Hello! I notice you're using Netscape (or other CSS-noncompliant user agent—in which case, consider this an easter egg) to view this journal. Because Netscape is so titanically shit, I have disabled image viewing on Netscape specifically. If I didn't, you would notice random images being replaced with each other and similar such strangeness. The posts are still visible, but you'll be missing the images, which are half the context of these posts.
You should use RetroZilla if you can; it runs on Windows 95 and up and gives you a perfect cammy.somnol viewing experience, plus more comfortable Web browsing on retrocomputers in general. Failing that, Internet Explorer 3 (which amusingly also displays this message, since it doesn't support the display CSS property) and up will also work perfectly fine for seeing my journal posts.
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This is a little old news now, but I haven't posted it anywhere yet, so let's fix that tonight. Lince! There's a certain old Cammy drawing with a big stuffed marf (you can see it on his original original 2019 ref) that we learned a few months ago dcb was mildly obsessed with for a time, so I decided to draw him a Lince version (featuring his real life plushie Timber!) as a present for completing this semester. Came really quick for how complicated the pose is, and he loves it! I'm proud of it too. Crazy to think of a time not that long ago when I used to have a lot of trouble drawing cats, and now they're like my favorite thing to draw, behind badgers.
I've got stuff a-brewin' again. Tomorrow or so, I'll give you guys another WIP project writeup for a certain MoodMatch search thing for my album reviews. Are you familiar with database normalization, chat?
Telling you, I do a lot of work so I have to do less work in the future
If you head out to any flavor of mari.somnol now, you'll see a story! Potentially more, by the time you're reading this! If you caught the previous post I did on my DocBook story build system, you know that it's been kind of a gigantic process already. It took another gigantic process to get it over the finish line, but I'm happy to say that I've hit all the targets I wanted to: one script to build six different versions of each story from a single double-click. I then put the output into my nofi/lofi/hifi AutoSite projects, build the project, and upload. That's all I need to do to keep a single story in sync across all three sites.
Since I've legit worked on nothing but this for days, I'm a little tired of thinking about it, but I figure I should probably get it into the journal for posterity. Besides, I am hugely proud of it, and I know I'll be rereading this in pride in a couple days anyway.
Step three: splitting the stories up with xinclude
Where I left it last, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to meet my requirement of being able to build both individual story pages and the whole story on one page. Turns out, I can! One of the glorious parts about XML is that you don't need an <html></html> sorta wrapper around your markup, you just have the markup, and if you declare your namespaces right, the processor will still understand what you wrote. In my case, I have the individual pages as separate files with wraparounds, and then I xinclude all of them into a master DocBook.
xinclude literally puts the content of the included XML file into the master file, as if you copied and pasted it in there. xsltproc and DocBook both can work with xinclude, again, with the proper namespaces. This means I can run xsltproc on any individual chapter or the master file, getting what I want out of each. Kino.
Step four: building into my AutoSite projects
Before this, for testing and learning purposes, I had my XSLT stylesheets set up to build full webpages with a doctype and everything. If you know AutoSite, you know that it's actually a templating system, where it takes stripped-down input pages with only the page's content and some metadata, and then smushes them into a rich layout template (the rest of your site markup). That way, you only have to edit the template to fix any errors or add to, say, a navbar.
As AutoSite's #1 fan now and forever, I wanted to be able to make use of my existing templates and use XSLT to output Autosite input pages I could drop into my existing projects for nofi, lofi, and hifi. This was pretty simple stuff, since input pages are still just HTML pages (or Markdown, but that's not relevant to us right now), but there were still snags.
For one thing, dcb wrote AutoSite to rely on specific whitespace around the attributes at the start of each input page, which xsltproc wasn't outputting using its <xsl:comment> processing. So this worked:
<!-- attrib title: Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure -->
But this (what xsltproc produces) did not:
<!--attrib title: Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure-->
As a result, these attributes were getting AutoSite confused, and it was passing them through as page content, breaking a lot of things in my templates as a result.
I could've worked around this with literal HTML outputting using the <xsl:text> element, but the good part of using your friend's tools is that they'll usually happily bugfix stuff for you. dcb rewrote his regex for parsing those, fixing another long-standing bug in the process (!), and I had an updated AutoSite that could handle these valid-but-odd attributes within a few days. Good lad.
