Today marks one year of the journal, and thus, one year of cammy.somnol! I intentionally brought the site back up absolutely bare bones, with nothing except this journal, to see how it would grow on its own. It's been slow, but super rewarding.
There's still a bunch of pages ready to go over on the home server beta site that just need a Setter in the header. This includes the score pages, the MIDI stockpile, and one of the timelines (though that one's inverted, the Setter is already done, I just have to get other graphics for that page down). I have some other flavor graphics sitting around as sketches, and I'd like to edit or redo some of the others to make them more consistent. I've improved really dramatically in my art in the past year, and July brought huge, sweeping improvements to how I draw snoots and shape my heads, so you get a weird mix at the moment of the old Setters with the slight bump on the side of the head and the ones with proper snoots. Some of the Setters have eye shinies, some don't. That sorta thing.
My motivation has been a lot healthier this year. I'm done feeling like I need to prove myself, which was a big thing that drove me forwards in the past, but also caused me a lot of stress and a lot of burnout when stuff didn't turn out exactly as I liked. That's why I haven't been rushing to get any of that done, though it is still on the to-do list; I'm making this for me, and I like what we've got live already. I'm not feeling any great rush to get the rest up in case someone thinks the site is too barren. The photo galleries alone brought a lot to see back to the subdomain, and the Wales trip diary being finally done makes for nearly a full month of daily content, art, photos, fun stories, vibes, and future Cammy plans to read.
In short: it'd take anyone who isn't in the group a night to a few days to go through all this already. The rest will be done when it's done.
I've said it before, but cammy.somnol is the site I've always wanted to make, but never thought I could make. I never thought I'd be able to draw period, let alone illustrate a personal site, but I've found I not only enjoy it a lot, but I'm a lot better at it than I figured I'd be. Not, like, amazing or anything, but I'm already drawing all the animal people in comfy clothes I've ever wanted to, so how far I go is just a bonus to me. My confidence is growing. I feel like I'm getting more ambitious with my poses, and my lines are more flowing and solid. cammy.somnol has not only given me immense joy on its own, but it's also given me several new avenues to take any future site plans I have.
And let me tell you, if any of this sounds complacent, it's very much not. My aim is to have cammy.somnol up to parity with cammy_v1 by the end of the year. That's a few more Setters and a few more pages, really. Once that's done, I'm going to start cracking on the new design for mari_v4; the content is already done, it's up on mari@macintosh.garden, I just need to finish up the Mac OS 8-styled thing I started last year. The illustrations for that one will be less intense, less like full pictures and more halfbodies, a few fullbodies, probably just lineart. Something clean and cute. I had an idea to make them animated GIFs lined a few times to simulate Squigglevision. I still think that's a banger idea. Caby sorta did that with caby_v2 in spots.
Once my sites are back to fully working order, I will be at full power. My focus will return entirely to my projects. I have stories started. I have albums started. I'd like to start making proper YouTube videos on a new channel, something combining all my loves of music and technology and wandering rambling vlogs. Even outside my personal sites, I'm gonna be building caby.art for Caby so she can get back to doing commissions and having a place to link folks instead of doing all her business over her private Discord account, and Meowcities and the archives redesign are also half-finished and stuck in the pipeline. I'd also sorta like to redo my toyhou.se completely, hide all my characters, draw them all, rewrite their profiles, get my new lads up there too, and especially redo the (at this point very outdated and very wonky) Cammy and Somnolians assets for my profile.
It's kind of become a rethink of my entire internet presence, now that I have this ability to draw. It's going to take a lot of work, but I'm living for it. This is the most satisfied and most coherent I've ever felt as a person. I realized at the start of this year that I needed to focus less on bandying words with randos in Discord servers and more on creating and getting back to showing everyone how it's done. I think it's already paying off immensely. All of my hobbies, all of my music, all of my games are back to making me super excited—and after the two long years spent waiting for shit to reopen? That's all a badger boy could ever ask for.
