Below are the most recent 5 friends' journal entries.

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
amnesiadust	6:55p	setting up a donation page for publication charges ( In which I am amused by a friend's suggestion. ) Someone explain to me why I shouldn't do this. Besides the fact that I probably still couldn't pay my rent this way. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
realityhandbook	12:23p	Home, Shelf, or Drug? I was walking through some rooms with a girl and pondering the word "Atillon" for some reason. I looked it up on a device I was carrying the definition came up as rack, or shelf. me: "I had the notion that it meant 'home' for some reason. It sounds French." girl: "If it were French it would be pronounced atillion instead." me: "But rack or shelf... hm... well, that could be considered home if you're a computer. Like a server rack, you know." (Note: It's the brand name for a cancer-treatment drug called Tegafur, that I've never heard of.) As it happened, the rooms we were passing through had a lot of cabling, wires, and racks. Things seemed rather disorderly, but people seemed to be ignoring us and working on putting things in order. me: "What is it we're looking for here again, anyway?" girl: "I think that's our clue over there." She pointed to a white door which had the doorknob painted bright purple. We opened it to reveal a room that was dark like someone's old garage, and had more technical junk inside of it. There were tons of post-its and sticky labels on things, and some were difficult to read. Several of them were labeled as DMV records. me: "Maybe this is a clue, something about people involved with The Long Now?" girl: (puzzled) "Where do you see that?" me: "Well this tape says LON and this other one says NOW, and they're right next to each other. Could be nothing I guess." (Comment on this)
realityhandbook	12:07p	Camry Accident Investigation Facility I was being guided down a wide hallway in what seemed to be an empty building. There was a red plastic bottle of liquid in my hand, and two men in surgical masks were walking behind me. I got freaked out and turned around to face them, and splashed some of the liquid in their direction. me: "You can't kill us... even if you think you did! We'll find you!" They didn't say anything and just kept on pointing me forward. We passed by rooms that looked like they had been equipped at one point in time, but had very few machines in them. Eerie music was playing. me: "Dammit, does there have to be eerie music playing, just because it's an eerie hallway?" This got one of the guys in surgical masks to take off his mask and laugh. A white gloved hand seemed to jump out of a terminal and snap, the music stopped. I could still hear a vague noise like windchimes. me: "Now all I hear are windchimes, and that's pretty scary too because there's no wind in here." We approached an elevator and they opened the door. We started to descend down into what seemed to be a parking garage or storage for hundreds of cars. They seemed to be in new condition. One of the men spoke, and I don't think he had been wearing a surgical mask. man: "Well really, we can do whatever we want here at this point. Let me give you a little grounding on where you are right now—but be calm. This is the facility where we've been doing the last of the fatal Camry accident investigations." (Note: My car is a Camry. So I got a bit alarmed at the idea that I'd died in a car crash, and that I was going through some kind of reconstruction out of brain bits being done by machines from the future. Though that wouldn't be particularly big or surprising news at this point, and I guess I'm down with that.) man: "Our computer specifically targeted you." (Note: At the time, the use of the word targeted made me think that a computer-driven car had killed me, although it's probably more reasonable to assume they meant "targeted me to investigate".) (Comment on this)
realityhandbook	11:42a	Paging Dr. Shrub I'd had a long and somewhat personal lucid conversation from someone who was criticizing how I live my life. I apologized for not doing better, but since things seemed solid I shifted the conversation to dream mechanics. It seemed we were in a toy store with a lot of other people. me: "Okay, what about the attacks. What should I do?" guy: "Oh it's always monsters guarding treasures or something. I just disable that." me: "You mean it's like a video game to you? Well I don't have any way to disable it. I won't last here very long if I don't get some help." At this point I seemed to become tangled in a thin green tape, and was being pulled at by a medium-sized green shrub. me: (panicked) "Here is a perfect example! Why is this shrub attacking me?" guy: (laughing) "I think you have it wrong, it's more like you're attacking it. Let's untangle you." I stopped struggling and he came over and began looking at the green tape. Some other people came over as well and started looking concerned. guy: "What the... no, you are right, this is going after you. It's not a shrub." Someone in the crowd picked up the tree, it seemed to collapse down into a base and vanish. The base was a green plastic thing that looked something like a smoke detector (or maybe this thing that Google Images found called a "laundryball"): They dismantled the device and looked inside of it. guy: "It's using an emergency room code." (Note: The insinuation I got was that the tree was able to whisk me away from the dream situation somewhat like how an ambulance would be assumed to be helping—and not hurting—someone it was taking away.) (Comment on this)
realityhandbook	11:27a	Vitomin 1-8-9-19 I was in a place that looked a bit like a shopping mall, and on the wall between some stores there was a device that looked like some kind of control panel. A person I felt like I was traveling with tinkered with it until it started playing 'Mickey' by Toni Basil. me: "No, don't turn it up that loud... turn it down. Okay, not that far down. All right." They disappeared and I realized I was laying on my back messing with some black shoelaces. The hard plastic end of one of the laces had come off. Someone who seemed like a mall employee came up and glared at the wall, and then at me. me: "I didn't touch it, that was some other guy. By the way, do you know if shoe stores sell replacements for these tips on shoelaces? What do you call these things?" (Note: Rumor has it those tips have a name, and that they're called "aglets") employee: (annoyed) "No, you can't buy those here." me: "That's too bad, seems wasteful to have to replace the whole thing when the shoelace is fine." She walked away and then my perspective shifted to where I was a bit far off, observing a conversation between some uniformed people who were walking in a line. uniformed man #1: "This is extremely suspicious. Six of our guys had unscheduled upgrades to the Michael program." uniformed man #2: "I don't trust it. Who did the upgrades?" uniformed man #1: "They were Air guys. From the Air Force, I mean to say." Though I felt I was just an invisible spectator who was far away, the line stopped and one man turned in my direction. He seemed to speak directly to me. uniformed man #1: "I need you to remember something. Think you can do it?" me: (startled) "I can try and write it down when I wake up." uniformed man #1: "Vitomin 1-8..." (Note: He articulated it as 'vi-toe-min' and not 'vi-taa-min'.) me: "Wait. What are the numbers?" uniformed man #1: "Vitomin 1-8-9-19" me: "Vitamin 1-8-9-19... hope that's right I'll write it down!" I jumped out of bed and leapt to the computer to try and type it in. A girl was looking over my shoulder. girl: "No, no... this is mixed up. Apple Computer and Animal Computer are not the same thing." me: "What are you looking at? I'm writing down these... these vitamin numbers, I was in a mall with some guys complaining about an upgrade to a Michael program. Something about the air force. I got the feeling it was like they were speaking about people actually getting software upgrades, you know, like to your brain." girl: "I mean the numbers, they're confused." Then I realized I wasn't awake yet, and actually woke up. (Comment on this)