face book nightmare

The following is not a nightmare about facebook, but a nightmare involving a face and a book.

Setting: Library/laboratory/hospital. There are bookshelves and study desks, but also flasks, test tubes, and sinks.

I'm sitting at a table with four people just chatting. Nearby, a woman is standing near a bookshelf and flipping through its books, looking for something.

Suddenly the woman at the bookshelf becomes motionless. Her back is turned towards us and she is still facing the bookshelf, but she is frozen.

"Hey, are you okay?" I yell. Upon further inspection I discover that she is leaning forward slightly, her face turned to the side and stuck to one of the books. Her right cheek had literally been glued to the cover of one of the books on the shelf. She does not respond. She needs immediate medical attention. The first step would be to get that book off the shelf. But who is up for the task? Moving the book from its current position could potentially REVEAL SOME EXTREMELY GROSS THINGS. The girls who were sitting at my table take notice of the situation and gather around the bookshelf in curiosity. Alas, I realize that I am the only man nearby; gender stereotypes kick in and I know I have to be the one that moves the book from the bookshelf.

But the situation is really scary. "Don't look at the book," I tell myself. So instead of using my hand to move the book like a real man would, I display a great feat of flexibility as I lean back, lift my foot up high, and poke that book with my toe. As the book falls off the shelf, it rips free from the woman's melted face. her body drops onto the floor, lifeless, the entire right side of her face nothing but black charred flesh. Unfortunately, I cannot avoid looking at the book. On it, the gelatinous goopy remains of her melted face stare back at me.

"Nightmare climax" having been achieved, I now experience the familiar (and extremely unpleasant) symptoms of coming out of a nightmare. The muscle spasms. The ticklish feeling. The overwhelming fear. And, to top it off, a hallucination of a crossbreed between a skull and a fat guy's face, which is laughing at me.

Finally, I gain control of my snoring muscles and let out the loudest snore I have ever made, thereby waking myself up.

Aragorn Rides a Dolphin, Fried Egg becomes Lady Gaga

Here I was enjoying my semi-conscious dream state, prancing around in a forest. I lay down on my back in the damp grass. I reached out with my hands and felt the soil underneath me. It was nice and cool, refreshing. Silver clouds loomed above me, and I beckoned the rain to come... everything was more real than real life, and I could smell the earth. In this limbo between dreaming and waking, all of my senses were heightened as if I were on drugs instead of asleep.

Unfortunately, everything was suddenly interrupted by none other than... Aragorn, son of Arathorn, riding a dolphin in the clouds! Needless to say, my heightened semi-conscious state was broken. My view floated to the clouds so I could get a better look at him and the dolphin. He spoke some words to me in a British accent.

Not long after Aragorn and the dolphin rode past me, a fried egg also appeared out of nowhere, cruising the clouds like it's the most normal thing for fried eggs to do! The fried egg was able to "cook" parts of itself by extending out its limbs into the sun from within the clouds. It cooked both its hands until they turned to an obsidian black, then put its pair of obsidian black patches over its own face -- a fresh new pair of highly stylish sunglasses! It was then revealed that the fried egg was actually lady gaga in disguise; that made a lot of sense to me in my dream logic, because lady gaga always uses the most outlandish ways to express herself visually in her music videos.

Asians are bad drivers + the art of saving gas

In this 2-in-1 article I discuss why Asians are bad drivers, and how to save gas.

ASIANS ARE BAD DRIVERS:

Asians are notoriously frugal (because their parents instilled them these ideas or because they value money, etc.). They are trying to save gas and maintenance costs...

-Distance: Asians will maintain a larger distance from the car in front of them than most people. In fact, I usually maintain a distance of 2-4 times the average distance between cars. This has the disadvantage of allowing other cars to cut in; however, it serves the advantage of reducing the frequency of breaking and accelerating. If the car in front breaks, the Asian does not have to hit the breaks every time, and therefore no momentum is lost. Momentum conservation is a key theme in gas preservation.

