This post was last modified: May 25, 2023 at 9:13 PM by Draku.

so valve started making games again but this time their model was to try to cash in on the computer cafe thing from asia... in the west

somehow this worked perfectly and became a huge hit, and i went to go try it out. the premiere software was half life 2: ravenholm, a new game exclusive to their cafes based around playing as a random npc. ravenholm wasn't the only locale and i didn't even wind up seeing it, the starting bit was based around city 17 with a dynamic day/night cycle where the horror aesthetic was played up with lots of headcrabs, zombie dogs, and resident evil type monsters inexplicably wandering about. the amount of interactables and the TECHNOLOGY present was off the wall which was why it wound up successful despite such a stupid distribution model, gates would block off monsters from you as the reached through them to swipe and bite and gradually broke through them extremely realistically and you could find completely random keys (like, door keys not crate keys) strewn about in various locations to unlock doors to ingame goodies like the sort of secrets you'd find in older FPSes mixed in with the realistic contextualization of new ones. it was a pretty cool and really atmospheric game all in all. it started raining in my session during nighttime and the water effects were amazing, a key i was after was inside of a puddle and i had to fish it out using my index controller (for some reason, my dream kept flipping back and forth between it being a desktop or VR experience). oddly enough there were no combine type enemies from what i got to, it was largely a mixture of more normal policemen types as their proxy enforcers, given combine weaponry. they were pretty dumb and not nearly as dickish.

my game time was up around noon so i went to go save my progress. the lady at the counter got annoyed with me that i didn't give her my punch card, which is how all game data was stored somehow. so i pull it out of my wallet and she clips it, i buy a big soda and go to catch the train back to my place. i pass by some IRL friends who are all in a big group about to play the game for the first time, i tell them that they should've told me they were doing this and i would've joined 'em. i think about joining them but dream me inexplicably remembers that i have to get back home to play darktide with seal and kyle today (actual fact) so i have to leave. why i wouldn't be able to play darktide from the cafe explicitly made for steam games is anyone's guess. they apologize for not informing me and then buy a big thing of popcorn cotton candy (cotton candy with popcorn inside of it) to share and go to their group cafe room.

i go out into the parking lot and start looking around for random keys lying on the ground because game logic has merged with reality. i find one next to a parked car and take it, then use it to unlock a door out front to a laundromat in the same general property vicinity. inside the laundromat i find the gnome from hl2ep2 and decide to not take it with me, before leaving to go catch the train. mysterious heroine x alter is walking up to the road crossing with some starbucks and i get jealous of her delicious looking bagel. she glares at me and then jaywalks across the part of the road she's at to not have to interact with me. i reach the road crossing proper and then wake up as the train pulls up at the crossing itself somehow.

this sounds completely like a mix between the japanese "half-life 2: survivor" arcade games and the cancelled arkane half-life 2 installment starring father grigori

this sounds completely like a mix between the japanese "half-life 2: survivor" arcade games and the cancelled arkane half-life 2 installment starring father grigori

i forgot hl2 survivor existed, though i recall there being an arcade-type l4d as well. it wasn't so much an arcadey experience as a full blown singleplayer campaign game that you inexplicably could only play at steam cafes.

also you reminded me that the best part of the dream where they DID have a digital steam release for all to download to promote the game. it was a new poker night at the inventory installment with father grigori and a headcrab (he didn't have actual voicelines just a ton of different noises, and could hold the cards just fine somehow) as two of the new characters titled poker night at the inventory: ravenhold'em

This post was last modified: May 9, 2023 at 4:36 AM by Reeb.

so valve started making games

if not for Alyx I'd say this is enough for a lucid dreaming moment right here

Punch card technology coming back into relevance is weirdly specific! Have you seen anything with those involved recently?

I appreciate that Dream You is still dedicated enough to commitments that you made sure to make time for Seal and Kyle.

My favorite part of this whole thing is that they released another Half-Life 2 add-on. Even in our wildest dreams no one can imagine Half-Life 3.

Punch card technology coming back into relevance is weirdly specific! Have you seen anything with those involved recently?

