My entire night last night was taken up with a long, involved #WeirdDream. Apparently my subconscious is both racist and terrible at history. I'm sharing because it was so detailed, long, and nonsensical that it's kind of impressive. As it opened, I was somehow teleported to what the dream called 1700's New York City. I decided that the best way to become wealthy and successful would be to invent the record player, years before Edison was even born! Unfortunately, I put tons of effort into it (somehow involving origami tinfoil birds), without realizing the obvious flaw: why would anyone buy a record player, when it's cheaper just to pay an Irish girl a penny and she'll come to your house and sing for you? As everyone but me probably already knows, every single street corner in 1700's New York City had an absolutely identical Irish girl clone on it. Same voice, same appearance, same clothes, and apparently no name or anything. But all the Irish girls could sing, and they all knew the same songs. If you taught one Irish girl a new song, all of the other ones would just immediately know it. So record players were just unnecessary and expensive! Thankfully, I had a second idea to ensure my wealth and success: I invented a slide projector, and an easy way to create slides that involved crystals, lenses, and movable type. It went gangbusters! The New York Times loved it, and said "Thanks to the invention of PowerPoint, mankind has achieved the pinnacle of human civilization." Unfortunately for me, not everyone was happy, and I found myself betrayed by the New York City police (all of whom were absolutely identical Irish men) who were still upset about the record player thing. They allowed me to be kidnapped by what my dream ambiguously identified as an African tribe. The tribe put me on a ship and we sailed to the jungle (lots of rocking and floating sensations), where the chief started to yell at me. He was upset because now that I had given the white man the mighty PowerPoint, his entire culture would be unable to survive, and the whites would surely use PowerPoint to exterminate all of them. Fortunately for me, I figured out how to dematerialize my hands (it felt extremely tingly, and I'm pretty sure my real hands had fallen asleep at this point) and slip them out of the handcuffs. Then the dream turned into a silly action sequence involving swinging on vines and climbing trees as I tried to escape the jungle. Lots of rocking and swinging and falling, and I think I was starting to wake up. Then my alarm went off and I woke up completely before my jungle escape could get resolved. Anyway, now I pretty much have the entire plot for a new 1920's style pulp fiction book for boys. Tom Swift And His Electric Slide Projector, maybe? Good grief, I have absolutely no idea where all of that nonsense came from. Yet it somehow felt meaningful; something about how bureaucracy is the first requirement for genocide, and slavery only goes away when the alternatives are cheaper, maybe? I dunno. But it was one of the extremely rare (for me) dreams where I woke up and felt like I was supposed to take...something...away from that experience. I just wish I knew what.

Last night I dreamed that Microsoft created a replacement for git, called got. After installing it, I tried to clone a repo, and got the following message: “Error: I’m afraid of dogs.” I went into program files to try and fix it (I’m not entirely sure what my plan was; how do you fix your version control software being afraid of dogs?) and discovered it was entirely written in powershell. My alarm went off and woke me up as I was uninstalling it. #dream#dreams#WeirdDream

Last night I had a really weird, sort of geeky dream. I believe what inspired this dream was me reading some Infocom-related articles by @DigiAntiquarian and @zarfeblong yesterday. In this #WeirdDream @a2_4am was making a video documenting the efforts of a group of computer historians/hackers trying to recover data from a bit of magnetic tape which was on the outside of some type of game package.
To understand what they did, you have to know about a very strange object that existed only in this dream. It was a microwave, but unlike every other microwave I've ever seen or known about, it used some type of special bags for some purpose. In order to make sure only genuine bags supplied by the manufacturer were used, each bag had a strip of magnetic tape on it. Also as part of its operations, the microwave would spin the bag around and around somehow (no, don't ask me, I just experienced the dream). Anyway the microwave had a magnetic tape head that would look for a certain signal coming off the strip of magnetic tape as the bag spun. If it detected the proper signal, it knew the bag was legitimate.
Now, back to these hackers. For whatever reason, rather than just ripping a tape head out of a recorder or something, they decided to use this very strange microwave for their own evil purposes. They put the game package in the microwave such that the magnetic tape on the package made contact with the tape head in the microwave. Then they turned on the microwave. About the only thing I remember vividly about the dream is that in the video, a loud cheer went up from the group when they heard the muffled sound of frequency modulated data coming into their system. I think they were eventually able to recover the data, whatever it was.
Anyway I suspect I won't have such a weird dream tonight.