Fish Davidson: The Man, The Mackerel, The Magnificent

My name is Fish, and this is the page for updates on my big projects. I also have a bunch of sideblogs for my various niche interests, which you can find at the bottom of my most recent State of the Mackerel. Allergy Information: Manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts; nuts, dairy, soy protein, wheat, eggs and sesame seeds.

[fishdavidson]

2023 State of the Mackerel

Hello fine internet people! The blog portion of my main account has been dormant for quite some time, and I've been wanting to put something here to give the few people who are following me an update. I've also wanted to change a few things on here, so with the end of the year upon us, I wanted to put forward something to help provide some clarity about the blog's past, present, and future.

The Past: Noteworthy Life Events

Since my last official post on here on August of 2021, obviously at least a few notable things have happened in the intervening two years. Here is a quick rundown of the highlights, presented as fake headlines:

Fish Davidson gets over by a minivan and yells swear words

"Guess I'll go back to school," says local internet weirdo

Studies indicate minor promotion at work leads to corresponding minor improvements in life satisfaction

Combining a bunch of words, Fish Davidson writes a book

Yep, tabletop gaming is a thing and it's not going away

Fish Davidson learns to make two sounds at once

Okay, so now that I've hopefully piqued your interest, here's a little bit more detail about each of those items. In November of 2021, I was walking across the street at a crosswalk and was hit by a minivan. The driver wasn't going very fast, but it was enough to break three bones (including my tailbone) and put me on crutches for a while and I needed special orthopedic pillows for my butt for about 18 months. I'm mostly back to normal now, but it was a long road.

The next big thing was that I went back to grad school in an online program. I've been a student for about a year now, and I'm about halfway through the program. Whatever intermittent dreams I would have and wanted to write about have been shoved aside to make time for the seemingly endless papers of graduate work. It's stressful, but I'm glad to be back in school.

Part of the reason for going back to school is because I got a minor promotion at work. Predictably, it came with more responsibilities, but it also came with a little bit more money. I'm going back to school to learn more about things that are related to my job, but also to leverage it into another potential pay raise.

Now we get to the personal creative pursuits of the recent past. I wrote a novel called Power Frank about a superhero whose only power is that he can open any jar. And he has to leverage that power to both overcome family dysfunction and save his desert hometown from being destroyed by malevolent hogs. I'm starting the querying process for agents and hope to have it published eventually!

I also finished up my multi-year Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Shits and Giggles that ran from level 1 to level 20. Several smaller (much smaller) campaigns happened after that. Then Wizards of the Coast did some stupid stuff with their Open Gaming License, and now I've redirected the bulk of my gaming money to provide support for smaller independent creators and lesser known systems. I've really gotten into several OSR systems like Shadowdark, Basic Fantasy, and (if you count these as OSR) Cairn and Knave. Other non-fantasy systems that I'm currently really digging into are Orbital Blues and Mothership. Granted, I don't currently run those games for people yet, but I do like reading the books and seeing different approaches to solving certain mechanical problems. I've also been creating a bunch of random tables for things.

The last important creative pursuit is that of Tuvan throat singing. Tuva is a region in the geographic center of Asia that is known for a style of singing that allows the singer to produce multiple notes simultaneously. I've been fascinated by it for decades and tried off and on to learn it, but this summer I finally made progress and am finally learning how to do it. It takes a lot of practice and making weird sounds, much to the chagrin of my (very patient and supportive) wife.

The Present and Future: Lumped Together For Expediency

I want to write a dream journal and that's what this blog was primarily conceived for. Unfortunately, my dream output has been incredibly fickle and the other demands on my time (professional and academic) make it difficult to report or even remember dreams. Does that mean I'm closing up this blog? Nope! I'm still on tumblr almost every day. But if I'm not able to reliably post dreams on here, what should happen to this blog?

That's the question I've been wrestling with for the past few months. What should I do? Since fishdavidson is my primary blog and I can't easily swap over to a new primary blog to archive my content, I've decided to pivot a little bit. Even outside of tumblr, I use Fish Davidson as my basically my brand (obligatory shoutout to the 1-800 contacts commercial).

So it makes sense to keep using Fish Davidson for personal promotion and creative pursuits. I'm not going to be deleting or moving any of my old posts, but new posts will be relatively rare and limited to mostly things that I create.

However, tumblr lets me create a bajillion different sideblogs for my various interests. I've got several different blogs, all geared toward different interests. Future dream journal entries, if and when they happen, will be published to fishdreams instead of here. Other posts and reblogs will be spread across my various sideblogs. So without further ado, here are

My Various Sideblogs and What They're For

fishdreams - dream journal stuff

fishcrap - various reblogs and anything that I find interesting but outside of the scope of my various side blogs

fishability - for disability awareness stuff

fishrpg - this will be where I post a lot of tabletop RPG stuff. I'm planning on participating in Hexplore24, which is a tiny daily challenge for RPG creation that starts in January.

tuvafish - stuff about throat singing (and maybe even some of my practice sessions) will go here as I find stuff to post (currently empty)

brownstonarmy - probably won't be updated, but if you want to read a novel-length account of the entire Shits and Giggles campaign, here you go!

