More bad sleep.

Woke up feeling groggy and disoriented and overheated and heat-sick, with sheets soaked in sweat. Same old same old around here. Sleep should not be this much work.

I am so tired of not knowing what the hell is going to happen to me when I lay me down to sleep. Will it be peaceful and restful? Or nightmarish and tormenting? Will I sleep on a cloud, or in the inferno? Will I wake rested, or bested? Will I even sleep at all?

Sleep is supposed to rest you, not stress you. Maybe this is what I get for trying to prevent my bladder from waking me so often by drinking less water before I sleep. I just dehydrate from the night sweats all that much faster, and hence, the inferno beckons.

I am still entertaining the idea that overstimulation of the imagination without release plays some kind of part in it. I suffered from this much less last November, when I was writing my little heart out every single day to get those fifty thousand words written ASAP.

I want to get back to that, somehow. As soon as I find the bridge. Or build it.

But for right now, I feel like I enter hell when I sleep. Or rather, I spin the Wheel of Doom, and half the wheel is marked Hell. The other half has entries like “meh.” or “sleep, sort of” or “that wasn’t even sleep, dammit!”. Only a very slender strip is marked “actual, normal, restful, pleasant sleep. ”

And no matter how long it’s been since you’ve had any decent sleep, the odds are still the same every time you lay down once more : everything to 1.

But enough self-pity. How about video clips?

Like this sweet piece of video.

Apparently, it’s a cutscene from some game called Binary Domain. I know absolutely nothing about this game except that it’s from Sega (obviously). The game itself could suck monkey taint, I have absolutely no idea and I am not curious enough to look it up.

But as a movie : if I saw that scene in one… I would be absolutely riveted. I would be dying to see where things go after that.

Talk about science fiction power : a world in which the powers that be have just realizes that completely lifelike androids exist and could be absolutely anywhere, blending in with the population perfectly, but with an agenda written by a malign outsider… that’s paranoia enough.

But to have the androids themselves believe they are human beings , and hence open up the frightening possibility that you, yourself, could be an android and not know it, and therefore you could be the next one summarily executed without any need of warrant or verdict…. that ratchets up the paranoia and tension to a truly epic level.

What do you do if you find out you are, in fact, a robotic replacement? That the person you thought you were is dead, and you murdered them before taking over their identity so completely that you have spent decades thinking you are them, living their lives, loving their loved ones, being them in all ways except for the deepest one?

Would you commit suicide out of sheer horror? Would you decide that whatever was inside you, you WERE the person you have always thought you were, and go on living your life as you did before? If you tried, would the paranoia destroy you? Always worried that you will be discovered and destroyed?

And what if the original you showed up, surprisingly alive, and wanted their life back?

Hmm. All this might make a good short story, honestly.

Unrelatedly, here’s another fresh clip I felt worthy of sharing with you, my eager but discerning audience. It’s faboo.

What I love about this video the most is how they obviously did it on zero budget, and yet, it is really entertaining and rich, especially once the song starts. Once they song kicks in, they really show that they know how to keep the ball in the air and keep new things happening. I am duly impressed.

Heck, the fact that the whole song sequence in the car appears to have been done as one long song-length shot, with car dancing and props and surprises and lip-syncing all in one long kickass take, just blows my mind. I bet they did a ton of takes of it before they got the one perfect, golden one we see here.

The points they make are not exactly fresh or new, although relationship humour is always a reliable source of comedy because relationships are a universal truth of the human condition.

But the format they put it in is fresh, with deft rhymes and funny facial expressions and so on. The mock-serious expressions they use while doing this goofy shit are just plain magic. It really sells the comedy and sells it hard.

One last fresh clip, of a fairly well populated genre that is nevertheless always a ton of fun to look at : blowing stuff up in the microwave!

Oh, right… VIRAL ALERT. This is actually an add for some restaurant that is bragging about how they don’t use microwaves in their cooking. Stupid, I know, but who cares? It’s fun anyhow.

This, to me, would be the ultimate thing to do with a microwave oven that was near the end of its life and was headed for recycling anyhow. Play a fun game of “what happens if a microwave THIS” until the thing dies or the police show up because you are putting out all kinds of weird interference and now nobody can get WiFi in your area, or something.

Of course, safety first. So ideally, you would do this with a nice clean dry outdoor area and a very long extension cord, and of course, a good camera with a good optical zoom function, so you can watch all the fun without you or the camera having to be anywhere near Ground Zero.

Why yes, I have given this a lot of thought, thank you.