I was at Best Buy today with two DVDs in hand, and then I looked down at them and said, "You know what? I totally don't need these." And then I put them back on the shelf and walked out empty-handed. AMAZING.

In other news, they now sell 5' ethernet cables and several different types of USB cable (including one that would fit my digital camera!) at the dollar store. This is good! One can never have too many cables.

Yesterday, the freaky dreams continued with my dream that I intentionally chopped off half of my forefinger to see if using generic Neosporin (that is, not the real thing) would facilitate the reattachment of it. Apparently it worked quite well -- the healing began almost immediately -- prompting me to replicate the action several times. However, on the last time, my severed finger fell on the floor and got slightly dirty. I went to wash it as a result -- but the water was so hot that it effectively cooked my finger, leaving it the flesh the color and consistency of smoked salmon. I grew more and more disheartened with each successive failed attempt to reattach my finger... and when it remained stiff and began to turn purple, I gave up and sadly reconciled myself to the loss. I then resolved to call myself "Wesley of the Nine Fingers" and began singing the corresponding tune from the animated version of The Return of the King with my own name in place of Frodo's. I was still humming it when I woke up with my finger intact.

And for the fun of it (and because I apparently cannot sleep), I went and recorded two short mp3s from said animation for you. The first, "Frodo of the Nine Fingers", is the song that I was singing in the dream. There is a much longer version of the song at the beginning of the film that recounts Bilbo's adventures before the story joins Frodo and Samwise en route to Mount Doom, but this is the shorter and more lowering version that I have a tendency to sing at times (I haven't got the other one memorized). And then here is the extended version of "The Bearer of the Ring", though a shorter version that only includes up to "shrink with hate" plays at several points in the cartoon in various tempos. Anyway, enjoy! 😐

Hi all! Once again, apologies about the lack of posting and communication from me as of late -- I hope that your new year is going well so far. 2007 has kicked off for me with some very, very strange dreams, the four most recent of which I will describe briefly below. Prepare to be confounded.

Yesterday, I dreamed that I was battling aliens masquerading as college coeds. My mission: to retrieve a mermaid keychain (which I now recognize as being a happy meal toy of Ariel from The Little Mermaid, except that offering wasn't a keychain) that purportedly possessed technological abilities so advanced that Earthlings throughout the centuries had regarded it as a magical artifact. After a very lengthy and frenzied race through a muddy, crumbling Japanese rural town, we arrived at a desolate school building and I managed to wrest the artifact from one of the aliens' hands. I awoke as I scrambled through the mud as the rain poured down above me, wondering if I should attempt to hide the artifact for the time being or keep it in my possession and continue to run.

Last night, I dreamed that I was playing UNO with four schoolmates from my high school/college days -- at least until my father showed up in the room and gave this lengthy speech about how our playing UNO could somehow cost him his job and reputation. Nobody thought he made any sense, but after he left I suggested that we switch to playing Tonk in accordance with his wishes. What made the dream even weirder, though, was that the people with whom I was playing kept changing into other former classmates and even some people that I have never met. Of course, I didn't take notice any of this as the dream progressed -- I continued to treat them as consistent entities, though only at the end did I explicitly recognize any of them as being specific persons. Even then, I have not thought about this girl for years (she was a senior when I was a freshman, so I only knew her for a year before she graduated) and truthfully didn't even think about her much when I attended school with her. I'm certain that if I walked past her on an empty street and she were the only other person there, I wouldn't recognize her because I remember pretty much nothing about her appearance except that she had blonde hair and wore a leather coat with metal studs, and I'm not even too certain about that last part. Anyway, the only reason that she got singled out was because some stuttering guy at the table -- whom I am pretty sure I've never met -- addressed her by name and asked if she had recently lost weight, because she had a soft figure that, while he approved, suggested to him that she had been much heavier at one point. The last thought I had before I woke up was that that was a really weird and potentially offensive thing to say.