Thank you all for being such cool people on tumblr, have a great holiday season and new year, and I hope we stay friends on here.

-Fish

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-08-18: Be Careful What You Wish For!

For three people in a dying town on a sweltering summer day, things are about to take a drastic turn. None of them have names that I can recall, though there were two men and a woman, and all appeared to be somewhere in their early twenties. The guy who kick starts the plot into gear is living in a house with a broken air conditioner and an overgrown driveway. His next door neighbor has an old limousine resting on cinderblocks in the yard, and the house across the street is little more than a pile of rotten rubble.

Anyway, this guy’s changing his car’s oil in his overgrown driveway when he wishes that he could leave this horrid town. This minor declaration of fantasy is enough to summon some sort of wish-granting entity into existence. Whatever the thing was, I’m not entirely certain: devil, genie, or fairy are all possibilities because I could never look directly at it because it was made of bright light.

One thing that I new for certain about this wish-giver was that it was risky to deal with. Sure, the wishes would come true, but there would always be a caveat. To offset this somewhat, the wish-giver offered four wishes instead of the usual three.

The first wish had a bunch of extra conditions on it so you could really only use it to determine that the wish-giver was actually capable of granting wishes. Our guy uses his preliminary wish to get his oil changed and BAM! Oil is magically changed and guy realizes he’s got an opportunity on his hands.

He does what I imagine nearly anyone else in his situation would do and call his two closest friends to come check out the situation and potentially share the wishable riches. The friends come over and they spend a wish or two on slightly more extravagant things. Exactly what they wished for isn’t important, but the three of them did learn about the need for careful wording lest you get unfavorable results.

Eventually the group decides on their final wish and it’s some long monstrosity of clauses that are very narrowly-defined to avoid obvious pitfalls. They want to live a lot longer and they define how exactly how strong they’ll be and how high they’ll jump and how much money they’ll have, among other things.

The wish gets granted and we get to see it play out... Including how it goes tragically, tragically wrong. Everything starts fine enough, though. The trio can now lift heavy things and jump several meters into the air. They become celebrity basketball players with fat contracts and leave the town on international tours.

Because such care was taken in specifying exactly how strong and wealthy the trio was, it seems like everything is good. But they neglected to include provisions that would keep them on top of the world’s stage. Soon the other athletes of the world began growing in strength and dexterity.

A few years after the last wish was finalized, everyone in the world is now stronger and can jump higher than these three. Plus there was a big round of hyperinflation, so those fat contracts weren’t worth much now. The dream ends with the trio being decades in the future but in the same metaphorical trap they found themselves in before the wishes were granted: stuck in a dying town, broke, and now everyone in the world is more athletic than they are.

Only this time, they don’t have any more wishes to fix their problem.

---------------------------------

“Deal With The Devil” artwork by Steven Rhodes

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-08-05: Tornadoes and a Doggie Burrito!

Ever since I started being able to remember dreams again, it’s been kinda weird. My parents seem to be showing up more than usual, as are storms. And because I mentioned parents and storms, that’s where we’ll begin today’s entry.

The sun is trying to set, but dark purple clouds are swirling about and nearly obscuring the sun. I’m watching multiple tornadoes form in the distance through the big wall of windows in my parents’ living room. My parents are also present, as is my wife.

And all of my pets are at the house, which is unusual only in the sense that all my cats never travel to visit my parents. The doggo, on the other hand, is my parents’ favorite grandchild (or so they tell me).

My mom runs out of the room and starts opening all the windows and doors to equalize the air pressure or whatever during the storm. I (now) know it’s a myth, but it’s something that was unfortunately taught to do growing up. Regardless of the safety ramifications of allowing a swirling vortex of wind inside your house, my chief concern becomes my cats.

The three inside cats we have are strictly inside cats, but they love a good chance to make a jailbreak.  As soon as the front door opens, they zip into the front yard and head south down the block toward the base of the hill where I used to skateboard. (Side note: this is less of a hill and more like a very gentle accessibility ramp, like nature just wanted to make sure the southern corners of the block were accessible)

My cats ended up in a storm drain at the base of the hill, and as another aside, I’m not entirely sure if I found a real-life kitten in there as a kid, or just assimilated a dream into my memory. Anyway, I grab them and haul ass back home where I can find a hallway with doors to wait out the storm with my wife, family, and fuzzy babies.

But it appears that my mental preoccupation with tracking down runaway cats made the storms cease to exist. My alerts me to this fact as I return to the house with three wiggly cats trying to escape my grasp. We decide to celebrate the lack of storms by making our dog an internet celebrity via the burrito method (like in the header image).

Everyone can wrap a dog in a blanket and take a picture, but my wife and I wanted to take it to the next level of artistry. We turned several sheets of newspaper into makeshift scarves and belts to wrap up our little doggo. And then we put her on a stack of empty DiGiorno pizza boxes that we stuffed into a pillowcase.

