Here's some games I've been really into lately! (You'll notice basically all of this pertains to RetroAchievements, where I'm now in the top 7% of the site and hoping to get into the top 5% in the next few months.)

• Vib-Ribbon (PS1): Mastered this one's RA set, very challenging, very satisfying set. Those Silver courses are honestly harder and more annoying than the Gold courses, but you bet I nailed them. I also streamed a whole bunch of "customs" courtesy of the Somnolians (my first in over a year!), and I'm thinking of doing that again fairly soon since everyone enjoyed it so much.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (for like every system it was on): I had actually 100%ed the PS2 version prior to me even knowing about RA, but of course, had to go back and do it again once an RA set was made. I also finished up the PS1 set now that the guy who made it moved all the nonsense "100% the level in one go" achievements to a subset. I am sorta going for the N64 version as the triple crown, but I'm a bit put off mastering the set because some of the really hard gaps feel even more difficult on the N64 version. Just can never seem to get enough speed. I think I've already sunk 3-4 hours over a few days into the Perfecting Your Skills gap on Suburbia alone and not come close to landing it once.
• Retro Game Challenge (DS): This is such an old favorite of mine, and playing through it again for RA makes me appreciate it even more. I legit find the fake NES games in the set more fun to play than real NES games. Can't believe I forgot about this one when I was working on the "games that shaped me as a person" page for cammy.somnol, because I was super into it then and I'm still super into it. Will have to rectify that now that I'm working on site stuff again. I'm amazed, usually when my mom or whoever bought me some game I'd never heard of as a kid, it turned out to be a dud. This is a hidden gem, and damn people for not buying it and making it so we never got the sequel here in the west.
• Various weird homebrew Pac-Man clones (Arduboy, Atari 2600): Paqman is hilariously broken, Pac-Man 4K is impressively good. I'm pretty sure Paqman is so broken that some of the achievements don't actually work. No one's mastered the set, and some of the ones that no one's gotten, I very much managed to do (like completing three levels without dying). So that one, I might forfeit the 100 points I got from it and make them up in a way more fun game and set. Pac-Man 4K, I can definitely master, just that 100k points in one game is a scary, scary thought.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (PS2): Freakin' classic. I swear everyone my age who had a PS2 or a GameCube at least knew someone who was really into this game, if not was into it themselves. This one's a definite easy master and completion, just gotta play it some more. Every time I think of this game, I have to go back to watch the borderline-illegal speedruns of it. The skee-ball abuse setup (using stone tikis to keep SpongeBob's bubble bowl active in the points trigger for the skee-ball machine in Goo Lagoon) is legit one of my favorite game breakers I have ever seen.

Okie, time to go clean my room.

Big real-world news of the now: I'm working on getting my passport! I have completed my DS-11 and I'm looking to get photos taken the first week of January.

I think most people dread paperwork, but honestly doing the form gave me a weird kinda glee of officiality I can't describe. Having to gather all my information and get it filled out and filed really makes you feel like it's getting closer, something that I stopped feeling a long while ago, sadly.

Then I just file everything at the post office and send off the money to Uncle Sam and in a month and a half, I can fly to Wales! It's gonna be...highly surreal having one of these, but this is happening. When that comes, I'll start warning people at work that I'll be gone for a whole three weeks and looking at planes and when Caby's folks can come pick me up.

Also starting in January, I get a raise! A whole $12 an hour, ooh!

Well, I dropped the ball on the journal thing. It's not that there aren't a lot of really fantastic legitimate real-world goings-on in my life right now! It's that I also collapsed a bit under the holiday retail joy and not being able to finish anything out of a mountain of drawings and site pages. (I'll explain later, but archives will be eating really good in 2023.) And anyway, it's Christmas! It's a time to vibe, and I got a neat controller, so I just hunted for more RetroAchievements.

So here's my penance. I'll break this up into a few smaller posts and post them daily, each focusing on something else. We'll pick up normal journal activity in 2023. Lemme show you some cool things I got for Christmas.