Nope, I was as confused as you are when I woke up that that of all things was what was used. I can't think of what would've inspired it at all.

I appreciate that Dream You is still dedicated enough to commitments that you made sure to make time for Seal and Kyle.

It's extremely rare that up-to-date real life context manages to make it into my dreams, it was surprising hahah.

My favorite part of this whole thing is that they released another Half-Life 2 add-on. Even in our wildest dreams no one can imagine Half-Life 3.

The strange thing is that the game itself was all completely new assets and a way better engine, I have no idea why it was HL2 themed. But even dream me was like "Are you fucking serious?" at Valve still dodging HL3 post-Alyx.

This post was last modified: May 23, 2023 at 3:08 PM by Draku.

ok just woke up from a new one.

i was headed back to texas to see my mom and sister. i get off the flight and am instantly at my mom's house. the lights are all off and it's quiet. i got here while she was out doing errands, somehow. i look out the window and the neighborhood seems uneasy and quickly move away from the window as i see some unruly figures passing by, armed with revolvers and shotguns with bandito getups. the houses on the street and the street itself don't resemble the ones that are actually there, except for my mom's.

i'm walking through the house, a bit scared but also trying to get my bearings since it's been so long since i was home. everything was more or less like it is in reality, just silent and unnerving due to the crime activity outside with no one else around. at some point my sister materializes and i begin trying to consult with her on what to do about the banditos. we try to get a hold of my mom but we don't have cell phones and in general communication tech has regressed back to how it was in the 90s despite my gaming PC and room setup being as it was, so when i try to ring her up on the landline i'm aware that she herself doesn't have a cell phone and i would have to call her work number to get a hold of her if she wasn't home, which doesn't help because she's not at work.

we're back in the living room flipping through some high tech hardcover books that display floating holograms instead of having text on the pages and using the wii to browse the internet for some information about the banditos. (???) the state of the living room has suddenly become filled with boxes like when my mom was sorting stuff out in the mid-2000s. the big window next to the front door has been inexplicably replaced with an LCD display that was a live feed of all of the security cameras in the area, showing us the outsides of unfamiliar houses as the banditos wreaked havoc on the neighborhood. we get more and more nervous, and eventually the banditos look right into the camera and we somehow realize they're watching a feed of US, in the living room. they lean into the camera with their mustaches and smirk evilly before shooting it and the whole LCD "window" goes into static.

we're panicking at this point but we hear the garage door opening which leads my sister to somehow know 100% for certain that mom's here and is gonna try to get us out of this mess. i rush with a bigass backpack full of all my stuff out into the garage, my mom's (modern) car pulls in, as does my sister's convertible jeep, with the roof off, which she does not own. somehow my sister hasn't actually been there the entire time at all (i do not notice this inconsistency until i wake up) and was just now coming in to rescue me as my mom, bloodied and with gunshot holes in her car, yells for me to get into my sister's jeep. i dive in and slam the door while ducking down and using my bulky backpack as cover, and we all pull out of the garage and onto the open road, which again betrays how everything is set up in reality.

my mom diverts the bandito's gunfire and attention heroically and pulls them onto a different path as my sister and i make it onto the freeway within like 3 minutes which also makes no sense. everyone is trying to escape the banditos so it's extremely crowded but moving quite fast as everyone is driving really well and quickly to cooperate in escaping, another logical impossibility. i converse with my sister briefly, hoping that our mom is ok. she tunes the super gaudy radio system dial into a news station with an audible and really loud radio frequency tuning noise. george w bush is pleading to the texas governor, who was namedropped (not the real name of any texas governor) but i can't remember what they called him. the news reporter makes some really spicy response to the president's (i guess) pleas that barely made any sense but i can't remember exactly what it was either, something like the governor being more likely to go golfing in his ferrari (???) than drop a single cent on fighting crime. a shotgun blast from the banditos approaching in a mad max caravan blaring a car horn version of la cucaracha fragments one of the side windows despite them not being up seconds prior because the roof is down and my sister tries to maneuver us like an action movie as i duck back down again under my backpack.

i wake up sweating and terrified for my life, before i slowly piece together in bed how absolutely nothing in the entire dream lined up or made any sense whatsoever. i then realize that i can make this garrison better by posting my dream and hop out of bed, leading to posting this.

i'm going back to bed that stupid shit made it so i only got like 4 hours of sleep.

oh yeah something else i realized while writing this was that my actual physique kept shifting around at random. i would flip flop around my various physical ages from across the years and it would only remain consistent for a given "scene" of the dream. i think around the end i was middle schooler me.

