity. Then I realize that the whole world has turned into zero-gravity mode, just like in Dead Space (a game I recently played), and now I have to escape by pushing against the floor at an angle to propel myself forwards. Then, as I drift towards the ceiling, I flip over repeat the same process for the ceiling. In this manner, I bounce between the floor and the ceiling, propelling myself towards the safe place, while a multitude of zombies are chasing me.
While drifting forward, a zombie finally catches up to me, but suddenly dies from a shot fired in front of me. Looking forward, I see that I am nearing the safe house: a small room filled with soldiers armed with automatic machine guns, shooting at the zombies behind me. I drift into the opening of the safe house and land on my feet, because the safe house now has gravity. The group of approximately 20 soldiers continue to fire their nerf guns at the incoming zombies, which crumple as soon as stricken by a nerf dart.
Unfortunately, my presence disrupts their firing because I have unintentionally brought a magnet with me. The magnet spawns ribbons that tie together the guns of the soldiers, forcing them to break formation and preventing them from taking aim properly. The entire group is stalled for about 10 seconds before one man is finally able to wrench the magnet away and throw it away. By this time the small room had just about filled with zombies coming toward us. Just as the front line of zombies is nearly upon us (at point-blank muzzle distance), the soldiers resume firing. Since the firing rate of the nerf guns is very fast, and the soldiers are trained to stagger reload times, they quickly clear the room of zombies and resume control over the entrance to the room.
By sheer luck, one stray zombie slips past the entrance and wanders into the room unnoticed by the soldiers. he begins to grope at a nearby civilian. I desperately point at the zombie and yell, and the soldiers quickly dispatch both the zombie and the victim of the zombie groping (because zombie-ness spreads by touch instead of bite, apparently).
Someone pokes me on the shoulder to get my attention. I turn and realize that IT'S A ZOMBIE POKING ME! I yell, "AHHHH! KILL THE ZOMBIE! KILL ME!" The soldiers comply, and some soft foam nerf darts land on the zombie and me. I feel the darts on my shoulder and gradually give in to death.
I wake up next to Fernanda (my girlfriend), and quickly try to recount the details of the dream I just had. Fernanda then tells me she had the same dream. She says that she was the girl that I was escorting in the dream. While fondling my face, she tells me, "During the dream, the face of the zombie in the office chair I saw was your face, in real life."
I wake up for real.
In an act of spontaneity, instead of staying away from the situation I gun the throttle and drive at full speed past the convoy, swerving and hitting multiple walls, before finally reaching my destination: a gathering of multiple police cars at some sort of crime scene. At this point I realize that my car happens to be a police car. As I get out of my car, I also realize that I just so happen to be a police officer. The "crime" had taken place at a lower, underground level in the city, which could be accessed via some flights of stairs leading downwards.
A girl tells me she has to pee. This is bad news, because the only bathroom in the vicinity just so happens to be inside this lower level, where the crime took place. Since we don't know what happened down there, and it could still very well be dangerous, my job is to escort the girl down the stairs, to the bathroom, and bring her back.
As we descend down the stairs together, some normal-looking people -- crime scene investigators, perhaps -- pass us by. As each person passes by, I jump nervously, half-expecting some sort of dangerous killer, only to realize a moment later that the person is normal.
As we progress deeper into the area, however, the atmosphere becomes drastically more frightening. It's late at night, everything is deserted, and I feel like I am walking in an underground ghost town. I draw my standard-issue 6-shooter revolver and hold it in my hands for reassurance. I ask the girl if she wants me to follow her inside the bathroom and wait just outside the stall, to make sure no one attacks her inside the bathroom. She says she'll be fine.
All the while, I have this nagging feeling that something is wrong. As we approach the bathroom, men and women can be seen sitting on office chairs, lying on the floor... dead, bloody, and pale.
The girl I am escorting is now frightened. "What happened here?" she breathes.
The dead man sitting in the office chair starts to move. We begin to run away, but soon, zombies are all around us. I have a fleeting thought of the girl, but it seems to be a lost cause to save her, since she was already inside the bathroom by the time the zombies came to life. So I run towards the narrow escalator leading upwards (but turned off and not moving, of course). A zombie woman who is blocking the escalator runs at me. I bring up my 6-shooter and fire one shot, which seems to kill her just as she is about to bite me.
