I've had the idea kicking around for a few months now, but it's finally come time to put it into action: stories deployed on all three of my websites from a single source file. The issue with nofi/lofi/hifi is that it takes some novel ideas to synchronize content across all three. Even though my stories don't change a whole lot once they're posted, the fact that I need to maintain three different versions of the markup for each (owing to nofi using no CSS and lofi and hifi using different CSS), even with the help of AutoSite, has put me off writing more. That's just a lot of busywork—and for everything that's on these sites, plain text stories should be on all three.

I initially conceived of a system using PHP and databases, like my album reviews, but what makes sense for two paragraphs and a bunch of little data around it doesn't line up for more longform writing where the HTML changes so oten. I started scouring around for typesetting and documentation systems that would translate easily to the Web and I settled on DocBook, which is XML-based. This means that the conversion to HTML is, ideally, 1:1, everything that can be represented in the output HTML document has a place in the original DocBook file. Because it's XML, and all XML-based languages are interoperable assuming your document is well-formed and your namespaces are in order, you can use a standard XML processing language like XSLT to turn DocBook into HTML.

If that's a lot of jargon for you, the plain English version here is that I'm using a format for the book that I can easily turn into other things. That doesn't just include website stuff, there's all sorts of tools and converters to turn a DocBook document into eBooks or PDFs or whatever else. It's a good, long-term format to bet on for storing my writing, but in the short term, I just want stories on my sites again.

How I'm planning the workflow

Ideally, I want the conversion process to be as hassle-free as possible. I'd like to get the story into the right format, run a script to generate the necessary three versions, one for each flavor of mari.somnol, and then upload the files. Actually, it's more like six versions—one of my requirements is that I'd like stories that are segmented (like Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure, which I've been using as a test case for figuring out the tools) to also be viewable as a single page, if your retro computer or device can handle it.

To make things even simpler, I'd like to convert not to finalized HTML, but to AutoSite input pages that I can easily slipstream into the existing AutoSite projects that nofi, lofi, and hifi are generated from. This means I will, again ideally, never have to toy with the XSLT stylesheets after they've been written, because any changes to the rest of the site layout will be handled in AutoSite, not in XSLT along with AutoSite.

Step zero: generating the DocBook

So, obviously, the story has to be in the right format first. I'm used to copying over stuff from an RTF or a Works document into an HTML document, and XML works exactly the same. Elements, tags, attributes, that stuff is all just as much in XML as it is in HTML, with some minor changes to suit XML's idea of being a good interchange format (any XML tool, even if it can't make much sense of an XML document's meaning, can at least read it successfully so long as it's free of typos). You know the weird trailing slashes people insist on including in void elements in HTML?

<img src="bubsy.jpg" alt="what could pawsibly go wrong?" />

That's not an HTML thing, that's an XML thing. XML requires all elements to be closed, even void elements, so void elements act as both an open and a close tag in the same tag. (If you're wondering where the mixup happened, there was an attempt to promote XHTML, which is an XML-based version of HTML, over HTML4 back in the 2000s. This was so feature phones were able to access converted versions of HTML sites in languages more suited for their lack of processing power, like WML. Then phones got more powerful and could just read normal websites and suddenly there was no need, so XHTML, which wasn't very well implemented in browsers anyway, died on the vine. Still, parts of it stick around due to misconception and also nobody but me caring about the difference.)

Anyway, if you're wondering what a DocBook file looks like, here's an abridged snippet of my layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<book xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
    <title>KEVIN AND THEO'S MULTIVERSE MISADVENTURE</title>
    <titleabbrev>Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure</titleabbrev>
    <info>
        <author><personname>
                <othername>mariteaux</othername>
        </personname></author>
        <bibliomisc role="canonical">http://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/writing/stories/pennyverse/kevin-and-theo/</bibliomisc>
    </info>
    <chapter label="1">
        <info>
            <title>PAGE ONE</title>
            <titleabbrev>Page One</titleabbrev>
            <bibliomisc role="canonical">http://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/writing/stories/pennyverse/kevin-and-theo/01/</bibliomisc>
        </info>
        <para>Musty books. An entire building of them, in fact. An abnormally large aardwolf in a baggy maroon jacket teetered on two legs, carrying a stack of the things from chest to snout. Evening had fallen on the Apricot Bay Public Library, another week had passed, and the void of patrons meant he could round up what books had been discarded around the first floor by impatient children and uncaring teenagers. They called him Kevin.</para>

Not every piece of information will get used on all three versions of the site. I have both an uppercase and a lowercase version of each page name, as nofi uses uppercase on the visible page and lowercase for the page title and lofi and hifi use lowercase everywhere. This will make more sense when you see the XSLT.