I’m not saying this is a great artistic statement with my awake mind, but everyone in the dream thought it was pretty rad.

--------------------

Header image taken from an article on Barkpost.com about 15 excellent burrito doggos.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-08-04: Car Trouble Leads To A Visit To The Terrible Games Store

It’s summer in real life and dreamland, so apparently that means it’s road trip season. While I’m chilling in the back seat of an old Dodge Caravan (the boxy early 1990s model) as my parents drive, they announce that there’s a problem with an oil leak and pull into a conveniently located mechanic that happened to materialize just outside the van.

According to the mechanics, we have to unload all the luggage from the back of the van in order for the mechanics to check the oil. This is a perfectly reasonable request, as they are the ones who deal with cars for a living. But once the luggage was unloaded and the back of the van was empty, the shop’s receptionist comes out and exclaims that it is her destiny to sit for at least a moment in the van’s recently-vacated cargo space.

She climbs into the area behind the seats before I can gather my things and exit the vehicle, but it’s not weird or creepy. We high-five and attempt to take a selfie to commemorate the occasion. The camera on my phone starts acting weird and I am momentarily convinced that it is looking at ghosts or at least a parallel reality.

The mechanics inform us that it will be an hour or two before the car is ready, but there’s a strip mall about a block away that we can visit in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with all the crap we took out of the van, though? SPOILER: It doesn’t seem to matter because it got sent to some sort of extradimensional inventory like a videogame character or it disappeared from existence entirely. Now that our material burdens are lightened, it is time to bask in the warm glow of suburban consumerism!

Only one of the shops seems vaguely interesting, so I step inside. An older man and woman, both with wild gray hair and presumably the owners of the store, welcome me by screaming “MOISTURE! MOISTURE!” We’re off to a good start so far!

According to dream logic, this dream is taking place in the current time in the the Year of Our Plague 2021. The wares available in the stores do not reflect this reality. Clamshell VHS tapes take up most of the wall space of the small shop, followed by several racks of preowned stereo cassette tapes.

My parents enter the shop a few moments later (”MOISTURE! MOISTURE!”). The older man compliments us on our matching shirts. Wait, we’re wearing matching clothes? Oh, yes, you mean the large applique pterodactyls we have on our shirts that didn’t exist until just now. I like pterodactyls, so this is a fine development.

“You know... I also have a pterodactyl on my shirt,” the man says. “WE’RE MATCHY-MATCHY MOISTURE!” He turns around to reveal an iron-on pterodactyl patch that takes up the entire back of his shirt. He puts a hand on my shoulder and directs me to look in a small crate on the floor. “You look like the kind of guy who can appreciate the good games. We have lots of good computer games on sale today.“

Despite having a real-life Steam library that is slowly being crushed under all the weight of the games I buy on sale, I pick through the offerings in the crate. Not to seem rude or snobbish, but I don’t run Windows on my computer and wanted to verify that the games had compatibility with my computer before I purchased anything.

I start reading the backs of the game boxes and looking at the system requirements. These are older games judging from the minimal system requirements, but they also have some other really weird requirements. Let’s look at the game Yard Racer, for example. In addition to requiring a 386 processor or higher, it also needs at least 2 acres of open farmland and a sheet of paper. And then there was another game called FROGS? (yes, the title was a question) that needed 4MB of RAM and a blank MS Word document.

Ultimately, I didn’t end up getting anything from that terrible store, but we did spend enough time in there for the oil to get changed so at least we could get back on the trip to wherever we were going.

--------------

Header image taken from an article on YourMechanic.com about how to stow seats in Dodge or Chrysler minivans.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-08-03: An International Dinner Party!

Or maybe it was a breakfast party or brunch or something? Anyway, I’m here in this big repurposed auditorium thingy with a bunch of people in nice dining attire. Don’t worry, I’m not naked or anything, but I do think I’m wearing a suit and a fuzzy backpack.

There was a brief interlude where someone gave a speech shaming Chris Chan for The Incident(s), and footage of her arrest was played, but we’re not gonna dwell on that because everybody wants to keep their eaten food on the inside of their bodies.

On the far wall of the auditorium is a giant window that overlooks a hospital/bus-stop combo that stands alone on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Purple storm clouds are rolling toward the auditorium and it’s gonna be a heck of a storm. Speaking solely for myself, I enjoy storms a great deal and find the storm quite beautiful. The dirt road is in Kansas, though, and I find that to be... less beautiful (Sorry, Kansans!)

But back to the meal!

I find a seat at a big circular table with probably about 15 other people and strike up a conversation. Excluding the seat my butt is now occupying, there is only one empty chair at the table, which will become important in a moment. My companions are all Indians (in the subcontinent sense, not the indigenous peoples of the Americas).

Each of the dozens of tables in the auditorium represents a country or geographic area, and each country’s table is generally occupied by citizens of that country. Several tables have individuals of different nationalities seated at them, but they’re usually people of diplomatic importance.