So firstly, Savannah sent us all gift boxes! They each contained Canadian snacks and a goofy memey generic Christmas card she then doodled our respective sonas in. All of the things in it so far (including an Aero bar and a Mr. Big, plus real Canadian maple syrup that I haven't had a chance to pour on anything yet) have been excellent. I will buy a box of each of these when I actually go to Canada someday soonish.

(It's fantastic seeing everyone else's card as well. Still love the idea of personalizing garbage Hallmark cards.)

My Caby sent me a big Amazon box as well (and I did in return), with some colored pencils that slap and a big gigantic book about silent film that I am intensely curious about reading. It's by Kevin Brownlow, one of the big silent film historians and the guy who produced the big infamous borderline-uncirculated Hollywood miniseries for Thames in the 80s. This thing feels substantial, and it's a gift I both wasn't expecting and I'm actually into! Pays to have people who know what ya like...

(Not pictured: the cute lil notes she wrote on em <///<)

As far as Christmas itself goes, eh, my folks try their best. I got some cool music I asked for (including Minecraft Volume Beta, music discs my beloved), but the really nice thing was this SNES Classic controller. Because of the amount of knockoffs of these online, I made sure to send a link to an auction with a legit part number and everything in the title so I got the real thing. I now have both the NES and SNES Classic controllers to use with my Raphnet adapter that's been trucking since it became the new meta in 2018.

(I think I've had Atari 2600 controllers with longer cables.)

I gotta hand it to Nintendo for both of those controllers, they feel very authentic, like they just gutted old controllers and put the Wii controller circuitry in them. They have good weight, the SNES one especially, the textures on them feel legit, and the buttons click like crazy, in an old used controller way. Love it. My Classic Controller (the one for the Wii) is also an excellent, comfortable controller I've used for years, but I like to use these other ones when I'm playing NES/GB and SNES/DS games respectively for a bit more authenticity and also just something different.

I bought a few things for myself this Christmas, the big one being a finally working AOL PhotoCam Plus with a battery door that stays closed. This thing will be such a treat to bring to Wales. I suppose I oughta see if I can't track down the cable and software necessary to transfer stuff off the camera properly, so I don't have to rely on the only semi-working PhotoRec. (Not that it's PhotoRec's fault, granted.) And yes, this means I have three of this camera now, one not working, the Pretec, and this one.

Oh, and I'm loading up on 3DS eShop money before that closes down. You can still add funds through a linked Nintendo account. I almost got locked out, but turns out I had my Network ID saved in my LastPass vault, so I was able to get in still. Will let ya know in the new year if I find any gems!

Y'know, it's not that I'm disinterested in the idea of journaling, it's just that I'm too busy either actually doing stuff or playing Tony Hawk or whatever to actually do it. Doesn't help that I've been kinda weirdly forgetful and all over the place lately? I tell people I have surprises for them after I told them what the surprise was two days prior! Just today, I've written a group newsletter, I'm writing this journal, I was sketching, I want to write a Scanimate blog post for the holidays, possibly others...

So yeah, apologies if this just turns into links or I forget to update it outright! I'm just busy and my mind is elsewhere.

Posted the full-color Cammy and Setter! I'm really happy to finally be settling into a style I feel is comfy for me at the moment. Dot eyes, simple shinies, simple shading, I think it just looks super appealing and it's a good way I can focus on form and learning how to draw more things than futzing around with my eyes, trying to get them to not look empty or too small or whatever.

Contradicting that a bit, I'd like to toy with the way I sketch and get comfier pumping them out. Y'know, so I can get my ideas out easier and quicker. I don't think I'll be able to do the loosey-goosey thing any time soon, but I know I should be sketching my ideas more, and this morning, I started doing that...and he got out of hand. I was looking at Treasure Keepers (the Neopets thing) and some art from one of my favorite artists, and...

...Out popped a wizardy Cammy whom I just need to shade now! Took a break because my hand was starting to wear out, but man, I really like this boy. I am so happy that Cammy's come so easily to me, he's a tricky one to draw.

