Some people will cut you 'til you're bleeding
But not me, 'cause I just wanna do it to myself

I'm just checking it up
Baby, one more time for you
Checking it up until the pile hits the sky
Well, even the best years are a waste of time
But baby, I'm a big star now

All these seasons, all this time
Spinning past 'til they leave you far behind
Lay me down in the circle where the spotlight shines
'Cause all this pleasure gets me high

I think I've felt every single emotion there is to feel in the past 48 hours. I've been so manic today, my word. I think I've been up since 4AM?

I will say, I just passed my 90 day probation at my job, so I feel comfortable mentioning what I do here explicitly and a little more often without worrying about someone trying to fuck with it: I have graduated from selling your grandparents cheap alcohol to fixing your grandparents' dirty, dusty Toshiba Satellites. I've learned a lot there so far; it's definitely a lot more pressure than my last job, but I enjoy it. I've finally settled in and I'm doing a pretty killer job, if the ESP numbers are anything to go by. (This has nothing to do with the Counting Crows song, as it's just a boring retail job. I just really like that one lately. The manic feelings, maybe closer to being related.)

Here, have a Cammy I drew this morning because I was fuzzy and missed him. I think, since Setter has the t-shirt and jeans comfy look going, I'll dress Cammy up a little more and make him a bit sleepier-looking to boot. This one didn't come out very large, so I can't do much with this drawing, and the sketchy coloring I did I think needs more practice—but then again, so does the way I draw Cammy period. I think it's super cute, and certainly a lot more solid than the last time I drew him in December of last year. Hooray for vaguely understanding heads now!

Alright, I gotta go get ready for work! On that saving money grind, yo.

Today marks one year of the journal, and thus, one year of cammy.somnol! I intentionally brought the site back up absolutely bare bones, with nothing except this journal, to see how it would grow on its own. It's been slow, but super rewarding.

There's still a bunch of pages ready to go over on the home server beta site that just need a Setter in the header. This includes the score pages, the MIDI stockpile, and one of the timelines (though that one's inverted, the Setter is already done, I just have to get other graphics for that page down). I have some other flavor graphics sitting around as sketches, and I'd like to edit or redo some of the others to make them more consistent. I've improved really dramatically in my art in the past year, and July brought huge, sweeping improvements to how I draw snoots and shape my heads, so you get a weird mix at the moment of the old Setters with the slight bump on the side of the head and the ones with proper snoots. Some of the Setters have eye shinies, some don't. That sorta thing.

My motivation has been a lot healthier this year. I'm done feeling like I need to prove myself, which was a big thing that drove me forwards in the past, but also caused me a lot of stress and a lot of burnout when stuff didn't turn out exactly as I liked. That's why I haven't been rushing to get any of that done, though it is still on the to-do list; I'm making this for me, and I like what we've got live already. I'm not feeling any great rush to get the rest up in case someone thinks the site is too barren. The photo galleries alone brought a lot to see back to the subdomain, and the Wales trip diary being finally done makes for nearly a full month of daily content, art, photos, fun stories, vibes, and future Cammy plans to read.

In short: it'd take anyone who isn't in the group a night to a few days to go through all this already. The rest will be done when it's done.

I've said it before, but cammy.somnol is the site I've always wanted to make, but never thought I could make. I never thought I'd be able to draw period, let alone illustrate a personal site, but I've found I not only enjoy it a lot, but I'm a lot better at it than I figured I'd be. Not, like, amazing or anything, but I'm already drawing all the animal people in comfy clothes I've ever wanted to, so how far I go is just a bonus to me. My confidence is growing. I feel like I'm getting more ambitious with my poses, and my lines are more flowing and solid. cammy.somnol has not only given me immense joy on its own, but it's also given me several new avenues to take any future site plans I have.

And let me tell you, if any of this sounds complacent, it's very much not. My aim is to have cammy.somnol up to parity with cammy_v1 by the end of the year. That's a few more Setters and a few more pages, really. Once that's done, I'm going to start cracking on the new design for mari_v4; the content is already done, it's up on mari@macintosh.garden, I just need to finish up the Mac OS 8-styled thing I started last year. The illustrations for that one will be less intense, less like full pictures and more halfbodies, a few fullbodies, probably just lineart. Something clean and cute. I had an idea to make them animated GIFs lined a few times to simulate Squigglevision. I still think that's a banger idea. Caby sorta did that with caby_v2 in spots.

