(no subject)
First, I might as well get it out of the way. No NaNo for me this year, not even my usual "I'll try to meet 50,000 words as a total of various short story writings). For the longest time I've been in a big writing slump with nothing really exciting me, storywise, and it'd just be painful to try to do NaNo with it. I will be trying to keep up with my normal slog of timed writing, of course. I have at least had a couple ideas recently that interest me enough to want to explore them, but I'm still not sure what I want to do with them and I don't want to burn myself out on them with NaNo style forced writing.
In life, nothing's happening.
So let's go to books.
Finished: The Waste Lands (Dark Tower Book III, by Stephen King (reread)
Started: Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower Book IV, by Stephen King (reread)
Still enjoying it, but not as much as first read. Of course, the Waste Lands is one of my favorites, because the scenes with Jake in New York call out to me. Especially this passage:
... Jake had become more and more fascinated with doors -- all kinds of doors. He must have opened the one between his bedroom and the upstairs hallway five hundred times in just the last week, and the one between his bedroom and the bathroom a thousand. Each time he did it, he felt a tight ball of hope and anticipation in his chest, as if the answer to all his problems lay somewhere behind this door or that one and he would surely find it ... eventually. But each time it was only the hall, or the bathroom, or the front walk or whatever.
...
Now, as he approached the cloakroom door, he felt that same dazzling burst of hope, a certainty that the door would open not on a shadowy closet containing only the persistent smells of winter--flannel, rubber, and wet wool--but on some other world where he could be whole again. Hot, dazzling light would fall across the classroom floor in a widening triangle, and he would see birds circling in a faded blue sky the color of (his eyes) old jeans. A desert wind would blow his hair back anddry the nervous sweat on his brow.
He would step through this door and be healed.
I'm still waiting for my door to open on some impossible place and I can leave this world, where I can't seem to make life work, behind, and find one where I can. Maybe one day. Until then, I'll keep opening and hoping.
Finished: The Temporal Void, by Peter Hamilton
Started: Tesseracts 4 (short story collection)
Temporal Void was okay. A sequel to The Dreaming Void, at least to some extent I'm satisfied one one of my problems from the last book. On the other hand, I'm still not really feeling attached to any of the characters. It's decent fun, some cool ideas, but I'm not invested really. Some spoilers. Last time I said I couldn't really quite understand why the Living Dream movement existed, since the life inside the void didn't seem THAT awesome that people should be trying to migrate in. Well, in this installment, we finally get the answer. And it is somewhat appealing, I'll grant you (even bigger spoilers than usual ahoy)... in the void, you can actually jump back in time to relive parts of your life and change them to get a better result. If things didn't work out well the first time, you can try again. Like I said, pretty appealing. I've had fantasies like that myself. But really, when you combine it with all the negative stuff that comes with being in the Void or Edeard's life compared to the world outside of it... that is, being stuck in a quasi-medieval world rather than the awesomeness of being able to explore the galaxy, I still don't really get it.
I also don't particularly LIKE Edeard or his story. I mean, I respect his general aims, but too often I just don't like him and some of his choices, on a personal level. I don't know, he seems a bit like... Harry Potter, where virtually everything seems to have been handed to him, either because everybody loves him, or because he's got the superior mental powers compared to everyone else. A Psi-Jock, basically. He faces difficulties, but they're huge entrenched difficulties and mostly just fodder for him to angst about. I don't know, I don't mind wishfullfilment characters generally, but something about him rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's all his sleeping around, which is a big personal pet peeve of mine in a character... not so much promiscuity itself, but going with other people when you've made promises to somebody, or dating somebody who's engaged, and the like.
Despite some of my harsh words, I don't dislike it as a whole. I'll certainly read the next book, but again, I'm not raring to go like I am for other books I enjoy. I'll be content to wait until I find the paperback in a used bookstore.
Now, moving away from books... What's been on TV?
I'm pretty much given up on The Event. I just don't care from episode to episode. I don't care about any of the characters. I don't even care about what the mission of the detainees was. Again, I'll watch it, but only because nothing else is worth watching at that time (on a channel I get).
