First drawing of the year finished! January is Wynuary, as is tradition, and I wanted to add to the weirdly large pile of "Wyn exploring the dark with a flashlight" drawings. Mine has some shitty layered fog though, ooooh!

Yeah, first time painting fog, and I think it came out...interesting. I used the bleeding watercolor brush in FireAlpaca and then smudged it. There's five different layers of darkness here, some on top of the boy, some underneath. It does give it a nice sense of depth, at least. I kinda like it.

I'm on the fence about posting my art out on the big sites again. On one hand, I am seriously proud of where I've gotten and what I've accomplished in the past three years (check out my old attempts at Wyn if you dare), and waving it in people's faces always feels like a good idea, but then my emotions about art get complicated when other people, inferiority, and social anxiety get brought into the picture. My new year's resolution is that if I'm not wholeheartedly into the idea on my own, I'm not doing it, so I think I'm happy just posting them here to the journal. Keeps this place going! If my heart changes, I'll just have a nice backlog of stuff to post is all.

I am working on stuff in the background, at the moment a blog post and trying to get back on the art horse. Trying to leverage the eternal slow season at work for writing journal entries and blog posts so I can focus on stuff I can't do standing around waiting for customers or shit to clean up at home, like more art or playing FreQuency. I had a bit of a rough patch at the end of last week into this one, but I'm alright now. More to come!

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So in case you missed it over New Year's Eve (boo! you suck dick), I streamed a whole bunch of WIP features and charts from my vaporware series of Guitar Hero custom discs called marfGH. I've been practicing, readying charts, and working my ass off to get it as presentable as it could be for the stream for about a month before the stream...and then I drank! And thus sucked at the game. It was a lot of fun, and I super enjoyed it, and so did everyone else.

It's all led to a small resurgence of excitement in myself for rhythm games and modding them, and I have a good feeling I can finally release a disc this year for people to play and enjoy themselves. 2025 has me still in a small pocket of total clarity, which will probably wear off, but right now, everything feels so fresh and full of potential, and that includes my mod work. While we enjoy the slowest Thursday ever recorded by scientists here at work, here's a journal entry for what all I'd like to do with it next.

Market research

It might seem funny to start off "here are my plans for this project" with something other than working on it, but it's true. marfGH is only partially my charting work—the other half of each setlist is curation, and you can only curate as good a setlist as your knowledge of rhythm games will allow, and unfortunately, mine is a little lacking. My own charts are definitely a lot of fun, but I want to seal the deal with well-done ports of songs recognizable to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band communities.

I have my guitar now, and that means I can go back and replay all the PS2 plastic instrument games—my childhood copies of Rock Band and its Track Packs, downloaded copies of the rest of them, Guitar Hero III (which I haven't played since I was a little kid), and Aerosmith (which I never played at all). (I could play most of the later GH games as well, but by World Tour, I remember the PS2 backports not being very good, and I just have no real interest in those right now anyway.) By my estimation, I have available to me about 500 songs I can play right now, maybe 350 of those never having been in the GH2 engine specifically. (Although it'd take a port job to play any of them, all 6,000+ Rock Band DLC and Network tracks are also up for grabs by me. I can have it all!)

I want to find the fun charts and hidden gems—and not just that, I want new songs to play myself! This year, I do want to play more games and just enjoy and absorb things, and of course that means revisiting Amplitude, FreQuency, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band on actual console, all games I love a lot and have deeply influenced my music taste and what I like in games. Even if I don't like GH3 any better as a game (I feel like I probably would look on it more kindly now), at least that's a whole setlist of songs to either steal outright or rechart, and a lot of people have major GH3 nostalgia, so it's an outright ace in the hole. If I do like it more as a game now? Gravy. Cammy has fun with a new game.

Shoring up my existing customs

Obviously, my methods and knowledge of the game and implementation of the new features I've added have changed over time. Sometimes, a mix doesn't come out sounding right, or it's a particularly old custom and I didn't know how to get the volume right without incurring distortion. Sometimes, I'm too lazy to add in some minor feature I need for my goal of a fully-featured chart. My lead/rhythm songs need bass in singleplayer, because my old way of doing it (two mix charts, lead-heavy and rhythm-heavy) led to some really bizarre and stupid charts.

