ive had weirder dreams. I think the best weirdest one was a reoccurring nightmare I used to have as kid. do yall wanna hear it
ok *cracks knuckles* here goes.
DREAM 1
when we first moved to my childhood home, the house was already kinda old. (it used to belong to my dad’s boss) the house already had a couple of furniture including some beds, dining set etc. Except for the bedroom, the rest aren’t really important so here’s a little sketch of a part of the house’s floor plan
we turned the smaller bedroom into a guest room and the bigger bedroom into a kids’ room so we moved the bed to storage and replaced it with a bunch of smaller beds.
Anyway, one of the first nights, I had a dream where I was standing in the bigger bedroom with a bunch of people in uniform. The big bed was back where it was but there’s a pool of blood in it. I overheard one of the cops mentioning something about a body not being found. Suddenly, I looked at the open door and saw the mirror in the guest room. In the reflection, there was a girl lying on the floor staring at me.
Since then, I was always afraid of the guest room.
I hated the house at first. I always thought it was haunted. There was also a giant tree in front of the house that was believed to be housed by spirits. (While playing there, I was told by some guy.. I think he was a gardener.. he saw my mom offer the tree some home cooked meal as a sort of peace offering but that’s a story for another time).
DREAM 2
For some reason, I was standing in the laundry room. I heard someone say “hey” and when I turned around, someone was hiding behind one of the clothes.
she continued to say “hey” as I started to approach her but then I woke up
The girl somehow started appearing in some of my dreams and every time she was playing a different role: a neighbor, a classmate, a friend, a stranger. She was older and had long black hair. She was always wearing white. At that time, I never even noticed how often she occurred in my dreams. I kinda just accepted it.
DREAM 3
The cops were back, walking around in my bedroom. The girl wasn’t there. I realized I was late for class so I ran outside. The street was littered with mutilated hands.
For some reason, I picked up one of the hands and tried to wash it with a gardening hose until it stopped bleeding. I don’t remember the rest of the dream.
DREAM 4
Remember I mentioned there was a large old tree in front of our house? It more or less looked like this:
I used to be scared of it especially at night because it looked like a giant hand in the darkness. Behind it was a wall and on the other side of the wall was a river. I always wondered what the river looked like but I never found until I was in high school and I was finally tall enough to see the other side (while standing on a chair).
Anyway, it was summer vacation and I had a dream where I was in my room. The girl was outside standing on the roof peeking through my window and was calling me to come outside. We went to the tree and I noticed the tree now looked like it was split in half. There was no wall but just a vast expanse of water as far as the eye can see.
I still remember it vividly. It was one of the best dreams I had.
DREAM 5
I had a dream where the river overflowed and flooded the whole neighborhood. I thought my parents were somewhere in the neighborhood basket ball court so I swam there but when I reached the area, there was nobody there. The creepy thing was that the whole time, I was being followed around by some guy I didn’t know.
DREAM 6
Near our house was an old factory. I used to hang out there with my other friends until our parents forbade us cause it was dangerous (obviously). One night, I dreamed I was walking by the factory and I heard someone call me from way above on the factory rooftop. She was sitting there by a really long ladder and urged me to climb on top.
When I reached the roof, suddenly there was just a land of rooftops that stretched towards the horizon. I followed her into a rooftop window which lead to the inside of the factory. Inside were just some machinery and a pier leading to the ocean in my last dream. There was a large chain (the ones you see on large ships) attached to the pier leading to something that looks like another factory in the horizon. She mentioned something about going there by walking on the chain but then I woke up.
Although she still reappeared in a lot of my dreams, I don’t really remember them as much as I vividly remember these ones. The last vivid dream I’ve had of her, we were classmates. She told me to be careful.
DREAM 7
this wasn’t really much of a dream but more like a dream where you’re awake?? I’m not sure what you call it. I was just under the sheets and I heard her whispering close to my ear that my mom is heading to my room and that I should get up soon.
Soon after, my mom opened the door and told me to get ready for school. I don’t remember how or at which point I woke up.
DREAM 8
I was walking home from school when I saw the man who was following me in another dream just standing there on the side. He was holding a knife.
I avoided his stare and quickly walked past him. I noticed he was starting to follow me so I ran. Before I knew it, he caught me and there was a knife in my back. I woke up.
That was the last vivid dream I ever had involving the man.
