Expect these in your mailbox soon.

You know, if you ever wonder why some piece of physical merch you special-ordered got delayed, just ask me. There are so many steps involved with just putting together a couple CDs for some friends, let alone getting a whole factory to make them, assemble them, and ship them out to the right places. I've had the cases assembled since August, but it's taken me until now to get all the drawings and stuff done, and now I'm also shipping my end-of-year mixtapes with them too, so that's actually two CD packages to assemble, graphics and all, and then burn and package up.

I've been burning discs since yesterday. It's been ages since I've burned a music CD, and it's caused me to think of such wonderful things as CD-Text and DAO vs. TAO burn modes that I haven't thought about in forever. I will play each burn to make sure they work throughout before you guys get them because I obviously prefer working CDs, but I think only me and dcb have CD players or disc drives anymore anyway.

I bought the bubble mailers on the 30th. My mom was mildly annoyed at me buying them from my old Staples (which, shoutout to Staples, is down so fucking bad, they literally can't keep the lights on anymore), but as if paying $5 for packing materials versus $9 for packing materials really matters to me. I'll work an extra hour and remake what I spent double over, it's fine. Speaking of work, I took some cardboard from work for packing filler to keep the CDs safer in transit. These are nice, sturdy boxes, I think rated to withstand 35lbs in edge crush tests? Bring it the fuck on, USPS. If it's good enough to ship glass and alcohol in, my stupid little CDs will be fine.

Even after all is assembled and marked, I still gotta do the customs forms, as three of these are leaving the country. I think it'll cost me like $65 total to ship it all, though that doesn't factor in that dcb is getting a big goodie box with a bunch of other CDs from Shaimus and Silversun Pickups and the like. Sharing is caring! And probably has to be sent flat rate. Such is life.

This really is my last celebration of the cool-but-excessive projects that I've put myself through over the time that I've been mariteaux. Building whole websites, CDs to mail out, gigantic group drawings, trying to keep Caby's crazy pace during Art Fight, fucking flying international first time by myself—I just kinda did all these things without thinking about it, and I'm proud of the results! But I'm also ready to relax for a long while. My 3DS is gathering so much dust right now, gamers—all my gaming stuff outside of my PS2 is, and that's entirely because of my streams.

I'll leave more detail for closer to the end of the year so I don't change my mind, but yeah, Cammy's gonna be a slightly different person from here on out. I think you'll like me more. Packages soon.

Working forty hours a week still kicks my ass some days u_u

I had to do some bugfixing of my album reviews section this morning (had to do with artist altnames, which were still buggy), so I took the opportunity to lay some groundwork for some features I wanna implement and polish up some of what was already there. You see, now that I have over a hundred of these things and no intentions of stopping any time soon, I want to turn it from a simple "Cammy talks about albums" section into a way to turn people on to stuff they like outside of simply my opinions. Discovering new music can be a little hit-and-miss, so I've come up with some ideas based on how it usually works for me.

(I'll be linking to the lofi version of mari.somnol through this journal entry, but all these features work on nofi to the same extent they currently work on lofi, just in case you were curious.)

Improved browsing of years and scores

So here's the easy one. I think it was when I was porting everything from nofi to lofi, I refactored what was formerly a single PHP script into three, an index, a review page, and a browse page. This browse page was what was bloating everything up before, because it pulls multiple duties. It lists artists and albums, of course, but sometimes, you're looking by year, sometimes by grade, and sometimes by artist name.

Before this, the only actual navigation on the browse page was artist alphabetical, which doesn't help you if you want to browse by year or by score. So now, it does some checking for which you're looking for and gives you a timeline view with decade skipping if you're browsing by year, and a grade-based navigation if you're browsing by rating.

There's probably a ton of different ways to glitch this out with fuzzy inputs or combining different HTTP GET variables, but it works if we're all playing nice. Some other time, I'll handle the checking better.

Cammy's Pick

Here's where we get into stuff I only have on the backend right now. If I go to anyone for album reviews I actually believe, it's probably AllMusic. They have many different writers on staff, but a lot of them seem to agree with me or at least use my methodology for rating albums. (Meanwhile, I've never had much luck with Pitchfork, who seem to write entirely based on what will get the most attention, and Sputnikmusic is a total crapshoot on whether or not the reviewer can even write a decent review. We don't go to RYM.)

AllMusic has an "album pick" function that lets you see which album from a specific artist's catalog the AllMusic staff has designated as the best, and I rather like this, so I added another column in the database for a "Cammy's Pick" flag, which will display on the artist page and probably in the artist browse as well. It's not visible yet, but the browse.php page is already set up to allow searches based on which albums have the Cammy's Pick flag.

I'll only be giving the Cammy's Pick designation for artists whose back catalog I'm really familiar with and therefore can judge a "best album" from, or artists who have albums I like so much, I doubt they can really be topped by future digging. More the former than the latter, a bit of both.

