More photo galleries have been posted! We got one old one, the Turtle Back Zoo page from cammy_v1, and one of the remaining pages from the old site which had not been redone for the new site, and one brand new one, a set of long-exposure night photography shots from when I went to summer camp in 2011. These were found on a DVD-R I had in my disc wallets, and I now have them safe across all my backup shards.

There's still galleries for me to make, but all the ones I had on cammy_v1 are now up. I'm seriously gonna celebrate once we're at parity with the old site. I think cammy.somnol is quickly becoming the best thing I've ever made. If I could pull this off back on Neocities, I have no doubts I would've been pretty damn popular for, uh, better reasons.

Man, just a bumper crop of stuff to see on cammy.somnol this month, huh? Back on the 12th, I came home from work and decided to put together a page on some music videos I love—something Caby did way back when on Neocities and a really fun idea overall. That page is finally live! It's not exhaustive, there's other ones that stick out to me (the video for The Rentals' "Friends of P" was one I was enjoying last night), but this is a nice exploration of some of my favorites and my overall tastes in videos.

As I've said previously, a lot of the holdup on pages is getting something drawn for the header. I wasn't drawing anything for a couple days in between finishing that Bunny (which I also haven't posted anywhere, give me a bit) on the 13th and more recently because I was too busy doing data backup stuff and finishing the Wilco boxset post. We're back and I'm working through my little backlog of ideas, thankfully.

As far as cammy.somnol goes, my aim is to finally have all those finished pages posted soon. I have rough ideas for what to draw for the headers, I just gotta go and do 'em. Also, more photo galleries. More photo galleries will be posted soon. I have to sort and assemble all the photos and thumbnails, which is way easier than drawing Setters.

Ever since the Fusion Drive Crash of 2019, I've been eternally paranoid about losing stuff. It sticks in my head at all times. I refuse to ever lose data ever again. I've been making random copies of stuff I feel like I'm gonna lose on random drives for years now, on top of the DVD-R site backups I already do and my two externals filled with random garbage I've been using since late 2019.

Of course, a backup solution is only as good as your ability to find anything in it, and I've just had shit everywhere for years now. I think the last time I really thought out the way I save files was when I was a teenager. Back then, I was able to fit everything I did onto a single Dropbox account, but that was a long time ago. I must've had three different writing folders across multiple machines and cloud storage accounts—it was a nightmare. I stopped saving things to my hoards because I didn't know where I'd put it, and I didn't want to lose it when I inevitably forgot I had it.

So, I've solved both problems. I've reorganized and consolidated all my files, and I've got a multi-tier backup solution that I can use a diffs program like WinMerge to compare copies of between, so I always know my stuff is up-to-date and identical between computers. Here's the plan:

• Tier zero is live storage, internal hard drives that are convenient and provide the working copy of whatever I'm doing at that moment, but can die at any moment, so are untrusted.
• Tier one is a set of twelve shards. Shards are sorted mini-drives and store anything I have in my possession on a specific topic. Writing and scanned books are a shard. My music library is a shard. Somnol's site backups are their own shard, as are my copies of all my site stuff. Shards are stored on the hard drives in folders, and they're copied onto one flash drive apiece. This limits what data can get lost if a flash drive eats shit, reduces the amount of work needed to bring a lost shard back up (buy an equivalently-sized drive and copy the shard over), and I can back up to it pretty conveniently since the flash drives are all stored in a case on my desk.
• Tier two are artifacts. These are extra copies of specific files, stuff at-risk of being lost for being so rare (say, Windows cracks or unreleased music I got specifically from an artist) or completed projects of mine with stuff to go with them (like albums and their project files, or my Quake maps and their screenshots). Artifacts are any other backup media, DVD-Rs, cloud, SD cards, and meant for more targeted preservation.
• Tier three are vaults, my external hard drives. The scheme for sorting these is the same as the internal drives, containing a full set of shards in folders, but because they're not on all the time, they should last longer than the internal ones. If they die, no big deal, vaults are redundant to each other; I can just buy another external and copy a full set of shards to it. I don't back up to the vaults constantly, more like a couple times a month when the mood strikes.