Okay, so years and years after. My dad finally retired. We wanted to move to a new place in a better neighborhood that was nearer to the city. It was a long process which involved lots of packing. I didn’t realized we had so much stuff and we had to leave some of our things behind. Strangely enough, our fridge suddenly stopped working. After that, two of our air conditioners. Our tv, then the couch suddenly split in half. We ended up leaving them all. My mom, like a passing thought, said maybe the house spirit was finally retiring too and I looked at her like she was crazy. Then my brother said “oh thank god. I thought I was the only one who thought there was a ghost in here” It turned out, we were all aware that the house might have been haunted but nobody wanted to point it out.
On the day of the move, we all said goodbye to the house as well as the “house spirit”. I called out to the ceiling that the house spirit could move in together with us if they wanted.
A few months later, my brother and our dad went to the house to check up on it. He said he overheard one of my dad’s friends mention that nobody wanted to come near it. It just gave off that weird feeling. Like someone was staring from out the window. The house is gonna be torn down soon.
The girl stopped appearing in my dreams since then.
Many of you are telling me that she was a ghost. I honestly can’t say. Maybe I just had a really powerful imagination as a kid. But if she really was, I hope she found a good boat that could bring her to that factory thing in the horizon that she was talking about. It would suck having to cross a big fat chain on foot.
End
@jammiehamato said “Honey I think that was a balete tree oh my god”
Balete trees look like this:
It looks pretty spot on for the tree OP drew above.
The internet seems convinced that these trees are supernatural in some way, with one website stating that “The Filipinos also have this belief that Balete trees are home to spirits and elementals. They serve as portals between their realm and ours and thus stories like this abound whenever there’s a Balete tree nearby.” I wonder if there is some meaning to the OP’s pleasant dream about standing in the hollowed centre of the tree?
This might also explain why the neighbour wanted to bring a meal to the tree to appease it.
Hypnotic Nature Palettes Showcase the Beauty of Nature Through Its Colored Candy Hues
Tumblr artist called Natural Palettes composes stunning compositions, which match “the beauty of nature through colors” to landscape shots. You can find her work in her Society6 shop.
Out of curiosity, how do my fellow DMs prepare their campaigns?
Do you open up a word doc at type out your story hook and make little bullet points from there?
Do you wing it completely?
What’s your notes system like?
I’m simply looking for new ways to plan for my d&d games!
The Over-Prepared GM
I can’t help myself. I love all the work that goes into prepping for a campaign, and I keep all of my crazy notes and papers, so today I’m gonna try and share with you my process for the latest DnD session I prepped for/ran!
Rough Notes
I always start by hand writing a full page or two of just random thoughts/story bits. I’m gonna give examples from the latest session I ran (BACKSTORY – this setting has frequent time travel moments and so every location I make also needs a past version and present version)
Writing Stonevale began with me rambling on about any vague ideas I had for the scene setting. I also find it’s useful to get the secrets and mysteries all clear and laid out straight away, and work backwards from them to slot in clues for players. “Stonevale Past” begins with me deciding that the ancestors of an important NPC live here – maybe the players never get far enough to discover that, but having the secrets and info at the heart of my process helps me keep things focussed, and it’s easy/fun to build walls around the secrets this way 🙂
I also generally get a feel for any creatures/NPCs that populate the area, and give them vague roles. And I try to note down key details/props/locations/events that will help the players navigate and investigate.
Session Summary
Now’s the time to check what happened last session just to make sure you know how the party characters will likely be feeling/acting at the start of the session, and to remind yourself of any items they picked up, or active statuses going on. Also a good moment to check what the party planned to do next, what their expectations could be and so on.
It’s hard to make myself fill this in at the end of every session, but the session summary page in this kit really helps me note down what’s most important.
Above are the images I used to inspire me, and below is the finished Stonevale map! It’s come out a bit rough/childlike but was definitely a fun way to explore more ways of making maps!
Later on, I realised I’d got too into making this and forgotten about some sort of depiction of the INSIDE of the manor… Since I didn’t have any time to make more maps by this point, I went to where I always go when I need a DnD map in a pinch – @2minutetabletop ! I picked up Castle Keep, which is free (like so many of his maps are!) and faffed with some colours and levels in photoshop until I was happy. Printed them out on A3 card and they were good to go! I can’t recommend this resource enough, it’s saved my GM butt a lot when I run out of time to make a map of my own!
Adding in Detail
So next I need to flesh out those vague ideas to make sure I’ve covered what’s likely to be important for the party. I love using the town builder here as it gives me a bit of mental breathing room and asks the questions for me. I find having questions ready means the answers come a lot easier than if I was trying to pluck this out of my head, if that makes sense?
It was at this point I realised I’d likely need a family tree, even just so I could keep track of the time travel/ancestral stuff. I roughed one out, then made a slightly bigger, still very rough, version that I thought might be a handy clue for players. If they make it inside the castle, they’ll notice a framed family tree on the wall, and this will be it!