The other issue was that xsltproc was spewing out an HTML doctype and some namespace attribute spam on all the pages it put out with no way to disable that. Even if I could write a new version of xsltproc to fix this, since it is open-source, that's just a lot of fucking work for no real purpose except this one niche edge case. I had a much better way to fix it, which I'd handle next step.
Step five: wrangling all this shit into a shell script
This was the most aggravating part of the process, because it required me to play with Linux. At least, something that works like Linux.
Remember, I've been basing this whole setup on Cygwin, which is a set of tools and a terminal of sorts meant to give you Linux functionality on Windows. xsltproc, coming from the GNOME camp, is naturally a Linux tool. If I wanted to automate it, I'd be writing a shell script. No big deal, nothing I haven't done before, but something always fucks up tremendously when I have to dive into the gooey guts of anything Linux-related, and this time, it was find that put me through the wringer.
find is a program that can search for files with certain criteria and then do something with them, like pass those files onto an executable or run a shell command on them. This is naturally what you want if you're trying to automate running xsltproc on a whole directory of XML files. The big frustration was that I obviously needed to make output directories for each file, named the file name but without the extension (01, 02, full, etc), and find doesn't provide functionality to pass the base name of the file to the executable you're running from it. That's because Linux doesn't care or use file extensions. At its silliest, find would try to run xsltproc on the output directories as well (also named stuff like "full.xml", despite being directories) and obviously that wouldn't work.
If that's gibberish, that's okay. I've blocked most of this out of my long-term memory for my health. My ultimate solution was to have find and xsltproc make the output directories whatever they'd be called and then use mv later on to simply scrape the .xml off each of the directory names. Hey, if we're already scripting it, might as well take the caveman approach.
This is also where I'd take care of the doctype and namespace cruft, again running find, this time on all the output HTML files it can find in the output directory, and then using sed to delete the first line of the file (the doctype) and any namespace cruft it finds anywhere in the document.
Anyway, it works. I now had xsltproc building AutoSite input pages for me. All that's left is to translate it to the other two sites.
Step six: writing lofi and hifi XSLT stylesheets
This was as much working on the AutoSite templates and CSS stylesheets for each project as it was doing stuff with XSLT. Now that I had the build process working, I just needed it to take those same files and make lofi and hifi compatible versions as well. This is also where I dragged forward my preferred story fonts (New York and Los Angeles, because the classic Mac OS fixation never dies) and also the color-coded character dialogue styling from my old sites to the new ones.
All is said and done, this had to happen. There was no way I was gonna be able to put stories on all three sites and then manage potentially six different versions of each story, even just to fix a single typo in each. Bigger changes or rewrites, not happening. This is a huge step towards being able to publish what I'm writing to my sites again like I always wanted, and I'm very proud of how it came out. Even better is the ease of updates: if I write a new chapter and want to publish it, I just add it to the DocBook, rerun the script, rebuild the AutoSite projects, and reupload. New chapter added, can link it to everyone, we're all good to go. If I want to build DocBook to some other XML-based language in the future (eBooks, maybe?), I can add that pretty quickly to the build system.
If you're curious to see the beast in all its messy glory, I made a GitHub repo for all the XSLT sheets and such. I'm sure there's lots to be cleaned up in them, but I really don't care. No one's gonna see it but me and the morbidly curious.
Anyway, all this techie junk distracts from the important stuff! Seriously, I've realized this is so techie-wonky that, when I try to explain it to friends who are less technically inclined and then show them the end result, all they see is the story—which is how it should be anyway, huh? And of course, there's the really immortal, million dollar question, "when will there be more stories, Cammy?"
Watch out. You might get what you're after.
Oh, totally random aside—can you believe I've lost weight in the past two weeks? I'm at 144lbs. That's 6lbs lighter than my stretch goal from this time last year, and nearly 30lbs lighter than I was last time I saw Caby. It feels good! Not really interested in snacking or drinking, just banging out projects and playing Guitar Hero. Lots to do, lots of time to do it. Happy Summer vacation.
"Fuck Bon Jovi", says man in big hat
Like I said the other day, I've got a small pileup of books—mostly music books, but with a few oddball topics on there as well—that general lack of time and patience has kept me from digging into. Cold anything is a hard proposition, but especially cold reading. Just picking up a book and starting, I dunno, it's not something I normally find myself in the habit of. Desertbound on Kindle did get me going though, and I'm eager to keep it going.
