impending autumnal anxiety

Last Sunday morning I dreamed that my friend Jen and I had a baby. It was gestated in a water cooler like thing:

When the time came I somehow knew that I needed to disconnect the black vacuum cleaner hose that lead down to a drain in the floor:

And out spewed a damp lump of cloth and flesh. Yup...fully clothed, something like a well used doll that one would find in the Goodwill reject bin.

Like any good new Father I sorta paniced. I grabbed the baby and turned it over. She -- one of those things you just know in dreamland -- started breathing frantically, her stomach distending and reddening with each gasp.

I rushed into Jen's office -- apparently Jen worked though the entire pregnancy and birth -- thrust the child into her arms and told her she needed to feed the baby. She was unimpressed.

I only add this to my permanent record because Jen insisted that I keep track of our relationship's ups and downs.

first person shootees

Video Game Proposal

I  discovered that "third person shooters" are a class of omnipotent view games where one gets to see those whom you kill from a global perspective. So I looked for "first person shootee" and found that it only exists as a typo on a sister blog here in the garble blogsphere or as score minus-one entry on  the Worst 100 Computer Games of All Time:

-1. Suicide! (Dutchco, 1999)

This first-person-shooter / first-person-shootee game never gained wide acceptance due to lack of repeat customers.

Therefore I propose First Person Shootee as the latest new thang:

You start out cowering behind a wall or other simulacra of shelter ("you" can be set to any avatar, e.g., small child, wandering goat, or comely female; and "shelter" can be selected from a popup menu visible for two seconds at the start of the game). If you remain cowering you have a small chance of being blown apart by an errant mortar shell or eventually starving to death. Should you choose to make a run for a seemingly safer shelter there is an increasing chance of being hit by sniper fire. The faster you run the more frequent the fire. Once you have achieved safer shelter, say a school or hospital, it will be deemed to be an enemy gun emplacement and targeted by larger weapons. The game ends with you. It is played in real time.

I'm sure you will all thank me for this. Sometime. Later.