This post was last modified: May 24, 2023 at 3:41 PM by Reeb.

we're back in the living room flipping through some high tech hardcover books that display floating holograms instead of having text on the pages and using the wii to browse the internet for some information about the banditos. (???)

This shit's so perfectly encapsulating of the state of a dream
"I have holograms and a wii to look up the crooks on but I can't call anyone"

the banditos look right into the camera and we somehow realize they're watching a feed of US, in the living room. they lean into the camera with their mustaches and smirk evilly before shooting it and the whole LCD "window" goes into static.

they're the only ones with knowledge of wireless devices and hacking in this twisted mad land

somehow my sister hasn't actually been there the entire time at all (i do not notice this inconsistency until i wake up) and was just now coming in to rescue me

It's very nice of her to reality warp herself into a more convenient position to help you escape instead of experiencing bystander syndrome imo

the governor being more likely to go golfing in his ferrari (???) than drop a single cent on fighting crime.

This part's just realistic

i wake up sweating and terrified for my life, before i slowly piece together in bed how absolutely nothing in the entire dream lined up or made any sense whatsoever.

It's always the weirdest ones that turn into nightmares. Giant monster in the backyard? Nah, he just wants to talk existentialism. Stereotypical banditos blasting equally stereotypical songs? Gut-wrenching.

The worst nightmare I ever had was of a Muppet store-owner that sprouted additional, human arms when I went to ask him about some groceries. He grew another pair and started rapidly approaching me just kind of waving his arms around menacingly and I woke up straight-up screaming (I was like five.) It sounds completely stupid, but this left such an impression on me that to this day I could accurately describe every aspect of that dream in vivid detail. I always wonder if everyone has defining dreams like that. Maybe I should talk about those while my current dearth of dreams is going on.

i then realize that i can make this garrison better by posting my dream and hop out of bed, leading to posting this.

And it's greatly appreciated! I laughed a few times here. Good stuff, thank you very much.

This post was last modified: May 24, 2023 at 3:57 PM by Draku.

This shit's so perfectly encapsulating of the state of a dream
"I have holograms and a wii to look up the crooks on but I can't call anyone"

Yes, exactly. And you never, ever realize this bullshit until you wake up. It's so funny.

This part's just realistic

True.

It's always the weirdest ones that turn into nightmares. Giant monster in the backyard? Nah, he just wants to talk existentialism. Stereotypical banditos blasting equally stereotypical songs? Gut-wrenching.

Yep. In my defense I was in middle schooler mode by the end and the gunfire (which I had visibly seen the effect of and was fearing for my mom's own life too) was pretty terrifying no matter how ridiculous the situation was.

The worst nightmare I ever had was of a Muppet store-owner that sprouted additional, human arms when I went to ask him about some groceries. He grew another pair and started rapidly approaching me just kind of waving his arms around menacingly and I woke up straight-up screaming (I was like five . It sounds completely stupid, but this left such an impression on me that to this day I could accurately describe every aspect of that dream in vivid detail. I always wonder if everyone has defining dreams like that. Maybe I should talk about those while my current dearth of dreams is going on.

That's incredibly fucking stupid but also sounds like it would be insanely creepy if I experienced it myself in a dream, so I don't blame you.

Hmm, I dunno about a DEFINING dream, but a genuinely terrifying one that always stuck with me was one I had when I was pretty young and at my dad's house. I was up in the same room I had fallen asleep in and the dream itself was fairly mundane and realistic where I just did stuff normally on my computer in said room, up to a point where I heard some scratching coming from the bathroom. I get spooked and leave the room, but it's the middle of the night, so I'm nervous about waking my dad, and I was getting a bad feeling from the bottom of the stairs, too. So I felt pinned in and decided to just check it out to see what it was. I open the bathroom door and nothing is there, so I peek behind the shower curtain, something I still do with a lot of caution to this day thanks to this dream, and when I do, I hear a noise from behind me.