I must've been in a Barnes and Noble last year with my mom around my birthday. Maybe I'm just deprived, but ending up in Wind Gap and going to check out even big box retailers up there is pretty fun. Books! Books I just said in the last paragraph I have trouble reading, but books! She'd plucked a Mudhoney biography from the shelves to get for me (can you believe I've still never owned anything Mudhoney, despite all the time I spent with Superfuzz Bigmuff in high school?), but this one caught my eye a little more, even: World Within a Song by Jeff Tweedy.
I've been slowly getting into Wilco courtesy of dcb, and Jeff is one of those kinds of legacy artists who's just as noteworthy for himself as he is for his music. Something about his hesitant, wary outlook and dry commentary, you really do get the sense he's kinda amazed anyone would want to listen to him, but we do! I wound up getting both books.
World Within a Song is an examination of the cross-section of life and music, the way that music colors the scenes of your life and the way that life colors the way you feel about songs, bands, and albums. That makes it sound really heady, but it's honestly pretty light reading. A lot of it is Jeff's storytelling and memorializing, and the rest of it is a peppering of outlook on the music business, some anecdotes about paying your dues at the crossroads of punk and country, and what music encourages us to do and feel and how it grows with us as much as it stands still, acting as a vantage point as we move through life.
Jeff picks out fifty songs (well, including every song by the Beatles, so slightly more than fifty) that take him through early childhood into his adult life touring with Uncle Tupelo and Wilco. That's the meat of the book, and thankfully, it's his strength. Lightly dissecting music, he's interesting. Telling these stories of his family terrorizing the neighbor's kid with ham radio gear, or the poor orderly at the rehab facility who, with pinpoint comedic timing, in the midst of Jeff's most horrific withdrawal symptoms, wanted to know if Wilco were still playing Coachella, or the Traumatic Toilet at CBGB's, he's quite funny. Not as funny when I retell them, but that's how it goes with these things.
Now for the less-than-positives. Jeff has a kinda bizarre writing style that I'm genuinely amazed his editors didn't clean up first. It becomes transparent fairly quickly, thankfully, but he has this wonderful habit starting sentences off with "and", "but", and "because", leading to what feel like fragments across the book. Apparently this isn't incorrect, as the AI slop articles and gleeful contrarian contrarians like to tell you, but my God, is it choppy. Perfect example, open the book, random page, page 64:
Is this song for everybody? No. It's not a song I would throw on at a BBQ. But it is special to me. Which is the point of this book.
Okay, it's not incorrect, sure, but is that elegant?
Truth be told, though, it's not like he can't write. In fact, I feel the urge to balance the previous example with another snippet I found interesting, about Carole King's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", just so you guys don't think Jeff Tweedy is actually a caveman:
There was a period in my life, back in the early Wilco days, when singing this song as an encore—a ballad that I would often deliver lying on my back while being held aloft and passed by the outstretched arms of fans, crowd surfing in slow motion—felt like I was being as honest as I could ever be with an audience. Will you still love me tomorrow? All of you. Will you? Because this night is forever to me. I can feel you... I sense you mean it right now in this moment... I can allow myself to trust you. But you're going to move on, aren't you?
My only other complaint is that, by the time you get into the final ten songs, it does seem like he stops finding personal anecdotes and experiences to regale you with in the songs, and even he's a little lost as to how exactly to get them to fit in the lattice he's set up for himself. As he says exploring "I Love You" by Billie Eilish:
As the songs I'm excited to write about get closer and closer to the present moment, I'm finding them more difficult to write about.
Is that a bad thing? No, but given that the anecdotes and the way these songs personally shaped Jeff's life were such a driving force at the start, it does make things more diffuse as the book comes to a close. He still finds something interesting in them, though, so I suppose that justifies it. That said, that brings me to another holdup you might have: how much is someone not up on their Jeff Tweedy lore gonna get out of this? Plenty of it is universal enough, catching shows with your mom as a kid or finding shelter from the displeasure of the world in music that seems common only to you, but I dunno—did you know Jeff Tweedy collaborated with Mavis Staples (do you even know who Mavis Staples is?), and is that going to impact how you read her chapter?
