Glieuaeiel's DJ

Sledding (9:03)

"As my first eccentricity," the groom declares, "I'm going to kick out a few tables." Someone has just said something to warn the wedding guests that the groom might be eccentric, and he seems to be wasting no time proving the warning right. "Let's have a look at some of these flags," he says. Each table has one special guest of some kind, each of whom brought a flag with a personal or national pattern on it. Of course, the groom comes first to my table (though, note that I'm not the special guest of the table; that's someone else). He handles the flag disparagingly, pointing out what he thinks are problems with it. It looks like the flag has two patterns, one on each side. One side looks a bit like the U.S. flag. Then the groom says that he's very sorry, but because of this flag, everyone sitting at this table will have to go. This is of course unreasonable and unfair, but I suspect reason will not work with him. I leave the wedding venue, which is a building on top of a tall hill.

Then I wonder whether I shouldn't have given up so easily. I decide this is a quest for justice and true love. (Everyone knows I'm the one who's supposed to be with the bride up there.) "There's some stuff back there that belongs to me," I declare to myself. For instance, my shoes. I took them off somewhere before going to my table, and I wasn't given enough time to collect them before leaving. I turn around and start back towards the main entrance. The groom starts making fun of me, specifically for the allies that I'm bringing along to help me. [I've no idea how he was doing this--physically, he was still at the wedding, nowhere nearby.]

What he doesn't know is that I chose my allies because they all have superpowers. We fall upon the wedding ceremony without warning. I try to invent a variety of superpowers and hand gestures to go with them. For instance, with a wave of an arm, one person can send out a wave of frosty air that freezes people in place, like icicles. There's one man in a hat standing calmly amidst the chaos, and I'm not sure if he's on my side or not. Inexplicably, my forces start retreating. I realize that hat-man must have a mind control superpower, and he's using it against me to make everyone run away. I wonder if they will all die, and I feel that's a terrible price for the main character to pay just to save one person and a pair of shoes. I run away from hat-man myself before he can take control of my mind, but not before separating the bride and groom in the snowstorm and taking the bride with me. The groom has a snarl on his face.

The movie cuts to an aerial shot of the heroes as they run away from the building. It was obviously rendered with a 3D graphics engine, and not very well, at that. The snow on the ground is too smooth and too reflective. I'm not impressed by their graphics team. The heroes are carrying a light, but I notice there's a second source of (badly rendered) light, as well. I wonder where it's coming from, and the movie cuts to a shot of the castle on the hill. There's a guard carrying a lantern around the outside walls--a sentry. The heroes must have been trying to sneak back in, and they had to run away when they saw the guard's light coming near. They'll probably try again soon. They do, and the guard sees their light. He raises a cry: "I see a cherry!" (referring to the size of the light, I suppose).

Spoiler for sexual content:

Again, the heroes turn and dash back down the snowy mountainside. The camera focuses on the main character and his long-lost lover. She's wearing a totally unadorned white silk dress. (There aren't even any visible seam lines.) Now that they've been reunited, nothing can stop them from enjoying each other's company. The man starts sliding down the snow on his back and the woman rolls on top of him--basically a sex position, except they also happen to be sliding down a hillside. [I suppose I should mention that this portion of the dream was from the guy's perspective, but I'm going to keep telling it in third person if that's okay with you. . . .] It's very comfortable, not to mention arousing, and they end up sliding into an area with relatively few trees. The man asks if this is an okay spot for her, and she says yes; the ground is flat, so it will be comfortable. He manages to respond (in a rather strained voice) that her body makes any place comfortable, but then he gets a bit too frisky and I wake up.

Chess and Orchestra

Five or six of us are outside, playing a chess game together. One of my friends from high school moves a knight into the middle of the board. As I look around to see what that move did, I realize that he's successfully blocking almost everyone else's pieces. That was a really good move. It's basically a foregone conclusion that he's going to win.

After the game, I walk back to my room. On the way, I notice a lot of people I know are wearing orchestra jackets and walking in the opposite direction. Shoot, I forgot about the orchestra concert tonight! I dash back to my room and try to dress for the concert as quickly as possible. I have trouble finding my dress pants. My roommate is there working, and he asks me what I'm doing. I tell him that the back-to-school concert is tonight, since it's the end of the first week back. He says no, the concert's at the end of the second week. After a moment, I decide he's right. What a relief.

Garden Path

The Dragon walks along a garden path. There's a wall covered in ivy, and a foot-wide dirt track leading up to it. His wife is dead: apparently she committed suicide by slitting her own throat. But she positioned her body in such a way that he wouldn't realize she was dead until he was close enough to the wound that when he did see it, it would be traumatic. She was evil, you see.

Housemates

I and a bunch of my housemates from school are living together in a big house. Right now, we're playing a game. But I want to take a shower, so I go upstairs and get in. But the stall is really, really cramped: it's just a little triangle in the corner of a room, and the ceiling is low. I have trouble finding enough space to bring my arm from below my waist to above it.

Later, one of my housemates' friends is in the house talking with me. He mentions sigmoid curves, so I show him my laptop's wallpaper, which I think is a cool example of the artistic use of those curves. "Oh yeah?" he replies. He shows me a graphic he's been working on with 3D rendering software. There's a sigmoid curve floating in the middle of a big rectangular room. There are spotlights all over the walls, directing beams of light at the curve. Clearly this project is an exercise in realistic lighting, because the reflections on the curve look really good.

