Had 3 different dreams about Scott “slatestarscratchpad” Alexander the other night, which was curious.

First one was me reading a post, or maybe series of tweets, by him, about coding a point-click adventure game and his design decisions about it. Like, he wrote about the tradeoffs in creating a sense of player autonomy, actions that can affect game state vs. actions that just create some flavor feedback vs. the necessity to limit the player to clearly delineate some finite number of viable paths.

And about how he handled memory allocation and how that affected porting to different platforms, and about how he had originally had two separate points meters hovering above the player avatar as purple and green circles with attached tags, only he had merged them into one circle with overlapping colored arcs and no text.

And it was all in his actual writing voice and whatnot but it eventually got incredibly tedious and I was aware it was a dream at points and kept trying to wake up enough to break out so I could dream about something else instead.


Second one we and a bunch of people were hanging around some party by the docks of a lake house, and then me and his consort ozymandias271 went up to check out the bridge of some three-decker fishing boat, only all of a sudden there started being crazy waves on the lake that dragged the boat out and started the engine, and then knocked us into the water.

And the boat was still heading to the opposite coast where it was going to beach or hit some houses, but the wave had also knocked off two jet-skis mounted on the back so I jumped on one and chased after it, and just before it hit the shore managed to hit a jump, and then leap off onto the bridge and turn the wheel to safety.

And so I dropped anchor and went back to recover the jet-ski, which had sank in maybe 7 feet of water, and this crusty old fisherman guy was giving me shit about how that was incredibly dangerous and it was much more likely that I would have hurt myself and damaged the jet-ski accomplishing nothing, and I just rebuffed him like “nah man, I’m not even going to pretend to care about your point until you admit how totally badass that just was”.


Third one I had front-row seats at like, WrestleMania, but the whole dream was just about setting up the arena, like it was a flat, super-huge high school gym where they had to bring in big white folding tables and chairs. And I got my good seat, only after they set up all these tables they started building these cage cells like, on top of them, with barely any headspace, and putting naked strippers in them.

And I was like “huh, I guess this is pay-per-view, they can do full nudity”, and the cell on top of my seat was this 40-something black woman, 8-inch heels and a little dumpy around the waist, and we had a pretty decent chat about where she grew up, but it was really cramped and ruined the view.

So they moved us to another table out from under the cells, but then they started to set up the ring somewhere else, and I was like “I thought I had front-row seats”, and they explained that front-row patrons were actually specifically selected for telegenicity, but then I made the cut, it was just me and a bunch of old guys from, like, some south(/)east-European social club circa 1982, flat caps and checked blazers and skinny, smelly cigars.

Anyway this dream was about him because the whole time I was moving around I’d been bringing along a book that was actually his blog in trade paperback form, the cover in the tricolor of the Cascadian “Doug Flag”.