Dude weed lmao

The final draft of Kevin and Theo wrapped on Tuesday! Bunch new scenes in it, things are better fleshed out, they make more sense, and characters and dialogue just hit better, more vibrantly, more sensically. Much happier with the new draft. We did agree to go through and switch all the US spellings and names for stuff to their British equivalents, but I'm gonna let her do that, because I don't know the full extent of what I'm looking for. Caby's nearly done with her illustrations too; all that's left is the poster, which will also be the book cover.

I'm really happy with the way it all panned out. This is really the first in the new wave of Pennyverse stories (a term I am endlessly frustrated I couldn't use in Kevin and Theo itself), which has changed a lot since 2019, in tone, in the strength of the writing and the maturity and the likability, frankly. Not a lot of that's gotten online since it's mostly been ideas and talks as we've stopped working on it for a few years, so it's nice to have the new era officially begun with this story.

To elaborate on that last point: I stopped working on Pennyverse for a while in part because I felt being a more empathetic and better-adjusted person would help me do the material better justice. I'm not particularly proud of the early days of the project. It was funny how "saccharine" and optimistic it was made out to be back when we started it, because we still joked lots about characters dying horribly, and I sure wrote a lot of miserable things with Seb and especially Colton (who I regret putting through so much despite him being a fictional teenage raccoon), miserable to the point where they basically made no sense. (So many adults bullying this kid, despite him being literally orphaned and probably malnourished. He'd be the first everyone would protect.)

I've stopped regretting it quite as much as I used to, but really, I won't rest until it's all the way it should be. The first step towards that was just growing as a person myself, and I'm happy to say I feel I very much have, but it does mean the flow of new Pennyverse media dried up for a while, and what is there (like the toyhou.se bios) is woefully out of date.

I'm pretty fond of it all again, all the stories and music and level design and site building and art I've always gotten up to, so to focus my attention, I've been thinking of it in phases. These aren't set in stone, they bleed together, they're months-long, and there's no deadlines, but my time gets more limited, I have more I want to do, and I've gotta start picking. Here's how I've been thinking of it:

1. The first phase involves my websites. I fell off of sitemaking over the lockdowns, and like Pennyverse, the way I presented myself (like my dislike of about pages or only having sections for what I feel people would care about from me) doesn't sound right to me anymore. cammy.somnol is just the cute little hobby and interest site, but I'd really like to have mari.somnol redone, nice to browse, and filled up with damn near everything I've made for some kinda audience before I go and make more of it with (currently) no place to put it.

2. The second phase involves my writing, both the stories themselves and the meta media around it. My toyhou.se is both barren of my new lad ideas and very out of date of my old lad ideas. Colton's updated personality, where he's less "vulnerable kid" and more "vulnerable teenager trying to make it look like he can handle himself when he has no idea what he's doing", isn't up there. Seb's totally overhauled personality, less "grumpy" and more "socially anxious to the point of defensiveness and basically ashamed of it", isn't up there. I'd like to make the actual profiles more visually appealing as well—the infobox thing is still cute, but it's a little stale by now.

   For the proper story end of things, I'd still like to do that PMD fanfic I started, Gonzo has a few more prequel stories in him (I was imagining one based on the Centralia mine fire, which isn't far from me, as a way to explore settlement guardians in greater detail), Under the Rain Shadow still needs its rewrite and illustration pass, and I'd love to start an in-character blog for Seb now that I have a good reason for him to make one. (I think he'd rather enjoy talking and talking about himself when he opens up a little.)

3. The third phase involves music. I would really like to return to guitar, get myself an amp, get a professional looking at my cheap Strat clone, take some online lessons, and actually be able to contribute that playing to my music. I haven't made a true attempt at an album since I was working on mtlx stuff in 2020, and all that feels rather stiff to me now. I know I have so much better music in me now, both using the sounds I've created for myself in these various projects and in new, yet-to-be-discovered sounds, and I know Caby would love to contribute her art skills to working on my album art and sleeve designs.

Art and level design aren't up there because they're not true focuses of mine. I fucking love them both, but they're much more "hobbies" than the rest of the stuff on the list, which feel like things I truly want to pursue and get better at and show off to people. Art is a means to an end (that being a way to get my ideas for cute animal people out into the world) and a way to blow off steam between bigger projects, and while I've been toying with TrenchBroom again and playing a bunch of Quake, I'm never going to be a professional level designer, so I don't really see that as being a focus of mine at current. Maybe someday! (That being said, while I'm at it, you can probably expect me to branch out into other games—can you imagine a Cammy Doom WAD? It's more likely than you think.)