NPCS
Our story involved one of the players having worked at Stonevale before the adventure, so I made a staff list for that player’s reference. This way they had some basic information on their old co-workers and the residents of the manor. I also filled in an NPC list from the people & society kit to make sure I had enough NPCs to generate about the property.
Then I used the map to mark some likely locations of the important NPCs. I made sure to spread them out so that no matter how the party approached the grounds, they’d likely hit a plot hook somehow.
Quest Hooks
Time to shove as many clues as possible in here! My experience has been that players need a lot more help picking up clues and reaching conclusions than you expect (myself included!) so I make a point of writing a bunch of quest hooks to inspire both the players and myself during play. I use the quest hooks page from the session kit to note down basically little story bites and clues that I can drop in as and when I need to. It’s a useful sheet to glance at real quick during the game!
Loot
Gotta make sure there’s some loot somewhere! There’s always at least one player who ransacks every location they visit 🙂 I hadn’t set up Stonevale to be a particularly loot-filled place but knew the manor in the centre could do with holding some of the resident’s belongings that could be steal-able. Again, I realised this quite late in my planning, and so dashed off to the @rpgtoonsPatreon to grab all the free item cards I could find! Then I picked out which ones could be appropriate for certain family members and residents, and stashed ‘em in the pile ready to hand out.
Ambience
This is one of the last things I come to, as it’s fairly easy to set up, but so important if you want your players to be focussed and engaged. Every time I use music or scents its palpable how much more invested in events players are. For ambient backgrounds, youtube is a gold mine. I like to have two playing simultaneously – one for music and one for background noise. For example:
As for scents, I use these a little more sparingly, but @cantripcandles does some exceptionally convincing aromas that really work for setting the mood, and taking your prep that lil extra step. My favourite is Goldwheat Bakery – the only way to get a more accurate smell would be to visit a bakery!
Finishing Up
At this point I’m almost good to go. I take one last look over everything I’ve prepped to see if there are any gaping plot holes or parts I’ve missed. For this particular session, it occurred to me there could be an opportunity for eavesdropping on an important conversation, so I wrote out a one page script for what the players might overhear should they choose to snoop.
Play!
I guess you wanna know how the session went down after all this prep? Did the players enjoy it, did they find what I’d laid out for them?
OF COURSE NOT! They made their very best effort to skirt the entire property, clinging to the edges of the map and hiding any time an NPC interaction looked likely. Predictably, I didn’t anticipate that they would attempt to avoid everything, but the Quest Hooks page kept things flexible. That, and the fact that one player’s rat companion decided to jump down a hole and became “irretrievable until further notice”…. ahem.
Hope you find this useful, I’ve tried to link to as many resources as possible because there are just so many good ones out there right now! Thanks to all DnD creators! I think it’s really cool everyone’s helping each others’ games become even more fun to play! 🙂
Never forget to bring this up when someone tries to defend IGNs credibility.
They scored a literal dumpster fire higher then the MLP movie.
The mlp movie isn’t some brilliant work of art, but it’s a fundamentally competent production. The emoji movie is nothing. This is outrageous.
MLP is a feel-good movie.
It’s the sort of thing you watch and get a warm and fuzzy nostalgic high off how much it pays tribute 80s and 90s animation where the roots of MLP are.
Not ground breaking but a solid 8/10 at the least and a blast to sit down and enjoy, especially with the high-quality animation and music.
It was also one of our last bastions of hope regarding 2D animated mainstream movies. It was fucking *gorgeous* with that animation and movement.
What did The Emoji Movie offer us? Nothing. Nothing original, insightful, or even visually interesting.
THIS
The movie was gorgeous and will forever respect it had the balls to use more traditional style 2D animation at a time when full CGI still rules big-budget animation.
Pinkie’s cuteness alone makes me want to finally see it.
They did a beautiful bringing out her character with expressions that are somehow both over-the-top and cute at the same time
Personally Tempest Shadow’s performance/animation just sold this movie for me.
I was told that the models for this movies had a RIDICULOUS amount of frames for each turn around. Rather than just sliding the features around on the face to give the illusion of 3 dimentions the characters had individual face shapes to flow between to make the turns SUPER smooth on every angle.
Having seen the movie I believe this 100%. Was it overkill? Possibly, but damn it looked GOOD.
It’s funny. I remember Lauren Faust one time commenting about how media targeted specifically for women or young girls are criticized more harshly than those made for boys. And here we are.
