Still all over the place, but a little notice that you should be watching my Macintosh Garden temp site if you want to see new work from me! I'll still be working on cammy.somnol content and drawings (mood permitting), but that's been the thing I've been spending the most time on lately. I just got the majority of my old Neocities album reviews ported over and rewritten and sorted by artist to be much nicer to browse, and new ones are starting to trickle out. I've also collected a ton of my old longform writing from Letters or the Scratchpad or wherever else, all the stuff I still like, for your browsing pleasure.

This stuff will all get moved to mari.somnol when it comes time to redo that site. As I've said, I don't want to do this stuff on mari.somnol right away so I don't have to worry about design or making it nice and official just yet. It's all been very freeing, though it's certainly come with the realization of just how silly, overblown, and ridiculous I can be with hindsight. I was already kinda behind before the lockdowns happened, and then the world shut everything down for basically nothing and I just retreated online and really started writing very authoritatively about philosophy and the future as a defensive mechanism since I had no fucking clue what would happen next.

Thankfully, things are back to normal, and I feel a lot more like myself than I have in many, many years, especially since the trip. I'm glad I came out of it as well as I did--it just also means there's a paper trail of delirious essays from some guy on the internet with no life experience and no clue what he's talking about, and I had to read it again to collect material for this site. Mildly embarrassing, but I know I'll find it charming and want to read it again someday, so it stays up. I'm also working on gaining that life experience, so no one can fault me there either.

Speaking of that though--I got my learner's permit again yesterday! I had one back in February 2020, then three years came and went and it expired. Thankfully, I nailed the knowledge portion of the test first try this time, so I'm really a stone's throw and a lot of practice away from having a real license and being one less step away from coming and going freely. Once I have a car, I can finally sell off the old Rediscovering discard pile and a ton of vinyl I no longer want to start making space for stuff I do want, I can go film rambling YouTube videos (2024, marf's Woods, we're making this happen), I can go get my ham license, all that stuff I've been saying I'll do for years.

I've been seriously all over the place lately. I've just decided to start doing absolutely everything that comes to mind, y'know, be an impulsive little shit about making stuff like I'm always tempted to do, and here's how that's going.

I've got two First Draft posts scheduled to the blog! First Draft was a series I was writing for Letters about early and alternate versions of albums, the first one having dropped back in February on the Dandy Warhols' Come Down predecessor, The Black Album. I wound up privating that because it ended up a lot more negative in tone than I particularly wanted, and I just plain liked The Black Album more with it. I rewrote that (it'll be reposted early in July) and I have a special one (we're talking 6,000 or so words) going up in September as well. One First Draft will go up per month.

I've made my web portfolio home over on the Macintosh Garden now, for the time being. I'd prefer not to make any real changes to mari.somnol until I have the next design settled (in case I switch around URLs and break people's links), and I've been batting around the idea of collecting content someplace offsite to make things a bit less high stakes until then. As I've said before, I've become highly aware of how 90% of everything I've ever made is buried in blog archives or on archives.somnol, so I'm aiming to make it a gigantic index of stories, essays, reviews, and everything else I've been up to since roughly 2017 or so. Once the design is settled, I'll start moving everything over there, but for now, you can see some new and rewritten old album reviews on Macintosh Garden.

The trip diary is shaping up! I have about the first week done. I'm having to really study logs and ask Caby to remember what the fuck we were up to on any given day. Next time, I'll keep better notes--I didn't feel like doing it during the trip (because it was my vacation, my time to relax), but I could do a 2-5 minute voice memo for myself each evening next time. Art is proving intimidating, but I was doodling on the call last night, so it'll come. Just gotta keep trying.