This is really just a brain dump and a bunch of waffle about some plans for the future. I haven't even gotten to all the new stuff I'd like to do, like start up some kind of YouTube presence doing comfy retrocomputing videos and rambling into a MiniDV camera, or all the travel I'd like to get up to once I have a car. I've got that trip coming up! The next era in my life is truly starting soon, and it's going to be a busy time, so I figured I'd just lay out a few priorities on here for all my hobby stuff as I attempt to keep it all in check.

Jesus, stuff got busy! I'm a bit better about updating this journal, but so much is going on that I always come home ready to rest instead of report in on the day's events. It's all been seriously fantastic, though, this spring is shaping up to be the best in a long time. Here's a small recap...

• Got my KTN! In like, two days tops. Thanks, government, thought that'd take a while.
• Flight booked, I'll be gone May 17th to June 7th. I got it for a damn good price, just under $750 including traveler's insurance. Amusingly, the trip there will have me going into Montreal for a few hours layover. Didn't think I'd also be heading to Canada this trip, but life comes at you fast.
• A lot of shopping, a lot of preparing. Got some nicer clothes, new shoes (and new work shoes, unrelated but still appreciated), and also buying gifts for Caby! You are gonna be so hype to see it, my love, I know it <w<
• I've been doing a lot of work on archives, so keep an eye on the group blog for a little highlights reel of some fun stuff from Somnol's past you should go and browse. I also did a full backup of our sites for this season, so no worries, even the weird, splintered state our stuff is in at the moment is preserved. (It will be less splintered shortly, am sure...)
• Keeping on with the rewrite for Kevin and Theo! Caby's an absolute mad lad, so immediately after going "man I am so overwhelmed by all I have to do", she's knocked out like five or six illustrations in 3-4 days. It'll be going to the presses very very soon, and we'll be making copies for everyone in the group, plus ourselves. My writing in print for the first time! Wack.
• I know I said I wouldn't workpost on here anymore, knowing who's watching and all, but I've amusingly stirred up my entire department by, uh, writing lists to management about how no one is doing shit. Listen, if I have to tell customers to not buy stuff because it's expired, that makes me big sad. I work hard so I don't have to work hard, so I'll be spending this weekend cleaning up other people's messes and gloating.
• In better news, they finally changed the music in there! So I get to listen to Garbage and Counting Crows and Nada Surf and Beck and Matchbox Twenty while I work, and that's just amazing. It's through work that I've realized my music tastes broadly fall into "90s adult alternative", which I think is pretty sweet.

I posted this on Blips this morning, but I'm not overwhelmed at all by any of this. No, I'm feeling motivated, at long last. I'm not avoiding things, I'm jumping right into them again. I'm glad to finally have momentum. Hopping from project to project, reminiscing, talking too much, kicking ass, making plans—things are finally feeling pre-lockdown again. This was all stuff we were talking about and doing back in 2019, and I made it my goal in 2021 to get back to that.

It took some time, but I'm finally feeling like I'm getting back there. Just you all wait until I have that car, see if I don't have some photos and videos for you...

Well, I'm now a felon. I got fingerprinted and everything yesterday.

Not quite. I went for my TSA PreCheck stuff! Was an hour drive both ways for five minutes of being run through paperwork, getting my prints taken (with a cool tablet!), and paying. Yay for our nearest IdentoGo not doing TSA stuff. Either way, I'll know my KTN in a few days, hopefully, and then the flight will be scheduled. I'll then have concrete dates for the trip to hand out.

The excitement is starting to build. So many things I want to do over there! Visit shops! Play vidya (and hack her consoles—my 3DS is now on Luma and yes hShop is actually incredible)! Watch lots of British TV! I don't even think of it like I'm seeing my girlfriend at the moment, I'm just flying out to hang out with my best friend and do shit. Obviously the girlfriend stuff is there, but it feels more like early 2019 where it was mostly just a lot of "let's nap together and hug a lot"—which I'm totally cool with right now! I need more of that. Your girlfriend should be your best friend, really.

So...now onto what the title of the post is about. Something that's been on my mind lately.

Also yesterday: I restored mari_nc2 from the weird, altered, hidden one that was on mari.somnol back in 2019 back to what it actually looked like and contained when I left Neocities. I linked to a few juicy things in my bio there, none of which were grabbed by the Wayback Machine, so I dug into the Somnol Discord's chat backups to find either what was being referenced or suitable replacements. The backup of the #neocities room was roughly 300MB of chatlogs and screenshots, a lot of which is a lot spicier than I remembered. More importantly, though, I might have the only copies of this stuff left in existence.

There's this adage online that the internet is forever, but it really isn't. It's only forever in the sense that any publicly-available data can be copied and preserved. Discord servers are basically ephemeral. People get locked out of admin rooms and stuff gets deleted all the damn time. Even site stuff has gotten lost. The Wayback Machine probably hasn't preserved my older site designs, despite its better efforts. I was going to move the post-move mari.neocities backup to mari_nc3 and have mari_nc2 be one of my September-November designs, but not enough of the content, and in fact not even the layout of the one I really wanted (the 800x600 two column layout, if you remember) survives.