If there's one thing I'll do more immediately with marfGH, it's go back through everything I've finished and make sure it's all as I'd like it to be. I did a bit of this the day of the stream, actually—my custom of "Very Ape" by Nirvana was missing camera cuts, I thought the lighting was weak, and I thought the mix was quiet and weird (it came from the original unmastered 24-track master tape and I never quite figured out how to tame it), so I quickly fixed it up in about an hour and a half. I figured, it was such a fun chart, I couldn't just have bits of it I wasn't pleased with with my initial public demo of the chart.

Some finished charts that need a bit of extra work that come to mind:

• Like I said, lead/rhythm stuff is a bitch. In vanilla GH2, they merge the two multiplayer guitar parts into one chart, and I'd have the second playable guitar part in singleplayer be the exact opposite of which parts are played by the normal singleplayer chart. Problem is, that means there's a "fun parts" and a "not as fun parts" chart, with guitar licks sometimes cutting off mid-lick. These songs are just better suited by having a singleplayer guitar mix chart and then bass alongside it—at least the bass is a whole part, even if it's not very fun. My port of "XLR8R" by Orbit from FreQuency and my "Ventura Highway" custom come to mind.
• My "Code Monkey" custom is from 2020, pre-DX, and I hadn't quite figured out how to mix audio for the game yet, I just knew it had to be loud. I made this one too loud, though, and it audibly distorts. Nowadays, I can always get things just about right and sounding clean on the first shot, so yeah, that one should get redone.
• Kinda combining the first two issues, my "Dear Kate" custom is a lead/rhythm track that, firstly, is too quiet in-game (I had to put the sound effects way quiet for the chart demo video), but also predates the singleplayer second-instrument play that Deluxe added, so it actually crashes DX discs like marfGH is based on for lack of a second instrument in the singleplayer channel mapping array. The tempomap for this one is also terrible (this is the last custom I tempomapped in FeedBack before switching to Moonscraper for that) and I seem to recall me feeling like a lot of my pitches and stuff were off in the chart itself, so yeah, just the whole thing should probably be redone. It's worth it, fun song, shoutout to Ben Minnotte.
• I have a port of Sunny Day Real Estate's "In Circles" that came from a Bluzer rip, and it was legitimately so obnoxious to make that I wrote a Scratchpad entry on it back in the day. (Amusing seeing how I describe the workflow back then, because it is so much quicker and more efficient now.) Nowadays, I can start from the official Rock Band Network audio and chart, which should make it a lot less icky to me than Bluzer's toyed with, second gen, wonky rip I was using.
• General punch ups here and there, very minor things that make me happy.

Menu retextures

Art is the big thing keeping you from playing a new marfGH disc next week. I don't expect anyone to be blown away by my drawings populating the GH2 menus, but I want the disc to have custom styling and theming, somewhere between "nicely rendered marfs in various styles" and "I drew bunny ears and a big mane on Edgar Allen Poe for the part select screen because it was funny to me". When I first started taking marfGH seriously in 2022, I was about five months into learning how to draw, and I was too scared of drawing ferals to illustrate much of anything, but the story is different now!

In general, I miss art. Art Fight last year took so much out of me that I don't think I have a single properly finished and lined drawing post-July. This year, for my comfort and Caby's sanity, I'll be sitting it out, but that doesn't mean I don't miss drawing my silly animal people and don't have a bunch of ways to apply it! This month, I'm really focusing on art for Caby, because it's our anniversary month and because I just feel I've neglected her a bit over the past few months and I'd like to make up for it. marf stuff will be in there, though. marf never really goes away.

More songs and ports

That one's obvious though, yeah?

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Happy new year to everyone reading my journal! I have a really good feeling about 2025. Like, really good. There was a lot to be proud of last year, but just as often, I learned I was just as sick if not a little more as the people around me, and, at my worst, I feel like I neglected my friends and my girlfriend. I forgot that, if you want good times, you have to make them. No one can do that for you or to you. It wasn't on purpose or anything, but that doesn't mean it's right.