As soon as she dies, her body continues to drift behind me, in the direction she had been moving, in zero gravity. Then I realize that the whole world has turned into zero-gravity mode, just like in Dead Space (a game I recently played), and now I have to escape by pushing against the floor at an angle to propel myself forwards. Then, as I drift towards the ceiling, I flip over repeat the same process for the ceiling. In this manner, I bounce between the floor and the ceiling, propelling myself towards the safe place, while a multitude of zombies are chasing me.
While drifting forward, a zombie finally catches up to me, but suddenly dies from a shot fired in front of me. Looking forward, I see that I am nearing the safe house: a small room filled with soldiers armed with automatic machine guns, shooting at the zombies behind me. I drift into the opening of the safe house and land on my feet, because the safe house now has gravity. The group of approximately 20 soldiers continue to fire their nerf guns at the incoming zombies, which crumple as soon as stricken by a nerf dart.
Unfortunately, my presence disrupts their firing because I have unintentionally brought a magnet with me. The magnet spawns ribbons that tie together the guns of the soldiers, forcing them to break formation and preventing them from taking aim properly. The entire group is stalled for about 10 seconds before one man is finally able to wrench the magnet away and throw it away. By this time the small room had just about filled with zombies coming toward us. Just as the front line of zombies is nearly upon us (at point-blank muzzle distance), the soldiers resume firing. Since the firing rate of the nerf guns is very fast, and the soldiers are trained to stagger reload times, they quickly clear the room of zombies and resume control over the entrance to the room.
By sheer luck, one stray zombie slips past the entrance and wanders into the room unnoticed by the soldiers. he begins to grope at a nearby civilian. I desperately point at the zombie and yell, and the soldiers quickly dispatch both the zombie and the victim of the zombie groping (because zombie-ness spreads by touch instead of bite, apparently).
Someone pokes me on the shoulder to get my attention. I turn and realize that IT'S A ZOMBIE POKING ME! I yell, "AHHHH! KILL THE ZOMBIE! KILL ME!" The soldiers comply, and some soft foam nerf darts land on the zombie and me. I feel the darts on my shoulder and gradually give in to death.
I wake up next to Fernanda (my girlfriend), and quickly try to recount the details of the dream I just had. Fernanda then tells me she had the same dream. She says that she was the girl that I was escorting in the dream. While fondling my face, she tells me, "During the dream, the face of the zombie in the office chair I saw was your face, in real life."
I wake up for real.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Zombie: 300 Infected -- and counting!
The following is a dream.
A drunk girl has her arms wrapped around me, from behind. I don't know how hot she is, but I am mildly irked by this because I am focusing on rummaging through the contents of some small lockers in a locker room. I tell the drunk girl, "Hey, I'm not even drunk," but she does not seem phased by this in the least. Her friends (beside me) make fun of her, and rummage through lockers with me as well. Apparently, I am among a group of hooligans who had broken into some sort of drug storage locker room, and we are looking for drugs.
Soon some people discover that these "drugs" are scarier than the type they're used to, and they leave. In fact, some syringes aren't even drugs; there are infections, diseases, mutation-givers, and just all types of general scariness in these lockers. My curiosity grows, so I stay in the locker room with some bold adventurous others.
One particular syringe with a needle catches my eye. It reads "Zombie: 300 Infected -- and counting!". Having seen 28 days later, I wonder, "How is it possible that only 300 people are infected so far?" but forget this thought as soon as multiple chilling screams issue throughout the locker room. The screams are not just from zombies; pretty much everyone who has tried a "drug" needle is now a weird diseased person or a type of monster. I decide that it's time to run, because I do not want to become a diseased person or a type of monster.
Alas, as I am leaving the locker room, I contract a disease. It has something to do with a tingly feeling in my legs and feet. Fortunately, the disease causes no side effects other than the ability to fly. So I fly around, landing in the UC Berkeley campus. (EDIT: Today when I went to the bathroom I remembered another symptom of my disease: I pooed a lot uncontrollably and all the poo was lined with viscous fluid resembling alien saliva. I assumed it was my sloughed-off stomach lining.)
Somehow, I had subconsciously taken the Zombie syringe with me. I pull it out of my pocket and again ponder my earlier question, "If every zombie hungers for human flesh, how is it possible that only 300 zombies are infected?" My question is immediately answered by an excerpt from the label of the syringe: "Each zombie may only choose ONE human to infect." That's when I accidentally poke myself with the needle, and my vision turns blue.
