The other dream I had last night was really, really weird and recursive.
I dreamed that I woke up, here, in Indianapolis in 2010, and the whole html/world-wide-web thing had been a dream. No Tim Berners-Lee. No www.bigcorporation.com web addresses on everything. No Amazon. No YouTube. No, you can't haz cheeseburger. The word "meme" was still an obscure bit of jargon that had never been insidiously spread from mind to mind by means of weblogs, because there weren't any of those, either.
I mean there were computers and modems and whatnot but it was all still dialup bulletin boards and Usenet newsgroups and ASCII porn, just like in the old days. I was trying to explain to the in-dream Bobbi that, no, for the last fifteen years or so we'd had pictures and even streaming video. Can you imagine trying to explain the rise and fall of awful blinkie-text- and animated-.gif-strewn GeoCities homepages to somebody in a dream?
Anyhow, there was still a blogmeet today, but it was not the same crowd as... did any of y'all ever go meet a bunch of people from a dialup BBS back in, say, the late '80s? Let's just say that the crowd trended even weirder than your average group of bloggers these days. The scarf-and-fedora wearing Doctor Who nerds were the normal end of the group and things got progressively dorkier as you went down the row of tables at the Applebee's until you got to the twitchy kid in the corner that was being looked at askance by even the guys debating the grammar of Hamlet in Klingon.
I was so pleased to discover that I hadn't actually woken up after all.
Umm, just what medications have you been mixing and matching? I know I find Vicks Nyquil to be . . recreational. I have never taken more than two doses - and the recommended intervals - without throwing out the rest of the bottle, as "just too weird".
ReplyDeleteYour mind created an analogy to the frustration of being focused and aware, while actually disoriented, distracted, and partially enabled. The vividness and amount of recall reveal that the frustration was close to the waking mind.
More water, more rest. Maybe some orange juice.
Yep...your posts so far today proves that Rannie's nursing worked!
ReplyDeleteCats...gotta luv'em...
cap'n chumbucket
<stinkeye>I WAS part of the BBS crowd back then!</stinkeye>
ReplyDeleteI was way too cool to dial into any BBS's with the 300 baud US Robotics internal modem in my Turbo XT.
ReplyDeleteNever having been cool, I was using the infamous Westridge modem plugged into the back of my Commodore 64.
ReplyDelete(I didn't get an actual XT until about 1991.)
Actually, I did go meet a bunch of people from dial-up BBSs back in the mid '80s.
ReplyDeleteIn fact I still have some contact with some of those people and there are people suggesting we should get together again.
I had a 1200 baud modem. In those days that was so blindly fast that I couldn't read the text as fast as it came down. And I was aghast that someone I knew had a 100 Mbyte hard drive for his BBS (devoted to porn of course) and was thinking of getting a second one. 100 Mbytes was unbelievably huge!
This was in the blinky-gif days, but I think I knew that twitchy kid in high school. Played clarinet. He was seen after graduation hanging out near the pep band at basketball games, looking lost.
ReplyDeleteI'm still in touch with some of those BBS-im. We have a little Google-Groups mailing list and pretend we're still avant garde and edgey and all that (average age somehwat north of 60).
ReplyDeleteM
I'll bet I'll be the last of those who used a 300 baud modem because there was nothing faster. Ditto tape drives, 5.25" floppies, et al.
ReplyDeleteHell of a dream, btw.
Jim
did any of y'all ever go meet a bunch of people from a dialup BBS back in, say, the late '80s?
ReplyDelete80s, no. Mid 90s, yes. To be sure, it was the grandaddy of BBS's: CompuServe. But it was a dial-up BBS.
That kind of detailed recursive dream crap happens to me way too damn often. It takes me hours to get a solid bead on reality again once I wake up, too.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that the worlds in those dreams are hardly ever better than the real one? In fact, the older I get, the worse the dream alternate universes are.
ReplyDeleteI remember a 300 bps modem. And when a 40 mb hard drive was huge.
ReplyDeleteMy first PC XT I got all tricked out. Both available floppy (5 1/4 inch) drives, plus a hard drive, not just the five meg, but the 10 megabyte upgrade.
ReplyDeleteMy first computer, though was an Ohio Scientific C1P Superboard. It came with a schematic to build a modulator to use the TV as a monitor. I used a grapefruit for a modulator enclosure. They recommended a $29.95 JC Penney brand cassette recorder to store programs (Basic in ROM) - but you had to be careful. The $35 JC Penney recorder didn't work as reliably.
In 1982 I worked on an assignment at a small transformer manufacturer - programming a PC with no hard drive, using BASIC in ROM, with two 5 1/4 inch internal floppies and an external 8 inch floppy - to read the disks from their IBM DiscWriter/modem.
And to kids today (HEY! GET OFF MY LAWN!) this sounds like so much "Barefoot through the snow uphill both ways..."
ReplyDeleteYouTube - Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen
LOOOOOG-ZHERY!
. did any of y'all ever go meet a bunch of people from a dialup BBS back in, say, the late '80s?
ReplyDeleteBoy, did I. Shoney's was mighty sick of us by the end of the meal. I was sure the lesbian playing 'grab the waitresses butt' was going to get slapped.
My twitching has been greatly reduced since I've started those new meds , but thanks for remembering.
ReplyDeleteBrad K - my first computer (in about '78) was S-100 bus (I forget brand) with a Z80 CPU, 64k ram, and I spent big bucks for a Micropolis dual 5.25" disk drive (hard sectored, 300k per disk). I even remember paying a bunch for CP/m and CBasic. I was lucky that CBasic was so much like Fortran IV.
ReplyDeleteUnless that was reality, and you're dreaming right now...
ReplyDeleteDo you recall meeting a Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike in any dreams recently?