Also of note, it’s unknown officially what the exact budget for the film was but it’s said to be around 8 to 30 million dollars, the usual minimum budget for a theatrical animated feature these days is around 50 million to 65 million dollars. The fact that they managed to make the movie look this good on such a small budget is an amazing accomplishment (also the animators worked overtime through 7 day weeks towards the end of production to get the film finished on time).
There’s also the fact that while the film does include celebrities voicing the newer characters, the main cast from the show have all their original voice actresses/actors from the TV series, something that is extremely rare for big screen cartoon adaptations as they usually just recast the main characters.
I know everyone is entitled to their opinion and that this film isn’t perfect, but come on! It at least deserves more respect than The Emoji Movie!
Fun fact- half of the bad reviews claimed it was too girly
Annemunition, a variety streamer who plays games like Rainbow Six, PUBG, God of War, and Overwatch, was playing Rainbow Six in her off time last week, away from the sometimes pressurized environment of her Twitch channel. The people she was playing with had no idea who she was, but they knew she was a woman, and that’s all they needed to know. Over the course of several rounds, they laid into her with a series of increasingly vile insults, calling her everything from “gamer girl” to “tranny bitch.” She continued to play like normal, dying in some rounds and clutching others for her team. When she did well, one guy said she stole his kill. When she did poorly, they used that to justify their attacks. “We’re not being like this because we don’t like women,” said one of the men. “We’re being like this because you’re shit, by the way.”
“Are you playing the right video game, miss?” the same man said later. “This isn’t like League Of Legends where you can just flash your titties on stream. It takes skill.”
“I hope you die,” another man said immediately afterward.
Annemunition kept her cool and finished the game. Then she decided to make an example of the people involved. She posted a video of the incident to her Twitter.
“‘Why don’t you use voice chat?’ ‘Why can’t I find a girlfriend who plays video games?’ ‘Why do you mute people who ask you if you’re a girl?’ Gee, I dunno,” she wrote.
The response was huge. As of now, the video has over half a million views and nearly 2,000 comments, some of which share similar online horror stories. Annemunition told Kotaku in an email that she posted the video to make a point. This is hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened to her, she said, and if it’d been during a stream, she would’ve just muted them. Since she was on her own, though, she decided to see how the situation would play out if she did nothing except make useful comments and help her team.
“As you saw in the video, that’s all it took for them to devolve into toxicity,” she said. “While I understand everyone, of all genders and backgrounds, can often be the subject of toxicity online, I really feel like people underestimate just how bad it can be for women or people who are recognized as ‘other’ over voice comms.”
She added that streamers often feel a pressure to just roll with the punches when it comes to verbal harassment or other serious issues, but she worries about the kind of example that sets.
“I feel like there are a lot of expectations for streamers not to complain about anything ever and that we should just be positive and ‘good vibes’ only,” she said. “When these types of things happen, I just think about all the young people (boys and girls) who experience this type of abuse online and don’t have the tools to stand up for themselves other than to mute people and pretend everything is fine.”
After Annemunition posted the video, one of the players who’d given her gallons of shit tried to apologize. In a sense. “I am extremely sorry for the way you feel, ” he wrote in a tweet from an account that’s since been deleted. “[K]now that the words I used were meaningless and have no substance.”Annemunition, a popular Twitch streamer with over 300,000 followers, was just trying to be a decent teammate and call shots in Rainbow Six Siege. Then, over voice chat, came the questions: “Are you a man or a female?” And the accusations: “You stole my fucking content. You’re shit at the game. Get out.”
“I appreciate that you want to apologize,” Annemunition wrote back. “But man, you went HARD just because you heard a woman’s voice… You called me a ‘fucking tranny bitch’ and told me to kill myself. Over nothing. All I did was exist.” However, she went on to write that she sincerely hopes the guy learns from this and wants to better himself.
“I don’t necessarily want to crucify people when I feel like there’s the potential for them to walk away from the situation thinking ‘Wow, I messed up. I said something really awful and it came back to bite me. I won’t do that again,’” she told Kotaku, explaining why she chose to respond so kindly to an apology that was dodgy at best. “I wanted him to understand the gravity of his actions and the fact that words can be hurtful and that your actions have consequences.”
In online games, she continued, people can tell others to kill themselves and face no real repercussions—or at least, not the sort of repercussions that’d convince them to cork it for more than a handful of matches. Meanwhile, the people being harassed are encouraged—both by their peers and the way many games’ reporting systems work—to just shrug it off in the moment, no matter how much it’s worming under their skin and writhing around.
“Gamers have learned that they can do these things without blowback because the solution so many people suggest is just to mute them and move on,” Annemunition said.