Mood search

Here's the one that'll take the most work and the most research from me—but it's definitely doable. Pandora continues to be the only streaming service that actually gives me relevant recommendations, and that's because it has the best classification system of any streaming service. Spotify and Apple Music rely on playlists and guesses based on what listeners of [x] band also listen to, but Pandora recommends music based on how similar its musical traits are to what it knows you like. They call this the Music Genome Project, where a human will listen to a track and give it "genes", stuff like "heavy use of syncopation" or "minor key tonality".

I love the Music Genome Project, because it completely removes genre (a classification nightmare that I could write a book on how much it sucks on) from the equation. Instead, you set up an artist station, it knows which traits are most common in that artist's music, and goes based on what traits that artist shares with others. This is how, as a preteen, I could create a station like Brad Sucks Radio and end up with artists as varied as Greenskeepers (who Brad has since covered, curiously enough), Fischerspooner, and RL goddamn Burnside. I like 'em all! The songs played on this station all have that same beat-heavy, muted vocal delivery, loopy, slightly electronic thing, despite the artists being indie rock, electroclash, and a salty old bluesman who got hooked up with hip hop producers shortly before his death, respectively.

I want to implement something similar for my album review section. Nowhere near as in-depth (and although they'd never actually go after me because I'm nobody, I'm obviously not trying to directly clone somebody's patented technology), but similar enough to where someone can say "I want textured, hooky, female singer rock" and would immediately be led to Last Splash by the Breeders, or "downbeat dreamy acoustic" would give someone Mutations by Beck.

Now, here's where this gets tricky. I rely on a MySQL database for my album reviews. This is great, and it's really simple to go "all Nirvana reviews", find the Nirvana entries under the artist column, and send those to the reader. How do you do a tag search though? If you're simple like me, you might just think to stuff all the tags in CSV into a new column next to all the other data pertaining to that review and then search through, but this is a really bad and slow idea, and I'm interested, at least a bit, in doing this right and thinking in terms of scale. What runs fast with only 116 reviews in a database might be a fuck of a lot slower with 500, or 1,000 reviews in a database.

Tag searching led me down a rabbit hole, but here's the plan I hear everyone recommend, roughly:

1. You have the normal review database. Each review is given a number, which starts at 1. They call this the primary key, because it's the way your reviews will be addressed from now on. This is quick because it's easier to match numbers down the line than it is to match text.
2. You have a second database that gives a primary key to each tag. At current, I have about 30 tags, ranging from singer qualities (male, female, gentle, extreme) to instrumentation (acoustic, ambient, strange) to the way the album was recorded and mood.
3. You have a third database where the primary key of reviews and the primary key of tags get matched up. In my head, I assumed I would need [x] number of fields for each row so I could attach multiple tags to one review, but no. You have a new row for each tag attached to a review. Say review #1 has six tags, you would have six entries in that third database, each one with the same review ID, but a different tag ID.
4. You then do a "database join" (which effectively temporarily makes a brand new table) that merges all the previous data together. You can then search this new, joined, phantom fourth table in a really efficient way and return all albums that have the tags you're searching for.

On the user end, this is implemented with an HTML form with checkboxes and the like. This is where you'd give it your aforementioned "textured hooky female singer rock" search. I can add an additional filter as well for rating, in case you only want albums of a certain score to appear in your search.

This is going to majorly improve the way someone can actually use my music recommendations section to find music that's relevant to their tastes. Everyone can think of a specific musical trait they like, like "I really like music with gentle singing", and now, any albums with that trait that I've covered, you can pull up and immediately find. Read a few reviews, see what sounds most interesting to you, go and listen—Cammy has helped you find some new music ya like.

That's also a lot of work, but I'll definitely make it happen at some point. Right now, I'm really focused on getting through the last couple pieces of art I'm sending out with copies of Last Summer, which now will include my 2024 mix CD in the package to save me having to spend another $60 to ship out a mix CD to all the Somnolians in December. I can make that October 31st deadline I've set for myself, I know I can! And then I can just play Alpha Minecraft for two months. (Did I mention I've got old Minecraft fever lately? So cozy. I love this game.)

Y'know, this is the kinda morning where I look out my window at a half-barren patch of trees and something just feels correct. I love familiarity. I think part of the reason I still blog about shit, even when no one else does, is because it's my little way to keep the mundanity of the Web I grew up on alive. I've been reading a lot about old Minecraft versions—perhaps I'll spend the day drawing and playing that.

I own two second generation Kindles, neither of which work. They both have flat batteries. I've been wanting to have an e-book reader around for dinking with and maybe even reading more, and while I know e-book readers have gotten fancier since the late 2000s (apparently Kindles can now take ePub files :omegalul:), I'm not a big fan of e-waste, and they worked perfectly fine otherwise, so I'm trying not to buy a new one if I can help it.