I decide, by some zombie logic, that if I can only infect one person in the world, that person should my girlfriend so we can both be zombies together. I begin to devise a plan to bait her out of her room and then bite her. My white woman mother aids me in this plan by sending a carefully devised letter to her, detailing a meeting with cookies in her office.
As I await her arrival, I go to the bathroom. Expecting to see a contorted ugly zombie face, I look into the mirror and am surprised to discover that my face is relatively normal. Aside from a red drunk Asian glow and a couple of yellow moldy spots on my cheeks, my zombie face exhibits no difference from my original face. As I am urinating, however, I notice that my penis is too small.
Jeff from my floor last year (not my current roommate) walks in. I remark to Jeff how easy it is to see that I am currently in a dream. "There are at least two indications that this is a dream," I declare. "One, my penis is too small." He laughs. Before I am able to state my second point, I wake up. I cannot remember the second reason.
A drunk girl has her arms wrapped around me, from behind. I don't know how hot she is, but I am mildly irked by this because I am focusing on rummaging through the contents of some small lockers in a locker room. I tell the drunk girl, "Hey, I'm not even drunk," but she does not seem phased by this in the least. Her friends (beside me) make fun of her, and rummage through lockers with me as well. Apparently, I am among a group of hooligans who had broken into some sort of drug storage locker room, and we are looking for drugs.
Soon some people discover that these "drugs" are scarier than the type they're used to, and they leave. In fact, some syringes aren't even drugs; there are infections, diseases, mutation-givers, and just all types of general scariness in these lockers. My curiosity grows, so I stay in the locker room with some bold adventurous others.
One particular syringe with a needle catches my eye. It reads "Zombie: 300 Infected -- and counting!". Having seen 28 days later, I wonder, "How is it possible that only 300 people are infected so far?" but forget this thought as soon as multiple chilling screams issue throughout the locker room. The screams are not just from zombies; pretty much everyone who has tried a "drug" needle is now a weird diseased person or a type of monster. I decide that it's time to run, because I do not want to become a diseased person or a type of monster.
Alas, as I am leaving the locker room, I contract a disease. It has something to do with a tingly feeling in my legs and feet. Fortunately, the disease causes no side effects other than the ability to fly. So I fly around, landing in the UC Berkeley campus. (EDIT: Today when I went to the bathroom I remembered another symptom of my disease: I pooed a lot uncontrollably and all the poo was lined with viscous fluid resembling alien saliva. I assumed it was my sloughed-off stomach lining.)
Somehow, I had subconsciously taken the Zombie syringe with me. I pull it out of my pocket and again ponder my earlier question, "If every zombie hungers for human flesh, how is it possible that only 300 zombies are infected?" My question is immediately answered by an excerpt from the label of the syringe: "Each zombie may only choose ONE human to infect." That's when I accidentally poke myself with the needle, and my vision turns blue.
I decide, by some zombie logic, that if I can only infect one person in the world, that person should my girlfriend so we can both be zombies together. I begin to devise a plan to bait her out of her room and then bite her. My white woman mother aids me in this plan by sending a carefully devised letter to her, detailing a meeting with cookies in her office.
As I await her arrival, I go to the bathroom. Expecting to see a contorted ugly zombie face, I look into the mirror and am surprised to discover that my face is relatively normal. Aside from a red drunk Asian glow and a couple of yellow moldy spots on my cheeks, my zombie face exhibits no difference from my original face. As I am urinating, however, I notice that my penis is too small.
Jeff from my floor last year (not my current roommate) walks in. I remark to Jeff how easy it is to see that I am currently in a dream. "There are at least two indications that this is a dream," I declare. "One, my penis is too small." He laughs. Before I am able to state my second point, I wake up. I cannot remember the second reason.
Friday, November 21, 2008
I can see cells in my eyes
The following is not a dream.
Last night I couldn't sleep, so there I lay staring at a pinprick of my light without my glasses. To any near-sighted person including myself, a pinprick of light without glasses appears as a blurred halo of light. The halo pulsated, growing smaller and larger as my eyes naturally adjusted their focal point repeatedly back and forth. I thought, "Hey, maybe if I can will my focal point to change enough, the halo of light will eventually converge to a single point and I won't be near-sighted anymore!" But I couldn't do it.