This week's looking real solid at work because I'm actually off three days! Well, off two days and I'm taking Friday off as well. I was scheduled then without asking and after eight months straight of even coming in on my days off, for $11 an hour or roughly $50 for that day after tax, I'm just not feeling like it. I've let them know I'm not coming in on the 16th, including the store manager who was totally on board with me not showing up if I give proper notice, so that's that. Sold it to him as I've had plans on that day for weeks since Fridays are my normal days off, and that's kinda true...

Instead! I'm gonna be streaming for the first time since November 2021! I've been playing a lot of Vib-Ribbon lately and I've asked the group to send me stupid songs to play in it. I know none of what they've picked, and they haven't exhausted all their choices yet. They've got until midday Friday or so. Fear. (Also, someone will be joining me on the mic! The lucky one has yet to be picked...)

Apparently it takes like six weeks to get your passport after you mail off the forms? So I'm gonna be settling that so it's all taken care of come the new year. It still doesn't feel real yet, but I've had some close calls.

After having this site up two months, I have...an about page! I've started others, but they take more work. Everything being illustrated slows stuff down a lot, plus I'm working five days out of the week. But y'know what, I'm really happy with how things are shaping up. This site is turning out adorable.

I'm gonna give that drawing of Cammy and Setter proper full colors and post it places because it's actually a pretty complex, experimental drawing for me and I'm proud of it and everyone else in the group likes it too.

The ideal for cammy.somnol at the moment is to finish up a couple of sections, a couple of pages, bring back some of the classic ones, and then start working on mari.somnol. With DeviantART rapidly disintegrating and trending towards "literally unusable" (there's a new system where totally innocuous drawings get flagged as mature and thus you need to sign in to view them), I'd like to get an art gallery for myself going over there, among many, many other improvements to my, uh, presence.

But again. 30 hours a week minimum, five days a week. This about page is plenty for right now.

December's gonna be a busy month too. This is the first year I'm buying gifts for people (and thus accepting gifts from people), so I'm arranging all that, getting addresses, hoping to have stuff ordered and arrived, hoping to ship out some more handmade stuff myself. Plus! No big plans for anything creative (aside from all the plans), but Caby knows I've been kicking around a Somnol group pic idea for New Year's, so uh...gotta sketch that.

And that's it—for now. I've survived that freakish ten days of pain, the Alcopocalypse. Tomorrow I'm off. I celebrate with alcohol. (What else do I celebrate with?)

I kinda wish wine wasn't so disgusting, because to be honest, the wine slosh hits different than the beer slosh. Wine is usually higher percentage, so one small bottle's all you need to get tipsy. I dig that. It's too bad it tastes like chlorinated pool water. We have so many different discontinued kinds of wine that I would happily buy if wine wasn't actually vile, but it sadly is. I tried Franklin Hill's Sir Walter's Red tonight, Franklin Hill being a local vineyard. It was as close to tolerable as I've gotten, though I still would not buy it for fun. I followed it up with a Yuengling Hershey's porter that I like quite a lot.

I was genuinely impressed with the pre-Thanksgiving rush of customers we got. Not a single one that Wednesday was rude, and most of them perfectly understood, or were forgiving about, the liquor rules I have to enforce. It was a busy shift, don't get me wrong—I made just under $7,000 at my register alone, and the store itself grossed a cool six figures—but all was fine, all things considered.

Then came my two morning shifts. It's funny, because I was considering switching to mornings once I had the transportation set up, but having actually experienced two morning shifts? Yeah, nah. Not for this job. It takes about an hour, two tops to clean up that small corner of the store, and then four if you happen to have beer deliveries to do. Between 12 and 5, I had fuck all to do other than the register (and there weren't even many customers buying beer at 8AM, natch), and I was still in so much pain and so tired that I couldn't exactly go home and do anything I wanted to do. I just collapsed in bed and called it good.

So yeah, happy to be working nights again. They want me to work a Friday in the near future, but I'm just gonna ignore that bit because Fridays mean group calls and no way I'm missing Savannah telling dcb how to play Spyro for work. (In all seriousness, these guys have really come out of their shell since March, and I wouldn't trade 'em for the world. I've got a terrific Christmas gift for you all coming, possibly a few. Genuinely love you all to bits, even if I can't type right now for shit.)