I spin around and a scary-ass Hellhound type thing is right there, shadowy saliva dripping from its jaws and evaporating into burning steam instantly once it hits the floor, which scorches it. The beast isn't entirely corporeal, it's made out of dark energies spiraling out of control and burning off of it. I wish I could describe it better because it's kind of cool in a sense nowadays since I'm long over being scared of the dream, Lancelot's shadowy mist from Fate/Zero is the closest thing that comes to mind, imagine a red-eyed wolf-beast made of that shit mixed with some kind of black flame except it looks 100% real and has glistening jaws. Also, I was utterly terrified even of completely normal dogs in real life at this point due to one shoving me down on the pavement and attacking me when I was much younger. I've mostly gotten over it by now with some lingering nervousness, but at this point I hadn't tackled it at all, so that's compounding things all the more as I was actually having said dream at the time and the feelings linger to this day.

So I somehow manage to skirt past it in the doorway and make it into the middle of my room, where I quickly find out that it was toying with me, as I'm now being encircled by several of the beasts, all uttering ungodly sounds that I can't possibly describe as they slowly close in on me before ripping me apart. Keep in mind that I had this dream when I was like nine years old. I was pretty convinced an actual fucking demon had come to me in the night once I'd awoken.

On a much lighter note, another dream I simply cannot ever get out of my head was one I had when I was four -- yes, four. I was a grasshopper type creature and I was with a bunch of other grasshopper-type creatures that were all in a dark cavern with a flowing stream of water underneath us, alongside a long dropoff with a waterfall. The group was in a trance almost, myself included, to an odd atmospheric music beat with rhythm drums and distant chanting. I feel as compelled as everyone else to follow the group and leap from the waterfall's edge downwards, and my own consciousness ends there as the rest of the dream hung on a still "camera" of the cycle continuing, never seeing what was beyond the leap, only the others hypnotically following the lead set before them as the music continued. I eventually woke up, I have no fucking clue what any of it meant or why I had that sort of psychedelic dream when I was four.

This post was last modified: May 31, 2023 at 5:06 PM by Reeb.

Holy shit. That hellhound dream sounds horrifying. I've died in my dreams before but I don't think it's ever been that gory (incidentally, I heard something somewhere about people dying in dreams waking them up without fault, and I can confirm that is absolute bullshit). If I had that dream when I was a kid it would've put the fear of god in me.

The grasshopper one sounds more like an acid trip than a dream. I guess that sort of thing might be empowered by a child's nascent lack of self-consciousness. Kind of wish I remember more dreams from when I was that little with that notion...

One of my other worst nightmares involved a hellhound, coincidentally, though not in the slightest similar. Maybe I'll make a thread on this stuff later to elaborate on notable past dreams when I feel more awake.

mario movie 2 spoilers.

ok so the entire premise of this one is a mess, i don't remember how it started at all because it dragged on so long. i'm armed with some kind of scifi rifle and working along with peach and toad who are also armed with such guns. not the rabbids ones think halo + darktide. so the part i recall starts with us knee deep in enemy territory in some kind of outdoor mall + park setting, the enemies are the chinese with some kind of cybernetic augments and their own scifi rifles and such. we're in a really bad situation but i grab a powerup and manage to create a bit of a distraction, but peach winds up separated from us. we break through and go indoors to try to create a chokepoint to gun people down from but there are even more cyberchinese folk inside. we play it stealthily and take a couple down, but it seems impossible to break through. then i notice an immigration office where somehow the logic will be that they can't attack us and we can't attack them in there as it's a ceasefire zone or something, so i point it out and toad and i duck into it.