We tried out Guilded for a bit! Discord was irritating me with its name change bullshit (I wasn't allowed to pick mariteaux on my private account because it was reserving it for my public account, swell), and Guilded looked promising, so we switched to that for two weeks. Pros: the forums and room types are a lot of fun to play with, global emotes for free, and the amount of room you have to set up servers exactly how you'd like is mind-blowing. Cons: the UI has a serious learning curve, the apps suck (Android's UI is tiny and horribly designed, iPhone crashes constantly), no image embeds, and no method of backing up servers at current, official or otherwise. We didn't hate it, it was fun, but it's a bit too janky for Somnol to officially switch to it at present.

Here's a lad I was doodling on the call, since I mentioned that. My second-ever OC, Rocco the spellsword aardwolf, circa 2015. Wanna give that boy some official outfits (this is his classic one, a sleeveless vest, plus trousers) and also draw Miguel and Marcela, the capybara and flying squirrel (respectively) who make up his little adventurer trio with him. Think he'd be a fun one on Art Fight along with all my other OCs I'm a little intimidated to draw still. Like I said, just gotta push through it. I think he came out cute here!

Also, I got a haircut. Forever reminded my curly, boofy hair only works when it's long, but it'll grow back.

I spent maybe way too much time today on a project that will actually be unveiled in September, so let's talk instead about me having to replace all my shit!

So in the interests of full disclosure, I've had my setup for roughly ten years now. I know! I've really been interested in making this iMac, this keyboard and mouse, and this optical drive work for me for as humanly long as possible, and it more than went through its paces. I was wondering if it'd last to the ten year mark and I'm pretty optimistic it will. That said, stuff is starting to go on me.

Before I'd even left, I was having problems with my mouse. I have a weird setup with my keyboard and mouse. The keyboard is a Wyse board, I forget the exact model number, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, and it comes with a mouse. That you plug into the side. With PS/2. (Hotswappable PS/2!) I quite like it, it's heavy and sturdy and everyone comments on how loud it is, I love it. I'll probably get another one when it comes time to upgrade the eMachines Box and upgrade my main PC to a buckling springs board finally.

Well, come a month ago, the scroll wheel on the mouse was starting to become loose and sporadic. Sometimes, I would scroll and it would miss my scroll entirely. When I got back from Wales, the scroll had stopped working entirely. It was seriously just a wheel spinning in a slot. (Having gotten a new one, I think this is down to the "stops" that track the wheel having completely worn down from, again, probably ten years of constant use.) I had to get used to either clicking the wheel, using the on-screen scroll bars, or keyboard-shortcutting my way through paint.NET and FireAlpaca. It wasn't fun.

New mouse arrived today, and you bet I walked out in the pouring rain to get it. It's hilarious how worn down the old one was. I'd forgotten they had a textured outside because I just wore the texture on mine off. Anyway, all's good now. I can draw in comfort again.

While I was waiting for my mouse to arrive, though, something else broke! Since I'm using one of those cucky newer iMacs without an optical drive, I've been relying on a USB slot-loading SuperDrive for, say it with me now, almost a decade. It worked, and y'know, it even worked nicely, even though it was always concerningly rickety. Well, come me trying to rip my big stack of new CDs (check the blog post I just wrote on it, gamers), and the very last one, Who's Next, got stuck in the drive.

I don't know if the CD was too thick to get out or if the return mechanism in the drive had failed, but seriously, I tried a dozen times to eject it to no avail. Of course, looking up "cd won't eject", all you get are software solutions, when the drive would eject, it just wouldn't make it back out of the slot. Sooooo, I had to disassemble it. This took a week.

1. I first had to order a spudger from iFixit, jam it down between the plastic bottom and the aluminum casing, and separate out eight clips. You basically have to manhandle and slightly damage the aluminum in order to get the spudger in there, but I managed.
2. I then sat down with my Torx screwdrivers in hand to discover there's only one Torx screw in the entire device. The rest are tiny little Philips heads, which none of our screwdrivers would take out.
3. Ordered another screwdriver from iFixit. (The good thing about ordering these tools is that you'll probably eventually need them again, and I've definitely encountered screws that small before.)
4. Got all the screws out, except for one, which came pre-stripped from the factory! I was irritated, but I said "fuck it" and carried on trying to disassemble the drive. (dcb has also found pre-stripped screws in Apple products before. Seems to be another one of their anti-repair methods.)
5. Peeling out the drive itself from the enclosure (it's just a Hitachi drive, amusingly enough), I was finally able to take a few more screws out and retrieve my Who CD. It thankfully didn't seem to damage the CD at all.
6. I also somehow managed to reassemble the drive without losing a single screw. Apple's final "fuck you" to DIY repairers on the way out: the tolerances for the screw holes were so ridiculously tight, you basically needed to bend and warp any metal pieces inside to get them all to sit correctly. Still, I did it. And this drive will never be used again.

