Warning: I went back and fourth multiple times on if this #fedidreams should have a content warning for male chauvinism. It didn't feel that way in the dream, but it could absolutely be interpreted as obvious chauvinism on the part of my subconscious. It also contains mentions of heterosexual relationships, and objectification of women. Also, I don't know anything about the person mentioned, other than that they have a YouTube channel, sound female, and my dream borrowed their voice.
With that out of the way, last night I fell asleep with YouTube playing. Autoplay had somehow gotten me into the weirdly specific video genre of slightly adorkable women reminiscing about flash games they played as kids. That lead to me dreaming that I was attending FlashCon, the world's leading convention for fans of Macromedia flash! However, I was the only guy there. Random women kept approaching me and saying things like "Wow, you're a guy and your interested in flash!" and being the kind of vaguely flirty where you're not sure if they're intentionally flirting, or that's just how they are, or you're just misreading things. Anyway, then the YouTuber Dream Jelly (I think it was her video I fell asleep to) ran up to me, grabbed my arm, and was like "You have to attend my talk!" She dragged me into her session room, and sat me down in the front row. Then she proceeded to give a lengthy and detailed talk about her work on GFC, the GNU Flash Compiler. It was rather awkward, as for the entire talk, I was the only person in the room.
Don't worry, Fediverse; I know you folks, and I'm not going to leave out what few details I remember about GFC from the talk. Note that I know nothing about flash or compiler design, so I doubt any of this is even a thing. The talk started with an overview of the Flash Virtual Machine, FlashVM. Apparently this is the key part of the Macromedia Flash plugin that allowed cross-platform, cross-browser execution of flash. But Dream Jelly wanted to compile to native microcode, so she had to reverse engineer Flash VM, and write an opcode interpreter. As a bonus, that apparently allowed her to run all existing flash code natively. Then there was apparently something that I only noted in my dream journal as "a long boring section on binary hashtree optimization and string handling". Well, those are sure some words my subconscious knows! The talk ended with boasting about how GFC was a nine-pass compiler. Apparently, somehow that means it is the most efficient compiler written, and code written in ActionScript and compiled by GFC will always run faster than hand-written assembly, or assembly generated by any other compiler of any other programming language.
After that awkward morning, it was finally time for lunch. But before I could get food, someone cornered me to talk about MicroMedia, her operating system that was being written entirely in ActionScript with the GNU Flash Compiler. She asked me if I wanted to be a committer to the MicroMedia codebase. I agreed, mostly so I could leave the conversation and get something to eat. But she told me that the only way I could commit to her codebase was if I was her boyfriend. I was just kind of like, "Yeah, sure, that's fine, whatever. Email me." Then she hugged me and ran off, and I realized with horror that I was apparently dating some random woman I met at FlashCon and working on her pet project that I didn't care about.
Then, as usually happens in my long dreams, the fire alarm in the conference centre went off, but it was actually my alarm in real life, and I woke up.
What on earth was that, brain! All the weird awkwardness of an NSFW dream, but with absolutely no payoff, just obscure technical nonsense. I don't think I want to know what this dream says about me.
@fastfinge@interfree.ca