While talking with my Indian dining buddies, I learn about an important treaty India had with Soviet Union that began in 1950. No, I don’t remember anything about what the treaty involved. But once the treaty was signed, Joseph Stalin stopped aging and became immortal.

You thought Stalin died in the 1950s? Nope! He just changed his name to Marcus Stalin, moved to Mumbai, and styled his mustache a little differently. NO ONE WILL EVER BE ABLE TO SEE THROUGH THESE LAYERS OF SUBTERFUGE AND REALIZE THAT JOSEPH STALIN NEVER DIED!

Over the decades, “Marcus” settled down and became a naturalized Indian citizen. Marcus was supposed to be at this dinner and my companions were saving a seat for him, but he got stuck on the bus or something and couldn’t make it tonight. Everybody at the table had lots of pleasant stories to share about Marcus and his  love of books full of dad jokes.

Marcus’s place at the table was indicated by a giant Soviet propaganda poster of Stalin hanging above the chair. But it said Marcus, so any coincidences about how Marcus looked a lot like former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin could be explained away. It’s truly a foolproof plan.

As the meal drew to a close, I actually grew disappointed that I wouldn’t get to meet Marcus after all this positive discussion about him. I’m not excusing his genocide or anything, just thought it would make for an interesting story about the time I told Stalin a bad pun and then we both went “eyyyyyyy” and did finger guns at the other.

Instead of a traditional ending to this dream journal, I’m just gonna end with a terrible Soviet joke I just made up. At least, I think I made it up, but the pun is so obvious that probably a bunch of people also made it up. Anyway, here goes:

Q: Why is Stalin in charge of housekeeping for the Soviet Union?

A: BECAUSE HE CHANGED THE LENINS IN THE PALACE.

IT IS GOOD JOKE, YES?

-----------------

Picture is of Joseph Stalin because that’s the picture used to represent Marcus’s place at the table.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-07-31: Darth Vader Helps At Summer Camp

It’s summer and that means that it’s time for kids like Fish Davidson to go to camp. Although I am a grown-ass adult in real life, my internal depiction of myself never really progressed beyond about age 14. So yeah, still basically a kid.

The camp is out in the boonies and hasn’t really been updated since the 1960s. I’m here with a bunch of other random campers who aren’t important enough to have names or impact on the plot. A few days after we get settled and acclimated to the pace of camp life, some weird insectoid aliens appear and go through the standard alien invasion tropes of trying to murder humanity and whatnot. The aliens looked like a cross between Zorak from Space Ghost and Gorn from Star Trek TOS, so they didn’t really come across as super-threatening on the appearance end of things.

Nevertheless, all the counselors are tasked with getting all the campers to safety. My counselor (as you could probably guess from the title) was Darth Vader. You would be forgiven for thinking he was a terrible camp counselor because of all that Death Star murder and Dark Side stuff, but he was pretty chill.

Of course, the reason he was pretty chill was because he was forced to wear this weird collar by the Rebel Alliance prior to the start of the dream. Called a “Wauk Collar,” it prevents people from doing bad stuff and it’s basically a collar made of invulnerable bubble wrap. The good kind of bubble wrap with the big bubbles you can pop. Wauk Collars also prevent their wearer from manifesting advanced Force abilities somehow.

Back in the alien invasion camp timeline, a group of buggy aliens are chasing us around, Scooby Doo style. Imagine a montage of Darth Vader shepherding a bunch of random kids between a row of cabins and setting up improvised barricades while the aliens give chase and the Benny Hill theme song plays.

And the whole time, Darth Vader is yanking at his collar, trying to rip it off. “It would be so much easier to destroy these bugs if I didn’t have to wear this collar.” For child safety and insurance purposes, the collar in the dream stayed on. But we didn’t get murdered by aliens, so at least there’s that.

My entire group of campers stayed alive until I woke up, so good job, Darth!

-------------------------

A big part of why I spent the last year not updating my dream journal is because the prolonged pandemic stress absolutely killed my dream recall, in addition to sleep adjustments from working in a new job role. But I’m trying to post stuff again, even if it means that I’m not all the way back to the level where I want to be. Gotta take those baby steps!

“Retro Darth Vader” Image by Chase Kunz

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-07-30: Time For Clickbait!

There’s not some long narrative or symbolism behind this particular dream (at least, not that I’m aware of). All I remember is green-tinged magazine cover with a single attention-grabbing headline:

“The Secret History Behind Jackie Kennedy’s Dead-Eyed Stare And Exactly Why It’s Still In Use Today”

Naturally, I had to reproduce that cover to the best of my ability and it came out pretty well. I’d definitely give that article a read if I had the chance. What about you?

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-07-29: Notes From An Unconscious Road Trip Through The Middle Of Nowhere

Batesville is a tiny town at the very edge of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta. Not technically part of the Delta due to its unfortunate founding on the wrong side of the Yazoo River, but it’s close enough for my purposes. Batesville is the crown jewel of Panola County, an honor that bestows upon it the title of city despite a population of less than 8,000 a location in a forsaken borderland between cotton fields. Dear reader, I’m going to go there, but not in the way you might think.

