u/dry_in_chi

Anyone else have dreams where the theme is needing to pack up everything in your life and leave abruptly? For me it’s always my first college dorm. All of a sudden I need to be out yesterday, and I’m doing panic math in my head about how much is going to fit in boxes, and how many boxes are going to fit in my car. And I keep remembering things. As soon as I think everything is accounted for, there’s another drawer, or shelf, or underside of a bed. It’s always chaos and it’s almost always a dorm. Another common theme is an elevator that doesn’t go all the way down, so you have to carry stuff down the last few floors.

Hi all!

(https://mickswasko-type.github.io/you-r-here/)

A bit ago I posted asking if anyone would be interested in a more centralized repository/site that housed the original Mallworld maps/drawings/renderings etc. The tl;dr feedback was yes, but make sure it's not being used to sell something + make sure to link back/give credit for work.

Above is a link to an MVP -- purposely haven't populated it a lot because I wanted to get feedback/a general consensus from folks that it's OK for me to proceed trying to compile a proper archive. Now that I have the guts together, it wouldn't be too hard!

Please let me know what you think in the comments or as a DM!

Hey fans!

(Here’s a link to the Teenieping app/encyclopedia/quiz I built and am going to talk about! https://mickswasko-type.github.io/Teeniepings/)

I’ve got a whale of a request (dad joke). My daughter became a super fan earlier this year. I guess I did too. I went from calling it “the little feefee show” to knowing (mostly) the royal bloodlines and proper season classifications of the Teeniepings.

However, with each passing day leading up to Aug. 5, I’m getting more and more anxious. I know she’s going to want to be one of the first to see the Whale Heartstone movie. Does ANYONE have any ideas of a good way to go about this? I’m in the US and love a good challenge — please DM me with any tricks, secrets or ideas!

Anyway — I also thought I’d share a little site I put together for my daughter. Her chief complaint was that other Teenieping sites had too many ads. So I knocked together a little Catch! Compact of her own. I hope you enjoy too!!

Been on this sub from the start and my favorite thing is when folks share maps, landscapes, sketches, mockups, etc. that represent their dreams.

I’m using this post as a straw poll: would anyone mind if I took a crack at creating a kind of central repository/collection of these? I’d give proper credit obviously and I’m not using it to sell anything . Just a passion project. Thoughts?

Maybe what the Mallworld is is an astral void. It's where all the stray emotions—the brooding, lusting, searching, wandering aimlessly we all did in the malls of our childhoods—live. The memories, the footsteps. They're all there. And unlike any other space in our minds, the fabric upon which we dream or recall these spaces overlaps with everyone else's. And it creates kind of a labyrinth. A shifting place. The JCPenney anchor store of my childhood appears across from the food court of someone else's experiences. Our strongest attachments and memories in specific places reinforce and solidify locations. Who among us wasn't changed in a dirty mall bathroom? Picked up by an intoxicated parent outside a movie theater. Not all of our traumas occurred in this space. But for the generationals who frequented the mall often enough, our traumas were most certainly carried through that place.

Walking and checking a watch, fiddling with whatever portable media defined our mall generation. Walkmans. Mini Disc players. iPods. Checking a watch again to see if it was time to use a payphone to check in. The time between was occupied squinting through store windows and pretending you need to check the map. A bomb could have wiped out an entire U.S. state, and you're probably not going to hear about it until you get in the car. The picture I'm trying to paint here is that the mall was one of the last bastions of device-less wandering we did. They're still around, some adapted, others shuttered. But all that free time for our minds to run amok. Imagine being overstimulated in a mall with no screens. We were, somehow.

The echoes and reverberation of our brooding and pining and worrying within the confines of a local mall remain in that overlap space. Bouncing around and off each shifting wall. Filling each store and new location stretching into the horizon.

And it does get bigger. Those who have been there know it's not just a mall. It's a boardwalk, grandma's house, and a red hotel in the hills. It's a lighthouse with a candy store on top. It's a nightclub at the top of a skyscraper with a hole in the center. And those who have been going there for a while know that it's getting bigger. Exponentially, it seems, in the past few years.

It's almost as if, as malls die off, shutter and decay in the waking state, the malls we've all been dreaming about make room for more. The memory echoes and emotional resonance are no longer held in the physical space, and slowly, carefully, they try to find a way back to our minds. They wander the endless landscape of Mallworld searching for you. Seeking you. On a spectrum and frequency that can only be seen and heard by you, and passed through unnoticed by other dreamers. It's constantly in motion inside a space that's constantly in motion, unbound by physical limitations like drag and atrophy, the thoughts and traumas you left in these spaces sniff you out endlessly.

So if you've been dreaming of Mallworld every night for one year. Or ten. Or forty. It's fun to explore. Some are darker and lighter than others (though everyone seems to agree most of the toilets are shit). But always keep in mind -- everything you left there never left there never left there never left there never left

I don’t remember much, but the dream was significant because I’m rarely this level of lucid anymore. But I was in the main part of the mall, and I met two people. Man and woman. Guy had dark hair, medium build. Wearing a tie dye shirt with tight wavy lines, like the surface of water. Blue and purple. Not much detail on the girl — kind of looked like the younger actress from Backrooms. I saw them and thought “oh, those are “real” people too”. I approached them and asked for them to say something recognizable , like a code word I could remember to see if I could find someone on the waking side. But I can’t remember what they said!! If this sounds familiar, let me know!