As expected, it’s Stargate in name only.

Guess I should get back to watching the rest of Atlantis — I’m yet to see 3.5 seasons, after all. Problem is, Atlantis was at its best in the first season, which successfully replicated the spirit of the original SG-1 (as opposed to the atrocity of seasons 9-10) on a whole new level. Then the show forgot it was set in an Ancient city full of mysteries, and became Stargate: Daedalus — and I practically had to force myself to watch it.

After quite a long delay in posting, with a multitude of various dreams (including one in which I was my WoW character), now that I’m back to work, I’m going to post dreams on a regular basis again.

In Friday’s dream, I visualized a scene from the yet-unposted chapter 6 of the fanfic “2008”.

Saturday’s dream was vaguely SF-themed. I made a bet with a well-known thief that I’ll be able to steal a certain set of documents from a government research facility (crossed with a university, and suspiciously resembling my old school, which often appears in my dreams) faster than him. To achieve this, I used a stealth generator first (I appeared translucent to myself whenever I used it), but it was unreliable and kept failing. Then I resorted to Geassing people to “ignore me”. Weirdly, whenever I used Geass, I placed my middle and index fingers above and below my left eye, like Sailor Moon’s V gesture. Eventually, an old professor told me the location of the documents out of his free will — they turned out to be completely unguarded, lying in a locker with a certain number.

I have a feeling that what I remember from my dreams usually occurs in the last half-hour of sleeping or so.

In today’s dream, I was watching Stargate Atlantis on my grandmother’s TV (another recurring element). At first it was the usual kind of episode, with the season 2-3 opening, then things got weird.

One of the episodes, ostensibly a season opener — and I even remember vague imagery from it — used a different opening with modified music, which had a green tint rather than the usual blue and involved, among other things, my grandmother’s dacha. Somehow, the action later jumped to my parents’ bedroom, where I watch Stargate episodes at times, and I found myself also reading a newspaper (and discussing it with someone). The newspaper had pictures of a fictional Russian politician and portrayed him in negative light. His name was given, but I don’t remember it — all I remember is that he looked roughly like Marrick from The Ark of Truth.

The episode also somewhat echoed an imaginary Transformers episode I saw in an earlier dream.

After the discussion, and while still watching the episode, I looked at my face in a mirror and discovered that my beard, which I shaved off last evening, already grew back to a ridiculous length, and I had to shave it again — while still standing in the bedroom — first with a trimmer and then with a razor.

Admittedly, my hair does grow back too fast for me to keep up. Everywhere.

First, I accidentally saw some Russian TV series (of the usual variety with boring camera shots and wooden acting) that used the opening music from Stargate Atlantis overlaid onto an original video sequence. Needless to say, I was enraged.

Later, I was wandering around the microdistrict looking for a place where I could buy the European WOTLK. (Because — and that’s a real life fact here — only the Russian version is present in retail stores. Mind you — now this is from the dream once again — I checked an Internet shop before, but its delivery time was listed as one to two weeks, and I was understandably unimpressed.) I found it in a fictional location that has already been present in one dream before that — in that one, it was the site of a WoW-ish battle between some dwarves and… a different clan of dwarves, I think, although I don’t remember.

In both dreams, that fictional building displaced the square with my former school and the nearby hospital and kindergarten. This may be another emerging stock location. Its distinctive feature is a white hallway with windows at one side and doors at the other, resembling the school and hospital from Evangelion, as well as the actual school that the building replaces.

In this particular dream, one of the rooms behind the doors was a medical-looking office, in which I bought a WOTLK box using my Visa Electron. Incidentally, along with it, I also took another card out of my pocket: the white keycard I use to open the door at work. They commented on that.

And once again, I found myself unwilling to wake up because it would mean losing the newly-acquired game. In all seriousness, this has to stop. Today I’ll go to the nearest academ.org office, buy a WebMoney card, and just buy the bloody key online. Screw the box, and screw Blizzard retailers.

Added: While I could find neither the means to buy WebMoney cards nor the means to transfer from a Visa to a WebMoney account, amazingly enough, Blizzard made it possible to upgrade the account online. At long last… Now I’m looking at the download screen instead of playing the game for the 3 hours remaining before I sleep because I can’t play the TBC client with a WOTLK account. “Thanks”, Blizzard.

Way too chaotic. I woke up three times, I think, and I hardly remember what happened between the awakenings. I don’t have a habit of getting up and reaching for the pen and notebook to write the keywords, although I do have them lying on my table specifically for that.

However, I remember that they were centered around Atlantis from Stargate Atlantis, which makes sense because I was reading episode summaries before I went to sleep. Also, in the dream, I mused how expensive the computer books I was interested in were, which also makes sense because I went to a bookstore on the way home yesterday and irritatedly noted the same thing.

Today, I had another Stargate dream. In it, I was Daniel, among the original SG-1 from seasons 1-5 and 7. We were going through the Forest That Leads Anywhere (we have one around where I live) to a metal building behind the Institute of Mathematics.

O’Neill has left for a few minutes for some reason. In his absence, I said something about him that Teal’c found amusing, and in response, he hit me in the chest and back at once in such a way that I flipped in the air fell on my back. It wasn’t really painful, and I realized that it was a friendly gesture of approval, just weird in a Jaffa way.

In addition, there was a brief moment of lucidity (nothing significant) when I “slipped out of character” for a moment and thought, “What, am I Daniel in a Stargate dream again? This is getting old.”

I think the reason for this is that he’s the Stargate character I identify the most with, and for good reasons.

I’ve started a dreams page, where I’ll start gradually summarizing what I know about my dreams and the patterns that occur in them.

The new blog software is gradually coming to life. I’ve got tags and RSS working, plus moved some articles to Textile and added redirects from their old URLs. I didn’t map WordPress categories to new tags because I didn’t see the point – it will be better for me to later tag every post manually, since I’ll add some new tags anyway.

Per-tag RSS redirects from the old address for the purposes of Planet Ubuntu, but global RSS doesn’t. Therefore, if you’re using RSS on this site, you should update your client to use the new URL as linked from the sidebar.

Two pages are also available at new addresses (with redirects from the old ones):

• The Expanded Otomeverse
• Time Travel in Stargate SG-1

The “Mai-Otome GEMs” article, originally saved from Wikipedia, is now available at this address on Wikia’s Mai-HiME Wiki.

To convert HTML (as used by WordPress) to Textile (as used by the new software), I use this Python script, originally downloaded from here and tweaked to read HTML from stdin and write Textile to stdout.

To determine what legacy URLs need to be mapped, I use the public inbound links page. What, you didn’t expect it to be public? Well, both the QDB and Sideways Spa contain one each as well, and admins can see your IPs. Be warned.

What needs to be done:

• Archive
• Tag cloud
• More articles