I have already beheld the vast and unending agricultural expanse that is much of Mississippi with my own two eyes, and have no desire to consciously revisit the experience. And yet, there is a call in the darkness of my slumber. An unraveling hand that pulls upon the threads of my psyche. There is a house that rests alone in a tomb of trees, and I must go there.

What follows is a mostly-true accounting of my journey to Batesville through an ethereal world unburdened by geography and logic, though not a entirely so. The white clapboard spectre of the house in the trees beckons to me through an emailed receipt for an Airbnb rental. My presence is requested at this house with no known address nor expected date of my arrival.

But I know where to go.

A rental car I didn’t explicitly request is waiting outside my house. I can only assume it was sent by the house in the trees for matters of expedience. I am not to go directly to the house; as I must first collect a key from someone to gain access. That is all the knowledge I am allowed to possess during this stage of the journey.

Time compresses and expands simultaneously as the rental car travels down the lonely highways. It is a sign that the keyholder is near. The road plummets downward as though painted on a vertical cliff face as I near the outskirts of Batesville. All four tires cease their hum as they lose contact with the asphalt and the car glides through the air like an Olympian ski jumper descending onto the slope below.

As long as I’m going the speed limit during this fall, the slope at the bottom of the cliff should allow the car to touch down relatively gently, though gently in this case merely means “not exploding on impact.” At the bottom of this roadside ravine sits a scruffy dog. This must be the keyholder, and behind him is a major water park with a giant twisting water slide.

Real Batesville does not have a water park. Nor do the surrounding roads have sudden drops of a hundred meters built into the near flat landscape. But that’s not important; the key is. The dog moves his front paw to reveal a lanyard with an empty keyring resting underneath it. Alas, this dog is not the keyholder; but he knows where the real keyholder is.

I stare into the dog’s eyes and see a scene that is not my own reflection. The scene is of myself approaching the largest slide in the water park. An attendant is standing there at the top of the slide, assisting everyone in the final step of their slide-based journey. I am to present the lanyard to the attendant, who will in turn provide the key to the house. I excuse myself from the dog and leave my mangled silver sedan on the roadside as I enter the park.

Things do not go according to plan at the slide. The man in front of me in the line was a professional dolphin smuggler, and had an adult dolphin underneath his arm like a pool toy. Officers from the Department of Fish and Wildlife were about to apprehend him for possession of an illegal dolphin, so he asked me to hold on to the dolphin “just for a little bit” until he could get down the slide.

Before I could protest, he tosses the dolphin to me and disappears down the slide. When it’s my turn to stare into the curving void of the slide, the attendant notices the lanyard around my neck and clandestinely passes the key to me. I can’t put the key on the keyring without holding up the line or dropping the dolphin, nor can I reach my pockets, so I do the next best thing and hold the key in my mouth while hopping into the slide.

Water sloshes around the dolphin and me as we speed through the bends and spirals of the slide. My grip on the dolphin fails as I hit a bump in the slide. The dolphin flails. I gasp in surprise.

And I accidentally swallow the key.

Having just angered the house with my carelessness, I skid out from the bottom of the slide and try to cough up the key before things get worse. Predictably, the key continues its descent to my stomach, and I can feel every sharp angle on the key as it is drawn deeper into my guts.

This is prime time to seek emergency medical treatment, but I have no car and am not some sort of millionaire who can afford to go to the doctor for things like swallowing the key to a potentially haunted house. So I do the next best thing and walk to Wal-Mart to buy every emetic and laxative I can find in hopes of passing the key one way or another.

I chug two entire bottles of milk of magnesia at the checkout counter and await an explosion in my bowels. Although my clothes are presumably still wet from the water slide, I have no desire to allow a brownout to happen in my pants because these are the only pants I have at the moment. Such an event could strike at any time, so I disrobe at the checkout line and start waddling with great care toward the toilets.

Did you know that Wal-Mart does not allow nudists in their stores? That’s a store policy you can learn about real quick when you are naked in the checkout line. I am asked to leave the store, despite the potential bomb in my bowels.

The house laughs at my plight as though this was the plan all along. It is a purveyor of existential terror that delights in the misfortunes it brings upon those who answer its call. And misfortune arrives in the form of an intestinal blowout in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Specifically the type of misfortune that does not result in the recovery of the key to a rental house.

It is here, dear reader, that I admit defeat and pledge to never visit Batesville again. The houses there are full of schemes and malevolence.

[fishdavidson]

Tag Game!

Thanks to an errant post by @amphibious-pussy, I am temporarily back from my tumblr hiatus to post at least once before a potential end of the world scenario. Anyway, here goes!

Last Song: “Wash My Hands Shorty” by The I.L.Y’s

Last Movie: The Thing (2011) It was okay, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the characters had way too much sunlight and way too little clothing for an antarctic winter.