No Ordinary Family, the other new show, I'm still watching, but... I don't know, it sort of rings hollow. Like, it's an ABC show, but it feels more like a Disney show where minor characters occasionally die. Everybody learns valuable life lessons from their powers and nothing really edgy ever happens. And, unfortunately, in many ways, that makes it really predictable. (Some spoilers for recent episodes). For example, I believe it was the most recent episode, where two of the plots involved the following:
Mind-Reading Daughter (I still don't remember the character names) encounters a friend of hers out with one of her teachers. She comes to the conclusion, because of mind-reading suggestive things, that he's having an illicit affair, and after some soul searching, sends in an anoymous tip. Only, surprise! (except, not really), what she read in their minds she misinterpretted. The teacher was actually secretly dating the girl's mother, and it had just ended but because he'd become close with the daughter he wanted to break the news to her personally. Now the teacher's tarred with the accusation which will stick with him even if there was no foundation, and Mind-Reader-Girl learns a Valuable Life Lesson. Gah. The moment I saw the first scene setting up the plot, I predicted exactly how it would go, except for the specific innocent explanation of what was going on. Similarly, a previous episode had her using her powers to fit in and going to a party with (gasp) underage drinking! And she gets caught for trying to use her powers to buy booze, and gets in trouble, but it's totally okay because she really wasn't drinking at all, she was just doing it to fit in!
One of the other plots of the most recent episode involved Slacker-Son-Who-Suddenly-Gets-Genius-Powers. His genius powers have let him join the football team (because he knows exactly what force and angle to throw to make perfect passes, etc). He's been hiding his powers from his parents, and in this episode they find out. Naturally, they do the moral thing and point out that using his powers for football is CHEATING, and he wants to anyway, so he continues to play on the team but then decides at the last minute that he's learned a Valuable Life Lesson and decides to not cheat and quit the team. Again, I expected this to happen the moment he joined the team (it was only a tossup between whether it would be THAT Valuable Life Lesson or one about "knowing things is different than doing them and even if you're a genius you still might get your ass kicked... once they made him actually be good at it, I knew where it was going). At least be a little different and have the kid make the argument that "Yeah, my super brain powers give me an advantage everyone else doesn't have. But guess what? The other guys on the team are 7 feet tall. They were born with advantages most people don't have, and THEY'RE allowed to use them. Nobody accuses the quarterback of cheating for being able to build muscle faster than I can, or having a quicker reaction time. So I can calculate angles and trajectories. What difference does it make where I got the talent, I didn't intend to get it, and I'm stuck with it until they go away. Why not use the powers?"
And where life lessons aren't involved, we have Michael Chickless, Super-Dad, who fights a different super-powered criminal every week, because every week there's a convenient crime spree that's never mentioned before or after. Like, rather than existing in a world where super-powered people exist, he's an old-school comic character who must face a new startling villain in every issue.
It all feels so painfully shallow. Like they're not really dealing with the consequences of a group of people getting powers, but that they're just grafting on the super powers to try to do very lame other types of shows.
Again, I'm still watching it, but mostly I want Speedy-Mom's Geeky Kitty-Pryde-Fangirl-Sidekick to dose herself with whatever's causing the powers and then do her own superhero stuff without everybody else.
What else... well, in bad news, Caprica is officially cancelled. Supposedly Canada is airing the remaining episodes in the next few weeks, but thus far they have not shown up via... "magic" yet so I've been unable to watch it.
It really is a shame, because in many ways it's one of the very few really good attempts at a "pure" SF show that's not space-based. It plausibly invents a whole new society similar to our own but with enough differences to be fascinating, and deals with a lot of big SF concepts and yet where the story is still driven by the characters. It wasn't perfect by any means, but I'm really disappointed it's being axed and replaced with "BSG: Blood and Iron" (set during the first Cylon War, with a young Adama and Battlestar Galactica again, fighting cylons). More action-war-explodey stuff. Which is fine. I'll almost certainly watch it and enjoy it. But it's "more of the same". Caprica was something special and is going away. I almost think Caprica was hurt by the BSG association, because a) I'm not sure it REALLY fits with any of the canon (and for once, I don't care one bit, it works as a solo piece), and b) it gave people some false expectations. On the other hand, it probably would never be made without those associations. I tip my hat to you, Caprica. You're no Firefly, and I probably won't even miss you as much as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I think you could have done some great things if given the chance.