Thankfully, things have been healing. I recently got back in touch with one of my high school friends, who dropped by the area, took me to lunch, we caught up and then we bought a ton of CDs together (Logan's trying to get me into Deftones, and he might just succeed). The last couple streams I've done, especially last night's demoing marfGH features and charts with Caby as cohost, were a blast. Seriously, even my mom told me how loud I was and how much fun I seemed to be having last night. Gonna say that's a pretty damn good way to spend New Year's Eve, online with a bunch of people watching you drunkenly play your custom Guitar Hero songs and chatting together.

I feel like, in a lot of ways, creatively and personally and emotionally, I'm starting over from scratch, but that's exciting and relieving, honestly. I want to heal things. I know I gotta take care of myself and the people around me better. I'm ready to get back to having fun and doing the things that made people like me in the first place. I really have thrown the rulebook out for 2025. I have no requirements and no idea what all I'll get up to, and I'm very happy about that. No doubt it'll be something good.

On that note, have that Quake II ramble I've been trying to write for weeks now!

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So slowly but surely, I have been doing a thing I've been calling "gaming through time". It's no big secret my favorite eras for games are the late 90s and early 2000s, and thanks to the trips and CEX, I've started amassing a nice collection of PC games, complete in box (albeit not big box, which doesn't really break my heart to be honest with you) from that time period. With the revival of the eMachines Box thanks to my new desk and the new hard drive I put in it in 2023, I've got a surprisingly really satisfying setup for playing them on. All the individual components are pretty low end, but next-gen low end, meaning they run last-gen games silky smooth.

Given that I do still want to upgrade it eventually to run mid-decade XP games, I've been starting with my older games, many of which I've never beaten, and finally beating them in chronological order and seeing the improvements in graphics, worldbuilding, and gameplay as I get to each next one. You might remember when I beat Quake and all of its expansions back in October or so, and obviously, Quake II was to follow. Here's a belated ramble about it.

Summing up Quake II

Let's address the name before we continue. This is not a sequel to Quake. This is, at best, a spiritual successor. The story goes that id, newly without its star game designer John Romero, wanted to take a less fantastical, more science fiction direction for their next game, couldn't come up with a suitable name, and Quake II it became. Quake II also makes sense in that John Carmack, who had recently taken operative dictatorship over id in the split of The Two Johns, believed more in iterating on what was known to work, the linear key-and-gun arena shooter formula, rather than coming up with new big ideas for id's next game. I'll come back to that thought throughout this post.

Carmack was known for his disappointment with Quake's development. He believed he took on too much at once, with Quake featuring a fully 3D rendered, self-occluding world, polygonal 3D models for everything, and a TCP/IP networking model for multiplayer being a really tall ask for maybe less than two years of development time. It suits that Quake II, technologically, only makes smaller improvements to Quake's existing tech stack, like colored and texture-based lighting, full skyboxes, DLLs for modding as opposed to QuakeC, and working towards the ever-approaching 3D accelerator takeover with better OpenGL support than even GLQuake had (naturally, I played using the software renderer, because I like crunchy).

So what all does change with Quake II? The story focuses on a race of cybernetic aliens called the Strogg (pronounce it like stroganoff), who have come to subjugate Earth, and you're the last guy who can slip inside their main bases and sabotage them from the inside. Like I said, if you're looking for anything to do with Armagon, or Shubby, or any of Quake's Lovecraftian mythos and themes, they're not here. This is about as connected to Quake as TimeSplitters is to Goldeneye on the N64—they share a similar engine, core gameplay concepts. and most of the same developers, and that's about it. Is that necessarily a bad thing? For me, Quake is definitely the moodier, more interesting game, but Quake II's setting isn't bad. If anything, its military bases are probably more visually defined than Quake's bases, and definitely neater built.

