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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Now is just tormenting me. Last night I dreamed I was riding the viarail train from Ottawa to Toronto, and Jenny Nicholson (the YouTuber) happened to be sitting next to me. We struck up a conversation, largely about goats. Turns out Jenny Nicholson is an endless fount of goat facts. I remarked on how much of a coincidence it was that a YouTuber I subscribe too was sitting next to me on the train. She laughed and said "Wouldn't it be funny if you were dreaming? Oooooh! Creeeepy!" I laughed along, and woke up shortly thereafter. No, I was not lucid dreaming at any point. Sigh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Last night was a deeply, deeply frustrating that was both annoying and difficult to describe. So you know that feeling you sometimes have in dreams, where you can suddenly float or fly by twitching the right muscle? Well, I had that, but for thunderstorms! I discovered that if I hold my face in just the right way, I can make a thunderstorm whenever I want! So I was happily walking around my house and bringing the thunder, when I had a thought: I wonder if this has something to do with tensing my jaw? Then I thought: if this was a dream, I'd be hearing the sound in my ears from tensing my jaw and that would be the thunder! I! Was! So! Close! To lucid dreaming! But then I got focused on moving my jaw and it woke me up.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
I've got multiple presentations to do for work today, and it looks like my personal life was bleeding into my a bit. I dreamed I was making a presentation on Zoom, complete with PowerPoint slides, about...wait for it...Why Hip Hop Hooray by Naughty by Nature is the best song ever written or recorded. Uh, what? No really, what? I don't like that song, I don't like that style of music...I don't even know the song all that well! Where the heck did my dream pull that from? Anyway, my slides included:
* The chorus was dictated from heaven by God
* it starts with clarinet noises
* it has gloriously and obviously fake record sound in the background
* it is a criminal felony not to be down with O.P.P.

No, really! What!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@TSchulte So I have a dream journal that I record the dreams I remember into as soon as I wake up. I use Just Press Record on my Apple Watch, actually. Then after working out, showering, etc, I come and edit my 5 AM ramblings into grammatical sentences that humans other than me could understand. While I would still remember the dreams otherwise, I get more detail this way.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Everyone but me will be glad to know that disturbing food are back! I was hanging out at the mall with my best friend Dave (we were both teenagers in the dream) and I bought myself a packet of gum. I popped a peace into my mouth, without realizing that this was a new product called living gum. It started to wriggle and crawl around my mouth! I spit it out onto my palm to show Dave, and it crawled around on my hand like a caterpillar. We both agreed, being teenaged boys, that this was really cool. I put it back in my mouth, and it wriggled around contentedly, making happy little flavor sprays every time I chewed it. Only now as I write this am I cringing. Eww! Why did my dream self think that was cool?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@sk76 Are you already aware of the free and open collections of charts and chart data at: tsort.info
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@Onj I dunno, that might be too exciting for people. I probably should have put a content warning on this post as it is.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Not every can be a winner. The only dream I remembered and recorded in my dream journal last night was about trying to upgrade Zoom on my work computer. But every time I tried to press enter, it acted as if I'd pressed escape instead! I bet all you fediverse tech experts know exactly how to solve this problem. Yup, that's right: I popped off the keycaps for escape and enter, and swapped them, jamming them in to fit. That fixed it. So I created a confluence page to document the problem and my solution. As I was doing that, my alarm went off, waking me up. Thank goodness; I don't think I could've taken any more pulse-pounding excitement! Imagine if the dream had continued, and I'd created a Jira issue or something? My heart couldn't have stood the pure adrenaline.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Also, as much as I hate to be the guy who makes everything about race, there's an important parable about white privilege here. We were a party of slightly buzzed and really hungry but well-meaning white dudes (the well-meaning ones are the worst kind!) who wandered into a space created by and for Chinese expats, yearning for the things we think of as Chinese food. Had I been less buzzed or less hungry, I could have made an argument that we shouldn't even be there. We ordered Molson Canadians all around, multiple things off the "Canadian" section of the menu, and one of us even had a stereotypical Canadian accent, eh? Yet, we felt welcome and like nobody was judging us. If a group of tipsy Chinese guys had wandered into a white space, hoping for...uh...beef wellington and Yorkshire pudding? I have no idea what other cultures think we eat...but I have a sneaking suspicion it might involve sweet and sour chicken balls with eggrolls and French fries. Anyway, would this party of hypothetical Chinese guys have been made as welcome in white spaces? Somehow, I doubt it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
You know your at a real Chinese restaurant when you’re the only person in the place who isn’t Chinese and sweet and sour chicken balls are listed on the menu in a section called Canadian food.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering Okay! Time for the answer. First, congrats to @tardis, and @jscholes for playing. While it is devastating, an accessibility cookie is not, in fact, the answer.
The world's first fedidreams award goes to @modulux, for getting the closest with his guess of "smothering". Note: fedidreams awards are completely virtual awards that aren't tracked by anyone and that nobody cares about. They can't be redeemed for anything. Enjoy your award!