That’s why she decided to post the video, risking even more harassment from eager-to-pounce internet mobs in the process. If nobody creates consequences for this sort of thing that are immediate and consistent, yet also impactful in a way that’ll encourage them to learn rather than doubling down, nothing will change.
“I’m just sick of sweeping this behavior under the rug and pretending it’s all fine and dandy,” she said. “It’s easy to sweep things under the rug; it’s hard to ask people to be better. Especially when so many people are just resigned to accepting the fact that online gaming and toxicity go hand-in-hand.”
“Maybe that makes me a naive fool,” she added, “but I refuse to accept that we can’t treat each other with a little more kindness.”
So I had the strangest dream this weekend and nobody understands me so I need to share it with you because you might. Press J to skip this post if you can’t deal, I will accept this.
In my dream I was standing on the back deck of a rural cabin that overlooked a beautiful Vermont/Scottish Highlands landscape of unspoiled wilderness. It was a crisp, perfect autumn morning. I held a cup of cooling coffee in my hands as I leaned against the railing and scanned the perfect rolling hills in the midground, behind which the great patterned mountains with their snowcaps marched on until they blended with the horizon: #aesthetic
As I gazed at a distant meadow clearing in the trees, a pair of brightly coloured humanoid creatures emerged from the woods and began to dance for each other. It was an esoteric, beautiful mating dance, a strange combination of instinct and choreography. I felt awe washing over me. I marvelled. I felt a deep sense of wonder and peace as I observed this vanishingly rare encounter that I had never thought to observe in person. These animals were instantly recognisable but had never been studied in the wild. I felt incredibly humbled and privileged to witness this behaviour – I knew that I was the first human witness to observe this behaviour – and I reached for my phone, wondering if I should film it, so it could join the scholarly record, where it NEEDED to be. This could change everything. But then I held back – something told me “no,” to let the creatures have their privacy.
Ok, I can’t go any further without telling you that they were Teletubbies.
A red one and a yellow one. I know. I know. Stay with me here.
The cryptids melted back into the woods. My subconscious drew a discreet veil over the rest of their mating ritual, but I knew instinctively that this had been a dance of courtship. I was busy pondering the implications, because they were critical. You see, although the creatures were instantly recognisable as Teletubbies, as I had studied them, even at a distance, I had an incredible realisation.
They were adult Teletubbies.
This realisation dawned on me and in my dream I understood it fully. The ones that we know of – the captive ones that we have seen on television – are juveniles. In fact, they are the equivalent of toddlers. When you see the adults this becomes obvious. The garbled speech and silly movements of the four captive Teletubbies we know are the babbles of babyhood, a private primal toddler-language brewed up between sentient beings who have never encountered an adult of their own kind.
The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.
In my dream my feelings of awe and peace turned to great sadness at the fate of the captive toddler Teletubbies. I realised that I had to be the scientist who brought this discovery to the world and raised awareness of their plight. And I also questioned: are Teletubbies like axolotls? Do they exhibit neoteny? (Axolotls, the cute aquarium pets with flaring gills, are actually juveniles of an amphibious species – if given the right conditions they’ll grow up into land-dwelling black newts. But they can breed in their aquatic juvenile form, and most spend their whole lives in this form. Deprived of their wild potential, will the Teletubbies ever mature? Or are they merely experiencing a long childhood, natural for a species that is unimaginably long-lived?)
So in my dream my husband came out onto the back deck and I began to share these discoveries with him and before I could even bring up the axolotls he just said “what the fucking fuck” and went away again.
I woke up disgruntled and unable to capture the feeling of peace and sadness. I then tried to explain this to my husband in the waking world, and he said “what the fucking fuck” and walked away before I even got to the explanation of the Teletubbies being toddlers, which just goes to show that you never know someone as well as you think you do.
Anyway I’m sure you guys will join me in this knowledge. And also I’ve googled it and apparently the Teletubbies reboot features infant Teletubbies, so clearly they are getting more from somewhere and the time to question this is NOW
I have a personal theory that how a dream makes you feel is more meaningful than the content.
What I got from your dream was a sense of wonder and privilege (the good kind), followed by the need to bear witness and advocate for the cryptids. Topped off with a disturbingly accurate example of the attitudes you’d face.
(staring nobly into the distance) yes. yes, you understand. you understand.
I’m so sorry but this is what came to mind and so this is what I drew
Holy
Thank you so much for sharing that dream, it was EXACTLY what I needed to stop feeling like shit. Now I, too, am honored by the knowledge of adult teletubbies.
Here’s my take on this lovely cryptid.
WHOA I’m sorry I missed this. this is magnificent. the feet and hands are really spooky. it definitely fills me with the Fear.
Izzie’s tumblr archive 