Whoops, I fell asleep before I could write that post last night. Here's the fun stuff!

So, I've said this many times now: whenever something creative I made becomes massive out of date, be it sites or stories, I have a hard time looking at it. The Somnolescent Gopher server absolutely, 100%, fit this criteria. The last time it was seriously updated was 2021, back when borb and mon were both still in the group. That's legitimately ancient. There were talks of making a GitHub repo and us collaboratively updating it, but that fell through and I've come to realize I literally do not take on projects anymore without first thinking of everyone else around me, which isn't great.

So I've been rebuilding it myself. Direct link for clients that support Gopher, proxy link. Have a looksee:

Click for full size. Ahem.

Firstly, menus (which is what you'd call pages in Gopherspace) are a lot more graphical now. Back in 2021, I was really on this "pure Gopher" kick where I thought menus shouldn't have informational selectors (which aren't a canonical Gopher itemtype, so some bad Gopher clients that don't understand them just discard them), so our menus were very plain to look at and browse through. I recently saw some grabs of the original 2018 Somnol Gopher (courtesy of The Potato), and our menus used to look so fucking swag with the ASCII art and the decorative dividers, it was nuts. I brought all that shit back, with fallback text files so those using said less robust clients can still understand what's going on.

Secondly, alongside updating what was already there, we're adding new menus to show off everyone's work in various mediums. The big thing has been a Gopher art gallery with some personally-selected highlights over the past few years, but I'd like to do the same on a new menu called the Grand Playlist featuring both my music and Connor's. Old-school file formats are still being taken into consideration here: there's small versions of each of the art pieces in GIF or JPG, and I'm gonna have 128kbps MP3s and 8-bit WAV files for the Grand Playlist for computers that can do MP3 playback and ones that can't, respectively. Lots more on the way, really loving how it's coming out and having an up-to-date Gopher server again.

Finally! I've saved the most exciting bit (to me) for last: Somnolescent now has a CCSO server, at gopher://gopher.somnolescent.net:105/2/.

CCSO is an absolutely ancient database lookup format first developed in the late 80s at the University of Illinois for their Computing and Communications Services Office. You can store anything in a CCSO server, but it was mostly used for looking up your professors and other staff through a command-line interface. There's less than ten known CCSO servers still in operation, most of them for colleges who probably don't remember they even have them, and some of those using LDAP-to-CCSO translation layers, not even proper CCSO servers.

Somnolescent is now running its own CCSO server. I had this idea back in 2020, 2021 or so to not only use it to list us, as is obvious, but also be a full database of every single character we've got (and we have a few!). dcb wrote a Python script for it back then, but I didn't like how it worked and I wasn't bright enough to realize I could just rewrite and add onto it either.

Anyway, that's all been deployed now. I've been working on the server code for the better part of a week now (here's the repo if you wanna see it, feel free to shoot bug reports), and you can search by name, universe, species, character creator, and affiliation for people's friend groups, guilds in Pinede, Somnolians, etc. I'm still adding people to the database, but SomnolCCSO is available through our Gopher server to anyone who has a CCSO-capable client, no authentication needed. Netscape 4 works quite well. The above screenshot was taken with the most recent version of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, you can use Lynx or telnet if you've got those lying around, and I've even gotten this old neat freeware Windows 3.1 Ph client working with our server, after some additional command scrubbing:

This is such a highly specialized, hipster, niche nerdy toy that I expect no one but me to fool around with, but I am beyond delighted for Somnol to have it. One of the last ten still in existence, and my knowledge, the only new one that's been deployed in the past five years. I really think there's a lot of life still left in CCSO, at least as much as there is in Gopher; Tildes and clubs could use them for member lookups, as an example. Just needs more client support, really. Ideally, when dcb gets a permanent home for Gopherlens, he'll add CCSO support through that so you can do CCSO lookups through the web instead of needing an extra program for it.

Click for full size!

And look! Caby finished that Setter wallpaper I commissioned her for! Look how well it matches XP Media Center Edition! He's such a ditz and I adore him and I adore how this came out. Thanku Cabyyyyyy~