And now, the answer. First, the bible passages you needed:
* "God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." -- Genesis 2:7. The man was Adam, and God's first act of creation on him was forming him from the dust, and his second action was breathing life into him. Thus, undoing the second action would be taking life away.
* "This is what the LORD says: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”" -- Jeremiah 31:15. Rachel was weeping because her children were dead.
* “A voice was heard in Ramah, Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, Refusing to be comforted, Because they are no more.” -- Matthew 2:18. Making it clear that the children were babies, IE the babies killed by Herod.

Second, the rest explained:
* It comes at night, IE while a baby is sleeping
* It leaves silence, because the baby is no longer breathing. Parents in North America often use baby monitors to hear that the baby is still breathing. Not hearing this would be devastating.

Thus, the answer is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). It kills babies suddenly in the night.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering @tardis @jscholes Other than the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Jeffersonian's, and the Morman's, they all use the same Bible. The Catholics also have a couple of extra books, but we're not dealing with those.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering @tardis @jscholes The exact words from the Bible aren't important here. Just knowing the references (what God's second work of creation on Adam was, and knowing why Rachel was weeping). Any language or translation will due.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering @modulux Even closer! But not quite.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering @modulux You're on the right track! Hint: what sometimes happens to children without warning at night, silencing them forever?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering @tardis @jscholes The passages you need are Genesis 2:7, Jeremiah 31:15, and Matthew 2:18.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering Also, chat GPT o1-preview solved the riddle on the first try, explaining the answer perfectly! So if you can't, it means is smarter than you! LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
triggering This could be triggering to certain people, but I can't really CW it without giving it away. Anyway, in the dream, I was either trying to create a new character in an online game, complete some kind of quest in a fantasy land, or join a dungeons and dragons group; it kept shifting. But what was clear was that to complete my somewhat mercurial objective, I had to defeat Gakleon The Riddle Master by solving his riddle. The was:
"When I come without warning in the night, I leave the silence of small devastation. I undo God's second work on Adam and make Rachel weep."
I had two guesses, and got both of them wrong. So Gakleon told me the correct answer, then announced that I was stupid to all of the other players, and everyone laughed at me. Then I woke up. Are you smarter than me? Can you defeat Gakleon The Riddle master, when I couldn't?
Some hints to make it easier for you, that I didn't get in the dream:
1. My incorrect guesses were "covid-19" and "the angel of death".
2. You'll need good knowledge of both the old and new testaments of the Christian Bible.
3. It was a riddle in a dream, so while the logic mostly holds, it doesn't quite work completely. Multiple correct answers are probably possible.

If nobody guesses it, or even wants to try (and I don't blame you), I'll post the answer in this thread tonight! My dream did give me an actual original riddle though, so I thought some of you might wanna take a crack at it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
nightmare, death, horror You know what? I think I want terrible food back! Last night was the kind of awful nightmare where I had to get out of bed for a couple of hours and read and listen to music, so I could shake it off and get back to bed. I'd rather not reflect on this one at all, honestly. I'm just doing it because of my stubborn commitment to my silly bit. In the dream I was on an airplane flight with my family, when the captain announced that there was engine trouble. Unfortunately, there was no way to land safely, and we were all going to die. My little sister started to cry, and I reached over to hold her. That's when I realized: I don't have a little sister! These people are not my family! And there was something...wrong...with all of them. My "parents" were hardly reacting at all. And my "sister's" crying was in an exact rhythm, like a metronome. But I knew that if I let on I knew, something horrible would happen. Something even worse than just death. So I held the thing that claimed to be my sister while the plane fell out of the sky and crashed into the ocean, realizing I was going to die and my real family would never know what happened. The plane slammed into the sea, and the cabin began to fill with water. The sister thing began to laugh, but it was just as mechanical as its crying had been. It held my head under water, and I drowned to the sound of "Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha." I woke up gasping for air, and got out of bed to read an audiobook for a while.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
This is a really good way not just to vote for the awards in , but to see the advancements that games have made this year: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjB4wwsYWUVgYx3IFc2NM91Kifw9cnYzJqnxNOS3WvSUeXbA/viewform?pli=1