That said, the lack of visual variety very much doesn't help the game, since it's now about three times the length of Quake with about the same depth. Each of the eight Strogg bases in the game give you a major objective that amounts to "find the button and press it", whether that's to disable a satellite array, render a Big Gun inoperable, things that feel less substantial than they should, even with the satisfyingly gooey polygonal explosion you get each time. Even the pickups, data CDs and commander's heads, are just renamed and reskinned keys like we've been picking up since Doom. Even some of the textures, especially the liquid textures, are literally reused from Quake, as are some of your player sounds.

Again, it all goes back to Carmack's desire for iteration than innovation. It's not that that's bad, but so much feels like its predecessor, the sounds, the gunplay, the fact that it retains secrets and a kill count per level, that it's impossible not to compare the two, and Quake pretty much always comes out the more satisfying game. For its design and feel, Quake was the ideal length. It was really difficult to get lost in its levels, and the variety in texture themes, from idbase to terracotta, swampy wizard to runic, gave you a nice sense of progression that Quake II really doesn't. Worse yet, the increased size means I had to consult StrategyWiki twice to discover the single passageway forwards I happened to miss, which never happened with the original.

That's not to say there weren't some genuinely memorable and chilling moments while I was playing, though. Quake II has sections featuring your fellow soldiers as they get tortured and medically experimented on by the Strogg, and yes, these sections are all interactive! Even with the game's 1997 graphics, seeing a soldier get dangled above lava in a cage, with an option for you to dip him yourself provided you can kill the aliens first (and you get rewarded with a spare gun, even), is seriously disturbing and quite effective. Other times, you'll pass through a holding area of delirious soldiers all mumbling to themselves or getting sliced up on tables, and it's freaky. Quake II definitely does its setpieces well, even if the level design is on the whole only alright.

How about the gunplay? It's not bad. The game starts you off with an infinite ammo peashooter laser gun and slowly introduces two flavors of automatic, a machine gun and a chaingun, two shotguns, a grenade and rocket launcher, and a few energy weapons up to the BFG 10K (obviously an upgraded version of Doom's BFG 9000). Like in Doom II and Quake, the double-barreled shotgun really steals the show for daily use, with the Hyperblaster not far behind, and the Railgun being a satisfyingly piercing supersonic cannon that always leaves body parts flying on the business end of the weapon. Seriously, if you remember how overpowered the rocket launcher was in Quake, the Railgun is that for this game, and it is very nice to have in the toolbox when the big guys on robot legs start to rain shit on you.

A lot of the other guns, though, really don't feel like they do enough damage, especially next to Quake's excellent balance where you could basically count how many shots you had left before an enemy dropped. I hate to keep going back to the original for comparison, but even when the guns are directly comparable, like the grenade launcher, I just felt like I had more power and better aim with the Quake version. Seriously, not to give you spoilers, but the final boss of the game went down way easier than the enemies that preceded him.

It sounds like I didn't like Quake II, and that's really not the impression that I want to give, because while it was on, it was decently fun. Each of the sections, preceded by an FMV cutscene giving you a briefing on your mission objective, I pretty much breezed through, and the soundtrack is a shift from the creepy ambience of the first game to some pretty gnarly (if only sporadically memorable) industrial metal tracks. Like I said, I do really like how it looks! There's plenty of atmosphere between the rusty pipes, rock walls, crushers, drilling machines, sawblades, and cybernetic jail cells as you monkey around the decaying infrastructure of the Strogg, clearing out mooks and reducing everyone after death to meaty chunks (which I recommend doing, the bodies draw flies and it makes my skin crawl).

But, that said, I'm probably good on playing it for a long, long time.

Really, where Quake II is most interesting is in comparing it to Daikatana, the high-profile failure John Romero oversaw at Ion Storm after his departure. Quake II has all of the technological solidness and none of the imagination. Muscly dudes and big robots with bigger guns is what ya get, and as I've been saying, if you've played Quake, you know the exact gameplay of Quake II as well. Daikatana on the other hand, comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, a place where "design is key" was practically an unofficial slogan of Ion Storm. Daikatana had a lot of cool ideas, a main character with a gigantic sword and two AI sidekicks traveling through time, and was notoriously buggy, choppy, and badly put together, stemming from it switching to, funnily enough, the Quake II engine from the Quake engine halfway through its long development.

