Weird Dream

Had a weird dream right before waking up this morning, and the details are sticking with me so I may as well throw it up here for y’all if you’re bored enough to read such things. Not gonna bother with emojis or italics or any of that crap… posted “as is.” (Although I should really be putting these things in that old “dream blog” that I started forever ago, and have kinda sorta kept up with over the years…)

The dream started at the end of a long road trip that I had apparently taken with my friend Jim Gilkerson and a few others. I believe we were going to a big stadium to see a baseball game… which makes sense, because I fell asleep to discussions on the news about how MLB is planning on starting their season somehow I’m three different “hub” cities. But anyway…

We were all right outside the stadium, and I realized only at that point that I had forgotten my ticket at home, hundreds of miles away.  For some reason though, the guy scanned Jim’s ticket and it allowed us all to get inside, as if his was some sort of master ticket for main entry. However, when we were getting ready to claim our seats, there were groups of armed security guards that were checking for tickets.

It turns out that Jim was the only one who remembered his ticket, so the guards forcefully removed me and the others in our group from the line. We were told that we needed to go down to “processing” and the guards pushed us towards a flight of stairs that led to a darkened, creepy basement with cinder block walls painted beige.

Once I got down to the bottom level I realized that everyone being sent down there was being “derezzed” (aka deresolution, from the Tron movies) … and for whatever reason, everyone milling around down there, waiting to be killed, were all strange digital characters as if they were all from some discount, dollar store video games.

They chose to try to kill me by throwing digital spiders all over me, but I was able to flip many of them off of me, although a couple of them were able to spin super strong webbing that they’d circle around my arms and wrists – tightening the loops until it started cutting off my circulation. But luckily, even though they were digital/mechanical, they were no harder to kill than regular spiders… so I ended up squishing the remaining few that were wrapping me in webbing and ended up running outside through a hidden door.

It started making less sense at this point… outside the arena there were huge, ridiculously high bridges that allowed pedestrian traffic to go over the nearby highway. But before I could leave on one of those bridges, a group of women stopped me to ask if I could help them find their dog. They said that they had left him in the trunk during the concert… (it was a concert now instead of a baseball game *shrug*) and they couldn’t hear him scratching anymore, so they assumed he was no longer in there. I, of course, assumed the dog had met a different fate than they were thinking, but then I woke up.

Fun stuff.

Tron: Legacy – Main Theme

This is gorgeous, and I’m totally jealous of this guy’s ability to play, the light up keyboard that he’s got with the excellent piano samples, and then the “Guitar Hero” type player-piano roll that comes down to tell you which notes you’re meant to play. 😯😃😊 Obviously he already knows how to play this, so the falling notes are just a bonus… but take a close look at them each time a note is played. 🧐 The digital “gel” that contains the particle effects, where the “dust” from a recently played note gets “pushed out of the way” by the next note’s exploding dust. 🤓 Should be played full screen, in HD, maybe with headphones, and definitely in the dark…

More Moon Stuff

Making a a little more progress with the $99 digital camcorder with the stupid good zoom… 😏 with its only major drawbacks being the purple fringe around some things in certain conditions, the lack of 4k resolution, and then of course the more you zoom the softer the image looks. 😒 I thought I had the focus as sharp as I could get it, but I’m thinking that there may have been a haze that was also affecting the output video. Might try again tonight, probably just full-zoom stuff, since the time-lapse in the beginning here is pretty meh.

(Make sure this is set to play in HD, full-screen, for the best results.)

Since the moon was lighting up the clouds, I did some more fiddling with the phone to get the brightest exposure possible (while still using only a 1/3 sec shutter speed) and I was gonna get a much faster time-lapse of the clouds out back… but of course they cleared up shortly after I started recording. However, you’ll notice a couple stars bright enough to be picked up, so I’m hoping that on a clear, moonless night I might be able to capture the rotation of the earth in the movement of the stars with this new method. 🤷🏻‍♂️🤓 Will have to wait a couple weeks to give that a shot, but even though the video’s overall speed is too slow – you should still be able to see that there’s some movement in the stars.

Before I Fall Asleep…

Last night the moon seemed particularly bright, with a shadow being cast onto the lawn by the big pine tree out front. 😯😃 I knew the camcorder still had some juice left in it, so I went ahead and put it on a tripod, set it up out there in the driveway, and aimed it up towards the top of the tree. 🤓🔭🌕🌲☁️

(I set it to record one frame every 5 sec, for however long it stayed powered on. Best viewed in HD / full screen.)

I wasn’t expecting anything amazing, but I was just curious if the clouds would spice things up by time the video was complete. And then I fell asleep about 15 minutes later and slept all the way through to 8am. 😳🤦🏻‍♂️ As soon as my eyes opened I realized what I had done, so I went out and grabbed the dew covered camera, dried it off, and then put it near the space heater to hopefully dry everything out. 😬🤞🏻

The video isn’t bad… there’s one part where the clouds look more like bubbling water flowing across the sky and over the moon. But the battery did last long enough for the moon to make it out of the frame, and the camcorder itself is now dry and currently charging as we speak – so with any lucky I didn’t accidentally sacrifice it for a mediocre video like the other dozen I’ve done just like this one. 😏

Anxiety Dreams

Third night in a row that I had a “too real” dream revolving around COVID-19, isolation, distancing, etc. 😒 And it’s getting old. 😠 Plus last night I only got about four hours sleep again, although that’s partially my fault since I’m taking half-hour naps during the day. 😏🤷🏻‍♂️ But man, this “stay at home” crap is actually starting to get to me, even though “stay at home” is basically what I did anyway before all of this.