This approach is already paying dividends. I only have one sitemaking folder, and if I'm working on sites over on the eMachines Box, I just copy to the matching flash drive when I'm done and update the other machines/vaults with it. I've already found files I forgot I even had, and now I have multiple copies of each one. WinMerge helps a ton with keeping stuff straight; I check by size and modified date, with some custom filters for ignoring the thumbnail databases and System Volume Information folders on Windows and the resource forks and .DS_Store files on Mac.

It might sound like overkill, but I'm much happier and more comfortable with this setup than I was with my previous. Seriously, it's hard to back things up when you don't even know you have them, or have no good way of finding out which copy is newer and has the right files in it. I'm actually not done yet; for one thing, I'm not particularly protected in the case of a disaster at Somnolescent HQ (at the moment, I don't have a good place offsite to store extra drives, but I'll be fine once I have a car), and I'm still waiting for one more flash drive to arrive, a 256GB SanDisk, for the final shard.

I've also learned through doing this that I just like collecting flash drives. I didn't have the ability to just buy new flash drives as a kid, but I always had one in my pocket at school, and when I'd invariably lose it, that was it until I got another at some point, really. They're cheap and they're all so differently shaped and colored, so I'm happy to indulge now. Some of the other flash drives I've picked up at my store on sale have either gone on to be used as live USBs for Linux, both nostalgic and new, and other alternative OSes (still haven't gotten the chance to play with Ventoy) or become technician's toolboxes for driver installs and other things work should be providing me but don't. Sometimes, I don't have a use for them, but I just find them neat. Flash drives are neat! They make me happy.

One of those fabled long-term Cammy projects has just appeared on the group blog: a First Draft entry focusing on last year's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot boxset, exactly 22 years after that album streamed for the first time on wilcoworld.net. I wrote the majority of this thing back in June, and with that anniversary just a few months off, I knew I had to hold it for today. Paired with that is a boxset and bootleg reference on cammy.somnol, showing you the overlap between each set of Wilco demos.

Going over six wildly different CDs with a fine-toothed comb, all covering the recording sessions for the same album, was absolutely a tall ask, but this one is a really solid set, if you ask me. Read it at your own pace—WordPress estimates the reading time for this one at 33 minutes.

Speaking of seasons, we're starting to wade back into autumn temperatures here. Still been working a lot—fixed four different computers over the weekend, got tipped $50 yesterday in total from appreciative customers, and sold $550 worth of stuff on top of a $600 laser printer. My confidence is starting to solidify, but it never does completely, really. Sometimes at work (especially later in the evenings), I'll just be kind of in a chemical daze about life. I still think it's crazy that people pay me, even if it's just for a retail job, still think it's crazy I can just buy stuff on a whim now, still think it's crazy to see that number in my bank account go up week after week.

A lot of people I know have absolutely hated adulthood, but I'm drinking it in by the pitcher. I was not a happy, functional kid. Everything good I've ever had came from me going out and making something happen myself, whether that's stability at school, finding work, taking the trip earlier this year, or learning to draw or do anything else creative. My life has been going uphill year after year, really. It doesn't feel like it sometimes because I'm more in tune with my emotions than I ever have been, so the bad stuff feels bigger than ever, but it's not. I know and have known plenty of folks with no ambitions that deeply miss when someone else took care of everything. That's not me.

There's power I'm gaining that still takes me by surprise, in a very good way. I guarantee you I'm not gonna know the full extent of the shit I'll be able to do when I have a car until a few years after I've gotten it. Nothing will hold me back after that.

(Conversation fear.)

Let's do a site content update, because it's been a bit. I finished up that Setter and I'm starting to get my photo galleries online! I've got two for you so far, shots from some of my local parks and scenes from the West End Fair, which is a week-long gathering in my area for produce, animals, crafts, history, and lots of fried desserts. You'll wanna see the rabbits especially. I do have more galleries I wanna put together—one for the zoo trip I took back during cammy_v1, one for a batch of truly ancient night/long exposure photography from a summer camp I went to back in 2011, and one for a ton of miscellaneous photos I've taken since 2017 or so. If you're wondering about the trip diary, I still wanna do another BunnySetter illustration or two for it first, but I promise you soon. I've shown the group and that's all I really care about right now.