DocBook has a lot of elements, a lot of which I don't need and a lot of which people have proposed cutting from the language entirely. I worked through the documentation to convert Kevin and Theo to DocBook throughout the week and got it done this morning. Now for turning it into stuff.

Step one: setting up xsltproc

One method of converting XML into other languages or forms is through a language called XSLT. XSLT is, itself, valid XML, but it also drives XSLT processors that turn XML documents into either HTML or other XML-based languages. XSLT is normally run in a browser on XML documents on a Web server, and this is usually how you'll see it referred to and documented online, but I want to run the conversion step offline for flexibility and also because I'm targeting browsers that have no support for rendering XML themselves, like Netscape.

My XSLT processor of choice is xsltproc, courtesy of the GNOME folks. I run it on Cygwin because it's the most convenient way I have to run Linux terminal stuff with my setup. I made a directory junction so Cygwin stuff could run on files in my sitebuilding folder, and I was ready to roll.

Step two: writing the XSLT stylesheets

This is the part that made me stumble the hardest, partially due to the complete lack of documentation. XSLT is based on templates—through your XSLT stylesheet, you have the processor match chunks of your XML input, and then you tell it what to convert it to. Problem was, I wasn't getting XSLT to match any element. The only thing I could get it to match was /, which meant "the entire DocBook". Funny as it was to see literally everything I wrote get stuffed into the <title> of the page, that's not really what I want.

So here's what wasn't working:

<xsl:template match="chapter/para">
    <p><xsl:apply-templates /></p>
</xsl:template>

Seems innocent enough, right? Match all <para> elements underneath <chapter> elements. Nope! Doesn't work.

After some time bumbling around in the dark, I discovered that XSLT requires you to prefix your namespaces. A namespace is a technical way to tell a program what XML elements are valid in a document. Technically, you can have any element you want in XML—<name>, <victim>, <objectshoveduparse>—but two different XML languages can have the same element name and thus collide with each other, so specifying namespaces and prefixes prevents that collision. I only learned this from StackOverflow, regrettably. (Even more regrettable: this adventure has made me reconsider my rocky long-term history with W3Schools, because it's the only place with decent examples of this stuff in action.)

With prefixes:

<xsl:template match="db:chapter/db:para">
    <p><xsl:apply-templates /></p>
</xsl:template>

That does work.

So began the process of slowly writing templates to convert everything in the DocBook to HTML. Anything that doesn't get used on the page, I have a template that just outputs nothing for that element.

Here's an example of the end result! It might just look like the story on nofi, but it was generated entirely using tools and scripting, not by me playing with the HTML directly.

This is where I left off for the day, though, because I've hit an additional snag: I don't think I can use xsltproc to output multiple separate files. Remember, I don't just want an all-in-one page, I want to have the pages split up and then have an all-in-one option. Seems I'll have to dig into xinclude to set something like this up, which doesn't look too hard, at least, and xsltproc does support it.

Isn't it funny how I do so much technical work to ideally not have to do as much technical work when I want to be artsy instead?

---

I've had a bit of a second wind with mari.somnol recently! There was talk on Aftersleep about other people implementing theme switchers on their sites, and it reminded me I put up something similar on hifi and then only gave people two themes to play with. I've now added two more and made a whole ton of improvements to how the style selector works as a whole and how the site loads assets based on the current theme.

As one of those projects I intended to get back to when I had more time (and now I do), let me take you through how the hifi style selector works. I always used to be curious how people implement these on their sites, so if you're not sure yourself, hopefully you can gleam something from my setup. (I'm gonna assume you know a bit about Web pages, how they're put together, and how they're scripted. Mostly, it's just terminology.)

There's three basic components to a theme switcher:

1. Different stylesheets/assets for each theme, of course
2. A mechanism to add and remove stylesheets to the page DOM as necessary
3. A way for the browser to remember the selected theme

Working backwards, the third one is pretty much always going to involve cookies. Cookies always felt to me like a fancy "big site" thing I'd never play with, but they're super straightforward, literally just a line of text stored by the browser with various bits of information inside of it. The cookie for hifi stores the preferred theme, the paths over which the cookie data applies to (so, the whole site), and an expiration date, which I set to be a year past when the cookie is first set.

The second one involves a "frontend" way to select themes and a "backend" way to add and remove them from the DOM, which is just a fancy way of saying the page as seen by programming languages. You can technically use PHP for this, but even as a huge PHP acolyte, I can't really recommend it. PHP is a serverside language, so you'd have to submit an HTML form with the selected theme in the dropdown, parse it on the server, and send back the page with the new theme baked into the markup. I dunno, you don't bring a KitchenAid mixer to a gunfight. If it involves styling the client, you should script the client and use JavaScript for it, even if it is the Devil's Language.

