A recurring game where you have to write a sentence. The sentence becomes your reality, your fate. There’s an unavoidable karma to this, no matter what you choose (and you have to write *something*) there will be some negative consequence, some necessary lesson. This feels like limbo or purgatory in retrospect, but in the dream it’s presented as hell.
New pricing structure fails to reflect the actual costs of service. While I lack insider knowledge, I have noticed suspicious declines in quality. Combined with these unjustified price hikes this suggests the true reason is something more troublesome: recent acquisition by predatory investors. These practices disgrace modern commerce and our society at large; I am eager to avoid them whenever possible. That was why I came to this host in the first place. Another lamentable example of the much-discussed “enshittification”, I suppose.
Ostensibly this concerns web hosting — and yes, it may be futile to say anything more — but this situation exemplifies a pervasive and perverse economic condition: wealthy decision-makers *pathologically* incapable of satisfaction. So-called “Affluenza” currently lacks clinical treatment, yet as a mental impairment it is profoundly harmful. When we consumers tolerate exploitative pricing and degraded products, we not only support compulsive greed, we contribute to its further harms. The ill-gotten wealth inevitably leads to abandonment of mundane standards like fairness, good faith, temperance, and accountability. It empowers those so afflicted to use our money for ever worsening misconduct. This is common. This is tragic. This is morally indefensible. And it does not matter if it’s web hosting today — another day it may be housing, government, infrastructure, or human lives. The only standards they will respect are those we force upon them. Here then is my frail line in the sand: this time, the rich jerks won’t get my piddling money.
Collective actions are necessary… however small. We fight enshittification whenever we can. No support for WHG, EIG, or any entity prioritizing their own gains at the expense of literally everything else. We fix this when we stop indulging broken people with more money than sense. One day maybe they’ll wake up and see what they’ve been doing.
I’m volunteering at a fair along with some friends. The booths are indoors but the public walkways outside, a bit like a public market. I’ve been wandering for a bit and come back to our booth, where I think we’re raising money for a charity. My two female friends have been holding themselves up with their feet raised on a dais and their hands on the ground, like the wheel pose in yoga. This has the effect of having their butts flexed tight and held in the air. I offer to take a turn the remainder of a the day to replace them, despite the obvious expectation that my male butt won’t be as eye-catching as both of theirs. Nevertheless, they’re thankful to take me up on the offer and I feel pretty good about being able to provide some equal-opportunity butt presentation.
While I’m zoning out in my pose, visitors to the booth mill around. I don’t pay much attention to them, as my role for now is just to keep the pose during my shift. One of them startles me by pinching my butt, which — while not exactly disallowed — isn’t particularly encouraged. I collapse in surprise, and when I look up to see who did it, I see a familiar face: Gabrielle from the TV show Xena (as played by Renee O’Connor). There’s no obvious connection for why she would’ve pinched me, nor have I thought of her recently. It’s a good laught though, and I’m kind of happy it happened to me. It’s a fun story to retell to the girls, and I doubt the reverse situation would be the case. I mention that hope we got the event on video.
There’s a Mom shopping at the fair who drops her two-year-old with us at the booth. I’m talking to it while, having realized that the kid can understand a lot more that she can answer. It’s fun to have a full conversation though, without regard for what she probably expects from adults. I remember a specific occasion where I made a very long, sophisticated, multi-step question, where I knew she understood the whole thing — but all she can reasonably manage as a response is a flustered “well I don’t know!” It’s a bit of mischief we both seem to enjoy.
We review the time we’ver had when Mom shows up again. Shortly afterwards, I get to tell the girls about Gabby pinching me, which the do find as entertaining as hoped.
Outside my house (my Kemper court house), two of my cars are waiting with people inside. We’re trying to leave and I can’t find the right car key. Eventually I realize we actually have a key sitting on the car’s floor; it looks identical but its untried. And of course, that finally works! Josh insists on driving my convertible Beetle since I made them wait so long. By now everyone’s eager to leave quickly, so both cars are driving in reverse at speed out of the court — I hesitate to ask to slow down since I made them wait. Half-heartedly, I ask if he’ll attempt a fast 180-turn, which I watch the other car do. Unexpectedly, he pulls it off and we merge into busy school-hours traffic — a familiar scene since the court is across from an elementary school.
My friend (S. of P&S) has died unexpectedly young… 32 years old? After realizing what it actually means, I feel the gap of his loss deeply. It’s only later that I also realize he has a kid, which makes it even worse.
A sprawling hostel, where an older lady has stayed so long that her shared dorm room is entirely colonized by bookshelves and stacks of books. The hostel itself is a long building with many stacked rooms in rows overlooking the downslope of a hill — a place that feels familiar from previous dreams.
The setting: a human planet that’s been administratively taken over by harpy-like bird aliens. I’m part of a team robbing a store and things go sideways (though apparently not too badly). Our escape route traverses security-activated bean geysers — most of which erupt chaotically around us during the escape. During the getaway, with authorities obviously observing us, one of the team (who reminds me of Cypher from The Matrix) says into our radio, “Can we blame this on anyone innocent?”
After other dreamss, the setting returns to the planet run by bird-people, where I’m flying in a cathedral-like room with columns and buttresses. It’s filled with redwoods, creating a humid atmosphere reminiscent of a cool redwood forest. There are elegant Asian-style stacked wooden shelves with narrow beams for plants. I fly outside through the large opening in the wall. Beyond, everything seems larger than normal (or I’m smaller than usual). As I fly towards a row of cypress trees (evoking a feeling of Northern Californian natural places), I land on an unoccupied bird-people nest I find. I don’t mess with their eggs for whatever reason. Perhaps I realize I don’t feel the need to indulge, even though I could crush them if I wanted to. I continue flying and swoop over a BBQ picnic, where I impulsively steal the big cooked fish just being brought out for everyone.
For a while now, I’ve had a disorganized stack of papers that I use as study material, flipping over the pages as I go to track of what I’ve read. It’s actually a fictional document but a worthy background reference (perhaps on our avian overlords). I realize suddenly upon flipping a page that I’ve read through the whole thing: it seemed like I was in the middle, but no, the last page I flipped is indeed the final page. I rememeber that, oh yes, I started in the middle, once upon a time.
Lillehammer, the place where the Olympics were held in 1994. The first Olympics I knew of. Somewhere in the woods, confusing to try to remember. A cabin maybe, on a hill maybe. A nuclear explosion of colorful plastic.
No real reason I would’ve lost the dream, except I was awakening and it’s like it was already gone. I was only able to recover it by doing a no-thinking technique, which I haven’t had to do in awhile — also, a decent chance of falling back asleep and losing a dream entirely.
I wasn’t going to write this down, but something about how I was able to recover it (twice, since I also had to remember later today that I remembered) made it worth keeping. Even now, I still throw out plenty of dreams. And by throw out of course, I mean don’t write down.
I’m working with a text editor, learning complicated commands. Thrilled that now I can make my AI model analyze stuff for me from different perspectives — *Brute Force!* The text is a big, complicated block that I’ve generated over iterations, parts of which contain mathematical characters. Sometimes, it seems to waver or throb with the energy inside it, coruscating. I started from a different file, a small base that was just a single character. I feel like I’ll need to hide this method from others because of some ethical aspects they wouldn’t approve of. What those are is unspecified.