I usually pick a video on YouTube (on the TV) and then let the auto-recommend / auto-play take over as I’m falling asleep, and I know for a fact that what I’m hearing (in my sleep) from those videos ends up leaking into my dreams and influencing them. 😳😟 So I’m gonna have to start avoiding the news once it’s a little later in the evening, and probably switch over to playing music instead of “random TV” as I fall asleep. 🤔

I wish I was one of those folks who can sleep in complete silence, but this house just makes too many weird noises that would wake me up. 😏 Clunky compressor on the fridge when it shuts off, pinging water heater… which, by the way, stopped leaking and acting like it was going to die. (I’m still gonna have it replaced, but I’m not in a rush about it at the moment.) But yeah, I need at least sound, if not light and sound. 🙉📺 Ooh… I think I’ll break out that sound machine that I got from Amazon last year. 🤔😃 It’s supposed to be pretty good, and it never fully made it into my routine after I bought it.

Welp, that’s all I’ve got for the past 24 hours or so… 🤷🏻‍♂️🙂  stay safe, all.

Get A Hobby

Bad dreams ended up waking me last night around 3am, and I’ve been up ever since. Kinda doesn’t matter what sleep schedule I keep these days, given that I’m not going anywhere and I didn’t even realize what day it was today. Not meaning April Fools Day, just meaning that I didn’t realize it was Wednesday. 😐🤷🏻‍♂️😏 Point being, anxiety filled sleep, waking up early… it didn’t lead to much of a day for me. I did text with Dad and Genesee a bit, and she got me thinking about playing the keyboard again. 🤔🎹🤷🏻‍♂️

I forget what she said, but it reminded me that thanks to the YouTube Music app searching my own videos for music to add… I ran across this old video of me playing Don’t Wake Me by Skillet. 😎 And when I did, I realized that if you put that keyboard in front of me now I’d have no idea how to play it. Elton John made a comment on his Melbourne Symphony album, that he was playing some songs that were so old that he had to re-learn them as well for that concert. 🙂 So that’s one thing I’m gonna try to make time for… “keyboard dickin’ around time” every now and then.

And then thanks to NASCAR and iRacing running these virtual races on the weekend… and apparently a dirt track / winged-car race tonight… that’s got my mind back on video games. 🤓🎮📺 I’ve got an XBOX One and a Playstation 4, yet it’s probably been at least six months since I’ve even turned either of them on. 😕 Once I got into a funk a while back, my brain just never seemed interested in reminding me that I’ve got kewl shit that I could play. So I’m gonna go through my games tonight and figure out which system I’ve got the best racing games for, and I’ll probably try to re-familiarize myself with all that. 🤔 I used to be good. Years ago I was really layin’ ’em down at the road courses, or at least it felt that way. (Wow, that was from 2013…)

I don’t wanna get ahead of myself, since I’ve already got a couple options there, but I’m probably gonna play around with time-lapse and long-exposure phone photography like I usually do each spring… plus I’ve got a couple new photogrammetry apps for creating 3D models from a series of regular digital photos, so that might keep my attention as well. Meh… we’ll see, I guess.

Don’t mind me… just doing a little more “talking out loud” to hopefully burn these ideas into my brain a little more effectively. 🤯 It’s not like I’m making valuable use of my time otherwise, so I might as well be doing something that I used to consider fun, eh? 😏 All this time stuck in the house might help me figure out where “old me” went. 🙂🤞🏻

One Day at A Time

Fox Sports did a great job with the “virtual” race that they put on today. I forget what the official name was, but it was an eNASCAR / iRacing / Invitational / Exhibition race… that they somehow managed to get on TV with an impressive presentation. Sure, there were more wrecks than in a real race, and a few glitches here and there… but overall, if you were just walking in and out of the living room, only half paying attention, you wouldn’t have even noticed that we were all watching a video game.

A nice little escape for a couple of hours today. Back in reality, Mike DeWine declared that Ohio will have a stay-at-home order starting on Monday. We’re all basically doing that already, but I think this may actually affect folks who were still wanting and trying to work. Only certain jobs are on the approved list, so here’s hoping that the government comes through with unemployment or another form of relief quickly – ‘cuz as if the virus itself doesn’t cause enough anxiety, now people are gonna have to worry about utilities, rent, car payments, food, etc.

The problem is, the way they’ve worded things, the way they’re going to enforce this order… it’s way, way too soft – and the people who want to be out, or just don’t want to be told what to do, they’re gonna find and use all the loopholes. I’d give it a week or two before DeWine gets fed up with the lack of cooperation and puts something stronger in place. But right now, you can still go out to the park, walk around, walk your dog, drive to shop, visit family, go to doctor appointments… I mean, I don’t know what the right amount of “enforcement” would be, so maybe that’s why it’s starting off light.

I didn’t watch Trump’s press briefing today, and I’m probably a whole lot better for it. I’ve seen a couple clips, and have read things that he said or did… and yeah, as many, many people and journalists are starting to say on Twitter – there’s no reason that these things should be carried live, since there is so much misinformation that causes fear and anxiety. So my day was a bit better than I was feeling last night. Honestly, I don’t really know how I feel at the moment… it’s almost like anticipation… not knowing how I should feel until we start seeing things happening closer to home each day.

I’m probably still right on the edge of that same anxiety that I had last night, so after I get off of here I’m gonna seek out Airplane! (the movie) so I can kick back and absorb some stupid, clever, dumb comedy as I hopefully get sleepy. I hope everyone out there made it through the day as uneventfully as I did today.