Someone offered to work one of my shifts this week! That means I am thankfully off today and doing as much as I can to do not much of anything at all. I'm down six hours as a result, but 33 hours is still not far off from my old high of 35-37 hours or so and still probably a bit too much for what I'm actually hired to do, but that's okay, quite happy with this arrangement.

One thing, months later, I still have yet to get right, is being able to balance working and hobby stuff. Forget big projects for a moment. Let me just show you my Downloads folder. This is where anything I grab for work or entertainment purposes goes until it gets deleted or stored, and I haven't cleaned it out in a minute.

We've got:

• Some Rock Band DLC I grabbed to check a song's audio (R.E.M, Offspring, and Richard Thompson, though I only needed the Offspring song) (and the inclined among you now have everything you need to find out which pack of singles I downloaded :marfpeek:)
• Stems for a Candlebox song from the Cambridge stem library that I was gonna chart, but haven't even transcoded to FLAC for safekeeping
• More RBDLC, this folder all for an all-80's curated Onyx setlist I was putting together
• My FTP Transfers folder, which contains full grabs of the old caby.somnol and cammy.somnol sites (matchy matchy? o///o)
• A copy of All Lights Fucked by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, their long-lost debut cassette that I got like four songs into and turned off because it was kinda spooky at 11PM at night
• An old version of PCSX2 with the video recording functionality intact so I could record marfGH videos
• dcb's contributions to Somnol Radio, still untouched
• GIFs of a Spore version of marf that Caby made, still untouched
• MSN Messenger group chat doodles
• Caby's new handwriting font
• A screenshot of early Guitar Hero that I needed for a TCRF page I still haven't finished
• An MP3.com DAM CD someone on Discord copied for me, again, untouched
• A very rare promo CD of one of the featured artists in Amplitude
• A video on MP3 hype from 2001 that I have yet to watch
• An ISO for Microsoft Plus! for XP, which I installed on the eMachines Netbook and now need to back up
• An installer for Rebelle, which I never installed because Lastpass was broken when I went to grab my password to activate it
• An ISO for Rock Band 2 that needs to get backed up
• A live version of America's "Ventura Highway", courtesy of dcb, that I have yet to listen to

The oldest things in this folder are dcb's Somnol Radio submissions and the Godspeed You! tape, from February and March of this year, respectively. Shit, shit.

Well, I've gotten my schedule for this week, and it's fucking scary. I'm working 39 hours total, one day off (not even my usual day off, Thanksgiving), and Black Friday, I'm working a nine hour shift.

Last night in general was a whirlwind of emotions. I got my schedule and that wasn't fun. I drank an alcoholic maple bacon slushie from the slushie machine and laughed my ass off the moment I took a sip (it is literally just drinking a sausage and it's the most bizarre thing I've ever tasted). The guy who said I had a small penis came back in to apologize and said he'd been there four times in a row trying to see me. I learned my manager's main job isn't even the store, it's managing her husband's art and animation business working with clients as big as fuckin Dave Chapelle.

It's not all bad! But it is a bit much. Needless to say I have like zero desire to do anything that isn't lay around and play Tony Hawk after work at the moment. (Be sure to follow me on RetroAchievements so you can see what I'm playing!) It's literally a ten day stretch, five days of working (started this past Saturday, is now Monday, so on day three), off one day, four days of working.

Thankfully afterwards it goes back to normal. Doesn't bode well for the mountain of stuff I always wanna do, but hey. Time for everything. I will try to keep up sketching when I feel up to that, because I think I'm going somewhere good with this and I've just been on a roll with the Cammys especially. Such a fun boy to draw. So fluffy, so comfy.

Oh, and since you guys haven't seen this finished Setter yet, here's the one that'll go atop a page on all my computers and consoles and cameras and stuff. I'm really fond of a one-color-for-the-entire-lad coloring style, kind of that Ant and the Aardvark thing, so in the interests of speeding up cammy.somnol site graphic development, I'll be going with that. This feels like a good balance between look and simplicity.