Currently Watching: Schitt’s Creek, Korra, Kipo, and One Piece

Currently Reading: The complete print run of Transmetropolitan (again, because I gotta stay woke before the election)

Currently Craving: A hug and and a sense of normalcy in a messed up world.

I would like to tag: @gramizar @pollolocouniversity @wildblueyoshi @captainfriendguy @contrivedcondolences @hobbiesovercoffee @160yie @pomegrrrl @elleshellsbells

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-22: A Cool Shirt, Email Problems, And A Tour Of The Food Court

There isn’t an overarching plot in this dream, so it’s a perfect candidate for my good friend, THE BULLETED LIST!

First off, I’d like to apologize to Canadian artist Curtis Wilson, whose art I have snatched and altered for the header image of this post (for reasons that are about to become clear). I had acquired a t-shirt with a really cool design on it in this dream, and the shirt itself was a joyfully bright neon yellow-green. A black line drawing of an eagle in flight took up the front of the shirt, and it was drawn in the style of First Nations artwork found in the Pacific Northwest. Recoloring one of Curtis Wilson’s pieces was the closest I can get to showing you just how cool this shirt was. It was legit. I literally put that shirt on in the dream multiple times because of how proud and happy it made me feel.

In the next dream unit, I’m working in a cubicle at night. But the cubicle is set up in the grass outside the local university’s student union, and the cloudy purple sky is all I can see overhead. My job is to correct issues with email systems, and there’s one coworker who keeps typing her email address incorrectly. Her email address keeps showing up as [email protected] (which I hope is not actually someone’s really email address), and only the “@” sign is correct. Each time the wrong email address pops up, I have to send her an email in response asking her to correct the mistake.

The last dream unit takes place in some sort of food court, but everyone is practicing social distancing and the food kiosks have limited menu options that are carry out only. Despite to floor being completely even, I realized that I could do a sort of squatting motion and propel myself around the room like I was a champion slalom skier. The pseudo-skiing was the highlight of the dream for asleep Fish Davidson, but the food options offered for sale were probably the most interesting for an awake Fish Davidson. Here are two of the foods I remember being able to try:

Jalapeno Balls - a cheddar-stuffed jalapeno pepper sits at the center of a fist-sized ball of Spanish rice. The rice has bell peppers, onions, and bits of mushroom in it, and the whole ball is dipped in some sort of corn meal batter/coating and deep fried. I will probably try to make this at some point in real life.

Taco Hat - This was neither taco nor hat. It was instead a cylinder of caramel corn that had a little base made of peanut brittle that made it look sort of like a tiny top hat. So basically my dreams tried to reinvent Cracker Jacks or Crunch n’ Munch, but with some hipster flair. I’m 100% okay with this, though.

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Header image is Eagle Design/Logo by Curtis Wilson, whom you can find at http://curtiswilson.ca

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-21: A New Meme Appears!

So I’m lurking on reddit at the start of this dream, scrolling through pages of dank memes. I navigate to r/gaming and see that someone made cool drawing of Link from the Zelda series of games, but instead of Link’s traditional green clothing, he was wearing only shorts made from a coarse cloth.

Link was still wearing green, though. It was just in the form of an intricate full-body tattoo that depicted leaves, vines, and flowers snaking all over his body. Another slight departure from his traditional appearance was that Link was wielding a rough quarterstaff instead of the usual sword. The picture was captioned something like “I drew druid Link!” and the art quality was top-notch... Except for one detail:

The hands were drawn backwards, and the thumbs faced the wrong way.

As is often the case on the internet, people seized on this little detail and started poking fun at it. Not in a malicious way, but in the way that everybody gets to have a laugh and no one feels left out. People started doing their own renditions of druid Link and the floodgates could no longer hold back the river of content.

Someone made a fake screenshot of Link in Breath of the Wild as druid Link. Another person got a baby doll, put the hands on backward, and doodled vines on the plastic body to create Baby Doll Druid Link. Yet another person took it in a different direction and used body paint to recreate all the tattoos on Link’s body.

Of course, the backward hands were the part everyone was interested in. So the guy tried his best but really just ended up holding the staff like an idiot. Self-deprecating humor at its finest!

P.S. I know I implied that it was basically endless druid Link memes, but dreams have a weird way of making 4-5 images seem infinite in the moment. So blame dream logic for that one.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-20: The River Of Souls

This dream took me on a vacation to the Guangxin (pronounced in the dream as (gwahn-SHIN) River somewhere in Asia. The river itself is relatively slow moving and covered in fog. It’s not particularly scenic, but it’s got one feature that no other place on earth has:

It can tell you how old your soul is.

According to the reality of this dream, every sentient creature has a soul. Reincarnation of souls is also proven in this reality, thanks to the river. The logic of how exactly this works doesn’t completely agree with the kind of reasoning an awake person would use, but bear with me.

Each person who wants to see the age of their soul climbs aboard a small wooden raft. And it’s only one person per raft, otherwise you don’t see anything. Tourists drift along the lazy waters, hoping to see something that looks like a bio-luminescent display in the fog that shows how old a person’s soul is.

