I thought of a game called something like "Fantasy Adventure '92." The "'92" was in a green circle. Now I wanted to build this game. It would run on 90s hardware and use 90s tech, like x86 assembly and mode 13h. But of course I could use 'modern' programming techniques to build it. Which I guess means version control and unit testing and probably some code generation.

I was on a bus driving along some tree-lined neighborhood road (it kind of felt like we were driving south on Saybrook) at night and everyone was listening to the radio. They were talking about a supernova that should be visible tonight. One guy was sitting at a computer terminal on a desk built into the side of the bus just behind where I was sitting, his face glowing from the light of the screen. He was also monitoring the star. The supernova was increasing in brightness by the minute, and soon we could see it through the sunroof, in a spot where previously no star had been visible.

It kept getting brighter, and I wondered if we were going to get all sorts of harmful radiation from it. And then it was no longer just a point in the sky, but a slightly blobby-shaped thing, maybe 1⁄6 of a degree across, gray in the middle but with a bright highlight. And it kept getting bigger until it was a circle larger than the sun or moon, at which point I was getting very worried that it would swallow us up. At this point we had gotten off the bus and were slowly walking on a road ahead of and perpendicular to where the bus had been. I hugged my mom, who was next to me.

But when the supernova had reached a size of several sun diameters it stopped growing, and didn't swallow up the earth or suck us in. It was just this huge gray ball in the sky with a bright halo.

Some months later there were missions to go visit the thing. This was possible because its gravity well somewhat cancelled out that of the Earth and Sun (I visualized this as a plateau that extended from low Earth orbit out to the thing), making it relatively easy to get to with rockets. I was standing on a basketball court (or some paved area smaller than a parking lot; maybe it was the same place we'd stood after getting off the bus) eating pink marshmallows. The captain of a ship that was going to head out in a few days came by and saw the marshmallows and said "We could use some of those to soak it up!"

I didn't think it was reasonable, but I gave him some marshmallows. And they went on their mission and threw some marshmallows in.

Later I was out on the court, again with my marshmallows. The star thing looked at me, which was startling. It smiled and said "Got any more of those?"

I was very nervous and didn't want to do anything that might upset the trillion-solar-mass (probably an underestimate) celestial object that was magically parked just outside Earth's orbit. So I just kind of nodded and held out my hand. It reached down with a tentacle-like arm and grabbed some marshmallows which seemed to make it very happy.

Then the tentacle became a vaguely humanoid figure that walked around looking for more marshmallows. It found the bag that I'd been eating out of.

Another day after asking me if it could come down for a visit, it came down looking like one of those fertility godess statues (but keeping Star Thing's gray-surface-with-glowing-outline aesthetic). Kids liked to try to pick up its butt cheeks and be like "they're so heavy! teeheee!"

Another time I was standing around on that basketball court with some friends. Star Thing was in the sky and had gotten the idea that maybe it should set. This was after it had been hovering in the same spot in the sky for months, so that it was never dark.

"Should I set now?" it asked.

"Yes, please." said someone standing near me, maybe Sara.

"Where should I go?"

"Down."

"Like this?" the star asked, sinking down so that the top was just peeking over the horizon.

"Yeah, star, that's great."

Sure enough, it was like dusk now. Now we were standing on the road across from my parents' house. We yelled at a couple of black people driving by in their car to turn their headlights on, since nobody was in the habit of turning them on anymore. They yelled something back at us, but also turned on their headlights.

Presumably Star Thing was just lighting up a different part of the world, now. Which raised the question in my mind of how could the thing hover in one place in the sky as the Earth turned if it was so far away? But I had given up trying to make any sense of this a while ago, so whatever.

Timmy and May were part of the group that I was with, and we started walking south on Reetz, mostly just to go for a walk, since we hadn't gotten to experience darkness in so long, and it was kind of nice out. We stopped into some shop where they knew the guy behind the counter. He was some skinny white dude that looked like someone Timmy would know from Georgia. Someone wrote (or had written) a "(D)" on the whiteboard behind the guy, "D" standing for "Democrats", along with some other stuff in a list. I was like "fuck that the Democrats suck", and the guy was like okay fine and changed it to "(I)", for "Independent", which I guessed was a little better.

Later we were at the intersection of Monroe and Regent, waiting for the walk light to cross Regent. There was a halfrican-american guy standing on Monroe St who had a narrow but high-velocity stream of blood shooting out of his leg or foot, and a similar stream of very watery snot shooting from his nose.

"Have the snot stream hit the blood stream!" someone suggested. So he did, and then it kind of looked like he was peeing on his foot and the pee was bouncing off, except the pee was blood and snot.

But he'd about had enough of this profuse bleeding + runny nose. So when Star Thing offered to fix him up, he agreed to it. And he was healed, but also ended up with a blue alien shell attached to him that made him super strong. Then he and the star were sitting in the restaurant on the southeast corner of the intersection. They were in the west corner by the Monroe St window, the guy sitting with his back to the wall, and Star Thing standing at the edge of the table (presumably in a humanoid form), asking how he was doing. The guy pretended to be grumpy about the blue shell/suit, but then he smiled bigly (there was an opening in the shell for his human face), because actually he was very happy with it.

Then they left the restaurant, which required walking around a "U"-shaped counter in the center of the room. A couple of friends had been playing a board game on a table along the north wall/windows, and they got up to leave also. The dude said goodbye and got up and left. His friend was a girl with a jacket who was also me. I tripped on the table leg while getting up, and then I was having trouble finding the exit. And I ought to put this game away.