Here's a picture of what I was staring at yesterday, starring my ragged-ass desk that also needs replacing. (You bet I'm gonna be treating myself when I find another job.)

Of course, right as I switch to using a journal engine that can be automatically posted to the group chat through a bot, we start toying with another chat service where our resident chat bot doesn't quite work right... oh well!

I was warming up with my own tablet again drawing a Setter last night, and he wound up becoming a site graphic for a page I made before I left, a behind-the-scenes look at how I make cammy.somnol and some of the aesthetic choices for why I've made it the way I have. I'm gonna go have dinner and then I'll try to doodle some of the lads of people in Somnol, because I really wanna start sprinkling them around the site for extra visual flavor. Gotta balance out all the puppies.

I mentioned the other day I was looking at a flat-file, low-overhead PHP blogging platform called HTMLy as a way to automate a bunch of shit for this journal. We're on it, baby. Lemme explain in slightly less hurried, delirious detail why I've chosen to do so.

So before now, all journal posts were written as raw HTML directly into Notepad++. No AutoSite, no automation at all, just what I wrote is what you see. That worked fine, but it became a gradually bigger pain in the ass month after month. Links constantly needed updating; a new month would arrive and I'd have to move the old posts to another page, then fix all the image links. When I added another month to the archive, that became another manual link to add to every single archive page, plus the main page.

I knew WordPress was really not a solution because WordPress is now general CMS software, not blogging software. It has a bunch of shit for shops, various media players, Google Analytics plugins—none of which I want for a basic HTML journal. It's fine for Letters, since Letters needs to be easy enough and robust enough for the group to use, but even there, it's literally thousands of PHP files strewn about my SFTP folders, forced CSS I'd have to do the !important dance to work around (the infamous no-height images on RetroZilla still haunt me), and I'd have to worry about using a browser new enough to access the admin features—or indeed, the fucking post editor itself.

I wanted the ease of typing posts in Notepad++, but with the efficiency of a lightweight little PHP core sorting everything for me. HTMLy has provided exactly that. Here's the benefits of it over either WordPress or the previous manual setup:

1. No database! Posts are just text files stashed in a single directory. No worrying about an editor outside of the one I already like to use, and it means as long as the computer has a text editor and FTP access to my servers, I can edit my posts. I don't think I need the admin console for a single thing outside of clearing the cache, I can do everything else in Notepad++.
2. Posts are literally just Markdown. Markdown is quick and easy and great. No more typing out tons of <p> tags over and over. If I want to insert HTML, I can (and I still do for images because I'm specific about how I want them formatted), but there's no need to for most things.
3. Automated old post sorting, as said. No need to ever play with my old posts now that I've got them migrated over. No more link rot, no more need to update stuff by hand, HTMLy handles all the links for me.
4. Permalinks to individual posts! Yeah, before, there was no way to link to individual posts, which is probably fine for what I use the journal for, but it's nice to have the option in case I'm referring to a specific entry. Now, yep, got it.
5. Pagination! One really big bonus to the automation is that I can afford to put pagination on all the blog entries and navigation pages. You've got your choice of browsing the whole archive, individual years, individual months, and browsing update-to-update now.
6. RSS! If you'd like to feed your reader, here's the feed link. Perhaps I would've cringed at the idea of making it so easy to find and stalk my real-life updates back when I started the journal, but after having some git at work showing my managers all my cute animal people doodles and random thoughts, I'm over that particular creeping fear. If I didn't want you to read it, I wouldn't put it online. (Plus it means these journal entries will be automatically posted to the Somnolescent server! Poggers!)