As best I can tell, there are pieces of something that reacts with souls also drifting through the water in the river. There are many different reactive particles, but only one particular particle reacts with each soul. Sort of like antibodies reacting to diseases in the body, only these won’t try to kill you. When a particle and a soul match, the water in front of that person shows the person’s age in their current body, and also the age of the total soul. Since souls have different ages, I can only assume that it means there is also some sort of death/birth process for souls, or at least some sort of recombinant process that mixes pieces of souls together to form new ones.

Most people have souls in the range of 1,000-2,000 years old, but there is a risk associated with learning this information. Occasionally tourists on the river will see massive tentacles writhing in the fog. If you collide with them, you’ll be snatched underwater. No one knows what happens after that.

These eldritch creatures don’t seem to actively attack people. They behave more like giant anemones or jellyfish that feed on whatever the current brings their way. But they command a great deal of respect for another reason, too. These things are OLD.

Each creature I saw was always illuminated by its age display. They had cool names given to them by the people because the creatures were often used as landmarks on the foggy water. Names like “Ancient Destroyer” or “Deep Sister.” The average age of the creatures in its current body was somewhere in the ballpark of 7,000-10,000 years old.

And the age of the soul in total? That part was blank or had an infinity sign. These creatures were here from before the beginning, and they would be here long after we leave.

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Header image from Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure

[fishdavidson]

Some things only SEEM impossible, but in France, they really ARE impossible.

Dream from 2020-04-16, which is coincidentally the only thing I remember from that dream

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-15: An Interactive Theatrical Experience

Sometimes I think my brain likes to mess with me in dreams. I received word that in a few moments, I (and a crowd of placeholder people) would be treated to a bit of theater. This seems fine and dandy. The program we would be seeing was a famous performance called “The Last Sun,” which I had never heard of. So I discreetly tried to google information about the plot of the play but couldn’t find any information about it.

That’s because this was a play based on a short film, in turn based on a photograph, which was in turn based on an album inspired by a field of wheat. The wheat album was the actual famous part (though that was a fact I picked up from the excited onlookers).

When the theater troupe arrives, they tell us that this is a performance unlike anything else we have experienced. The primary performers have costumes, but don’t know the whole plot of the play. Randomly selected members of the audience are given costumes and asked to collaboratively improvise with the other performers. But the uncostumed audience has a role to play as well, because that’s who decides how the ending plays out.

To be honest, I don’t remember much of anything about the first 3/4 of the play, though the costumes prominently featured Spanish conquistadors. I was a member of the audience who decided the ending, though, and that’s the part I have the best memory of. There was an ancient artifact from a thousand years ago in Mesoamerica. It was called the Obsidian Bottle, because it was made of obsidian and looked like a wine bottle.

As an audience member, our role was to decide what happened to the Obsidian Bottle. But according to dream logic, it was a one-of-a-kind artifact that held great power in the real world. If the conquistadors got it, our history would be altered and the Mesoamerican people would be completely erased. But if the performers who represented the Mesoamericans got it, they would summon a deity that would purge the world of everyone who didn’t worship this god.

Neither of those options sat well with us as an audience, so naturally we just destroyed the Obsidian Bottle so nobody ended up getting murdered by a powerful artifact. Sounds like a solid move to me. :)

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Header image is of the Hamilton play, taken by Joan Marcus

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-14: Vampires, Nachos, and Ethereal Libraries

Happy quarantine, friends! Hope you all are doing as well as you can, given the circumstances. I have some tales for you this evening to help lighten your hearts and spark your imaginations.

Dream Fragments

I was participating in what I think may have been a world record attempt for creating the longest platter of nachos. Fully-loaded nachos covered the sidewalk as far as the eye could see, and I was toting a 5-gallon pot full of melted cheese. A placeholder friend was walking alongside me, and I gestured to them with my pot of cheese and said “I think this is what it feels like to fly business blass.” I have never flown business class before, so I can only assume that you get a floor full of nachos instead of a sad sack of salted peanuts for a snack.

My friend Bart and I met up for a discussion over dinner at a foggy boardwalk after dark. Leafless trees jutted through the fog, and we talked about how cool our friendship was and also about stuff like balancing encounter difficulty in Dungeons and Dragons. After finishing our meal, Bart confessed that he was actually a vampire and planned to avoid spreading the curse by living at the bottom of the ocean for the rest of his days. All I could think about was how awkward it would be to explain this situation to the police when I had to fill out a witness statement for the missing persons report.

The Main Dream: A Special Library

Somewhere way off in a dream version of the campus where my favorite high school was, there was a library. The library itself was an old building with a glass front and only a handful of books. It was ugly and just one step away from being declared a condemned/blighted property and torn down. The book selection was purposefully awful so that people wouldn’t want to check out books from there. And when coupled with the library’s eyesore appearance, it was a popular topic of discussion for demolition. There was even a musical number where people held a protest and tried to damage the inside of the library in order to get it replaced with a newer, better library.

