Disturbing Dreams

Good Eats!

Uncle Fragmaster here with the weekend news just a wee bit early. Don't forget that XFL starts this weekend, so be sure to turn in and laugh your ass off at the truly awful combination of professional wrestling, film school production values, high school football, kindergarten boob-jobs, and pre-school intelligence. It's gonna be great! From the makers of "E.R.," "The Bushwackers," and "Mother, May I Sleep With Danger!"

Dreamcast: It's Sinking

I don't particularly want to start writing about videogames again anytime soon, since I did that for the past four years and all it's gotten me is a wussy out-of-shape deformed body, a lack of social skills, and an encyclopedic knowledge of totally useless crap. Like who programmed the "Pac-Man" Atari 2600 port and the proper order of entities and triggers needed to cause a "Half-Life" scientist to say "WANNA SEE SOMETHIN' NEAT?!" before jumping off a roof to his death in a custom map. But this week Sega announced that it's giving up on the Dreamcast to focus only on making games as a third-party publisher. Not even the hip-hop antics of the criminally doofy-looking DJ Swirl can save the Dreamcast now. Doh.

When I was a kiddie, I used to think videogames were magical and that World 4-1 in "Super Mario Brothers" really did exist somewhere out there. I read and re-read Nintendo Power, and I think Nintendo missed out on a great opportunity in the late 80's: if only they had thought of giving away forty free NES games of your choice in exchange for your lifetime enlistment in The Nintendo Army, Navy, or Air Force. Nintendo was a master of using the magazine to spread their propaganda, and I'm sure they could of convinced millions of kids to sign away their lives for a chance to get "Hudson's Adventure Island," "Bayou Billy," "Kabuki Quantum Fighter," and "River City Ransom." Hell, they had most of us eating Nintendo cereal out of Mario lunchboxes! The SNES was our reason for living! Then, they'd lace these free games with subliminal messages that would induce all children enlisted in the Nintendo Military to show up for basic training at Nintendo's secret headquarters two days after their fourteenth birthday. Then, Nintendo's drill-sergeants would transform these kids into elite soldiers via a strict program of light gun games, power pad exercises, U-Force sparring, and Contra button mashing.

In just a few short years, Nintendo could have built up a huge army of unstoppable force and taken over the entire world, but instead they decide to spend all their money on making "Pilotwings," "Pokemon Mauve," "Banjo-Toolface," and "Yoshi's Temptation Island" or whatever the hell they're doing. Nice going Nintendo… "now you're playing with power" my ass! Nintendo could be in charge of the entire world by now if they only had planned ahead. All they're in charge of now is a mediocre major league baseball team and a huge stockpile of unsold Virtual Boy machines. BOO!!!

BONUS VIDEOGAME JOKE: Tony Hawk Pro Skater? More like Tony Hawk Pro MASTURBATOR! Get it? It's like Deus Goat Secx, except it's from the front instead of the back and far less disturbing.

In Your Dreams

I don't know about you, but I have really, really, cool dreams. When I go to sleep, it's like I'm watching a messed up foreign television station with the most surreal programming you can imagine. Unfortunately, I don't remember most of my dreams, but I thought I'd give you a totally true (seriously) example of two dreams that I've been fortunate enough to remember:

Waterslide Schoolbus - This was a long dream, but I only remember the end: I'm on a school bus and we're driving slowly down a blue waterslide through a heavily wooded area. This is taking forever and I'm starting to get impatient. So I get off the bus (I don't remember how) and start sliding down the waterslide myself. I'm really flying down this thing - probably like forty miles an hour - while the bus is chugging along at like three. All of the sudden, the relatively flat waterslide becomes a series of steep falls, and I'm falling hundreds of feet between drops. Things start to even out a little bit, but I'm still going too fast. Luckily, I notice a rope ladder dangling into the waterslide from the right (at this point the waterslide is about forty feet wide, but it was only three feet wide up by where the school bus was, which makes me wonder how the bus fit). So I climb the rope ladder type thing and end up in a tree-house type encampment.

Inside, it's really dark, but I notice an old 13-inch TV and an Intellivision (it's an old videogame system) with some games I've never seen, including one called Rainbow Lights or something. I'm looking through the games when I notice somebody looking at me from the back room as my eyes adjust to the light (this is a really big treehouse). I don't remember what happened, but I think I pissed somebody off and ended up getting back on the waterslide. But the bus had passed me up in the meantime, and even though I sped down the rest of the slide as fast as I could, when I get to the bottom where everything is just one blue, flat, waterslide road, there's the school bus in the distance and a Police SUV with flashing sirens parked off to the side of the road just behind it. The trooper is leaning against the truck and looking directly at me as I splash down, so I know I'm in big trouble. That's when I woke up.

Analysis - I think this dream is trying to tell me that a) I like treehouses, videogames, and waterslides and b) I'm too ugly to ride the bus and any attempt to escape the waterslide of life will result in my quick arrest and violent social embarrassment.

Farm Bicycle Maze Journey - I'm on a busy road somewhere, and I bike back home like twenty miles through the country from the outskirts of a farm in the middle of this busy road commercial district (this farm also sells stuff, like flowers). Or did I bike to the farm from home? I don't quite remember. Anyway, I get home and realize that all that hard work of biking twenty miles was a total waste since I left a really expensive bike and eleven or so special ears of corn in a field by the cross-walk on the outskirts of this road by a busy traffic intersection (I think I left that stuff there because I was tired of waiting for the walk signal light to change). So my mom (who isn't played by my mom in this dream, she's someone else… in fact my entire family is different) drives me back to this farm in the family van (which interestingly enough, is played by my actual family's van, perhaps they killed my old family and took over earlier in the dream, taking all my old family's stuff?). I get out near the farm and my bike is nowhere to be seen. So I wander through the fields of this huge farm to get closer to the big barns where they're selling stuff like cabbages and flowers, but these fields are really just high grass so I have no idea where they get their produce. I get into one of the barns and start looking for my bike (I think, I really don't remember what my motivation was at this point) and I'm acting all secret agent-like because I don't want to be seen. I get through this barn, which has wooden pig-like feeder things filled with veggies laid out in a wacky swirling one-way maze configuration that winds up to be a dead end. Shoppers are trapped and confused by this dead end and just stand there, so I use them for cover.

Then I figure a way out of this barn without getting scene, only to end up in another building filled with people and their dogs waiting for a lesson or something. I somehow have acquired a dog and I walk up to the desk with it, trying to come up with an excuse for why I'm there. I don't remember what I say (if anything), but I do remember the dog I'm holding starts chewing and biting the face of a dog standing on the desk while everyone else in the room, including the clerk behind the desk, watches on in total silence. After my dog is done chewing on the other dog, I leave a note on the clerk's desk that says something incredibly witty and leave. After I'm gone, the clerk reads my letter aloud and becomes simply aghast at the clever turn of phrase or insult or joke or rhyme or whatever it is I wrote, and I appear to have won, but I'm not sure what, and I don't think I got my bike back. THE END.

This could be the same dream where you have to drive about five miles to get out of Wal-Mart's parking lot campground on the edge of a cliff, only to discover you don't have enough cash to get out at the gate, but I don't think it is.

Analysis - Writing about your stupid dreams are a great way to fill up space. Also, I must have eaten LSD breakfast cereal as a kid.

In conclusion, it is fun to dream! So dream away, you sleepy saps!