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...)

Hype times. Savannah's building a website! And she picked it up really quickly! I don't know of many people who'd build a two-column layout the same day they start learning HTML. It's looking pretty slick. I've already got her set up on the network to start posting stuff to her own subdomain, and I'll be sure to link it when it's ready for folks to look at.

I've finally got the front page a little more structured to how I imagined it. I really like the lined bubble handwriting thing, I think it's got a lot of character and gives my now very old Pachouli font some new life. Most of the pages aren't built yet, but as I said the other day, they won't just give you a blank not found error when you try to click on them, and they're colored so you know which is which. All in time, all one update after another...

It's also been nice because after a whole lot of time of just not listening to new (to me) music, I've found a new album to get obsessed about: Marcy Playground's Shapeshifter. This album got pretty much ignored after it came out because there's nothing like "Sex and Candy" on it, and that is criminal. The album is basically all killer, no filler. Every song on the album has some annoyingly catchy hook in it. I think I've listened to it every day this week, and surprisingly, my singing voice isn't far off from his. Maybe I should do some covers from it when I get back into guitar someday. Hm.

This album is probably due for a proper ramble from me sometime, but I'm running on no breakfast yet and I should rectify that before I babble on for a bunch more paragraphs.

Halloween is past, into the 55 days of Christmas! The scariest part of my Halloween was when a man with a vaguely eastern-European accent came in and put $40 into our lottery machine without quite understanding how the lottery works.

I've made all the links from the old site redirect 501 Not Implemented while I get everything resituated. Some of it will be coming back, some of it will go back to mari.somnol, and others will be redirecting 410 eventually. Sorting through it all individually as I get to it.

I'm really fond of using different HTTP status codes for different site errors, even if I'm writing static pages and not a web app. Using 501 doubles as taking much of the pressure off getting all the pages back up as quickly as possible, as dcb very astutely pointed out. I'll definitely be adding it to mari.somnol too when I start to rework all that.

I've been sketching some more site graphics as well. Here's the one I'll be using for the computer history page, where I ramble about all the computers I've used (regularly) in my life. There's a really irritating story behind this one, but namaste. All is fine. It's still cute, and it's just a sketch. This should also set the doofy tone for where I wanna go with cammy.somnol in the coming weeks...