The galleries are meant to be pretty easy to produce; I've gone with a full-color Setter up top that I can just replace the text and the background on, and then I just have to produce thumbnails and arrange the page. Since I can't escape Windows 10, I've set up a VM on my Mac just to be able to run paint.NET, which I need for its alpha mask plugin (that's how I keep the XP Paint dithering effect on all my drawn assets while still maintaining the transparency—see my behind-the-scenes page for more on how I put all this together). The pages are assembled on the eMachines Box, which is quite comfy to put together site stuff on and can connect to the home server and to DreamHost/Macintosh Garden no problem.

Speaking of mari@macintosh.garden, I have also unearthed, reformatted, and added onto all thirty of my Rediscovering entries from the old Scratchpad. This was started probably back in August, but I wanted to listen through most of the pile one last time to see if my opinions had changed at all—remember, 2020 and 2021 were the dark ages when I was stuck inside, so that fucked with my head something chronic. Post-having a job and especially post-trip, I've been able to think a lot clearer, and on the whole, I like both the winners and the duds more than when I initially did them, or at least, I'm more fair now.

I'm on day three of five between days off at my job. I keep oscillating between thinking I'm about to fit in there and then getting reminded it's still retail, and retail with a group of folks my age not like me, and therefore sucks. At least it's been quieter, and the $400 a week gets me closer to a car and the eventual move to Wales bit by bit.

Hope everyone's September is going swell so far. I'm really keeping my head down and working a lot, and it's paying off. Customers dropping $2200 my store in one go tonight. My manager was impressed, and after I learned he's just hard to read and doesn't actually hate me, I've been a ton more comfortable in my job—and I mean, that's what you need in retail, to feel good and be able to chirp at customers. It helps that I'm a lot more excited about what I'm selling now than I was about beer—though I do miss beer. Haven't had a Yuengling in months now.

I've dragged myself back over to using MacOS! I'm not proud of it either. I've been wanting to toy with music again lately, since my last couple of music projects all ended in tragedy and I just plain want to put something better than my high school noise escapades out there. I had the most trouble getting my tablet to work; since it's so old, the drivers really aren't meant to work on Mojave, so I have no ExpressKeys! I've had to resort to remapping the shortcut keys in FireAlpaca to the numpad to get the buttons I rely on in a configuration sorta like what's already on the tablet. Guh. But the rest of the setup is comfy. I've been really in the mood to draw my girl lately, so have a guinea pig herder Caby and a Bunny looking all soft and sheepish.

And more typically from me, a Setter I'm gonna finish up for the photo gallery headers on this here site (so I can actually post some goddamn photos I've taken?):

Speaking of high school, tonight especially has been a Quake and Failure sorta night. I've been really into J.F. Gustafsson's custom levels—he's the guy who made the semi-official (and I guess official, as of KexQuake) Dimension of the Past 20th anniversary Quake episode, semi-official because he works for MachineGames, the company working on the new Wolfenstein games. Honestly, I'm a bit jealous. He's everything I really wanted to be in a mapper, perfectly replicating that imagination and magic that id had in their original levels, but just polishing the shit out of it. Revisiting my old levels for the rewritten postmortems on mari@macintosh.garden has been a humbling experience. Even in the 90s, when J.F. was still a hobbyist, they would've been a bit crap, or I guess nothing special most charitably. I'm taking it on the chin; they're old, everyone's long forgotten about them, and I know I've got a lot better in me. Eventually. When I get back to Quake. He's definitely gonna be a major inspiration, though, I love his work.

Guh, speaking of Failure, I meant to have a First Draft on Magnified on the blog last month, but I just never got around to finishing the mostly done draft I had for it. I can't post it this month, because the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot First Draft is supposed to come out on the 18th in celebration of the album's 22th anniversary, so the end of the Black Album First Draft makes no sense now. That's alright, it'll be for October. I've had a lot going on and I'm still only a month and change into this job, so I'm allowed to not be hyperfixated on website stuff for an indeterminate amount of readers. (Speaking of, I got a nice email from someone lurking the site network since 2020 asking to join! We don't really accept random people like that, but it is nice to hear from you if you're out there. You'll shoot us an email sometime, maybe?)