And the first? Here's my setup for that:

Each style is given its own folder in my site files with fonts, images, and stylesheets that pertain only to that style. It's almost like a WordPress theme in execution, and it's very clean and self-contained. It's also really easy to make child versions of other themes. I have a dark version of Clean and Tidy, the default hifi theme, which was as simple as @importing in the clean.css in the dark stylesheet and then overwriting a couple of its rules to change the colors and background of the page. Any updates to Clean and Tidy also get applied to the dark version completely automatically.

Making a new theme is actually a lot simpler than I expected it to be. hifi's markup is very theme-agnostic, and the individual page components can be rearranged any which way using CSS grid. The markup is organized so the page collapses into a scrollable tower for phones without the desktop CSS rules, and then above a certain page width, the desktop CSS rules are loaded in using a media query and the layout takes shape. If there's any elements I don't want to appear on certain themes, I mark them with a [theme]_hide class in the markup, and then set that class to display: none; in the theme stylesheet. There is a little bit of duplicating elements on each page, and I could clean that up, but it doesn't seriously impact speed or functionality, so I don't really care to.

styleswitcher.js is where all the magic happens. I've commented up the code, and I guess it's not doing anything too crazy, but in case reading JavaScript makes you break out in hives (me too), I'll give you the rundown in plain English.

1. readStyleFromCookie() gets called first—if the cookie exists, get the preferred style from it, if not, set the preferred style to the default, Clean and Tidy.
2. Both of these options pass the preferred style to the setStyle() function, which does the actual heavy lifting of setting up the new stylesheet on the page.
3. setStyle() starts by nuking all stylesheets from the page DOM. In other words, the page is now completely plain HTML.
4. setStyle() then adds a new stylesheet to the head of the page by constructing a brand new element and setting it to load the stylesheet at /styles/[preferred style]/[preferred style].css.
5. I also determine the date one year from now and set a variable to it. This is what we'll put in the cookie for an expiration date. If I don't set it, the cookie only seems to last a few days, which is annoying.
6. I create/update the cookie. Whatever style is preferred, whether it's the default or an existing preference, is now set as the preference once again.
7. The style selector dropdown gets set to the value of the preferred style as soon as the page is fully done loading, so that way the name in the box matches the name of the active theme.
8. One more step! There's a function called loadStyleExtras() that the preferred style gets passed to. This is a big catch-all function for making elements that only exist on certain themes. Nostalgiamining Away (the minerteaux theme) and The Platypus Years (the mari_nc1 theme) load in header images. The Platypus Years also loads in a script of rotating footer lyrics from songs like mari_nc1 had. These would be unnecessary on other themes and add page bloat, so they're loaded in only if you're using that theme. Some themes have no extras at all.

Say the user then sets a new style from the style selector dropdown in the footer of my site. There's an onChange attribute attached to this dropdown that calls readStyleFromSelect(). This reads the value of the dropdown, passes its value to setStyle(), and the process begins from step three anew.

I've said it too many times now, but it bears repeating: this is so fucking satisfying to me. For one thing, it just works well. Modern HTML and CSS have enabled me to completely transmogrify any page into any layout; this kind of thing would simply not be possible on lofi, where the markup is far more closely tethered to the layout and functionality of the page. (And nofi doesn't use CSS at all! Or have much of a layout to change!) Beyond that, each theme is based on an older site I've had, and at any moment, I can just look at my modern, 2025 work and art and album reviews in any old random Cammy site layout, like the most bonkers kind of alternate reality time travel. My favorite at the moment has to be the minerteaux theme—for a site that was literally only up for a week at the time, I'm strangely attached to it. Must be those XFader textures. Pleasing to use and to look at.

I always thought that hifi and returning to mariteaux.somnolescent.net would come with a feeling of my identity online being solidified again, and it really has. I've just been feeling a lot more confident in myself and how I look to the world lately. It's lovely.

If you're curious about further themes—I think I've run out of Cammy sites to turn into themes, really. mari_v1 is now a theme. mari_v2 became lofi, so it doesn't really need to also be a theme on hifi. mari_v3 is the default hifi theme in light and dark variants. mari_nc1 is a theme now. mari_nc2 is a little too basic to turn into a theme. minerteaux is a theme now. I could do some meme layouts based on other Somnolians' sites, but those would date potentially with redesigns. I was thinking of doing a Bootstrap version of hifi a la dcb_bootstrap, but when I started adding Bootstrap grid classes to the markup, it started breaking the other themes, so that's a no, sadly.