Once my sites are back to fully working order, I will be at full power. My focus will return entirely to my projects. I have stories started. I have albums started. I'd like to start making proper YouTube videos on a new channel, something combining all my loves of music and technology and wandering rambling vlogs. Even outside my personal sites, I'm gonna be building caby.art for Caby so she can get back to doing commissions and having a place to link folks instead of doing all her business over her private Discord account, and Meowcities and the archives redesign are also half-finished and stuck in the pipeline. I'd also sorta like to redo my toyhou.se completely, hide all my characters, draw them all, rewrite their profiles, get my new lads up there too, and especially redo the (at this point very outdated and very wonky) Cammy and Somnolians assets for my profile.

It's kind of become a rethink of my entire internet presence, now that I have this ability to draw. It's going to take a lot of work, but I'm living for it. This is the most satisfied and most coherent I've ever felt as a person. I realized at the start of this year that I needed to focus less on bandying words with randos in Discord servers and more on creating and getting back to showing everyone how it's done. I think it's already paying off immensely. All of my hobbies, all of my music, all of my games are back to making me super excited—and after the two long years spent waiting for shit to reopen? That's all a badger boy could ever ask for.

As I was settling into my desk chair after a long day of working the store, I realized that there was no easy way to see what the most recent update to cammy.somnol was. You have my journal, but that's more like a diary with some other project stuff thrown in. mari@macintosh.garden (soon to be mari@somnol) has the front page changelog and the older updates page, but I had that on cammy_v1, and I don't think a changelog matches the friendlier, more personal vibe I'm going for on this site.

Easy fix: go to the front page. There's a breaking news bar up at the top. That's the most recent site update. No more guessing.

It's raining and I'm gonna go play Minecraft and listen to Mad at the Internet and whatever's in my sub box until it's time for bed. I'm experimenting with new ways to keep myself interested—apparently roleplaying as a bitter, exiled gardener rabbit who's gonna make the most gigantic fucking farm you've ever seen is that.

Remembering the warm summer nights
Everything is gonna turn out right
All the answers lie behind your eyes
Everything is gonna turn out right

All I want is to see you smile
All I want is to see you smile

Answers always are waiting there
You give me feelings that I used to get
Remember things that I had forgot
Get the feelings that I used to get
Remember things that I had forgotten long ago

You can read the trip diary now. It's properly done, posted, public. I held off for a few months because I wanted to get a few more BunnySetters done for it, and they're drawn now. Twenty-two exhaustively long pages detailing every single interesting thing that happened visiting Caby, and a lot that I'm sure isn't very interesting to people who aren't me. I'll be sending this out to both our families; hopefully it'll still be worth the read to them five months on.

I am posting this one everywhere. I am IN LOVE with how this came out.

I do this thing in my head where I always size down very big things like they're nothing. I did three new, full-color, shaded dual fullbodies for this trip diary, itself already probably an hour-long read, because it wasn't quite finished to me without them. Same thing happened with going to Wales in the first place; her dad told me I was a braver man than he was, making two long connecting flights as my first-ever flight, but I didn't even consider that, because I was so focused on being with my girl that I'd pay any price to do it. I struggle to swim long distances because I get tunnel vision for the shore ahead. It's occasionally bad for my health, but I think that's kinda cool, being conditioned to aim high like that. It's given me an incredible pain tolerance as well.

The trip diary still stirs up such strong emotions in me. I think it's awesome, I think it's a lot of fun to read, it's so vivid, it puts me right back on any given day (we were still pretty active on Discord throughout, which helped me gather up the details and logs as they happened)—but it also fills me with such a sad longing to return, to be with Caby again. I read it, and I'm back on June 7th, landing in that thick, worrying plume of smoke that had all the maps reading Hazardous for air quality. I'm hopping on a train to New Jersey, smelling of smoke, tasting smoke, and catching up with my mom about what all just transpired and how it's been back home as she holds the plushie Welsh dragon I got her in her arms. That's the road that's led me to today, finding a new job, getting absorbed in it, and all the good and bad that's came of it—but at the cost of leaving my girl behind.

To be clear, if I really wanted to, I could fly back over there right now. I have about four grand banked up, and I'm sure it's no more difficult to find retail work over there than it is here (maybe easier because of the trains). It wouldn't be a very good idea, since I've got a job currently (hunting always sucks) and I'd be living with her folks, and while they'd be more than happy to host me (they've said so, literally unprompted, I'm not assuming this), their house is full enough as it is. I don't want to take advantage of their generosity. My life strategy right now is just to work and have fun creatively and squirrel money away until Caby's bringing in a decent second income off her art (and I'm optimistic she will, given that there's lots of opportunities for an illustrator in her area as she's seen through university), then we pay for an apartment together, I start the immigration process (probably getting married along the way), and I go back to school over there myself.