Instead, I ordered a new battery. And everything went wrong.

Getting into the thing was a chore. The first step is to take the plastic bit on the back off so you can work the metal backing off and gain access to the battery. A lot of places will tell you to wedge a spudger between the metal and plastic bits, but they're flush on both my models and I didn't want to scuff up the outsides if I could help it. The real way to do it is to press your thumbs on both sides of the Kindle logo, slide them up gently onto the plastic bit, push down, and then push the plastic piece off.

The plastic bit came off easy, but being an idiot, I completely wore down the soft plastic spudger that came with the new battery trying to get the clips holding the metal bit on. (In fairness to me, this spudger really was a piece of shit. You could wear it down scraping it along a piece of drywall.) I then noticed I took out the wrong screws. Even when I removed the correct ones, though, I still couldn't make any progress with those clips! Eventually, I got the metal backing off using a small flathead screwdriver to push the clips down, because nothing else could fit in there and I was scuffing up both my hand and all the cards in my wallet thinking one of them would do the trick.

I mentioned that I own two of these units—one belonged to my older sister back when the Kindle 2 was new, and the other, I ordered used because that one's battery had already eaten shit. I opened up the first one, I guess out of curiosity if there was anything still on it, and discovered the original battery had swelled pretty dramatically. This is what they in the trade call a "spicy pillow", where a lithium-ion battery swells to the point of being convex, like a pillow. A mildly dangerous one. In my case, I can actually see what I think are glue strings where the outer cover of the battery was attached to the metal chassis.

This is where I discovered I ordered the wrong sized battery! The one you can easily find on Amazon is for a Kindle 3, not a Kindle 2, and Cammy didn't check his model numbers. While I was able to return the battery within a few hours for a full refund (Kohl's dropoffs sure are quick!), looking around, I discovered that the Kindle 2 batteries are so outdated, you can only get them as made-to-order parts with a three week to potentially six week turnaround time. I was able to get free shipping on the order, and it was roughly the same cost as the Kindle 3 battery I bought, so price isn't the issue. It's having to wait yet longer that's the issue, and with it being that far out, it's not out of the question that my order will just get canceled outright at some point. I've had it happen.

Worst case scenario, I'll just recycle these at the Staples I worked at (free electronics recycling to try and get people into the store, woo!) and order a later gen used Kindle or something. The new ones are much fancier with backlit screens, bigger batteries, and can actually buy books from Amazon—apparently these older ones are blacklisted from receiving downloads if attached to an Amazon account. I've never really looked at where else I can get e-books from outside of Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and toying with getting my own or friends' stories onto it, which probably doesn't help my inability to stick with the habit.

That said, I definitely think I could make use of a Kindle in the same way I use Pandora, as a way to try out books before I order proper copies of them. That appeals to me. I'll keep you posted.

This is a couple days old now, but I gotta post it here, it's big news! And I've been bored at work, and bored at work is ideal writing time. Two years to the day of my last Guitar Hero II chart demo video, I've posted another. It's for one of Connor's tunes off the self-titled MoriHime album I did a joke review of for my music recommendations sections, "Shooting Star". Check it out here.

I'd do a YouTube embed, but I'm trying to be mindful of retro PCs that don't swing that way. A screenshot will suffice.

I've been getting the warm gooey insides for GH2 modding again this year, but nothing compelled me to dive back in until Connor handed me some stems for "Shooting Star" and told me to go nuts. I figured this wouldn't just be a good way to indulge my love of modding probably my favorite game ever made, it'd also be good promo material for his record, so nuts I went.

You want to know how nuts I went? I asked Connor to record himself playing the guitar part and used that as a reference for not just left-hand fretmapping animations (so where on the neck the in-game guitarist places their hand), but as a reference for which chord shapes they should make with their hand as well. I went and upgraded my custom camera cut code for this—now, instead of having to place notes on specific MIDI pitches in the TRIGGERS track in Reaper like I used to, which is slow and annoying and takes an extra pass at the chart that I usually don't come back for, I can place custom text events in FeedBack, my normal chart editor, as I'm working on the chart itself. I also don't usually use this many flares, but I wanted to go big, not go home, so the whole venue lights up real bright on those big hits.

I am so pleased with this chart, days later. This may be the best stage I have ever authored for GH2! Nah—it is. It just is.

What's been great even outside of how well the chart came out and how much fun it's been to come back and work on the game is just how positive the reaction has been to its release. With the sole exception of a GH2 meme chart I did (ironically my last posted chart video in 2022), this video has been the fastest growing video in the history of my channel, hitting 120 views in the first day of it being up, and tons of comments too. What that tells me isn't just that there's still interest in my modding work, even after what happened with MiloHax, but that there's more interest than ever in it.

You ain't seen nothin' yet. B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen n-n-nothin' yet.