I'm happy with this, honestly! If there do come more opportunities for theme fun, it's dead simple to make new ones and add them, but for now, the current set pleases me greatly. The final frontier of hifi work is honestly just to get my stories on there again. I've finally been poking at DocBook and XSLT, and as overwhelming as it is at first blush, I think it'll be everything I need to keep six (!) different versions of each story in harmony. That'll be a journal post for a day when I have that figured out, though.

---

If you've known me for a very long time, we're talking the teen years, and even then, you had to be close to me—okay, so basically, only Savannah knows, but still—I've actually had OC ideas and ambitions since I was 14, but a lack of drawing ability really kept me from sharing them widely. I tried to write them, but nobody reads that shit and it wasn't very good anyway. Even since I learned to draw, there's been a certain fear I've had of actually designing them for whatever reason. 2025 marks ten years of a lot of them existing with literally zero trace of them outside of private chats and the isolation of my mind.

This boy was the very first one! His name is Felix. I got into Pokémon and Mystery Dungeon early in 2014 as a way to pass the time stuck at home expelled from school, and I got obsessed. Oshawotts just became my favorite thing ever especially and are probably the reason I like mustelids so much these days. I was super creative, so originally, Felix was named Maru (y'know, Oshawott's Japanese name?), but somewhere down the line, he became Felix to me. He's soppy and easily frightened, often convinced he's cursed thanks to his shiny coloration, but unendingly loyal and will push through the pain when he knows he has to. He also loves sweets and seafood. He lives with his lifelong Chespin friend/sorta girlfriend Hazel, his headstrong, adventurous, protective other half (while Felix acts as her common sense and conscience).

Felix does have a more realistic anthro otter design I'll be designing for Pinède as well (and Caby encouraged me to come up with a species and Pinède design for Hazel as well, which is a great idea). This was just a sheet to figure out how I like to draw him, since I've never really done so before now. Shame, really—I've decided to start really cranking out toyhou.se bios, refs, and doodle sheets of all my neglected characters (which is basically all of them) to make up for it. They'd forgive me and appreciate the attention, I hope. I know I'm happy to see him.

---

Few more random thoughts while I've got the journal pulled up. Some more discussion with the Somnolians about me getting fired has led me to settle on the idea that it was probably financial, if they were replacing me with part time help that wasn't owed benefits or anything. Still majorly shitty, but whatever, less to do with me than I initially thought. If you're curious, the beer store was already tightly staffed—it was just the four of us, and that includes two store managers. I was the least senior of anyone there, so I guess it makes sense. Still shitty, but I've made peace with it.

Finally, if you cast your eyes back over to hifi, check the theme switcher! I cranked out a theme based on minerteaux earlier today in literally two hours, which is a far shorter turnaround for building a site theme than I anticipated. If you don't remember (lots of memberberries today), minerteaux was a literal week-long redesign I did of my Neocities site back in November 2018 to get back at the idea (thanks to my essay on nostalgiamining) that I just happened to hate old-looking websites. It was actually a pretty fun larp to go on, and I'm still fond of how it came out, so a theme it becomes! (You can read this slightly later essay on the project if you're wondering how I put it together. The modern version uses grid and CSS and just looks like a table layout.) That just leaves mari_v1 on the table for needing a theme...

Later though. I'm gonna keep working on the Guitar Hero II RetroAchievements set. Five-star Expert bass grind is hugely satisfying.

---

Well, I am again unemployed. This is the first time I've ever actually gotten fired from a job instead of leaving. If you're asking "well, what did you do?", so am I. I got broken up with over a thirty-second phone call that just said "we're making some changes and your services are no longer needed" at noon on my day off. That was it. Wasn't like "hey, was good working with you", no explanation for why, just "Okay? Alright, bye." And no, there were no writeups, no paper trail for any incidents. This just isn't how you fire someone, but that's how it was done.

My first reaction was one of anger, honestly, at how bitchmade a fucking firing over phone call really is. I stayed positive about it for the rest of the evening and through last night's stream, thinking how that job made me a bunch of savings and paid off my student loans and how now I have so much more time per week to catch up on creative stuff, but something sad hit me last night instead, and that's kinda been the feeling ever since. I'm just sorta left to wonder what it was that was sealed the deal—and it really could've been as simple as the trust fund kids who own the company don't like me. Everything I can think of that they might claim was firable, someone else there was openly doing and saying as well, and usually multiple people. Maybe that's like how it's always been though, where marf bad even though everyone else is also doing the same thing.