Carmack was Romero's rock. Romero was Carmack's flights of fancy. Carmack would develop a crazy engine feature, and Romero would make sure it was front and center in his levels. They were young, and hubris split them apart. Each subsequent id game would be less and less noteworthy, save Quake III: Arena and Doom 3, and Ion Storm's more successful games like Deus Ex and Anachronox largely had nothing to do with Romero. Quake II and Daikatana are the perfect examples of why they needed each other, and how they helped each other excel in the end.

Anyway! Onto Half-Life—which I've since discovered I cannot play seriously whatsoever anymore, as I try to bhop across Black Mesa, usespam and sequence break all the NPCs, and generally act like a crackhead. That's all part of the fun though.

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Hey, I'm busy preparing art for the stream tomorrow and listening to Semisonic (life comes at you fast), but promise you'll be there? We'll be showing off marfGH features and brand new charts publicly for the first time ever, and I'll be doing it on my real PS2 with a guitar I've been practicing with for a couple weeks now.

It'll be a real good time. Be there. Come hang out. Watch me barely be able to play Expert.

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I have fallen way, way behind on the journaling thing—I'm starting to miss it. You know I had to serve on a jury last month, and I just didn't write about it? (I'm not going to, it was a pretty downer outcome to the case, not fun at all.) I've bought so many cool toys this past month, for me and for others, I still wanna recount my adventures in Quake II, I've got my feelings about the end of 2024 to write about!

As happened last year, I'll be doing some daily, ideally smaller updates with the journal to catch back up. We still have one bit of unfinished business from November to write about—all the packages! The rest of the group (and even some people outside of it) received some CDs recently, personalized CD copies of the anniversary reissue of Last Summer, the mtlx EP that I wrote back in the fall of last year, and a mix CD of songs that I loved and have given me funny feelings since getting back into discovering new music post-lockdowns. Now that Connor and Savannah have gotten theirs, I can finally recount putting it all together.

Here's what a year of on-and-off arts and crafts will get ya...

Last Summer: Special Anniversary Edition

I overdo projects a lot. Some of it is innocent—I just think it's cool to have something feel super official and fully complete, but I'm sure some of it is just my weird issues as well. In the case of the Last Summer set, I wanted to have this disc feel like an official, major label CD, nicer than some of my mass-produced indie label CDs even. I wanted a glossy booklet, I wanted a back inlay, and I wanted bonus tracks.

On the music itself, I tweaked some of the melodies and mixes on a few tracks and suffixed the final EP with four early demos of the songs, most from 2020 but one from mid-recording (when "Siestas" was faster and I was still trying to track it with percussion). Honestly, it's really cool listening back to these now that they truly are demos. I remember not knowing what to do with them back then, and Caby's since told me she didn't really get 'em either, but now, with the context of the final release, you can hear where certain song parts got expanded on and where sounds got carried over from my initial experimentation. (I also mixed in subtly variable flavors of tape hiss, like they came from different old late 90s cassettes. Someday, I'll do an actual run of Last Summer cassettes for funsies.) I'm very happy they have a proper home now that isn't just in the Scratchpad's archives.

This adventure started not long after I finished the album—January was when I made my first test copy, which was only a few days after I got the test prints. At the time, I still worked at Staples, and all my time spent doing Amazon returns in the Print Center exposed me to the wonders of 80lb gloss, which feels almost exactly like CD booklet paper. I did up a back inlay and an eight page booklet (and thus a front cover) in Paint.NET, got the test copy printed, adjusted it a bit further, and sent in a print order for 22 copies of each page on 80lb gloss. This all cost me roughly $70, and while the Staples printers aren't meant for graphics, I really like how it all came out, just that little bit scrungly, but still really official feeling. (The copies are all numbered, out of twenty total. We're up to 9/20! I'm pleased at how much of the pile I've been able to give away. I'll list them on my Bandcamp probably in January.)