-Red lights: Asians break the convention of cruising/rushing to the pedestrian line and obediently stopping at the red light. Instead, Asians will slowly drift towards the red light, hoping for it to turn green so they can continue accelerating without sacrificing all of their momentum.This will piss a lot of people off and they will complain that the Asian is driving too slowly.

-Shade: Asians will hog shade from the truck beside them if it is a very sunny day, and if traffic is slow.This will piss people off because the Asians will often stop prematurely at a red light, or go slower than usual during a traffic jam with an ever-growing distance between himself and the car in front.

-Going uphill: Asians will try to start going uphill very fast, then gradually slow down over the course of the uphill stretch, to save gas (more on this later). This will obviously piss a lot of people off, particularly if the Asian is in the fast lane and in the "slow" phase of going uphill, or if for some reason the Asian had to slow down due to cars in front of him and is now cruising at 60 mph refusing to go faster until the incline ends (I always switch out of the fast lane if this happens but sometimes there are too many cars in the other lane, and also, even next-to-fast lane cars don't want to be stuck behind 60 mph; for the record I blame the cars in front of me that were going at 65 mph which forces me to slow from 70 to 60).

DISCLAIMER: If you are offended by this (for which I do not blame you, even if you are not Asian) by all means feel free to substitute "Max Loh" for "Asians", because I basically just talked about how I drive.

THE ART OF SAVING GAS:

-DISTANCE: Distance is great not only for safety purposes but also for saving gas. If the car in front of you breaks and you are only 5 feet behind him, you will be forced to break, sacrificing your momentum. However, if you are 100 feet behind him you can simply take your foot off the gas pedal; chances are he will start accelerating again after a couple seconds anyway. This "buffer" reduces the amount of breaking and accelerating. Many aggressive drivers like to rush from car to car, always accelerating then breaking then tailgating. These people are not good at saving gas.

-RED LIGHTS: Do not simply cruise/accelerate to the red light and then break at the end like a normal person. In fact, you must apply the brakes UNCOMFORTABLY EARLY. At a red light you always want to maximize your "expected speed" when the light turns green. There are probably advanced statistics models for how to calculate this, but they are not practical and we must rely on estimation. If you are going too fast, you minimize the DURATION over which you can take advantage of your leftover momentum. If you are going too slow, you minimize the QUANTITY of your leftover momentum but increase the duration for which you can take advantage of said leftover momentum. So, one must strike a middle ground. Always apply your brakes such that the "expected turn green point in time" coincides with your car hitting the pedestrian line. If there are one or more cars waiting at the light, the problem becomes much more complicated as you have to account for the time it takes all of them to begin moving.

-GOING UPHILL: ALWAYS START GOING UPHILL AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. A car going uphill for 1 mile at 100 mph will use much less gas than a car going uphill for 1 mile at 10 mph. Physics explanation: Assume no air resistance, blablabla etc, a car needs a force of F just to keep it moving at same speed or staying still, if going uphill. Would you rather apply F (aka use gas) over the course of 5 minutes or 2 minutes? The less time you need to apply F, the better. Also, INCREASE YOUR SPEED DURING VALLEYS. There will be uphills and downhills throughout your driving and you should try to "increase your speed" (I use this term instead of accelerate, which might mean simply pressing the gas pedal, which you should always be doing) while at the bottom of a downhill to uphill scenario.

Physics explanation: Assume a model in which we have a car that goes downhill for 1 mile then uphill for 1 mile. Now, given an impulse F*t which we can all agree is representative of the amount of gas you will be using, and you can only apply this impulse either during the downhill or during the uphill stretch. Now, common sense tells us that the end result will actually be the SAME no matter what, because change in momentum = impulse. In fact I thought this for a long time and was convinced that my uphill gas-saving strategy was based on superstition.