So then I had a better idea. I wondered, "Are there more details inside this 'blurry' halo?" I directed my attention to the details of the "blur," and found that it was not blurry at all. The halo was actually composed of tiny circles. I thought to myself, "This looks uncannily similar to what I would see under a microscope slide in high school biology." I looked more closely at the tiny circles. I blinked. They moved.
Naturally, I was skeptical. Hell, if someone told me they could see cells in their eyes and wrote this note, I wouldn't believe them at all. But gradually, after staring and blinking a lot, I became convinced that these were, indeed, CELLS ON THE TIP OF MY PUPIL. By staring at a fixed light in darkness, I essentially turned my eye into a LIGHT MICROSCOPE, with the slide being the tip of my pupil. I think it only works because I am severely near-sighted.
By the way, these are not floaters. If you tell me I am seeing floaters I will punch you in the face. I've noticed floaters since I was 5.
You can see cells too! (But only if you're severely near-sighted, like -900 or more). Here are some easy steps!
1. Make sure the room is dark.
2. Take off your glasses.
3. Cover one eye (if you leave both eyes uncovered you will be seeing cells from both eyes at the same time, which would be confusing).
4. Stare at a pinprick of medium-brightness light about 5 feet away (this should appear as a blurry halo).
5. Focus on this light for a minute or so. Try to catch what's going on inside the blur.
6. Close your eye exactly half-way such that your eyelid is covering half of the halo of light. You should now be seeing the bottom semi-circle half of the halo.
7. Open your eyelid all the way. Notice the WATER MARK you left behind on the halo (it should appear as a thick double-membrane line dividing the halo). This should be enough to convince you that what you are seeing is in your eye on the cell level, not in the light.
8. If you're still not convinced, blink a lot. Notice how the cells at the top layer move and slide with the blink, and momentum carries them forward as it should, but they slow down due to a viscosity in the liquid they live in. Also notice that deeper-layered cells remain stationary.
Enjoy, if you're near-sighted.
Last night I couldn't sleep, so there I lay staring at a pinprick of my light without my glasses. To any near-sighted person including myself, a pinprick of light without glasses appears as a blurred halo of light. The halo pulsated, growing smaller and larger as my eyes naturally adjusted their focal point repeatedly back and forth. I thought, "Hey, maybe if I can will my focal point to change enough, the halo of light will eventually converge to a single point and I won't be near-sighted anymore!" But I couldn't do it.
So then I had a better idea. I wondered, "Are there more details inside this 'blurry' halo?" I directed my attention to the details of the "blur," and found that it was not blurry at all. The halo was actually composed of tiny circles. I thought to myself, "This looks uncannily similar to what I would see under a microscope slide in high school biology." I looked more closely at the tiny circles. I blinked. They moved.
Naturally, I was skeptical. Hell, if someone told me they could see cells in their eyes and wrote this note, I wouldn't believe them at all. But gradually, after staring and blinking a lot, I became convinced that these were, indeed, CELLS ON THE TIP OF MY PUPIL. By staring at a fixed light in darkness, I essentially turned my eye into a LIGHT MICROSCOPE, with the slide being the tip of my pupil. I think it only works because I am severely near-sighted.
By the way, these are not floaters. If you tell me I am seeing floaters I will punch you in the face. I've noticed floaters since I was 5.
You can see cells too! (But only if you're severely near-sighted, like -900 or more). Here are some easy steps!
1. Make sure the room is dark.
2. Take off your glasses.
3. Cover one eye (if you leave both eyes uncovered you will be seeing cells from both eyes at the same time, which would be confusing).
4. Stare at a pinprick of medium-brightness light about 5 feet away (this should appear as a blurry halo).
5. Focus on this light for a minute or so. Try to catch what's going on inside the blur.
6. Close your eye exactly half-way such that your eyelid is covering half of the halo of light. You should now be seeing the bottom semi-circle half of the halo.
7. Open your eyelid all the way. Notice the WATER MARK you left behind on the halo (it should appear as a thick double-membrane line dividing the halo). This should be enough to convince you that what you are seeing is in your eye on the cell level, not in the light.