I intended to put it together over the slow February nights, using their guillotine slicer and long stapler over in Print on my lunches or days off, but getting the unceremonious "quit or we'll eventually fire you" in January put a damper on that. Even after getting back from Wales in March, I was more focused on settling back in, losing weight, and finding another job than putting together elaborate CD packaging at my former workplace. August came, I'd waited long enough, and while the faces had changed a decent amount (turns out the store basically imploded after I left, mwah, the drama, magnifique), enough remained from when I was there that they let me behind the counter to access all their sharp objects. Three or four hours later, phase one of the Last Summer reissue was completed.

But then the project got bigger—I wanted to personalize each copy. I figured this could double as my Christmas card for the year, and I wanted to draw people stuff they'd be really excited about, and that meant OCs over sonas like would've been easy for me (because again, I have a bad habit of overdoing it). dcb got his Neopet lad Cedrus, Caby got her perturbed Caerpinwyd greengrocer skunk Azurite, Connor got a kittyfied Moritani (I was apparently the first to do anything with his hatred of lettuce :omegalul:), and Savannah got a goat version of her witch boy Micah, because humans are scary. I was also shipping one of these out to Mr. Midwestern Dirt in Chicago, and I wanted to include a note in with his like I included for all the Somnolians, so he got a Colton in his jewel case. These were done digitally and then printed out on my home inkjet on nice blue and pink cardstock on the same template as the booklets were done on, and then slotted in behind the booklet as you open the case.

This is really what made the packages take so long. Not one of these characters, I'd drawn before, so the nerves about getting them right were there, and while I love how they all came out (Cedrus is probably my favorite of the lot and one of my favorites of the year, if I'm honest) and while it was all completely worth it—well, it was a lot of work. A lot of weeks of me hinting at things to people, because I'm terrible at keeping secrets.

Here's the full-sized digital versions, if you're curious (obviously click the thumbnails, doof):

marf's mix 2024

Mailing out mix CDs has been something we've been talking about in the group since Devon was still around. As I mentioned, during the lockdowns, my desire for any music that wasn't the warm, comfy, familiar confines of licensed video game soundtracks from the mid-2000s about disappeared completely, so my mixes didn't come out very good (least, not that I remember). 2023 and 2024 have been killer for my discovery though, and instead of writing out some long post about the music I loved this year or something, I figured I'd make it a mix CD. Let me not tell you about this song I love, let me let you listen to it.

Truth be told, it's probably the project this year that's felt the least like work. I already get into the weeds of music sequencing, mastering, lyrical content, and the like when I'm just casually enjoying a record, so it was just fun to pick out all the songs that spoke to me the loudest this year and arrange them in a proper running order. I remember really trying to dig for songs that got me emotional, or songs I've fantasized to. I really got into the details, normalizing song volumes, trimming silences, creating seamless segues, interludes (two of 'em to separate out the two halves of the mixtape, courtesy of The Conet Project), and even trimming one song slightly to make a sort of unofficial radio edit. Seriously, I wanted this thing to play as its own piece, even if it was other people's music I was using to paint.

On song choice, this frankly could've just been 15 Superdrag songs in a row. I lived in Regretfully Yours for months, the droning, desperate infatuation of "Truest Love", "Carried"'s angular, anthemic low self-confidence, "Destination Ursa Major"'s ode to drunken abandon. It only got better when I discovered The Fabulous 8-Track Sound of Superdrag, with a lot of the same lyrical focuses but with an even grubbier, growlier, low-end sound. "Sugar" would be the opener to my mix CD for 2024.

The rest of the songs all came from CDs and digital albums I've bought in the past two years. The Raconteurs, two songs from Adwaith, Matchbox Twenty (I am just ready for my Rob Thomas arc, yes), Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Ted Leo, Built to Spill, Ash, Remy fucking Zero—a mix I enjoy quite a lot. The vast majority were bought in Wales with Caby standing next to me, which makes it especially odd when one of them reminds me of her. I guess it is a little strange to have such strong, personal emotions (not exclusively for her—"As Sure as the Sun" was more me thinking about people who left the group more than anything) wrapped up in songs that got mailed to the people they make me think of, but consider it more like a time capsule of my own neurosis more than anything about them. I'm just an insane person on the Internet.