I lucked out. It's perhaps easier than the old way of writing these posts, certainly easier than the old way of sorting these posts, with all the benefits of WordPress and none of the drawbacks. Good times. (I didn't bother making any of the links redirect properly. Too much work. I consider it okay because /aboveground/journal/ is still where all this is located.)

Beyond that, I'm still settling back in at home, playing with site stuff and enjoying my CDs. I haven't fully gotten through either because I'm ADHD, but Counting Crows' Recovering the Satellites and Ash's 1977 are both really fucking good from the first half of each. I'm gonna try to get a post on my experiences at both of the record stores I visited in Wales up on Letters, because they're fun enough stories that I think they should be separately highlighted from the trip diary.

And as for that! I do have the photos on my computer, I'll be continuing to write the diary entries today. Telling you, it's just gonna be an avalanche of content from me this month. Every day, something new!

I'm waiting on a new mouse with a not-fucked-up scroll wheel before I do any more art, but here's a monk-y fantasy Colton I drew on Caby's big screen tablet while I was visiting her. I guess it's an unintentional redraw of the Maldwyn I did back in March 2022, but Colton's a lot more of a doof. He was actually the first lad I got into drawing back when I was toying with the idea of art in 2021, but I've never shown any of that off because I didn't have the confidence then. Maybe I'll scan in all the printer paper sometime. Would make a cute cammy.somnol page.

Welcome to a weird future! RetroZilla didn't know how to handle the admin panel, but Firefox ESR 52.9.0 on XP can do it just fine. This makes it a fairly viable solution for blogging on XP and Vista, and possibly even 2000.

Writing themes, as far as I can tell, is as simple as WordPress; there's a PHP "loop" for post formatting, and I think you can do custom HTML per post type (which there's basically every post type that Tumblr has, which is nostalgic). I suppose this would've been really good for the scrapbook vibe I originally wanted for the Scratchpad.

Obviously the built-in themes are only semi-functional on RetroZilla, but if I wrote HTML4 ones, they'd work just fine. All the PHP preprocessing is done on the server, after all.

Still unsure if I'm really gonna replace the journal with this, but it's fun to toy with!

(EDIT: I have discovered that HTMLy has no database! It just enumerates Markdown files in a certain directory on my server, meaning all I really need to do is drop text files in that folder and bam, new post. No need to even bother with the editor. In fact, this edit was done without even touching the editor. Genuinely lovely. This massively increases my chances of sticking around with HTMLy. Set it and forget it.)

Another thing I was pondering in Wales is, well, scarier. I was talking to Caby's dad, who's a writer, about stories with bad magical systems and coming up with them for Calelira and Pinede, and in trying to pull up one of my old Chronicles of Calelira entries, I discovered that none of the series is on archives! In fact, very little of my old stories or writing material is on archives. That's on purpose.

I've on-and-off hid my old (2018-2020 or so) stories over the years due to the sheer embarrassment especially early Pennyverse has caused me. It just felt like a bad reflection on me as a writer and as a person. Seb being an asshole for no reason, Colton being this miserable, kicked puppy for no reason, not a lot of fun, not a lot of laughs.

If we're being completely objective, nothing there is particularly bad or off-putting. Caby certainly liked them. It's just they're off-putting to me, and I don't wanna hide from a good two years of my work anymore.

Everything I've ever written that was ever on mari_v2 is now back up on mari_v2 for your use and mine. archives is the best place for them, really; it means they're online somewhere without me having to bring them along to my current sites. And if I do, for whatever reason, get the crazy urge to read through "Mothwing Bite", then I don't have to dig through backups to do so.

