I've been seriously all over the place lately. I've just decided to start doing absolutely everything that comes to mind, y'know, be an impulsive little shit about making stuff like I'm always tempted to do, and here's how that's going.

I've got two First Draft posts scheduled to the blog! First Draft was a series I was writing for Letters about early and alternate versions of albums, the first one having dropped back in February on the Dandy Warhols' Come Down predecessor, The Black Album. I wound up privating that because it ended up a lot more negative in tone than I particularly wanted, and I just plain liked The Black Album more with it. I rewrote that (it'll be reposted early in July) and I have a special one (we're talking 6,000 or so words) going up in September as well. One First Draft will go up per month.

I've made my web portfolio home over on the Macintosh Garden now, for the time being. I'd prefer not to make any real changes to mari.somnol until I have the next design settled (in case I switch around URLs and break people's links), and I've been batting around the idea of collecting content someplace offsite to make things a bit less high stakes until then. As I've said before, I've become highly aware of how 90% of everything I've ever made is buried in blog archives or on archives.somnol, so I'm aiming to make it a gigantic index of stories, essays, reviews, and everything else I've been up to since roughly 2017 or so. Once the design is settled, I'll start moving everything over there, but for now, you can see some new and rewritten old album reviews on Macintosh Garden.

The trip diary is shaping up! I have about the first week done. I'm having to really study logs and ask Caby to remember what the fuck we were up to on any given day. Next time, I'll keep better notes--I didn't feel like doing it during the trip (because it was my vacation, my time to relax), but I could do a 2-5 minute voice memo for myself each evening next time. Art is proving intimidating, but I was doodling on the call last night, so it'll come. Just gotta keep trying.

We tried out Guilded for a bit! Discord was irritating me with its name change bullshit (I wasn't allowed to pick mariteaux on my private account because it was reserving it for my public account, swell), and Guilded looked promising, so we switched to that for two weeks. Pros: the forums and room types are a lot of fun to play with, global emotes for free, and the amount of room you have to set up servers exactly how you'd like is mind-blowing. Cons: the UI has a serious learning curve, the apps suck (Android's UI is tiny and horribly designed, iPhone crashes constantly), no image embeds, and no method of backing up servers at current, official or otherwise. We didn't hate it, it was fun, but it's a bit too janky for Somnol to officially switch to it at present.

Here's a lad I was doodling on the call, since I mentioned that. My second-ever OC, Rocco the spellsword aardwolf, circa 2015. Wanna give that boy some official outfits (this is his classic one, a sleeveless vest, plus trousers) and also draw Miguel and Marcela, the capybara and flying squirrel (respectively) who make up his little adventurer trio with him. Think he'd be a fun one on Art Fight along with all my other OCs I'm a little intimidated to draw still. Like I said, just gotta push through it. I think he came out cute here!

Also, I got a haircut. Forever reminded my curly, boofy hair only works when it's long, but it'll grow back.