On a positive note, there are plenty of optimistic and more lovey songs on the disc, and I'm happy to have embraced my love of Brad Sucks again, especially his newer material that just didn't really interest me during the lockdowns, of which two songs feature.

But this all begat another leg of the project! I needed cover art for the mix CD! Initially, I was gonna do another character illustration (just of Cammy, possibly including marf), but after doing five of those already on a similar canvas, none of the ideas I had were all that interesting to me, so I cleared out my head by digitally painting for the first time instead. I took a screenshot of the Minecraft Alpha world I was playing a lot at the timeand tried to paint out a weird, dreamy, sunset version of it, kinda paradise but also kinda isolated and lonely. It isn't very good, but the fun thing about indie rock is that bad and amateurish art is a staple of the genre's entire look, so somehow, it all worked out.

What worked out slightly less was that this was the moment I figured out my cheap shitty Canon inkjet can't do duplex (double-sided) printing, not even manually—the print won't line up! I gave up on the nice, decorative, typed insert design I had in mind and simply handwrote the tracklist in very tiny scribble on the back of the cardstock prints five times, pen mistakes and all. Boo-womp. (But that's its own vibe, I suppose, so no big deal.)

Shipping and handling

Then came mailing it all out! I got a pack of bubble mailers one night and reinforced them on both sides with sliced up cardboard from my current job. (If the boxes there are good enough to transport beer and glass in one piece, my CDs will make it there just fine.) dcb got a whole box of CDs from me, a signed Shaimus CD I ordered for him years ago and never passed on (sorry lad), a few duplicates from my collection I figured he'd like, half my print copies of the spring 2024 SomnolZine, the mix CD, and of course the Last Summer CD he helped springboard in the first place. Everyone got something a little different! Discounting the personalization, I gave more copies of the zine to Caby because she spilled coffee on hers, Mr. Midwestern Dirt didn't get the mix CD because I figured he wouldn't be into all the 90s pop/alt stuff I had on it, and there was another guy in Virginia on Reddit who wanted to do a mix CD trade, so he got the mix CD and an unpersonalized copy of Last Summer. Lots to keep track of! Addresses!

Shipping in total cost me roughly $100. (You see why I wanted to include the mix CD with the Last Summer stuff now?) I had all the customs forms printed out, fixed to the envelopes, dcb's box was all packed up nice—now the last leg of the journey was just hoping it all got there! dcb, Patrick, and the Reddit guy in Virginia all got theirs within a week, makes sense, none of those are too far from here. Caby got hers within two weeks, big excellent, international shipping is iffy sometimes.

Savannah and Connor got theirs December 19 and 20, respectively. Canada Post's Christmas-nuking strike caused the packages to stop right where they stood three days after I mailed them out. Thankfully, that's most of the way from Somnolescent HQ to Ontario, so they got them a day and two after the strike ended, but the fact that I could've hand-delivered theirs in an evening as opposed to waiting almost forty days to not only see their reactions to what I drew, but also to be able to write this very post and put some closure on the whole project, definitely derailed the end of the year vibes for a bit. On the bright side, Christmas miracle!

Oh yeah, and the reactions were absolutely worth it. Hope you guys don't mind me posting these here for posterity:

Closure

I realized halfway through all of this that this was an absurd amount of work, and in a way, I put more into it in return. It feels like a nice tribute to my tendency towards excess. Like seriously, just handmaking a CD, or doing up a mix CD for friends, or mailing out six different packages at once, would be quite the undertaking—and I did all of those at the same time.

I've obviously learned to trim it back next time, but thankfully, I've also learned a lot about prints and CD artwork to expedite the process. (Basically, print it at Staples if it needs to be double-sided, and a booklet, while cool, is overkill and a simple two-sided insert is more than enough.) This was an adventure in handmade CD-R releases, and it came out fucking cool, and I am glad I did it and everyone loved it. I'm also glad, especially given that this definitely won't be the last CDs I ever send to people, that I know now to make it a lot more manageable for myself.

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