Math Aerobics

On the third floor, there's a math aerobics class. On each count, you switch between an aerobic move and a math-related move. There's also a class being taught by Professor S, and I'm not sure which class I should be attending. Then I get stuck on the other side of the door. In order to get back to class, I'll have to walk all the way down to the ground floor and find another way back up. I don't remember how I got to the third floor in the first place, so this could be difficult. I just walk around for a while, letting my thoughts wander. Eventually I realize that I'm sitting in a chair, sipping a drink. That must mean I've arrived, since otherwise I'd still be looking. I stand up and look for the classroom door.

Crocodile

I'm playing with a graphics editing program. I'm trying to make a realistic 3-D model of a tree. I've found some textures and random generation algorithms from various other sources, and I'm trying to see how well they can be combined. For example, the models for the fruit on the tree come from Skyrim. Now, I manage to generate a tree. But it's one of those strangler fig trees from the jungle, and the setting is just a basic North American backyard. Also, the branches sometimes have a weird orthogonal slant. I'm not sure exactly how to fix these problems, short of designing my own textures for a tree, and that would be very complicated. I also notice that there's a thin spot in the middle of the tree--not enough leaves there. I spend some time trying to make an extra branch and affix it manually. The patch looks okay from a distance, but when I enter the 3-D environment and rotate the tree by grabbing a branch and pulling it sideways, it's clear that the new branch doesn't quite connect to the rest of the tree. It's just floating in the air in the right general location.

I look over the white picket fence bordering the yard. My parents are visible through the glass doors of the next house. One house over, a big group of 9 or 10-year-old kids is having a pool party. And on the other side of the fence from the pool is a crocodile. Wait, what!? Sure enough, there's a live, fifteen-foot crocodile sort of hanging upside down off of the fence. I'm both terrified and excited by this. In any case I'm definitely going to stay up here in my tree. There's a guy crouching next to the crocodile, but I'm not worried for him. He's probably from animal control or something.

I call out to my parents. "Mom! Dad! Look, it's a crocodile!"

They open the glass door and come outside. "Oh, have they come to pick it up already?" my dad says. I guess they already knew the crocodile was here. Meanwhile, the kids at the pool party are still busy doing cannonballs from the diving board.

Suddenly, the crocodile snarls at my dad. He crouches, but he looks frantic and confused and there's nowhere to run. The crocodile lunges, and Dad trips backwards over a white plastic lawn chair, which falls between them. Then, to my horror, my mom jumps on the crocodile and tries to wrestle with it. "Shit!" I say, desperately. She should have run. I can't see exactly what's going on, because my mom's back is to me. I wonder if I should try to help, or if that would only get me killed as well. Then I see blood and bits of flesh spilling onto the patio. It must have gotten her neck. "Shit," I moan, overcome with horror at the fact that I'm watching someone die, and that someone is my mother. Somehow, I'm on the ground, and her body lands next to me. There's definitely something wrong with the shape of her neck, and there's blood all over. I wake up.

Math Seminar

I'm sitting in the audience for a math seminar. Absently, I look at the speaker for the first time in a while. It takes me a minute to realize that instead of Prof. S, the speaker is a very broad-shouldered man whom I don't know. He looks very strong, he's in shape, and he's not wearing a shirt. Huh. The man explains somewhat embarrassedly that he's advertising for a company whose logo appears on his shorts. Also, I guess he's the substitute teacher for the math seminar, and he's kind of hoping that we won't talk much about math, since he doesn't know much about it.

This is the second half-naked man I've seen in the math department today. I guess the female undergrads must be feeling pretty lucky. Anyway, after the seminar I walk onto the stage and see that the guy's not wearing shorts now, either, or underwear. He's picking up his clothes and getting ready to leave.

At some point later, I discover that I'm wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, and my shorts are around my ankles. I feel somewhat irrationally superior to the substitute speaker in that I decide to pull up my pants, instead of taking off my underwear like he must have done in the same situation. But I do recognize that I'm probably just jealous.

Math Book

One of my friends in the math department leads me into a side room where the floor is covered in dozens of packets of paper, printouts from various mathematical lectures and books. He hands me the printout of the last chapter of the book I've been working through. When I go back and add this chapter to the rest of the book, I take a moment to contemplate the book as a whole. It's in a very rough state: for example, after I add a couple of entries to the glossary at the back, I notice that some of the definitions end with commas, some with periods, and some with nothing. It will take some work to clean up, but I'm still proud of it. I think I understand a little better the essence of a math book. It's not all about the typesetting and the grammar--it's about the content, and content is what we have.

Piano Lesson

Three of us are sitting in a room, waiting. We're all musicians. A friend of ours is having a piano lesson in the next room. The two others decide to rehearse a tricky spot from the string quartet they'll be playing in the recital. I'm a bit uncomfortable with this, since I'm worried about the noise being heard in the next room. It looks like one of the older adults who's back here with us is about to come over and stop them, but then she decides it's unnecessary. I guess if she thinks it's okay, then I'd better not worry about it.

Frags:

• Playing a platform game of some kind.