It's former sister show, Stargate Universe, is still ongoing, and still doing pretty well, in terms of enjoyability, although ratings-wise it's still struggling. The last episode "Trial and Error" was a little weaker than most, but it surprised me in a couple good ways, too. I will go into spoilers behind the cut, but mainly because it edged onto a story idea I had way back when I first heard of the concept. It didn't really do anything THAT similar, but it hit the point where I can't see them ever doing both what they did in this episode AND my idea, so I might as well reveal my story idea. So, spoilers and a plot-idea-I-might-have-done-if-I-wrote-for-Stargate (and I should totally write for Stargate!) behind the cut. Okay, the actual episode plot has, as one of its plots, the Colonel Young reliving the same disatrous encounter over and over again, only to wake up and it never happened. He tried several variations, but it always ends in the destruction of the ship.
When it first happened, I thought, "Oh, they're doing THAT episode again." The traditional Groundhog Day episode. Like Window of Opportunity in Stargate SG1, and pretty much EVERY SF show does it once if it lasts long enough... Of course, they did it a little differently this time - time travel wasn't involved, and the only thing that repeated was the event itself - the rest of the storylines continued throughout the plot, because time continued to pass.
Still, like I said, I had my own variation on the Groundhog Day episode, and I can't see them doing both, so I might as well outline it. I had this idea way back when I heard of some of the plot elements the show would use, but before anybody was cast (and of course I made some adjustments after the fact).
There's still the basic "disaster that destroys the ship and one person goes back in time remembering it", but the McGuffin involves the communications stones, with some technobabble explanation about the ship being close to a neutron star or something that's sending the signals back in time. Whatever. Anyway, the gist of it is, one crew member (I envision it being probably Eli) keeps going back, using the communications stones to inhabit the body of somebody else ON Destiny. Perhaps the first time, Eli goes back into his own body... or maybe Rush's, to prevent Rush from being awesome and solving everything once he's warned about it. The second time, he goes into somebody else's (somebody else who recently used the stones). Now there are two time-displaced Elis. But they can't figure it out together, so it happens again, and there are three. At least one of the people he jumps back to should probably be Scott so Eli gets some Chloe-angst over being in the body of the one she loves. Anyway, they cycle repeats until he finally works out the solution.
It occurs to me I may have already posted this idea, and just forgotten it. If that's the case, sorry for bothering you with it twice.
The other big TV thing recently was "The Walking Dead"'s premiere. And it seems to have done very well in the ratings, beating even Mad Men for AMC, and that may be just because it was on Halloween and everyone was in a horror mood. And of course not all those viewers might stick around. But it's a good sign and gives me hope for a S2 with characters like Michonne (I totally nominate Gina Torres as Michonne). The episode itself? I actually got a look at the script many months ago. And the show episode matched the script, so really, there were no surprises for me in this episode. However, it was well-put together, well acted, and the zombies looked suitabley creepy. Very much looking forward to more.
And since we finished on zombies, that feels like a nice segue to dreams, because I had a couple zombie dreams in the past couple weeks. Except, they weren't traditional zombie dreams.
Basically, they were zombie ROLEPLAYING dreams.
I had one dream where I was playing a MUSH (with several old people from XET), that was basically a zombie apocalypse theme as a special limited run dream for Halloween. Which I'm sure has at least been suggested and probably done before, and I'm not all that sure I'd want to play it, but it was amusing. Specifically, the dream was a lot of text-based roleplaying. It was a big scene so I kept trying (and failing, because the text kept changing) to make sure what I was about to pose made sense with what was posed by other people.
The other one was different... it was sort of a LIVE ACTIONG Zombie RPG. Everybody was out in some closed-off town-looking area, and I guess we were all there to play a zombie RPG. Except I guess the way it was set up, we were told that the game would be starting sometime later and we would just be hanging out and having fun the first day, getting to know each other, but whoever ran the game decided to just tell us that so that when zombies did start arriving we'd all be suitably surprised and freaked out. I was at the edge of the play area, in a park playing frisbee or something, when I ran to get to frisbee and noticed some people shambling towards me and then running (the zombies ran, at least at first). And I yelled out "Zombies!" (and immediately felt guilty because one of the unspoken tropes of the zombie genre is that nobody is aware of zombie movies). Anyway, I narrowly escaped a horde of zombies and ran to town, where somebody who was running the game gave me a little packet because I was one of the first to arrive with news of the horde. The pack gave me a couple advantages (ability to win one argument, a 'get out of death free' card), and I was pointed towards weapons, which were all rubber-like replicas. I took a knife. Then I met somebody else who was playing the wife of someone else in the game who I knew and I had to tell her I didn't know if he managed to escape them or not.