One last update on the Savannah stuff: she's officially on the top-level somnolescent.net with us! This kinda site really was meant for five people, and now we have a much, much better, much more excited and productive and cool-to-talk-to fifth person. Spot her all over the site! In the tree! Having a sleepover with us! Carrying a djungelskog! (She's also finally on the humans.txt, which I neglected to list her on earlier this year... Did I mention we have a humans.txt?)

I've recently taken up digital sketching, as I said in my last update, so here's a bit more on that. I used to work on paper, take a picture (or scan) of what I drew, and line over that. This was fine until I started to get pickier about how I drew, and started routinely erasing to the point that the paper texture would actually get rubbed off, thus no grooves for pencil graphite to sit in, thus even blurrier, nastier strokes. I've ruined two sketches doing it and I'm irritated to shit about it.

Actual paper workers just sketch something over and over until they like it and then work on that. I'm not quite there yet, so instead, I'm just starting to sketch digitally. It is the single greatest decision I've made yet. I'm still trying to figure out how big to draw on the canvas, so there's still some sketch resizing, but I finished that Setter ref last night and, dare I say, it came out better proportioned than any of my paper sketches!

(Really need an art gallery. Really need to get all these site assets drawn and shit built!)

This ref has also gained me a cool three new watchers on DeviantART overnight, plus a few favorites from non-Somnolians, so yeah, I think I'm getting alright at it.

I gotta go to work in a half hour... Bad days happen, everyone knows that, but man. When you have a crap day in retail, gigantic shipments you can't finish on your own, customers being spicy (I told a guy not to put his drink down on top of some product and he said I was a punk kid with a tiny dick), I dunno, it takes a toll on you for a bit. I'm sure today will be great and I'll smile and go "y'know, things will be alright", but yeah. Going because I have to. Going because I'm getting paid.

Hey, if you want some good news, I've only got like five months until I ship out to Wales for three weeks. This stuff is getting kinda concrete, as in plans are being made to let me stay at their house and for me to get my passport ready, and it's something else to think about. It stopped feeling real for so long, and here we are, as it's getting progressively more and more real.

Ah, fuck me, site stuff gets away from me so quick... Trying to pick up the pace on everything, kinda not doing too great. Kinda struggling with personal stuff. That's okay! Good things are happening.

Still gotta finish the Setter cloud drawing. I had originally pegged it for a page on my computer-using history, but all the cool computers, I've gotten in the past 2-3 years. (So yeah, the links on the front page currently are all maybe-future pages. Just needed something to fill out the layout.) Instead, I'm gonna use it to show off all those computers and also my iPods and cameras and game consoles and things. Gotta finish the text, gotta finish the art for it, gotta take pictures of everything.

That's why I started a Setter ref instead. This one actually came out of a bout of trying to learn how to sketch digitally, which I'm super stoked about. It feels so much faster and more efficient than doing it on paper, especially when I don't inevitably ruin the paper with my erasing... The goal is to make it match Bunny's ref, and then eventually to do a Cammy ref that matches Caby's new one. I've already lined the normal outfit boy (look to your right), he's turning out fuckin' supremely doofy and adorable.

As promised, Savannah has finished her site! I've told her many times how impressively clean it is, both in layout and markup. (She used flex! I didn't even teach her that???) She jokes about her now being a canon Somnolian because of it, but really, it does glue together a little divide that's been standing for honestly years now, both in herself and in the group. Very nice to see, very recommended! Very cute. Now comes the fun part of getting her hooked up to the main site and all my mari.somnol pages! :marf:

One last bit of good news: been doing some room rearranging and furniture selling to accommodate a second desk. The eMachines Box is about to get a second wind. Thankfully, I've already got a spare keyboard for it! Even an eMachines-branded one! It's gummy as fuck and kinda sucks and still needs a deep clean, but hey, at least it's stock(?) (The entire rig needs upgrading, stay tuned next year for that...)