Got a lot of really exciting real world stuff that's gonna make me a lot of money going on, but I'll save that for another post. Let's talk my August creative plans! I meant to make this post a week ago, but then I spent it playing Gran Turismo 2, watching that boxset of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! I got from the library sale back in June, and recuperating instead. I need to shut off more—2025 will absolutely have more of that.

So back in May of last year now, I picked up a grey cat adopt from Caby that I named Miranda. She designed her to be sold obviously, but I just couldn't let her go to someone else, especially not when I had such a great idea for how to use her: a mascot for archives. archives was initially designed in a couple days in 2020 and themed around the Archives level in Goldeneye on the N64, but as cool and recognizable as that theming is, I wanted something more for it. Something more unique, something more personality-filled, and something with a little more meat and context than simply a list of download links and browseable old Somnol sites.

I've known how it should look since the beginning of this year, but it's taken me until now to do it. Part of the issue is I've never been too happy with how I draw Miranda, or any housecats really. I couldn't shape their heads correctly, I couldn't position parts of the face correctly, Miranda's got long hair like I was never all that great at drawing, I was experimenting with what details I wanted to put on them, and it was just a big fiddly mess that didn't come naturally, which is funny given how many kids get into drawing through drawing lots of cats and dogs. Just didn't come naturally to me!

Thankfully, developed skill and a lot of practice during Art Fight has made me much more confident in my ability to draw all of the above, and so now, I'm ready to start developing a better archives and give Miranda her home finally. Take a look:

Click for full size!

If you read the 2023 Wales trip diary, you can see an example of the redesign prototype from a year ago, and the moment I landed back in the US, I just stopped liking it. Aside from how much I didn't like the Miranda in the header, I wanted archives to be open, borderless. Initially I had an idea of doing a very 70s orange thing with thick white lines around design elements, but that was never very sharp in my head and I'm not a design sperg, so I just kept it simple and went with this HTML 3.2 table layout thing. Realizing that tomb theming would be kinda cool with the sandy background, I pretty shamelessly stole the icons from the old PopCap game Alchemy and guzzied them up on this 90s gold-marble surface courtesy of XFader.

I'm still surprised at how much I actually like the Miranda illustration, honestly, not just because of how tricky I've always found her to draw, but because I actually didn't line it. I realized doing so much art for Art Fight that a lot of the wonk in my sketches has been due to me trying to figure out limb thicknesses and extra poof from clothes in the same step, and normally, I hate my sketches for that reason. This time, I did my skeleton stick figure pose, then a nakey pose for the character proportions on another layer, and then finally drawing Miranda and her clothes on the top layer. It worked really well, and because the final size for the illustration was about half my sketch size, I didn't feel the need to line it. I might go back and touch it up and add the second guinea pig, but the experiment was a success!

This new iteration of archives is gonna have a nice timeline of Somnolescent history (projects/joins/leaves/events), a proper way to browse through the various versions of our sites with thumbnails and dates, and of course, more of this kitty woman I'm still really fond of. Expect it out later in the month, and that'll be one more thing I wanted to do officially off my list.

As for the rest of that list, I'm still aiming to have the Last Summer CDs finalized and ready by September or so. I still have to actually make the CD master, and I'll likely go back and tweak levels and some of the melody parts on some of the songs while I'm at it. It's one thing if it's some Web copy I can replace anytime, but once it's burned and mailed out, it's burned and mailed out. I want to make sure I'm totally satisfied before I do. I also intended to send art out with it, which has admittedly been the real holdup. Again, I wanna do it right, like it's been in my head. I have to wait for dcb to go back to school first anyway so he can actually receive packages.

Beyond that, the only real thing I'm aiming to do is have all my mari.somnol stuff settled. lofi still needs Kevin and Theo finished, nofi has a nice list of bugfixes and features it's behind on since I started working on lofi, and I need to build hifi. They all need illustrations. If I can pull this off before 2024 is out, I'm taking the rest of the year off. I don't remember the last time I just wasn't working on anything. I think I've fatigued a little bit (I honestly don't even know if this journal entry is particularly coherent), and I just don't have a lot to prove like I used to. I think time away from constantly Making Stuff will let the idea bucket start to fill up a little bit too, which is super important if I wanna spend 2025 entirely on my stories like I do.

Oh yeah, and stories—Savannah might have some really fucking good ones for you soon. Watch Letters for the announcement.