It was all pretty cool, actually, and something I kind of wish people could actually do. Of course in any real situation it'd neeed much more stringent rules that would violate the 'reality' of the situation. (I imagine no biting would be rule number one). But it still might be fun. Sadly most of my other dreams have just been dull or unmemorable, much like my life. Ah well.
In life, nothing's happening.
So let's go to books.
Finished: The Waste Lands (Dark Tower Book III, by Stephen King (reread)
Started: Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower Book IV, by Stephen King (reread)
Still enjoying it, but not as much as first read. Of course, the Waste Lands is one of my favorites, because the scenes with Jake in New York call out to me. Especially this passage:
... Jake had become more and more fascinated with doors -- all kinds of doors. He must have opened the one between his bedroom and the upstairs hallway five hundred times in just the last week, and the one between his bedroom and the bathroom a thousand. Each time he did it, he felt a tight ball of hope and anticipation in his chest, as if the answer to all his problems lay somewhere behind this door or that one and he would surely find it ... eventually. But each time it was only the hall, or the bathroom, or the front walk or whatever.
...
Now, as he approached the cloakroom door, he felt that same dazzling burst of hope, a certainty that the door would open not on a shadowy closet containing only the persistent smells of winter--flannel, rubber, and wet wool--but on some other world where he could be whole again. Hot, dazzling light would fall across the classroom floor in a widening triangle, and he would see birds circling in a faded blue sky the color of (his eyes) old jeans. A desert wind would blow his hair back anddry the nervous sweat on his brow.
He would step through this door and be healed.
I'm still waiting for my door to open on some impossible place and I can leave this world, where I can't seem to make life work, behind, and find one where I can. Maybe one day. Until then, I'll keep opening and hoping.
Finished: The Temporal Void, by Peter Hamilton
Started: Tesseracts 4 (short story collection)
Temporal Void was okay. A sequel to The Dreaming Void, at least to some extent I'm satisfied one one of my problems from the last book. On the other hand, I'm still not really feeling attached to any of the characters. It's decent fun, some cool ideas, but I'm not invested really. Some spoilers. Last time I said I couldn't really quite understand why the Living Dream movement existed, since the life inside the void didn't seem THAT awesome that people should be trying to migrate in. Well, in this installment, we finally get the answer. And it is somewhat appealing, I'll grant you (even bigger spoilers than usual ahoy)... in the void, you can actually jump back in time to relive parts of your life and change them to get a better result. If things didn't work out well the first time, you can try again. Like I said, pretty appealing. I've had fantasies like that myself. But really, when you combine it with all the negative stuff that comes with being in the Void or Edeard's life compared to the world outside of it... that is, being stuck in a quasi-medieval world rather than the awesomeness of being able to explore the galaxy, I still don't really get it.
I also don't particularly LIKE Edeard or his story. I mean, I respect his general aims, but too often I just don't like him and some of his choices, on a personal level. I don't know, he seems a bit like... Harry Potter, where virtually everything seems to have been handed to him, either because everybody loves him, or because he's got the superior mental powers compared to everyone else. A Psi-Jock, basically. He faces difficulties, but they're huge entrenched difficulties and mostly just fodder for him to angst about. I don't know, I don't mind wishfullfilment characters generally, but something about him rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's all his sleeping around, which is a big personal pet peeve of mine in a character... not so much promiscuity itself, but going with other people when you've made promises to somebody, or dating somebody who's engaged, and the like.
Despite some of my harsh words, I don't dislike it as a whole. I'll certainly read the next book, but again, I'm not raring to go like I am for other books I enjoy. I'll be content to wait until I find the paperback in a used bookstore.
Now, moving away from books... What's been on TV?
I'm pretty much given up on The Event. I just don't care from episode to episode. I don't care about any of the characters. I don't even care about what the mission of the detainees was. Again, I'll watch it, but only because nothing else is worth watching at that time (on a channel I get).