8. If you're still not convinced, blink a lot. Notice how the cells at the top layer move and slide with the blink, and momentum carries them forward as it should, but they slow down due to a viscosity in the liquid they live in. Also notice that deeper-layered cells remain stationary.
Enjoy, if you're near-sighted.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Shrimp and Eggs
Yesterday I was sitting on the bus when an old woman shoved a plate of shrimp and scrambled eggs in my face and tried to cram the plate into my mouth. Disgusted, I shoved it away, fearing it was poisoned.
She then explained to me that she feared the food was poisoned (which is why she was trying to feed it to me first, just to see what would happen). I asked her why, and she said, "My ten-year-old son cooked this for me, and then he ran away. I think he's trying to poison me." She had no other reason to suspect her son of any such malice; she was simply a deranged, paranoid mother. However, I managed to convince her that her son's intentions were entirely benevolent and that she should look for her son, who probably ran away for some other reason.
So we got off the bus and called the police, informing them of her missing son. We walked around, and -- lo and behold, there was her son, running away. The police, conveniently nearby, gave chase.
Suddenly, the police who was chasing the son dropped his counter-terrorist shield, drew his pistol, and inexplicably began firing upon the running child. I yelled at the police, "STOP! I'll shoot you if you keep shooting him!" But it was an empty threat, for I had no gun. I could sense that the next shot would connect, so I threw some textbooks I happened to be carrying between the police and the boy. But I was too slow, and the bullet caught the child in the head. Then the two police officers hopped in the police car and rapidly drove away.
The child's mother and I were outraged. We rallied some fellow students and pursued the police car by foot. Soon, we reached a dead end with a panel-activated metal warehouse gate as the only exit. The police car rammed the large silver panel, and the gate began opening upwards. We the students, however, surrounded and marauded the surprisingly small police car (little bigger than a backpack). The police themselves were pretty small too, and we easily overpowered them, took their guns, and shot them to death.
As I wiped the blood on my hands onto my pants, I remarked, "It'll be hard to explain this in court..." and lamented that my fingerprints were now on the guns. One of the students responded, "It's ok. We can bribe the forensics people to contaminate the fingerprints and render them unreadable." To which I said, "You know we're like... in the 1980's, right? Technology sucks, and forensics people can't do shit, other than maybe read fingerprints."
A couple of hours later, I played the Pokemon theme song on an under-sized piano at the request of some Asian guy.
By the way, this was a dream, obviously.
She then explained to me that she feared the food was poisoned (which is why she was trying to feed it to me first, just to see what would happen). I asked her why, and she said, "My ten-year-old son cooked this for me, and then he ran away. I think he's trying to poison me." She had no other reason to suspect her son of any such malice; she was simply a deranged, paranoid mother. However, I managed to convince her that her son's intentions were entirely benevolent and that she should look for her son, who probably ran away for some other reason.
So we got off the bus and called the police, informing them of her missing son. We walked around, and -- lo and behold, there was her son, running away. The police, conveniently nearby, gave chase.
Suddenly, the police who was chasing the son dropped his counter-terrorist shield, drew his pistol, and inexplicably began firing upon the running child. I yelled at the police, "STOP! I'll shoot you if you keep shooting him!" But it was an empty threat, for I had no gun. I could sense that the next shot would connect, so I threw some textbooks I happened to be carrying between the police and the boy. But I was too slow, and the bullet caught the child in the head. Then the two police officers hopped in the police car and rapidly drove away.
The child's mother and I were outraged. We rallied some fellow students and pursued the police car by foot. Soon, we reached a dead end with a panel-activated metal warehouse gate as the only exit. The police car rammed the large silver panel, and the gate began opening upwards. We the students, however, surrounded and marauded the surprisingly small police car (little bigger than a backpack). The police themselves were pretty small too, and we easily overpowered them, took their guns, and shot them to death.
As I wiped the blood on my hands onto my pants, I remarked, "It'll be hard to explain this in court..." and lamented that my fingerprints were now on the guns. One of the students responded, "It's ok. We can bribe the forensics people to contaminate the fingerprints and render them unreadable." To which I said, "You know we're like... in the 1980's, right? Technology sucks, and forensics people can't do shit, other than maybe read fingerprints."
A couple of hours later, I played the Pokemon theme song on an under-sized piano at the request of some Asian guy.
By the way, this was a dream, obviously.
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