However, COUNTEREXAMPLE (refer to NICE PHYSICS DRAWING): Assume the uphill stretch is a bit longer than the downhill stretch, such that if you did nothing at all, your car would roll down the downhill, and up the uphill... almost crossing the finish line... but then roll backwards back down the hill. Let's imagine you are allowed to use F force for 60 seconds, and F is EXACTLY the amount of force necessary to keep the car either staying still or same speed while on the uphill stretch. So if you apply this force F at the near-end of your car's journey, where it's almost crossing the finish line and its velocity is exactly 0 and it's about to fall back down, you will net a whopping ZERO METERS in distance no matter how long you accelerate for! Because F is exactly the amount of force necessary to keep the car either staying still or same speed while going uphill. If you were to apply the force at some other time such as when the car was going fast at the bottom of the valley, one can clearly imagine that this would increase the car's velocity and allow it to clear the finish line. So how is this paradox explained?

When gravity comes into play, your NET impulses are actually different, even though the impulse due to the effort from the car is identical in both situations. Instead of pointing out why these are different, which is hard even for me to wrap my mind around, allow me to re-phrase this qusetion in terms of energy, which is better suited for the math in this question, rather than momentum. Now we all know that more speed = more kinetic energy, and change in kinetic energy = WORK. and work = F*d. Now it becomes easy to envision why it's better to floor that accelerator while going fast rather than while going slow. Or, to put it more accurately, at the peak of gravity's helping you rather than at the peak of gravity's hindering you. For the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME spent flooring the pedal (e.g., 1 second), in one situation you get to apply that force across a greater distance because gravity has already helped you attain a nice speed to get a lot of F*DISTANCE per F*TIME, whereas in the other situation you only apply that force for a lesser distance as gravity has worked against you and reduced your gains for a given impulse.

PLEASE RESPOND; PHYSICS NERD DISCUSSIONS ARE HIGHLY ENCOURAGED.

nice physics drawing. d on both sides are equal. Theta on both sides are equal. Epsilon basically just means "a small value" making the right side a tad bigger than the left side.

Evil Sam Dream

Part 1:

I am in some sort of obstacle course marathon with a friend. We encounter some cuts of cooked pork (one of the many food resources scattered throughout the park to prevent starvation), but it is completely unprotected from the elements, and some ants are crawling on it. "You know, I'm really glad that it's just ants, because if it were worms I'd totally not eat this," I tell my obstacle course buddy. Then a strange-looking pincer bug scampers across one of the meats. I cringe and lose all appetite. My buddy calls me a pansy.

Part 2:

At some point during what appeared to be an innocent conversation with Sam and his accomplice, a white car spontaneously appeared out of nowhere and crashed into two innocent people in the room, sending them flying. They were not the target -- I was. The car had been headed for me but they were in the way, and they slowed the momentum of the car just enough for me to sidestep it.

At this point Sam and his accomplice both haughtily revealed that they had plans to take over the world. Apparently the first step of this plan was to kill me.

The car kept running people over, trying to get to me. I kept reassuring myself, "Ahn is driving the car so of course he will not run me over," but unfortunately he kept trying to run me over.

I realized that if I took out the two masterminds, Ahn would stop, so I started with Sam's accomplice (who had now morphed into an exact clone of Sam) and osoto-gari'd* him towards the ground while driving his head into a wall. This banged him up enough to knock him unconscious. I did the same thing to Real Sam, banged his head up pretty good against the wall -- but he remained conscious. He grabbed my shoulders, looked me straight in the eye, and said something cheesy like "I am not so easily defeated." The end.

*osoto-gari: A basic judo takedown involving an outer leg reap.

approximate representation of the white car that kept running people over.

The Origins of the Zerg

Most people believe the Zerg to have origins from the Xel Naga. My dreams have told me otherwise. Believe it or not, the Zerg actually came from broccoli!