But there was a reason this library only got the bare minimum of attention to stay open. The founder of the library was incredibly excited about books and the library was like his baby. He had emigrated from Sweden in the 1950s and served as the head librarian for decades until he died in the late 1980s. But after his death is where our story really gets juicy.

The librarian’s bones were placed in a burial vault, and an ethereal library sprang up around his bones. As long as the original library existed, the spirit of the librarian felt compelled to exist in this world. But the mortal world was much more excited by the ethereal library that existed around the librarian’s bones.

Now, I keep saying “ethereal library” like it’s some sort of translucent ghostly apparition, but it was as solid as any regular building would be. It was indistinguishable from a normal structure, other than the fact that you had to go to a graveyard to visit the library. The librarian’s bones were hidden in an office on the second floor down a long “staff only” hallway that you had to be really looking for, and the only clue was a memorial plaque stuck to one wall that mentioned a quote by the librarian.

The library itself was decorated in an unusual modern/abstract way. It permanently looked like it was decorated in the 1980s or early 1990s by Tim Burton. In fact, the Delia’s sculptures from the movie Beetlejuice in the header image of this post are a pretty close indicator of what the art style of the library was. Except with more books, of course.

For living folks, the ethereal library had one amazing benefit. Because it was constructed by a spirit, it contained a rotating catalog of books and other media that described things beyond our mortal comprehension. And there was a good chance that you might find a book with information from the future in there, too. But presumably because the librarian died during the height of the Cold War, there were a few big quirks about the library:

Propaganda posters hung on almost every wall that depicted the fall of the Soviet Union

Any non-book media in the library only appeared on technology from the late 1980s. So you could get videos about stuff from 2020 on VHS tapes, or hear future news casts on cassette tapes, or load up unpublished magazine articles on microfiche readers.

No one who visited the library could remove anything from building because of the whole knowledge of the future/supernatural thing

So university researchers would spend hours poring over stuff they could find in the ethereal library, but only put in the bare minimum of effort into keeping the original library standing in order to keep the ghost of the librarian around. Though if I were in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing.

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Header image of Beetlejuice props taken from PropBay

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-07: Subpoena, The Musical!

Legal jargon time! For those who don’t know, a subpoena is a document that the government gives people or organizations that orders a person to attend court. And because spelling words is completely divorced from their actual pronunciation, “subpoena“ is pronounced “suh-PEEN-uh” because there is no god and all language is a construct designed to endlessly torture humanity. I know this is a weird way to start a dream journal, but the pronunciation of the word “subpoena” is relevant to this story.

So I’m wading through the firehose that is the internet in this dream. It is unclear if I am sitting at a computer using the internet or actually INSIDE the internet like a character from Wreck-It Ralph 2. Either way, I come across a video titled “Subpoena: The Musical.” And since I am precisely the kind of person internet marketers target for weird and esoteric content, I slap the play button to see what sort of legalese abomination I will be granted the chance to witness.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this video was about a legal document, or maybe a musical court case. This is not at all what the video is about. It was produced by two men who are best described as a Lebanese version of comedy duo Key and Peele. These guys looked exactly like Key and Peele, except they were of Lebanese descent. In the interest of brevity, they shall henceforth be known as LKP.

The music video starts in a dark void, but a light slowly reveals the silhouette of a statue. LKP appear in the shot and start chanting the word “subpoena” while they are riding to the top of a rollercoaster’s first big hill at night. Electronic dance music and neon lights burst out of the darkness. The cinematography reminds me a lot of the night-time forest bits of the music video for Ylvis’s “What Does The Fox Say,” which is why I included it as the header to this post.

Nary a legal document shows up in this video. Instead, LKP start saying only the “-poena” part of the word. Which is pronounced “peena.” And then the video just becomes a psychedelic turbo journey that features every penis (or “peena” in LKP’s parlance) that has ever appeared in famous works of art. All of this happens against a backdrop that looks like a green wormhole from the winamp music visualizer.

This is not a drill. There are marble dicks, painted dicks, block-print dicks, charcoal sketch dicks. More dicks than you can shake a dick at. And yet, I end up watching the whole thing. But hey, at least the music was good.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2020-04-06: Kitty Snuggles!

Disclosure time! This dream made me cry both in the dream and upon waking, but I still consider it to be a good dream. The dream comes into focus in my parents’ house and I’m walking through the dining room. Underneath one of the chairs is a cat.

But not just any cat!

This is one of my childhood cats who died a few years back from stomach cancer. But in the dream she was still healthy and at a comfortable weight. She was sleeping, but I knew this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I flopped down on the floor next to her and petted her fur as she rolled around lazily in that apathetic half-sleep that cats have weaponized into adorable perfection. The rational part of my brain knew that she had passed away in the waking world and that this was just a fleeting approximation of her, but even so, my entire brain screamed “GET SNUGGLES!”

And I did. It was wonderful, and I wept tears of joy the entire brief time we spent together. I miss you, Lucy.

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Header image from AnimalWised.com