Really, that's really the valley where World Within a Song dwells, a book that's deeply personal, and a book where the depth comes from examining what these little things mean to Jeff personally. He'll spend two pages telling you that it's okay if you just never get a song, that it's okay to dislike things as much as it is to like things, only to say "actually wait no, fuck Bon Jovi, you should not like Bon Jovi". He's human! Jeff's book, like his music, is interesting precisely because of how much light he finds in the shards of broken glass. It's imperfect and maybe a little wispy, but that suits it, I think. It's a good book to mail to dcb.
I've been putting off making this post for whatever reason
Earlier today, my mom told me of a local flea market with metric shittons of vinyl and CDs going for cheap, and well, it reminded me that I hadn't even opened my previous cheap CDs, let alone catalogued them. (40 hour menial job work weeks are nightmarish, turns out.) Let's do that quick. Here's some CDs, DVDs, records, and games I bought this spring that I've yet to show off on here.
Quick notes and stories on some of these:
- Most of the CDs came from a store called FYE (like FYI, but For Your Entertainment), which shut down this year and was letting their stock go like 90% off. You could even buy the racks the shit was on if you wanted. It looked pretty fucking dire in there when all was said and done, kids playing tag in the aisles and everything knocked over and scrambled.
- I also picked up that Forensic Files DVD there. I used to catch Forensic Files very late at night as a kid on TruTV after World's Dumbest got done airing. A creepy air of death took over my quiet little suburban house between the ads for Pepboys and Sokolove Law, almost like it was a show about murders or something. Indeed, this one's TruTV branded. A nice little snapshot in time.
- I also got one of those Japanese sodas where you have to push the marble into the bottle in order to open it, as a tribute to when I went in FYE with my older sister as a teenager and got one. I got Japanese Doritos too. They were good.
- The Hootie and the Blowfish and Sleater-Kinney sets are both reissue/limited edition with extra stuff, a second disc of Hootie's self-released EPs and an additional DVD of some live performances in with The Woods. Both were impulse purchases that I've heard very little from, but you can't beat like $3 for a sealed package. (I guess expect a whole lot of Hootie reviews on the main site sometime soon!)
- The three games and the vinyl came from two of our local nerd shops, which I visited with Logan when he was down from Maine last. I was gonna gonna go with Hot Pursuit instead of Porsche Unleashed for the Need for Speed PS1 game, but they misplaced the disc for that one. No worries.
- The vinyl selection at the other nerd shop was unbelievable, not just really good classic rock stuff from Meat Loaf and Cream and Manfred Mann, but 12" rap singles from Method Man, DMX, Eminem (early Eminem too, with the Web Entertainment branding on them). I didn't pick any of that stuff up just because it wasn't at impulse purchase pricing and I wasn't as familiar with the stuff on offer as I wanted to be.
- The Doors record was too scratched to be fully playable, sadly. I did try to check this stuff in the store, but apparently not well enough. It did play okay enough to where I knew I wanted to replace it though, it was good, and at least I didn't pay a ton for the privilege. (I had no idea "Break on Through (to the Other Side)" was censored originally! I'm too used to the Rock Band mix of that song where the "she gets high" line is intact.)
- The Cream LP only has one skip at the end of the first side, thankfully, and it's a pretty kino set. It has my favorite Cream song on it, "SWLABR", which I'd hear all the time at my first grocery store job selling beer to your grandparents. And "Tales of Great Ulysses"! I'd hear that one a lot too.
- Finally, the Chevelle CD and the Pearl Jam DVD both came from that flea market. Apparently it's an all-day event in there, so next Sunday, I aim to get up early and scope it out. (My mom is already asking where I'm gonna put all this stuff, and uhhhhhhh)
Okay, time to actually get listening to some of this stuff...
And some thoughts on when someone massively improves on your ideas
I have finished reading Desertbound! That's Savannah's still in-progress Pinède novel. She hasn't been too loud about it publicly, but believe me, it's a whopper—and contradicting that, also just a nice, tidy little adventure novel. I have a pretty unique perspective on it, partially because it stars (massively overhauled versions of) some of the characters she was kicking around back when I first met her, and we were just two awkward and sad preyed on teenagers that grouped under this "Somnolescent" umbrella. Back then, it was on Skype. The Skype times.
