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.

Did I really post the previous entry on Thanksgiving? If I'd realized that, I would have wished y'all a happy one in addition to going on about those monitor shutdown programs. I do hope you had a happy holiday, though.

Things have been pretty busy over here -- following the holiday, I spent a great deal of time mucking around with the new router that I bought during the black Friday insanity. Folks who communicate with me in real-time fashion online may have noted that I experienced frequent disconnects with the old router, which apparently sucked as far as routers go, so I picked up a new one in the hopes that it would resolve the difficulty. What I did not know, however, was that despite apparently receiving excellent reviews, the Linksys WRT54G is also sort of crappy because apparently there are eight versions of this thing, which they started downgrading around v5. Mine is a v6 -- a fact that is conveniently not noted anywhere on the packaging and must be determined by an analysis of the serial number. By the time I learned this, naturally, I had already taken the thing out of the packaging and was attempting to set it up.

Despite being a downgraded version, however, the WRT54G v6 -- like its superior brethren -- can be flashed with third party firmware that improves its performance. The process is apparently a bit trickier than it is with the others (or so I have been told; I've never tried flashing the others), but with me being extra impulsive about keeping the thing after staying up all night and standing in 2+ hours' worth of lines to get it, I undertook to do just that. I'll spare you the details regarding the confusion that resulted, but suffice it to say that I finally got the thing up and running with the 3rd party firmware and configured as necessary. The problem with the disconnects has been fixed, and I have probably downloaded like 8+ gigs' worth of stuff since then -- at first just to test whether it was working properly, and then because I happened to find a whole bunch of new stuff that I wanted to watch. Frex, "Jigoku Shoujo" (Hell Girl) and a whole bunch of other anime series. Hurrah.

I'm still oddly dissatisfied, though. Everything is working fine now, but I still have that dissatisfaction that attends having an inferior product -- it's kind of like having your hunger completely satisfied by a tasty seafood enchilada at Chevy's but knowing that you could have gone for a sushi buffet instead. That's a terrible example. It's more like getting a B+ on a final exam when all you needed to do is get a B- to maintain your A grade, but knowing that you could have gotten an A if you'd known that solving the last 10% of the questions on the Calculus test required you to know the names and properties of various flora. Granted, that's some pretty difficult stuff to predict, but you could have found out if you'd done more consulting with people who had taken that instructor's exams before and therefore knew about his unhealthy obsession with flowers. It's more like that, yes.

Also, in case you missed it, I posted a (very late) review and analysis of scary 49¢ Thanksgiving cards over on Scary-Crayon. Feel free to check it out! I suppose that is all for now, then. Ja ne.

Laptop users, have you ever wanted to turn off your monitor without closing the lid? I don't mean setting the timer in the power options properties -- I mean simply turning the thing off via a keyboard shortcut or, at the very least, a system tray icon. I have been wanting to do this ever since I got the machine (back in the old days, I simply would have pressed the monitor button), and now and again I have gone on little searches of the web to see if I can find a utility that will let me do just that. Until tonight, all of those searches were failures. I have no idea why these programs are so hard to find -- you'd think that a whole heap of people would want to do this! So many, in fact, that you'd expect Windows to have a default shortcut key for just that function. If there is, I have not found it yet.

What I found tonight, however, is a utility that will finally let me do what I've been wanting to do for ages. Granted, my search probably would've gone a little better if I'd been willing to pay for this functionality, as there are several programs (Softany Monitor Control came up most frequently during my searches) that will give you the ability to manually turn off your monitor for a fee ($16.95 for the Softany program). Alas, I hate paying for computer programs -- especially when they're for things that I should already be able to do for free! So I've been searching and searching and searching.

In the end -- at last -- I found three programs that are up to the task, though only one (at least thus far) is my preferred program of choice.

First, there's Tooler 1.00. This one would have been effective, except when I turned the monitor back on by moving the mouse or pressing a key, there would be this weird little window active in the upper left-hand corner that sometimes needed to be closed manually. Otherwise this tiny tool would have been perfect, but I decided to do a bit more searching first. Had I not found another program, however, I would've gone with this.

Then, thanks to a forum post in a thread, I stumbled onto NirCmd, a command-line tool that, among many other things, will let users create a shortcut to turn off the freaking monitor, which is all I really wanted to do. Admittedly, you'd have to know a little bit about creating shortcuts and using said tools (which takes us back to the good ol' DOS days) before using this program -- which could be a bit daunting for some -- but that wasn't my main problem. No, my problem was that while the monitor turned off just fine, I had absolute HELL getting it to come back on. When I tried, it did this weird flickery thing and get dim and then my computer started beeping and I'm not sure what the hell happened, but once my screen came back I promptly deleted that program, rebooted the computer, and ran a registry scan (since it modifies registry values -- I wonder if something conflicted with my custom settings?) to remove any lingering issues. NirCmd may work better for you, though, so feel free to give it a try.

Ultimately, however, I opted to go with ShutdownTray, which (thus far, anyway) does exactly what I need it to do with no freakish or annoying side effects. It sits in my systray and can be activated with a simple right click, and it allowed me to set up a keyboard shortcut with the greatest of ease. Now, by pressing Ctrl+Alt+M (for monitor!), I can turn off the screen and give it a rest while I do other things. I will say, however, that after I first used it the screen turned back on for no reason several minutes later. Subsequent tries have not yielded the same effect, so I suspect that I inadvertently jostled the desk, thereby causing the mouse to move and wake up the screen. Apparently some of the paid programs have settings that automatically decrease mouse sensitivity when the screen is off -- which would be ideal, as then it would take a deliberate effort to bring the picture back -- but we'll see how I do with this free tool first. Seems to be effective so far!

Hopefully now someone using the Google to find a good, free program that turns off the monitor will end up here at some point and give ShutdownTray a try. And hopefully this post has been of use to some of my readers. Or at least I hope it has been interesting! I dunno. Anyway, ja ne. 🙂