See, what's funny is that they said they were hiring for "part-time help with the summer coming up" in the days leading up to my firing, and they've been training a new guy over the past week. They would've just gotten done showing him how to tear down trucks yesterday when I got the call, and that was the end of his training to my knowledge. It's not out of the question that was actually my replacement, and if that's the case, that's some hardcore bitch shit. Nothing was amiss. No goodbye for the night was out of the ordinary. I just left on Sunday, hung out on Monday, got the call Tuesday. She waited until I was far enough away to say "see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya" and then ducked the fuck out in under a minute.

I wonder if I'll still be able to peek at people's schedules through the app for a bit—if he gets promoted to full-time, I suppose I'll have my answer.

Yeah, I think that's the gayest part. I specifically asked during the interview back in August of last year if I was actually going to get told if something was a problem, and I got emphatically told yes, and the answer turned out to actually be no. This is why, for all the bad shit at Staples, I felt connected to my GM, an honest dude who understood me, explained a lot of shit to me, and told me to get out of the way before it was too late. I have gotten infinitely more honest answers from my first grocery store job where I was making $11 an hour as the asshole beer counter guy than I did from the cowardly fucking store manager here, two years in and infinitely better at the work and the social skills.

Fuck 'em.

For me going forward, the plan is pretty simple. I'm not gonna look for work ahead of the trip, because that would be stupid. I have the savings, I can just hang out at home for a couple months and work on art and marfGH stuff like I've really wanted to anyway. Then I'll do the trip, stay probably a month and a half (I'll ask Caby what's the longest she'll tolerate me, not like staying longer costs more), and find something when I get back home. I think I can finally start chipping away at my various music and reading backlogs and getting ahead on the things I've been wanting to do without standing around, waiting for HVAC workers with missing teeth to sell cases of Busch Light to. You enjoy your flagging store because your owners are too concerned with bringing in craft NA beer no one drinks and spending thousands trying to win glorified AB display lotteries for the princely sum of about half of what currently sits in my bank account as a peasant. Eat shit.

(Sidenote, I saw a post on Tumblr a few weeks ago where someone was bizarrely confused at the idea of a gaming/etc backlog? Like no, most people's backlogs are not like a business trying to hit quarterly earning goals—you just have a lot you wanna play and finite time to get to it all. It getting turned into a neat list only makes sense. I imagine backlogs probably don't make sense to people who only play three games, but y'know, whatever. Just a stray thought.)

I'll try to get this journal moving more as a result of all the extra free time. Buckle in. It's nice out.

I might sound insincere 'cause I'm
Wasted all the time, I've
Thought it over and

It's over

I'd like to thank you, my dear
In less than a year

It's over

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Well, what is this? A drawing from your old pal Cammy? Yeah, turns out Warring with my Mental Health doesn't stop me from drawing a fucking picture, because I don't suck dick on the weekends, so instead I lined this sketch of Bunny and afan from last year and shaded and colored it all sunny, because happy Easter, you fucks! Good times.

Completely unrelated story: sometimes it takes a dragon spitting in your mouth (while fruitily whispering into your snoot how much you like it) for you to realize how precious life is. I had this really hot Carolina Reaper jerky from Mythical Meats, the jerky we sell at the beer store I work at, on Friday, and my stupid ass, told plenty of how this jerky was A Little Excessive, kept popping piece after piece of just the 2oz bag of it, waiting for the truly mythical heat to kick in until I finished the whole bag. In the mouth? A little nose running, need a drink. In the stomach? I was still doubled over at 2AM, and you bet I hibernated for 12 hours and had to go super Saiyan the next day.

Don't fuck with the Carolina Reaper. That shit will sue you in Australian court for $300,000, and it will win.

Anyway! It was good jerky, and people IRL speculated it was the cause of my absurd energy on Saturday. In reality, I think I'm just tired of being down bad, and I think I'm ready to start embracing how I work and the good things I have to offer the world. It's just the fact of the matter—I work fast, I do everything, I'm here to get my ideas out and not to be gifted in any one medium. I want to celebrate that more. This is the first time in history I've really been able to appreciate my specific, well-rounded gifts, and somehow it's all flown under my radar until now because I'm a sperg who has perpetual tunnel vision.

I visited some comic shops on Monday with Logan, who came down for a visit. Got myself some PS1, PS2, and Wii games, plus an unplayably battered vinyl copy of The Doors' self-titled and a much better condition copy of Cream's Disraeli Gears. Both are very good, the former I thankfully only spent $4 for the privilege for, and the latter $10. I liked 'em both quite a bit. I'll have to replace the Doors one sometime soon. Keep an eye on the album reviews for more random record store pickups I've been listening through at random soon.

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