It's bigger than the logs and the sites, though. It's the people. All the names that routinely cropped up in these logs—jcbug, antillion, Mia, wastebin, heathsy, thundercat, Grinchie, vas, strata—I don't know where the fuck they are. I have no clue what became of them. Maybe, if they were real consistent with their usernames like I am, I could find where they are now in a Google search or through their (probably abandoned) Neocities, but some of these people rebranded. Sometimes they're just outright fucking gone. I kept ahold of a few and the rest just disappeared.

It's even bigger than the people though! It's me! We looked through a lot of logs yesterday, and the resulting feeling was just how much more willing to outright insult people we used to be. I forgot about the hostility. A lot of giggles, yes! But a lot of reminder that, yeah, technically I'm still in the same room doing mostly the same thing I did back then, but the context is so much different. I'm a different person, you're a different person, and we're feeling differently than we did five years ago. That is weird to me.

It's the same feeling I got when I was digging through some old furry webcomics I used to read. Now, as a middle schooler, I was not interested in reading big, long stories. I did like cute art and gags, though, and the rest I was just aware of. There's a comic, now seemingly-concluded but the guy behind it is still active, called Newshounds, and a splinter story of Newshounds involved a small side character, a computer hacker named Manny (who was a mink), getting horrifically murdered and living on through his computer, I think. It was called Manifestations.

Cue me rediscovering Newshounds and wanting to actually give this weird, dark, cyberghost story a go.

Only the index page still exists. The Wayback Machine didn't grab it, because it was a thing you had to pay money for back when it was running on the Newshounds site. It also did not grab the free, public rerun of it from a few years later. To my knowledge, it does not survive in any public capacity.

I do plan on actually asking the guy behind it (once I find a good way to contact him) if Manifestations is still around somewhere, even in a printed book (he's got a few of those collections, I'd buy it to read it), but for now, it's just left me with this eerie chill of something I knew about and saw back then is fundamentally gone forever. That's my point, I guess. We're jaded into thinking nothing ever changes, but goddamn does stuff change, even when you're not looking.

I do wish I clicked "Download entire site" a few more times back when I was on Neocities, but I can say that about a lot of things I've worked on, YouTube videos I've uploaded, stuff I worked on in school, and so forth. Maybe someday I'll magically get the chance to re-experience that stuff, but that's why I'm so tied at the hip to archives right now. It's my way of keeping these old friends alive, because that's what I consider the experience of looking through Caby's old sites or dcb's old sites or anyone's old sites. Old friends.

Here's a rare mari Caby drew back then that I didn't even know existed, nor had saved obviously. I'll be keeping all these sites and somnol.net itself up for as long as I possibly can. The domain will be in my will if the internet doesn't collapse first.

Yes, peep that header! There's plenty more finished where this came from, I just gotta get the aboveground/underground update done to push it out. There is an embarrassingly wide gulf between the beta version of the site and what piddling little I have up on the main site now, so I'm gonna try to get that last little thing I've been putting off drawn so I can push it out finally. (It involves Bunny and it's also snuggly, so it scares me to death to draw. But I know I gotta.)

I've decided against quitting. It's just a logistical nightmare to try to find another night job (that's when I can work with the transportation I have) at some other place and deal with no money coming in for an indeterminate period of time when I could just mark myself as unavailable for the three weeks, fuck off for the three weeks, and come right back to having a job I really don't mind, all things considered. Quitting was still kind of a byproduct of when stuff at the store as shaky and I felt really targeted. I honestly don't anymore. Getting hassled about shit was a byproduct of the previous manager.

I'm over the $6,000 threshold, and I'll probably be hovering around $7,000 by the time I can get my physical and stuff done to clear me to take the written test (and thus get my permit again). Hunt down the car, get the permit, take the road test, get my license, and that's a major milestone taken care of. Can drive down to the Jersey Shore or wherever whenever I want, visit friends, do hobby stuff in the area (ham radio!), do the Uber Eats/gig economy thing, find work further out of town, be available whenever, or just joyride at night. It's only a few months away.

Been quietly realizing that a lot of my contrarian nature over the years has probably been the result of just being deprived as a teenager. Easy to slag off new games or stuff people like when you can't be happy or indulge in your hobbies due to being poor and family and so on. I've never even taken a vacation. Been stuck in one place for almost 24 years now, man. Am happy that's due to change soon. I'll have so many more interesting stories when I'm free to go.

Also, starting to get warm out again! It's almost midnight and my window is still open. Hot stuff. Will be a good summer.