No Ordinary Family, the other new show, I'm still watching, but... I don't know, it sort of rings hollow. Like, it's an ABC show, but it feels more like a Disney show where minor characters occasionally die. Everybody learns valuable life lessons from their powers and nothing really edgy ever happens. And, unfortunately, in many ways, that makes it really predictable. (Some spoilers for recent episodes). For example, I believe it was the most recent episode, where two of the plots involved the following:
Mind-Reading Daughter (I still don't remember the character names) encounters a friend of hers out with one of her teachers. She comes to the conclusion, because of mind-reading suggestive things, that he's having an illicit affair, and after some soul searching, sends in an anoymous tip. Only, surprise! (except, not really), what she read in their minds she misinterpretted. The teacher was actually secretly dating the girl's mother, and it had just ended but because he'd become close with the daughter he wanted to break the news to her personally. Now the teacher's tarred with the accusation which will stick with him even if there was no foundation, and Mind-Reader-Girl learns a Valuable Life Lesson. Gah. The moment I saw the first scene setting up the plot, I predicted exactly how it would go, except for the specific innocent explanation of what was going on. Similarly, a previous episode had her using her powers to fit in and going to a party with (gasp) underage drinking! And she gets caught for trying to use her powers to buy booze, and gets in trouble, but it's totally okay because she really wasn't drinking at all, she was just doing it to fit in!
One of the other plots of the most recent episode involved Slacker-Son-Who-Suddenly-Gets-Genius-Powers. His genius powers have let him join the football team (because he knows exactly what force and angle to throw to make perfect passes, etc). He's been hiding his powers from his parents, and in this episode they find out. Naturally, they do the moral thing and point out that using his powers for football is CHEATING, and he wants to anyway, so he continues to play on the team but then decides at the last minute that he's learned a Valuable Life Lesson and decides to not cheat and quit the team. Again, I expected this to happen the moment he joined the team (it was only a tossup between whether it would be THAT Valuable Life Lesson or one about "knowing things is different than doing them and even if you're a genius you still might get your ass kicked... once they made him actually be good at it, I knew where it was going). At least be a little different and have the kid make the argument that "Yeah, my super brain powers give me an advantage everyone else doesn't have. But guess what? The other guys on the team are 7 feet tall. They were born with advantages most people don't have, and THEY'RE allowed to use them. Nobody accuses the quarterback of cheating for being able to build muscle faster than I can, or having a quicker reaction time. So I can calculate angles and trajectories. What difference does it make where I got the talent, I didn't intend to get it, and I'm stuck with it until they go away. Why not use the powers?"
And where life lessons aren't involved, we have Michael Chickless, Super-Dad, who fights a different super-powered criminal every week, because every week there's a convenient crime spree that's never mentioned before or after. Like, rather than existing in a world where super-powered people exist, he's an old-school comic character who must face a new startling villain in every issue.
It all feels so painfully shallow. Like they're not really dealing with the consequences of a group of people getting powers, but that they're just grafting on the super powers to try to do very lame other types of shows.
Again, I'm still watching it, but mostly I want Speedy-Mom's Geeky Kitty-Pryde-Fangirl-Sidekick to dose herself with whatever's causing the powers and then do her own superhero stuff without everybody else.
What else... well, in bad news, Caprica is officially cancelled. Supposedly Canada is airing the remaining episodes in the next few weeks, but thus far they have not shown up via... "magic" yet so I've been unable to watch it.
It really is a shame, because in many ways it's one of the very few really good attempts at a "pure" SF show that's not space-based. It plausibly invents a whole new society similar to our own but with enough differences to be fascinating, and deals with a lot of big SF concepts and yet where the story is still driven by the characters. It wasn't perfect by any means, but I'm really disappointed it's being axed and replaced with "BSG: Blood and Iron" (set during the first Cylon War, with a young Adama and Battlestar Galactica again, fighting cylons). More action-war-explodey stuff. Which is fine. I'll almost certainly watch it and enjoy it. But it's "more of the same". Caprica was something special and is going away. I almost think Caprica was hurt by the BSG association, because a) I'm not sure it REALLY fits with any of the canon (and for once, I don't care one bit, it works as a solo piece), and b) it gave people some false expectations. On the other hand, it probably would never be made without those associations. I tip my hat to you, Caprica. You're no Firefly, and I probably won't even miss you as much as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I think you could have done some great things if given the chance.
It's former sister show, Stargate Universe, is still ongoing, and still doing pretty well, in terms of enjoyability, although ratings-wise it's still struggling. The last episode "Trial and Error" was a little weaker than most, but it surprised me in a couple good ways, too. I will go into spoilers behind the cut, but mainly because it edged onto a story idea I had way back when I first heard of the concept. It didn't really do anything THAT similar, but it hit the point where I can't see them ever doing both what they did in this episode AND my idea, so I might as well reveal my story idea. So, spoilers and a plot-idea-I-might-have-done-if-I-wrote-for-Stargate (and I should totally write for Stargate!) behind the cut. Okay, the actual episode plot has, as one of its plots, the Colonel Young reliving the same disatrous encounter over and over again, only to wake up and it never happened. He tried several variations, but it always ends in the destruction of the ship.