It's a simple enough request: a blind Volkhov fox royal wants a fake-ass, smooth-talking, thieving, conniving rabbit bard, enemies all around him and a bizarrely nice lute at his back, to guide her across the world to the deserts of Murad. What an ice queen could possibly want in the hot bazaars of opium and questionable magical practices becomes a question he soon doesn't want the answer to, but either as easy payment or an easy mark, he accepts. A snotty, annoying raccoon kit blessed with lightning magic complicates things, sure, but the three quickly learn that the long journey is actually the easy part.
Savannah's been pretty hard at work on this book for, Jesus, ten months now, I just checked? July 2024 was when the first mention of the name "Desertbound" started cropping up in our Discord. (That thing sure is handy for checking dates.) I read the novella back when it was just a tiny little thing, and the quick growth, constant edits, and just my general lack of free time meant I kinda avoided reading it for a while. That's not right of me, though, and my first priority since getting fired really has been to read through it all and enjoy and support a close friend's work.
Here you go, a review of a book you can't even read yet: It's really fucking good. Savannah has a great sense of humor and timing, which is not easy in novel form, and she has a knack for planting important bits among the weeds as passing details, which means you can read it a few times and get new things out of it each time. She loves the psychological aspect of characters, so you bet she digs into what makes Euphemia and especially Trapper the way they are, through nurture, the politics of the gods, or just what Trapper is and isn't capable of feeling. It goes quick, it's very easy to take, and it subverts expectations without ever being a pretentious, coy showoff of breaking genre norms. (For one thing, there's no true romance in it—Euphie is married to her god, and Trapper will never be more than a side hoe. That's the real tragedy.)
There's naturally some tone and pacing stuff early on that Savannah's been working with me and some of her other beta readers to tweak, but even as it is, it was thoroughly enjoyable. (I'm also in it, and Trapper tries to sell me a child that sneezes in people's mouths. I naturally do not take his offer.) Lots of memorable moments (the one where Trapper's pinned under a dead bandit body will forever stick with me, perfectly horrific), lots of good jokes, and it's just nice to see someone make this world of mine come alive.
That's the other reason I have a unique perspective on it. To see locales that were once just little places I built with Caby in Minecraft and OCs that have just been sitting unused turned into living, breathing backdrops for a good story is pretty humbling. For a while, I didn't know how to feel about that, that someone can come in and massively improve on your work like that, but then, I never know how to feel about it. One of my first interactions with jnack, who I worked on Guitar Hero II Deluxe with, was when he saw a really shitty main menu graphic I'd hacked up for Rocks the 360 and did me a much better one sight unseen, and I was pissed. Same thing happened with the Valve Developer Union logo once upon a time. (I've done it to other people too—ask me about the launch of DM4Jam sometime.)
In a lot of ways, over and over again, Savannah and her work has been kind of a kick in the ass and a reminder of how fucking silly I can get. I've felt locked out of Pinède plenty before, somehow, despite it not even being a thing yet. My time has grown limited over the years, my projects are numerous and ever more complicated, my skillset only so large and so skilled. I've chosen to do a lot of things alright instead of a few things really well, and sometimes, I feel outclassed by people who do specialize.
Fuck all that, come in with a clear head and just make something fun, something really enjoyable that I like and people will also probably like. What should I be putting into the world, self-doubt and jealousy that someone else is showing me up, or getting back up, getting better, and having fun with it? It seems obvious, and maybe it's just because I am an Egotistical Bad Person (as designated by the random shits from Neocities that still find their way to my old mariversary posts) that I've even had to learn this lesson, but y'know, valuable to remember. We're all human.
I've probably listened to "Shapeshifter" by Marcy Playground 200 times since discovering it yesterday. It was the cut title track to their album of the same name, which I reviewed very positively for my main site and usually credit with reviving my interest in finding new music after the lockdowns got me depressed and uninterested in it. Marcy in general has been a great backdrop for reading to. I think that's the key. Pick up the book, put on some music I'm super familiar with, and just read. I got a stack of music biographies and other assorted weirdness to get through. I'll share it all with you as I go.
When I was standing on the gallows
Nothing to say, I watched my sun
Go down
And light got dark around the edges
With no control, I felt my soul
Go down
When you're dead, there isn't anybody else
Nobody else at all
So darkness came upon the valley
And all the war machines broke down
Broke down
And all the children ran for cover
And all the animals broke down
Broke down
Ooh, and maybe they should not have
Been quite so bold to test me
'Cause I am a shapeshifter
And I will have my revenge
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