we get into the line with a bunch of college students with vaguely urban mario theming seemingly, like they have the mario cartoonish aesthetic and various types of urban clothes with mushroom + beanbean + etc kingdom themed charms and hats and such. the people at the desk in front handling the whole deal are chinese and in business suits but they're not aggressive. so we figure we'll just get approved to get out of here and make it out of the operation to organize round 2 later. we get to a crossroads in the line where we have to say we're either a chinese national and will be instantly approved or aren't and will be deliberated on, toad for some reason thinks we need to lie really badly and pass ourselves as nationals, but we have passports they'll check and obviously know otherwise so i step over that part of the line to pull him back and go through the other way with me, but this clears a checkpoint and an invisible wall prevents me from backtracking to the choice again. so i willingly leave the line and whole room to start the process over as toad continues on.

i come back in and the whole area reboots into a college lecture hall of sorts. the people from the line, toad included, are all seated and listening to wario who is presenting a powerpoint and asking questions. i go in and sit down next to toad and we're pretty confused now. we answer a couple of survey-type questions and then class is dismissed, wario and everyone else all leave the room and toad says he's had enough of this and will go find peach, he's worried about her. i try to stop him from charging off on his own into obvious suicide but he's got the fastest speed stats in sm3dw for a reason.

i decide to try something and walk down to the front row and sit down while all of the class lights are off. suddenly, they spark back on to life and everyone but toad starts to walk back in, as if i've rebooted the simulation. some guy stands in the doorway flabbergasted that i've taken his seat and throws a fit before running back out of the room in tears.

now wario starts things off by playing the mario movie sequel on a projector. i don't really remember the finer details of this point and it doesn't really have a "beginning", it's already midway into the action. mario is fighting attack dogs stylized like poochy and defeating parts of bowser's army as he tries to make it into his castle. it stops at some point 50 minutes into the movie (we had been watching in total for maybe 5 or 7. i know it was 50min in because we could see the media seek bar.) and wario begins asking more survey questions. his voice actor barely puts on a wario voice at all and just gave up at it for the survey stuff btw. i answer some more of them and it really drags on before he starts playing the movie again. the seek bar is at the same physical point but our time jumped up to 1 hour 15min in, so wario just lets it play out without realizing something is up. mario is way deep into the castle which has the paper mario 1 type dungeon-y aesthetic to it. he looks up in horror as peach, identical to how she was earlier in the dream rifle and all, is seemingly taken down by one of the dogs on a higher elevation in the room. mario falls to the ground and wonders if things could have gone differently as toad, also identical to how i saw him before, runs in and screams that he's too late. the credits begin to roll, an obvious tragic cliffhanger.

wario then looks at the screen, goes "oh. whoops." and rewinds the movie so we can figure out what all we missed. i'm looking up reviews for the movie on my phone and they're all bitching about how they went in WAY too hard on the school aesthetic and that the chinese were a bizarre inclusion. i start to wonder what the fuck is going on, and when wario hits play, i wake up.

ok so most of my dream this time wasn't particularly interesting but the ending portion was amusing.

i was visiting my mom's place (again) in a much more normal situation. i was playing fgo on my phone and farming the nodes ive been doing the last few days just to use AP and then noticed my phone was a little wobby when i pressed into it from the back, so i got curious and applied a very light amount more pressure before the entire thing snapped in two, but the screen still worked on either side. There was just a ribbon cable stringing the two halves of the phone together and it worked perfectly but with like, a DS-type gap between the two screen halves.

so my mom comes over as i'm still finishing off my AP and i try to hide my phone so that i can finish doing so before telling her about the problem. she wonders what i'm covering up and i have to reveal it to her, which she messes with and manages to make it stop functioning entirely. a small robot comes out of one half and tries to bring the two halves back together forcefully but they were misaligned so it makes the problem even worse and refuses to let go so i can fix it. my mom goes to her computer to try to look up how to resolve this issue and schedule an appointment so we can get it fixed, i tell her i'm antsy because a big phone game event is going to start tomorrow (i'm tactically talking around LB6 dropping)

my mom turns on her monitor and quickly minimizes a moaning shirtless gudao desktop buddy. i pretend i didn't see it. she then closes a bunch of BL tabs. i am disgusted. she fake laughs and says she was trying to look into that annie may stuff i like. right. so we go to the samsung website and then i woke up.