Month: August 2019

Dream Journal, estimated 8/26/2019 and 8/28/2019

philbertLeave a comment

I’ve been busy with the big move to Shanghai (more on that later), but here are a few more dreams I’ve been having sleeping on air mattresses and trying to get rid of a chest cold. Not working is stressful in of itself.

8/26/2019:

A race of Godlike beings dressed as wizards (quidditch gear, red robes) ride broomsticks into space and defend earth against dark clouds, like the dust creatures in Totoro but much more malevolent. They dissipate the clouds with their hands but some still get through to earth. It turns into a demon man who attacks a girl, police try to intervene and shoot him with a shotgun but it’s too late. The Old and New Gods decide to band together to work more closely now to defend humans against this threat.

Now there are men and women in goth(ic) dress, wooden swords and scaffolding and bridge that they let me pass through, though first challenging me. Next, one of the men who challenged me on the bridge earlier runs to me for protection as he’s being hunted down by an assassin; I throw a knife at the attacker but miss. I pull out another knife to attack him but the assassin holds onto me and starts slicing my wrist.

8/28/2019:

The Jay Chou song 雙刀 is playing as I see a mountain from afar at dusk with some lights already lit up, one of the mountains by the sea in Taiwan’s north coast. There are people practicing kung fu at the top of the mountain as the “camera” circles them and the mountain itself like drone/plane footage.

Then I am in an office at the side of the mountain at night with ships in the waters in the distance. My friend from grad school Peter Satre is there too. Again I have to close a window shade with the metal chain, I have to walk carefully along metal girders and reach over a precipice to close it, whereas Peter’s “dad” (who is actually actor Chris Cooper) closes it easily. Then I am fully in an office complex and getting into an office that is not my own, seeing colleagues that are not my own with my mom. One of the executive types there asks if I know the board of directors (which would explain why I am a stranger there). My mom thanks me for bringing in good business for her.

It’s window shades that look like this that I had growing up in Taiwan too. These are in FTI’s DC office

Commentary: I think those dust sprites from My Neighbor Totoro are a little more chilling than they let on in the cartoon, or at least they left a strong impression with me. The Old Gods and New is a reference to the TV show American Gods. Hard to explain the gothic folks.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Jay Chou lately to prepare myself for the big move. I used to go to the North Coast of Taiwan a lot with my father, we would drive up and sometimes go to the beach. The natural beauty of it all was always wondrous to behold, along with the starkness of the mountains against the sea. The window shades may be returning to my dreams as the ones I had growing up were placed directly over open windows that you (or a pet) could fall through if you really tried. So these were precarious things to open and close, and it was always so hot/cold in that apartment too. New colleagues, new office…sounds familiar.

My Machine Life – Into the Myst (I)

philbertLeave a comment

My Machine Life is not just about what the machine could be, but also about our relationship with the machine, which in my case, is the computer. My relationship with the computer began very early with the introduction of computer games into my life, which have continued to influence my writing, dreams and creative process today. I consider myself to be a creative individual, but for a long time I wasn’t able to focus on a single creative writing project for more than a few hours or a few days. It wasn’t until the end of graduate school, when I was regularly writing 20+ page papers, that I decided I could apply my long-form writing skills to creative writing.

Image result for myst falling man
Into the Myst

In this blog arc, I will share and discuss some of the computer games I grew up with and how they may have impacted me as a person and as an artist. I have split my interaction with computer games (not video or handheld games, which would be even more) into 5 periods of my life until today and counted the games I remember playing, which totaled to 87 computer games:

Early Period, 3-7 years old: 27 games

Landmark Period, 7-11 years old: 13 games

High Period, 11 – 14 years old: 29 games

Sustaining Period, 14 – 20 years old: 8 games

Waning/Nostalgic Period, 20 – 30 years old: 10 games

I’ve decided to highlight some of the more meaningful/impactful games in more detail while rolling through the less impactful ones. At any rate, here is the full list of what I remember, with names in brackets when I wasn’t able to find the official name:

Early Period – 3-7 years old

Zoo Keeper

Arthur’s Birthday party

Harry and the Haunted House

Just Grandma and Me – Little Critter

Around the world in 80 days – Paintbox pals

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego

Peter Pan – Paintbox pals

Commanche

U-Boat

[B-17 over Germany]

[Star Trek game]

Battle of Britain II [?]