When it first happened, I thought, "Oh, they're doing THAT episode again." The traditional Groundhog Day episode. Like Window of Opportunity in Stargate SG1, and pretty much EVERY SF show does it once if it lasts long enough... Of course, they did it a little differently this time - time travel wasn't involved, and the only thing that repeated was the event itself - the rest of the storylines continued throughout the plot, because time continued to pass.
Still, like I said, I had my own variation on the Groundhog Day episode, and I can't see them doing both, so I might as well outline it. I had this idea way back when I heard of some of the plot elements the show would use, but before anybody was cast (and of course I made some adjustments after the fact).
There's still the basic "disaster that destroys the ship and one person goes back in time remembering it", but the McGuffin involves the communications stones, with some technobabble explanation about the ship being close to a neutron star or something that's sending the signals back in time. Whatever. Anyway, the gist of it is, one crew member (I envision it being probably Eli) keeps going back, using the communications stones to inhabit the body of somebody else ON Destiny. Perhaps the first time, Eli goes back into his own body... or maybe Rush's, to prevent Rush from being awesome and solving everything once he's warned about it. The second time, he goes into somebody else's (somebody else who recently used the stones). Now there are two time-displaced Elis. But they can't figure it out together, so it happens again, and there are three. At least one of the people he jumps back to should probably be Scott so Eli gets some Chloe-angst over being in the body of the one she loves. Anyway, they cycle repeats until he finally works out the solution.
It occurs to me I may have already posted this idea, and just forgotten it. If that's the case, sorry for bothering you with it twice.
The other big TV thing recently was "The Walking Dead"'s premiere. And it seems to have done very well in the ratings, beating even Mad Men for AMC, and that may be just because it was on Halloween and everyone was in a horror mood. And of course not all those viewers might stick around. But it's a good sign and gives me hope for a S2 with characters like Michonne (I totally nominate Gina Torres as Michonne). The episode itself? I actually got a look at the script many months ago. And the show episode matched the script, so really, there were no surprises for me in this episode. However, it was well-put together, well acted, and the zombies looked suitabley creepy. Very much looking forward to more.
And since we finished on zombies, that feels like a nice segue to dreams, because I had a couple zombie dreams in the past couple weeks. Except, they weren't traditional zombie dreams.
Basically, they were zombie ROLEPLAYING dreams.
I had one dream where I was playing a MUSH (with several old people from XET), that was basically a zombie apocalypse theme as a special limited run dream for Halloween. Which I'm sure has at least been suggested and probably done before, and I'm not all that sure I'd want to play it, but it was amusing. Specifically, the dream was a lot of text-based roleplaying. It was a big scene so I kept trying (and failing, because the text kept changing) to make sure what I was about to pose made sense with what was posed by other people.
The other one was different... it was sort of a LIVE ACTIONG Zombie RPG. Everybody was out in some closed-off town-looking area, and I guess we were all there to play a zombie RPG. Except I guess the way it was set up, we were told that the game would be starting sometime later and we would just be hanging out and having fun the first day, getting to know each other, but whoever ran the game decided to just tell us that so that when zombies did start arriving we'd all be suitably surprised and freaked out. I was at the edge of the play area, in a park playing frisbee or something, when I ran to get to frisbee and noticed some people shambling towards me and then running (the zombies ran, at least at first). And I yelled out "Zombies!" (and immediately felt guilty because one of the unspoken tropes of the zombie genre is that nobody is aware of zombie movies). Anyway, I narrowly escaped a horde of zombies and ran to town, where somebody who was running the game gave me a little packet because I was one of the first to arrive with news of the horde. The pack gave me a couple advantages (ability to win one argument, a 'get out of death free' card), and I was pointed towards weapons, which were all rubber-like replicas. I took a knife. Then I met somebody else who was playing the wife of someone else in the game who I knew and I had to tell her I didn't know if he managed to escape them or not.
It was all pretty cool, actually, and something I kind of wish people could actually do. Of course in any real situation it'd neeed much more stringent rules that would violate the 'reality' of the situation. (I imagine no biting would be rule number one). But it still might be fun. Sadly most of my other dreams have just been dull or unmemorable, much like my life. Ah well.