Hoping I see charm in that stuff someday. It'll be better once I've rewritten and replaced it all, and besides that, I've never deleted even the original Word 5.1 files because I've done the delete-out-of-embarrassment shuffle before and I always end up regretting it. Not to mention, all that stuff is still on the Wayback Machine, and it's inaccurate at the very least to not include them and hypocritical on my part, given the times I've intentionally kept stuff on archives despite other people trying to delete them.

It was my edgy wolf phase, really. Feel free to read through my edgy wolf phase stories.

One thing I was mulling over while I was in Wales was alternatives to WordPress for this journal. Typing raw HTML is liberating, but man, it gives me a good excuse to put off updating this thing.

"Cameron, you already had the Scratchpad and you gave that up because it was too much work. Why are you going back to blogging software?"

Well, pointed question asker, I like to fiddle with shit is why. But really, part of the reason I gave up the Scratchpad was also the reason proper alternatives have escaped me until now: WordPress isn't blogging software to most people anymore. It's a CMS. I don't need a CMS, but when you look up "wordpress alternatives", Google thinks you want a CMS, so it recommends you Joomla and Drupal and, astoundingly, stuff like Wix and Squarespace, which is completely out of the scope of cammy.somnol. Fuck Squarespace and Wix.

Meanwhile, if you look up "php blogging software", you get more fitting options. I stumbled across a really lightweight, customizable one called HTMLy, which is a noSQL blogging platform that's meant to be really simple, fast, and low-overhead. You can of course write custom themes for it as well, it's pretty similar to WordPress in that regard.

I'll be testing it on the beta version of the site hosted on my home network. If you don't have access to that, there's a good chance you'll never see anything about HTMLy ever again. I'll see how it goes and what I like about it, and if its post writer works on older browsers too. This should mean nothing to you outside of possibly quicker and more frequent journal updates at some point in the future.

I return home. The trip was, and I don't say this lightly, life-changing. Genuinely phenomenal stuff. Wales was so nice, her family was so nice, the guinea pigs were adorably moody, the museums were nice, wandering Cardiff was a ton of fun, we're even better in person than we could've imagined—my god, I can fill paragraphs with how good it was. Literally before it was over we were checking flight prices for January so we can spend our next anniversary together too (and I can enjoy some Welsh winter!).

Minor downside is that I stopped checking my email and YouTube and things, so I came home to a whole lot of backlog. That's largely what I'll be working on in the next few days. I do intend to get a short blog post about specifically the Welsh record store experience (of which we went to two, both really fun in their own ways) up in a day or two, but mostly, I'm gonna be watching videos, doing laundry, cleaning out my bags, and getting settled back in. This is by no means the last word on the trip. Actually, speaking of that!

I took close to 500 photos (on a DSi camera no less—vibe filter), and I'll be working on sorting through them with text commentary and putting together the first "crossover episode" photo gallery, as Caby named it. I'm gonna have a page for each day, bringing you along the happenings as they happened, funny stories, memories, all that. Better still, I actually brought back some half-finished drawings done on her big screen tablet and web pages to polish up and post, so yeah—lots and lots from me to come.

This trip was a real eye-opener on just exactly what I'm capable of pulling off on my own—scheduling flights, getting my passport, navigating airports in foreign countries on my own, navigating entire cities with my girlfriend—and likewise for her, so you can bet I'm pretty stoked about doing it all again. Not just with Wales too! If I can make it through airport security (which if I'm honest, people really blow out of proportion, and in fact pre-9/11 lack of airport security terrifies me to no end reading back up on it), crossing the Canadian border and seeing Savannah and her boyfriend, or driving 18 hours to see dcb and raid Free Geek will be dead simple.

Tonight, I showered. In my own shower! And as much as I enjoyed it, there was a lot of less-than-ideal bits about the setup (crowded house, tiny bed we shared together, me having to lug $250 worth of CDs, plushies, and boxed PC games home), so yeah, it was nice to be back home, as sad as it was to leave everyone behind (seriously—thank you for letting me stay in your house for several weeks, Caby's family!).