Myst

[Myst (kid’s version)]

Riven

Darkseed

Out of this World

SimCity 2000

[Tank and stick figures]

[WWI combat flight simulator]

Hellcats over the Pacific

[Futuristic tank simulator]

[F-16 flight simulator]

[Gardening simulator]

[Puzzle game involving a Castle]

[Design your own palette]

[Game involving placing Stickers on a game board]

Ski free

Landmark Period: 7-11 years old

[GI Joe-like toy saves rabbits from malicious toys]

Age of Empires: Age of Kings

Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far

[Die Hard 2 shooter]

Minesweeper

Space Cadet

Sonic and Tails

Wargames

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines

Nuclear Strike

Close Combat: The Russian Front

StarCraft

StarCraft: Brood War

Age of Empires: The Conquerers

High Period: 11 – 14 years old

Counter-Strike

Half-Life

Half-Life: Opposing Force

Half-Life: Team Fortress 

Command & Conquer 

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

Dune 2 

Dune: Emperor

Fallout 2

Diablo 2

Quake 3

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Final Fantasy 8

Worms: Armageddon

Dark Reign

Total Annihilation

Tribes 2

Treadmarks 

Ground Control

Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2 – Pacific Theater 

Command & Conquer: Tiberium Sun

Liero

Triplane

小朋友齊打交

風色幻想 SP

風色幻想

Stickdeath

Sustaining Period: 14 – 20 years old

Star Wars:Battlefront

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Fallout: Tactics

Grand Theft Auto 3

Battlefield: Vietnam

Warcraft 3

Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War

Team Fortress 2

Waning/Nostalgic Period: 20 – 30 years old

Giants: Citizen Kabuto

Duke Nukem 3D

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (again)

System Shock 2

Fallout 3

Fallout: New Vegas

Treadmarks (again)

Fallout 1

Primordia

Dungeon Keeper 2


Dream Journal, estimated on 8/7/2019

philbertLeave a comment

Two dreams. The first one is simple, I am in an apartment and there is water everywhere, pooling all around. I try to soak it up with towels and buckets. I’m not sure where it’s coming from, maybe a broken pipe, but it’s everywhere.

It wasn’t this bad and the apartment wasn’t this tacky, but oh well.

Second dream is much more involved. In a WWI-style trench warfare environment, a war hero’s M60 machine gun is recovered after his death in combat. A blacksmith is brought to the battlefield to retrieve the weapon and ordered by the Papacy to restore it as a way to commemorate the war hero and other war dead. Everyone is vaguely Italian. The blacksmith is a pacifist, though, so he empties the gun of all its ammunition before taking it back to his pacifist community on a mule. The Papacy orders a greasy/unsavory inspector type to make sure that the weapon is functioning again or at least restored. The blacksmith and his daughter bring the inspector up a flight of stone stairs to a small stone hill. All around them in the shallow water young men and boys are playing and practicing gymnastics. The daughter retrieves the restored weapon from a platform in the water and presents it to the inspector with a smile. The inspector lays the weapon down and begins to load it with ammunition to test fire it, firing directly into the crowds of young men and boys, whose bodies burst open with blood and everyone is screaming and crying out. The inspector is exacting payback upon the pacifist community for them not participating in the war. The dream ends with the blacksmith taking his tool and striking the inspector down in shock and rage, breaking his pacifist vows.

An M60 machine gun

Commentary: Water is a component of many of my dreams. The Pacifist story sounds interesting, hopefully I can turn it into a short film.

Dream Journal – 8/4/2019

philbertLeave a comment

One dream and one nightmare.

Mulan-style Chinese soldiers wearing armor march in a column carrying blunderbusses/muskets and banners. A rag tag group without armor face off with and charge towards the enemy (probably the Huns) and throw javelins before engaging in hand-to-hand combat, I see this from the Hun perspective. Then I am playing capture-the-flag and am hit with a beanbag from a player from the opposing ream who is actually a former classmate of mine from Jinhua junior high school in Taiwan who I don’t think liked me, maybe because I am half white. I punched that guy in the face (in real life), that shut him up. Anyway, tagged by the beanbag, I am “out” and receive scores of my efforts on an electronic blackboard connected to a drink fridge, high marks for earnestness but low marks for athleticism. I ride an elevator above the fray where I see Chinese soldiers standing in a winding, line around the grounds, lining up to their execution at the hands of the Hun.