The Zerg were actually born from man-made genetic engineering. 1,000 years into the future, I witness the standard medical procedure to treating an infested human, and one of the most important steps is to withhold any forms of modern organic food, especially "modern broccoli." "Modern" refers to anything made within the past couple centuries or so; "ancient broccoli" refers to any breed of broccoli that we currently eat (21st century).

Why broccoli, you may ask? Well it just so happens that through the years of constant genetic engineering and "improvement" of food, broccoli was the first such food to develop sentient clusters of cells that deviated from our human goals of improving nourishment. Those other broccoli cells had their own goals in mind, and because of our genetic engineering they had become very, very adept at lightning-fast evolution/mutation. They were the Zerg.

I witnessed another scene in which one military commander takes a large gulp of wine, only to keel over dead seconds later. A separate commander, believing the first to have simply had extremely low alcohol tolerance, takes a small sip of the same wine and also keels over dead. This wine has had its food cells infested by the Zerg.

So, as you can see, it started with broccoli, but currently any organic material is at risk of having been compromised by the Zerg. Most modern foods are not infested, but some are -- you have to be careful what you eat or you might be at risk for becoming a Zerg. When in doubt, go ancient! Eat only breeds of food that have not been genetically altered since 2800 a.d.

Just my two cents.

If you eat broccoli you become like this after a couple years

another nightmare

I come downstairs and my dad asks me where my sister went.

I look around the whole room but I can't find her.

I peer over the top of a coffee mug to see if she is inside that, but she is not inside the coffee mug. Anyway, I have no idea why I looked inside a coffee mug for a girl about 1,000 times its size; perhaps it was because I was high in the dream (in the dream, not in real life! lol)

But then oh, suddenly Christine is right there, sitting in her usual dinner table seat. I point that out to my father, "Christine's right there."

He looks in her general direction, laughs and shakes his head, and CONTINUES TO LOOK FOR CHRISTINE.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! i scream and wake up uncomfortably.

Ah, the hardships of being a dinosaur

I am a dinosaur, in a pack of dinosaurs of varying species. I use the term "pack" loosely; we are just a hodgepodge group of dinosaurs not really focused on working as a team or hunting anything... In fact it's worse than that -- we are hunting each other!

I don't really need food at the moment so I'm just focused on running away from any potential incoming predators. The worse thing is that I am yellow. Completely bright yellow. This is not an evolutionarily fit color. How was I even born with these crappy genes? Anyway, it's really scary because every predator big dinosaur who passes by me looks at me (because I am bright yellow) and I am saved only by the fact that they are after a different dinosaur, or simply not hungry. It's a horrible feeling because I know I cannot outrun these bad boys.

Suddenly we are moving. The whole pack is moving in the same direction and dinosaurs are struggling to keep up. You might wonder, why are all the dinosaurs struggling to keep up with this dangerous crowd of dinosaurs full of predators? The answer is that we are the only living things left in the world. As such we are the only source of food for each other. If one dinosaur falls behind, that dinosaur will no longer have any food, and will starve to death. So, we take the risk of being eaten by a predator, in hopes that we will eat dinosaurs smaller than us and avoid being eaten by the big dinosaurs. Once again I must stress that I am yellow, so this is a big risk for me.

I take a look at my surroundings. Why, all the human buildings are still intact! No humans, just the buildings. And there are buildings of all types. Office buildings, residential, supermarkets. There must be food in those supermarkets and food stands! I diverge from the group. Some of my "friend" dinosaurs follow me. We poke around at the food stands and we find some white rice, but I'm like "fuck, why don't they have BROWN rice? White rice is not nutritious enough to live off of." Then I also start to wonder if this human food will even be compatible with our dinosaur digestive systems... maybe the only food we can digest is other dinosaurs, and white rice will just pass through unabsorbed. It may even be toxic! And I can't even google if rice is toxic for dinosaurs or not. Ah, the hardships of being a dinosaur.