The third and fourth dreams both took place during a nap from which I very recently awoke. In the first, I was watching a Christmas/Halloween special in which three children were supposed to be on their way to a winter wonderland, whereupon they accidentally fell into a snow-covered volcano and were kidnapped by witches who meant to have them for dinner. Then somehow, without recognizing any of this, I traded places with one of those children -- which is to say that I found myself captive with two other people in the witches' lair. Apparently we were bound with frost or something equally weak, though, since I broke my bonds incredibly easily, roughly shoved the witches out of the way, and escaped into the narrow tunnels beneath the volcano. They were pretty tight fit even for me, but eventually I managed to emerge from a trash bag in the foyer of my high school building, whereupon I somehow realized that I had come there to attend a haunted attraction or something that had been closed. (By the way, I think that the retconning of events in a dream is an extremely interesting phenomenon.) Then I ran into a college classmate who told me that if I didn't hurry I was going to be late for our high school graduation -- which doesn't make sense, I know. Since I was wearing the same exact clothes in the dream that I had worn to bed, he offered to loan me one of his ties.

Then Bacardi started barking, which woke me up for a bit. When I returned to sleep, I was in a different dream. I was staying at an inn on some docks in Spokane, WA (I have never been there and have no idea why this place was explicitly named in the dream), and during a morning walk along the area I and another person happened to spot an orca in the water. The guy then fell in, whereupon the orca proceeded to grab him by the leg with its mouth, drag him into a shadowy area underneath the docks, and begin to eat him as he flailed and screamed. Horrified and awed, I watched for a few moments before rushing into a diner to tell them that an orca was eating some guy and to call 911 -- but naturally, they didn't believe me and burst out laughing. And I burst out laughing too because laughter is infectious, but even as I did so I insisted that I was serious and that they should call. After a look out of the window confirmed that an orca was indeed eating a guy, they complied. Then I returned to the scene, where the orca had finished eating that guy and was now eating another guy and his son as a woman dove into the water after them -- and then, somehow, I could see inside the orca's closed mouth, where the man, the woman, and the son had pressed themselves against the interior and were fighting not to go down its throat (apparently, like the TARDIS, this orca was bigger on the inside). Then the orca somehow telepathically communicated with the boy and told him to let it eat him, whereupon the boy complied and, in a trancelike state, stopped struggling and allowed himself to slide down the orca's gullet. The father of the boy began raging at the orca to spit him back up -- and then, after a moment of silence, the orca regurgitated (without opening its mouth, so everyone was still trapped). Instead of tossing up the boy, however, Gilbert Gottfried emerged wearing a red bathrobe and proceeded to complain about how humid it was in the whale's mouth. Then I woke up.

I sure do like strange dreams. 🙂

P.S. Wesoteric is now running WordPress 2.06. As always, let me know if you encounter any problems!

Hey all -- sorry for the lack of posts and e-mails lately! I have not forgotten about the people who have written to me in recent weeks and will try to get back to you shortly! 🙂 Also, hopefully you haven't noticed that I've upgraded the site to WordPress version 2.05, as everything should look about the same. HOWEVER, I did encounter some snags with this upgrade that I had not experienced before, so let me know if you see something that looks off! I think I've managed to fix the problem(s), but is possible that something else got changed during the update that I need to fool with and try to fix.

Anyway, since I don't think too many folks who come here also keep up with Scary-Crayon -- and since the last Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash comic features my scowling visage (as opposed to the adorable Sharpie-rendered version) -- I've decided to repost it here. I was originally going to post here it as a quick blog entry or even an audio post, so it's only fitting... right? Enjoy!

Aaaand... happy holidays, minna-san!

Towards the middle of November, I was thinking maybe my online DVD collection count wouldn't make it to 400 after all before the end of 2006, but my initial speculations have proven incorrect -- the arrival of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm today did indeed push the collection into the next level.

And for the record, those of you who think that Batman Begins is the best Batman feature film are totally wrong. Totally.