Image from Instagram: @dee_age

Nightmare. I am at a window facing the city lit up at night (looks like New York, since there is a tall, skinny building known as 432 Park Avenue visible out the window.) There is a white plastic windowshade flapping in the wind and a metal chain at the side of the window (outside the window) that is flapping with it. I try to hang on to the chain to close the window and windowshade but it keeps eluding my grasp. Now a thunderstorm begins outside the window with thunder and the sounds and feelings of rain, it is afternoon and the clouds and rain are making the view dark, but there is still grey-ish green light. The rain makes it more urgent to close the window, and now the white curtain turns into a white dummy/mannequin with rubber covering her flat chest (there is only a chest and head), I am holding on to the mannequin with white fake hair and I stroke her hair without seeing her face, as she is facing a bit down even though her chest is facing up (it’s obviously mixed up, I see a bit of her face but not much). The mannequin seems to be on a swivel crosswise so I turn her up a bit, and then she fully turns around and upward at her own volition and her face and eyes are contorted in a grotesque, skull-like manner, and she emits a hissing sound. I cry out softly and awaken.

Commentary: The Mulan dream is influenced by my viewing the trailer to the new live-action Mulan movie. The mannequin dream, all I can say is that I was attracted to the mannequin at first, which made her transformation all the more frightful. Also the feeling of not being able to do a simple task (close the window). I think this nightmare is a good candidate for a short film, though. I would love to create the mannequin prop myself and it might be decently easy to animate her face, the city at night, and the storm outside.

Dream Journal – 7/31/2019 or thereabouts

philbertLeave a comment

I still dream about my grandparents; my grandma passed away in 2015 and my grandfather just passed away this March. But sometimes my dreams of them are distorted, not exactly the same face that I knew, but some variation that I still recognize. This happens a lot in my dreams, the “recognizing” of people’s faces that aren’t their true images.

Anyway, I haven’t been remembering my dreams very well recently, so this dream is a little fuzzy to me, even though I recorded it right after I woke up around 3 or 4 am.

I have friends who do bad things a la the movie Trainspotting, or A Clockwork Orange, though not as extreme as the latter. They are picking on someone and I vomit (or some substance) on my shoe. Then I am picking up a prescription at a pharmacy (Walgreens?) when they ask for my credit limit and I tell them. My mother, who is there, says don’t tell anyone who isn’t us. I fly away and see a a building and gardens and fountains down the side of a sloping hill similar to gardens I saw in Florence. I feel sad and am crying because the gardens are beautiful, but small and aging, but the groundskeepers have tried to keep it in good condition, but it still looks a little run-down.

There was a building at the top of the hill, a fountain and hedges beneath it arranged in a line

I continue flying down the hill until I see a level area with many Balinese-inspired stone figures, statues, monuments, fountains, and an empty stage made of stone with red/pinkish curtains. There is a monument or statue that circulates ashes (probably human ashes) throughout the stone edifice. I am flying to a hallway where I am faced with yearbook-like photos of young women (like my high school) whose faces transform into or are superimposed with cat and dog faces. Then I am by the sea, by a salesman I used to know, trying to make sales myself. There is a Japanese restaurant with a job board and employee in front of it. I ask if there is an opening and how to apply, she tells me I have to be a shareholder(?) or part of some Japanese scheme that I am not in and it would be difficult to enter.

Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Analysis: I interpret flying dreams to be good. The stage beckons me even in my dreams. The ashes are probably those of my grandparents, who we buried in Westfield New Jersey (where they lived for a long time) last week. The transforming faces sound a lot like Deep Dream, but probably also influenced by one of me co-workers talking about her puppy at work. I keep thinking if I should switch over to a more BD client-facing role, and maybe the last bit represents how hard it is to find a job overseas (and the Japanese in general).