Beyond the sadness though, this trip still brings me deep, life-affirming joy, something that was totally missing from my life for years when everything was at a standstill, or even when I was working to finance the trip. I met my girl! We hit it off! We were loving together, we were napping together, we were exploring together, and we proved every single motherfucker who's ever cocked an eyebrow at me "having a girlfriend" in another country that I've never even met wrong. Now, people ask me what the plan is, if she's coming over here or if I'm going over there. Her folks talk about the move like it'll happen in the next year or two; my mom has told strangers I'll be moving to another country soon, and told me not to even worry about a car if the move is soon soon.

It's not, but I appreciate everyone's excitement. I want it to be soon too. I yearn to be next to her again. After enjoying us in person, online just kinda...sucks sometimes. I'm without my best friend here in the states, but I felt her while I was in Wales. I would never admit it, and neither would she, but we sure thought in our darkest moments that it would never happen. And we fucking made it happen. And we can make it fucking happen again.

Gah, hearing her voice makes my brain shut off every time. Feelings, gamers. Gooey, lovey, needy feelings.

So my mom and my sister often pawn off tech issues onto me, just because it's quicker and easier if I handle it than if they learn how to do it themselves. I'm alright with that bit, but the one thing I hate is when I have to sit on the phone with customer support of any kind, let alone outsourced customer support. And the past few days, over my days off from work, I have gotten stuck with so much of it.

So I have Consumer Cellular. They've been phenomenal. Their prices are great, they have a large selection of phones (and you can bring your own if you have an unlocked one), international and roaming worked great when I was in Wales, their tech support is entirely US-based—I seriously do not know why they exclusively market themselves to seniors. They're a just plain great carrier and I'm glad to be with them.

Previously, I had Straight Talk, which is a branch of TracFone. I fucking hate Straight Talk. Every single time I have to call them up or try to set anything up through them, it's been agony. My mom and my sister also had Straight Talk, and with Consumer Cellular's recent deal where adding extra lines are free for the first month, they decided to make the switch. After all, their phones are unlocked, and it's just cheaper to use my service (unlimited talk and text + 5GB of high speed data) than it was to keep paying Straight Talk's ripoff rates.

Both phone had their own laundry list of issues—on the Straight Talk side. With Consumer Cellular, I buy the SIM, put it in the phone, and call them to activate the line and port the number over. Couldn't be simpler, outside of not knowing 100% what was needed to port a number over (if you're in the same boat, it's the account number, which in Straight Talk's case was the phone's IMEI, the porting PIN, and the ZIP code attached to the account). I even got the direct number of Consumer Cellular's porting and activation team from one of the representatives, so I didn't need to go through the phone labyrinth for the other number. That number is literally nowhere online, I looked it up. (877-590-1749—am I allowed to post that? Ah well.) That is power.

For Straight Talk? Well.

• The first call to them concerned "port protection" on my mom's number (which she's had since 2002?? Fucking props to her for managing to keep it for 21 years now). That was just the porting PIN, or so I thought, because Consumer Cellular still couldn't port the number.
• Turns out, the porting failed because Straight Talk didn't have our ZIP code attached to that account, hence Consumer Cellular repeatedly using the wrong one. The second call was to figure which ZIP code was attached to that account. Turns out, two, both in Miami-Dade, Florida. We have never lived in, been to, or entertained the thought of entering Florida.
• The third call, this time for my sister's phone, I figured I was prepared—I had called Straight Talk once, got the porting PIN, got the ZIP code (also in Florida), and indeed, Consumer Cellular ported her number first time. I switch the SIM cards, and—oops, the phone is carrier locked! Now, keep in mind, this phone was bought outright from Straight Talk and was under their service for two entire years—there was no reason for it to ever be carrier locked.
• The fourth call, the Indian guy said outright "Straight Talk cannot lock this phone". But they did! So he had to put in an unlock request (for a phone that cannot be locked), and that required me to give him a ton of my sister's information to verify. He said it would take two days, but once it was unlocked, I wouldn't need to call for anything else. He also said Straight Talk would email my sister once the phone was unlocked.
• The fifth call, I actually never got through to a representative. While I was on hold, I had the bright idea to look in the phone settings and found the carrier lock had been removed. Said email never arrived, hence me calling. Switched the SIMs, everything is now peachy, and I never, ever, have to call Straight Talk ever again.

The Pocono Parks page has been updated with a trip out yesterday to two (three, but one was too small to bother getting photos of) parks that the township refers to as a "park system". That was the good part of my days off; getting to see some nice leaf colors and explore a bit before it starts getting real cold out.