It could have been such a great dream...



  • A few nights ago, I had a dream. This in itself is noteworthy; I'm one of those people who rarely remembers dreaming at all, let alone what a dream might have been about. But this one was... particularly peculiar.

    I was traveling somewhere, I think, and had arranged to stay with a distant acquaintance, or friend of a friend of a friend, or some such. I entered the spare room and tossed my duffel bag down on the floor. It was apparent that it wasn't meant as a spare bedroom. Indeed, while there was ample room for a bed, half the room had been converted into an office, with several file cabinets and a large desk stacked with binders and file folders taking up the far wall. Although I half wondered whether I had been shown to the wrong room, I didn't really think long about it. The carpet was a soft medium pile and quite clean, and I could use my duffel as a pillow, so it would do comfortably enough for one night. I glanced disinterestedly across the desk and noticed something that left me less disinterested.

    The monitor had been left on, with a browser window left open, showing a porn site. Not only that, it was in a members only section. This was somewhat awkward, as the person whose room I was staying in was not someone whom I knew well. On the other hand, well, I had free porn in my room. Then I glanced over the desk, and noticed something else. All those binders and folders stacked everywhere? Portfolios of models, apparently prospective, um, contractors. The person whose room I was staying in was operating a porn site out of their house. This was potentially very awkward, so I took a moment to review my options. Perhaps the most obvious thing to do would be to point out that there was no bed in the room, and to inquire whether they'd meant for me to stay in a different room. In classic dream logic, however, I decided the best course of action was to pretend as though I'd never even noticed the desk or its contents; after all, that would do well enough for a single night. But it wasn't bedtime yet, and there was free porn... it was time for a closer look. I realized immediately that something was amiss.

    It wasn't the mouse, that was moving around just fine. It wasn't the browser either, hovering the mouse over various things reacted as one would expect. Yet nothing worked at all: no Flash videos running, no popups popping up, no link activation, not even the link to the site's landing page worked. With the intuitive certainty that only a dream can provide, I diagnosed the problem. The page I was looking at was in a members only section of the site, and the session had expired. Somehow, this was interacting with the page's Javascript in such a way that prevented the page from reacting to mouse gestures. I sat back, annoyed. Not because I was missing out on free porn, mind you. No, I was annoyed that in 2012, we still have incompetent webmasters using such wtf-y site templates that this sort of thing can even still come into existence. On a porn site, no less, where their income depends on hooking potential customers with excessive popups and teaser videos. (Erm, so I've been told *ahem*.) I became so engrossed with trying to uncover the nature of the error that I completely forgot my earlier intent to pretend that I had never noticed the desk, and was quite startled when I heard someone keying the lock. It took me only seconds to realize that it was only my neighbor across the hall coming home, but by then I was of course wide awake.

    Two hours of sleep is not enough to get me through I day. I think I need to stop reading TDWTF before bedtime.



  • I wonder if all the links were intercepted into AJAX calls, but the GETs were failing with 403 or similar and the page had bad error handling.

    I once wrote a site with a similar problem, but it was easily fixed.

    Did you try opening a link in a new tab? That would cause a normal fetch for which the browser could then properly alert the user.



  • @Xyro said:

    I wonder if all the links were intercepted into AJAX calls, but the GETs were failing with 403 or similar and the page had bad error handling.

    I once wrote a site with a similar problem, but it was easily fixed.

    Did you try opening a link in a new tab? That would cause a normal fetch for which the browser could then properly alert the user.

     

    When I tried to open a link in a new tab, the room was suddenly filled with alligators singing showtunes.

     



  • Rutger Hauer stepped through a stargate and we had this political dicussion, in a room lined with shelves with all kinds of My Little Pony et al plushies. I wore a light-green baseball cap.

     

    It was enlightening.



  • @da Doctah said:

    Filed under: We're in a dream here--remember?

    If his subconscious can force his dreams to be that logical and coherent, there's no reason why debug analysis can't also be that way.

    I usually have dreams onto which I impose a realistic logic, even for which such analysis would prove fruitful.

    Like this one time when I dreamed I was back in high school and I found golden macaroni in my locker. But I knew that wasn't possible, so the gold transmuted into whole-wheat. I was pleased with that, because not only did it make more sense, but I could eat it as well. I figured that the initial identification of gold must have been an optical illusion due to the lighting and the oil already on the pasta.

    However, such imposition of realism tends to fail at my time-traveling dreams, which I experience frequently, almost weekly. I'm hoping that one of these nights, I'll be able to analyze the method of first-hand time travel with sufficient coherence to reproduce it while awake.



  • @Xyro said:

    @da Doctah said:
    Filed under: We're in a dream here--remember?
    If his subconscious can force his dreams to be that logical and coherent, there's no reason why debug analysis can't also be that way.

    I usually have dreams onto which I impose a realistic logic, even for which such analysis would prove fruitful.

    Like this one time when I dreamed I was back in high school and I found golden macaroni in my locker. But I knew that wasn't possible, so the gold transmuted into whole-wheat. I was pleased with that, because not only did it make more sense, but I could eat it as well. I figured that the initial identification of gold must have been an optical illusion due to the lighting and the oil already on the pasta.

    However, such imposition of realism tends to fail at my time-traveling dreams, which I experience frequently, almost weekly. I'm hoping that one of these nights, I'll be able to analyze the method of first-hand time travel with sufficient coherence to reproduce it while awake.

     

    I had a dream about a year or so ago in which I was invited to take part in an exotic-foods buffet that featured "crocodile udders" as one of the dishes.  They looked roughly like fuzzless kiwifruit, all green and ovoid.

    When I woke up, the first thought that went through my conscious mind was "probably should have been bladders, not udders".

    The second thought that went through my mind was "damn, that was a stupid dream".

     



  • See, this is why I love videogames. You guys may be debugging software in your sleep, but last night my team and I were fighting this huge alien queen/dragon monster. Of course I ran out of ammo (every single godamm time) and had to assemble a grenade launcher out of little plastic parts like those crappy little toys you get in chocolate eggs. The stupid thing only had two grenades and only one actually hit the target. Then we lost because we ran out of time or something.



  • @Xyro said:

    I wonder if all the links were intercepted into AJAX calls,

    Obviously,

    @Xyro said:

    but the GETs were failing with 403 or similar and the page had bad error handling.

    but unfortunately I never got that far in the analysis.

    @Xyro said:

    Did you try opening a link in a new tab? That would cause a normal fetch for which the browser could then properly alert the user.

    Of course not. I was trying to surreptitiously view someone else's porn collection, and didn't want to leave any evidence.



  • @da Doctah said:

    crocodile udders

    This makes me imagine some weird hybrid monster, that looks mostly like a Holstein cow, but with a crocodile's head and tail.



  • Much like RL, whenever I find myself alone in a dream, I immediately try to find a computer to surf pr0n.  I also tend to lack imagination.



  • @frits said:

    Much like RL, whenever I find myself alone in a dream, I immediately try to make pr0n.  I also tend to lack imagination.

    FTFY

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