geekent’s stuff’n things

I had a dream last night that went so far beyond absurd that when I woke up I was pretty frustrated about the whole thing.
Apparently I was in Japan - Tokyo to be precise - with some of my fellow GTA Bloggers (I don’t remember exactly who came with me but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was David, Jacqui, Carla, Rannie and Jeremy). There was a huge blogging convention going on and we were a day early.
The hotel was pretty ritzy - as I would imagine all hotels are pretty ritzy in Tokyo - and yet the lounge was a dull scene.. It wasn’t an ugly place, but we were all sitting at the bar, the rest of the place with its circular booths virtually empty. On a stage in front of a large bank of tinted windows (it was night so I’m not sure how I know they were tinted) was a pretty drab space-pop band backing up a lilting space-pop chanteuse. The whole thing was putting us to sleep, and the gin’n'vermuth wasn’t helping.
But then out of nowhere a trio of Japanese-beatnik-hipsters approached us and infected us with their enthusiasm.
“Hey, okay!” They moved and stood in a triangular formation, the leader had a bright white smile permanently etched onto his face. His companions, a male and a female, were both wide-eyed and grinning but exposing no teeth. “You guys are bloggers, right!”
“Yeah,” I said barely lifting my heavy head up from the bar, “how’d you know.”
“We can spot bloggers miles around. Canadian?”
“Right,” I responed, managing to sit upright finally.
“Aha,” he said, and he slapped his hands together. The lights around him seemed to be brighter than everywhere else.
“You want to come with us. We show you good time, Canadians.”
Everyone hopped off their stools except me. “Come see band. Good fun-time band, not boring stuff like this. Planet Smashers. Ska make you dance!” And behind him his two compatriots started kicking their feet skank-style.
“Planet Smashers? Here?” I perked up, and hopped off my stool. “Hey, ho, let’s go!”
And we went.
Along the way I was chatting with Jacqui (I think), asking her about Japanese money, because I had none so far, just our pretty Canadian bills. She explained to me that the Japanese had money similar to the Euro, only here they called it the “en” (the eeee en), and roughly converted one Canadian dollar was worth a 10en bit.
Don’t even say it, as I know quite well this is incorrect.
We arrived outside the club, which was actually inside a shopping mall. Everything inside was closed except for this one area with blaring music and a giant blue curtain in front of it. All the other stores had big grey slab walls erected in front for nighttime security (don’t ask me how that works ’cause I don’t know). Everyone went to the curtain, where a big burly but not quite sumo-sized bouncer stood at the entrance. He didn’t ask for id, he simply pulled the curtain back slightly and tapped everyone on the back as they went in.
I hung back noticing the ginormous bank machine on a nearby wall.
The thing was a grey tank, and had two terminals to service people… however I couldn’t read any of the signage as it was all in Japanese, which I not only can’t read but can’t even begin to comprehend, so feeble is my brain.
There was a very go-go-space-girl already at the one terminal, and I tried to observe her in action at the machine to see how it worked. She was just finishing up her transaction, pulling a large black card out from one slot in the terminal and putting it into another slot. She retreived her stack of oddly shaped bills (about 2/3 the size of our money) and pulled out her card. She saw me watching her as she packed up her shiny silver purse, and she looked scared. I smiled politely but the white stranger was perhaps even more menacing with a toothy smirk. She clomped away in her white vinyl platform knee-high laceup boots, while I was left examining this machine that only seemed slighlty less complicated than a console on the Enterprise.
My first step was to put in my bank card, thankfully the screen also was displaying in English… but its instructions past “insert stripup” were nonexistant. After my card and pin number were accepted, a long card, like the black one I saw the girl move around minutes ago, ejected from the machine. It was about 10 inches long and the width of a credit card… it had all these holes in it, as well as silver foil on it, and a bunch of tiny tiny switches. The silver foil was like that you would find covering a tray of Claratin or Dentine Ice, you would have to punch through it to get your pill/gum and in this case, there were all these obvious spots for you to punch through, as beside each of these spots were a number 100en, 200en doubling itself all the way to k96en (which I guessed was 9600en). I punched the 200 en and noticed all the little switches, which had Japanese characters beside them. Perhaps this was account information? I randomly pushed some of them, and they clicked when moved from 0 to 1 or vice versa. There was a slot on the machine that had a little flashing light so I supposed that’s where I was supposed to stick this horrendously long punch card.
It made some clicky-whirry-old-fahioned-processing sounds (like the grind of a dot-matrix printer) and then something flashed on screen. “PRESS YOUR OPTION” it said… although I had no idea of what option it meant. I looked around… there were buttons, dials, slots, switches, lights and the like everywhere. I randomly hit something, and the machine went ballistic with noises sounding like an electronic jackpot machine that just cashed out.
From above me a microphone fell down, and I became very confused. On the screen was a Street Fighter meets Bad Dudes style side scrolling fighting game. My head was about to explode but I figured I should play… but there were no joystics, and the microphone had little lights on it that flashed every time someone hit my avatar.
I said “Ach” into the microphone and my character hunched over throwing his arms in front of his face. I said “hit”, “punch”, “left”, “right”, “kick”, “punch”, “kick” until 8 seconds later my character was on the ground “dead” because it didn’t respond to anything I said.
Another short-skirted, ponytailed girl walked by. She stepped a little closer to me and the machine to see what was going on, got a look, giggled (her hand covering her mouth) and kept walking.
Oi.
A black card, like the one I had seen before, ejected out of a slot. Up close it actually looked like those Florida voting cards I’d seen on the news with all these punches taken out of it and a few “hanging chads”.
I put it into the slot like the girl did before me, and nothing happened, except my bank card was spat out. A few tuchscreen options then appeared on the monitor, nothing English though. The backdrop image was something akin to the baby in the sun looking over the fjord like on Teletubbies, only less childish but still ungodly bright. I touched one section and a whole new set of selectors appeared. I pressed another random selection and the whole screen went blank.
An exact duplicate of my bank card shot out of another slot, only this card had gold foil lettering on it, but it was still a TD green card.
It seemed like I’d been at this machine for hours at this point, when the guy who rescued us from the louge appeared behind me. I knew he was there because things were brighter all of a sudden.
He noticed my confused look and at the blank screen on the machine and laughed heartily. He said “Give me card,” with his palm up.
I gave him the new gold lettered card the machine gave me. He wiped the back of it on his pants and stuck it in a slot I didn’t even see. The screen went blue and he moved with the quickness as other cartridges needed to be moved from one place to another. It took him less than 10 seconds before he was handing me my money, and his last step was to put the gold lettered duplicate in a slot that essentially ate it and made a horrid grinding noise.
I was curious about the whole procedure but also extremely frustrated. I was going to ask my new saviour what the deal with the machine was, to get an explanation but, well, then I woke up… the vivid memory of defeat branded to my brain.
And I was looking forward to seeing the Planet Smashers in concert again.