Roy Tang

I rarely tell other people my dreams anymore because it feels kind of weird, but this one was too good to pass up. It involves pro streamers and the fighting game community.

So in the dream for some reason I found myself attending some sort of fighting game conference and ended up in a convo with a Guilty Gear pro streamer named “verythepast” about a recent patch that nerfed a particular character. The discussion was somewhere along the lines of “why would you practice a follow-up combo after an astral chain when the astral chain always kills the enemy?” (“Astral chain” here probably refers to an instant kill move that doesn’t actually exist with that name, as that name is a different game). I commented that since the recent patch, in some instances this particular character would be able to survive against such a move and you would need a followup to finish him off. I basically got called a scrub and verythepast said that was ridiculous and he sent me a link of a video showing him upgrading to the latest patch and peforming the “astral chain”.

I went home a bit humiliated and decided to review the video. But when I checked the video, I saw that he only upgraded to patch 7.x.10, when the latest version was patch 7.x.12. I was a bit miffed and spent some time trying to decide whether I should just let it go or call him out publicly or what. Then the next morning I woke up and found that he had tweeted and said he had tried it out and there was indeed a bug in the latest patch that could cause the character to survive the “astral chain” and he tagged me and a couple of other guys who had pointed it out and in effect apologized to me in public, so all’s well that ends well.

Dream ends and I wake up.

Now that I wrote it out that doesn’t seem much. (There was some other inconsequential stuff I don’t remember like going to the toilet during the conference and there was this one guy sitting on a suitcase blocking the doorway and everyone had to walk around him, etc), but I was amused because of a few things:

• the username my subconscious came up with: “verythepast” (a pun on “bury the past”). I had to double check when I woke up that Google showed no such streamer. Now I want to use this username somewhere!
• there was actually a detailed discussion of Guilty Gear game mechanics during the “conference”. Of course, most of it was probably inaccurate.
• The apology tweets by verythepast the next day were very detailed when I read them in the dream, enough for me to remember most of the text when I woke up (except verythepast tagged me as @roy instead of @roytang). It’s always nice when I’m able to read text inside a dream, because as anyone who has seen the Batman:TAS episode “Perchance to Dream” knows: you can’t read inside a dream!

I’ve always been amazed by the complex and sometimes convoluted plots that your subconscious can come up with for dreams. This one is relatively simple by comparison, but I still felt amazed at it when I woke up, enough to write this post immediately after! (Or perhaps the amazement is part of the dream??).