The end of the year is always ripe for epiphanies, ain't it? I can't believe that one post about coming to terms with being autistic was now four years ago. Something keeps coming back to me about the past ten years, and I don't think I've ever properly vocalized it or even come to terms with it in myself. I'll have a lighter lookback on my art progress going up on the group blog soon; this is just one that's been brewing in my head for the past month or so as well.

At the start of the year, I left MiloHax, which was a Guitar Hero and Rock Band modding Discord if you're not aware. I left because of the fallout from a situation where I was drunk, said something mildly edgy (we're talking "haha you're 14 and you think you're bi" levels of edgy, like real weaksauce shit), and the other mods took it as an opportunity to strip me not just of the mod role (which, who cares, I can't clean it up for free anymore), but also the Homie role with access to the private room that comes with that role. That bit rankled me. All the work and all the stress I put myself through (including personally—working so much on Guitar Hero mods had me neglecting Caby plenty of times), contributing to so many big projects—and then I came home from work one night to find a "unanimous vote" from all the other mods saying that I fucked up and I should "do better". I don't think it was just about this incident, I think it was a slow boil, but this definitely broke the camel's back.

If anything, it's amusing looking back at how little it meant. I didn't drop any YouTube subs, despite some fat NEET who presses buttons really fast doing his best to cancel me for attention on Xitter. I've since had modder people add me on my public account to ask questions or what have you. I even had someone who used to talk to me about marfGH drop in on the Vib-Ribbon stream for a brief moment, which was nice. Of course, I also look back at who decided to drop me and I remembered that one of them was a literal teenager, one just turned 40 and posts recordings of arguments with his dad for his internet friends, and another got one of his previous Discord accounts deleted for posting the "American culture is centered around neighbors" copypasta (ahem) in some other server.

This ain't sour grapes, this is a reminder that people in Discord servers are not your friends, and they're usually a lot sadder than you are, or are just as edgy and are pretending not to be so they themselves don't get canceled.

Instead, I became international. I quit my first job (my previous manager told me the last time I dropped in how she wishes she had me back because I was the only reliable worker she had), got on two planes basically for shits and giggles, flew to Montreal to London, and slept in the same bed for three weeks with the girl I love. I got a slightly better job when I came back—took a lot of time getting used to it, but it's a stepping stone to something I truly want to do, I believe. I moved forward in life. Why then did it affect me so bad?

I've wound up going through this loop a lot over the past ten years, and even before. My first taste of internet infamy came in the mid 2010s when I humming along on Tumblr and got into it with some blog with a thousand followers. I guess I said something that upset them, because suddenly I had tons of mocking, venomous anons in my inbox, plus this blog shittalking me very publicly. Brianna (who was the adult woman who groomed me through my teenage years, remember) encouraged me to shoot back, and I did. About a year later, I had another run-in with a blog who said that I was a "potential rapist" because I didn't think "Blurred Lines" was as creepy as folks made it out to be. Remember, I was 15.

In 2017, I started up the Valve Developer Union, which was born out of a Steam group and Discord server for folks who made custom content for Garry's Mod. The kid in charge of that Steam group bothered the hell out of me and a couple other folks, so after we got mod in his server, we made our own, trashed his, and invited everyone to the new one. That was VDU Mark I. When I had no reason to keep it around anymore, I shut it down. Some previous regulars convinced me to bring it back up, and I figured with a website attached, I now had a reason to. VDU Mark II wound up causing me a solid year of aggravation, both with regulars (some coomers, some just fucking miserable people, some tried to get me banned off Discord in spectacularly unsuccessful fashion) and with my webmaster. I remember one of the first truly heated arguments I got into was about what font we should use for the body text of the articles. Which fucking font.

In 2018, I joined Neocities—my experiences on there are well, well documented at this point. Lots more arguing, lots more being a gadfly, lots more stress around another web project, this time Districts. It's funny how much of it has been forgotten about, and I've written about that in blog posts prior, but it affected us greatly at the time. I bought DreamHost hosting initially for the sole reason that I saw how it was stressing Caby out and I wanted to get a girl I really cared about away from people throwing shit at me. I haven't even mentioned the Quake scene in all of this, where I marched into a well-established modding scene, went "I am the new wave of Quake mapping and all the Quakedads can get fucked", and handed over a level without coherent texture themes. Hilarity ensued, perhaps.

And, of course, in the age of Somnolescent being its own group, lots of people have come and gone with similarly sparky results. Brianna got kicked out in 2018, prengle got kicked out in 2019 and proceeded to stalk me and try to humiliate me with some of the erotic RPs Brianna had me doing with her, Neo left a month later and also tried to humiliate me, mon left in 2022, borb left in 2022 (and also tried to humiliate me, see the aforementioned Xitter drama), and Devon has most recently flown the coup a month ago for being a legitimately violent racist who doesn't think what she said is the issue, just that people look at her wrong for it.

The point of all this storytelling is that it's never that I miss the people. The people I've met are sex pests, incels, bitter losers, middle-aged burnouts telling you about the wonders of psychedelics for fixing mental problems, oh yeah, and a literal child groomer (and some better folks, of course, folks I wouldn't mind chatting with again now and then). I don't even necessarily regret the outcome. I've got great friends now, I have money now, I'm working on moving up in the world, and I'm more creative and more successful at being happy with what I make than ever.

I just wish it didn't have to happen the way it did. I wish that every good idea I had didn't also come with a tidal wave of nonsense that wound up killing it. I regret the loss of that potential there and the connections that could've been had. Every single loss comes with a little more baggage that I have to navigate next time I try to make friends. I still have a hard time seeing when people like me. I still get nervous every new community I poke my head into will eventually chase me back out. Some of those previous times were well-deserved, and others, I don't quite think so, but it affects me the same either way.

I absolutely wish Somnol could've continued with every single person we lost (except Brianna, obviously). I wish folks weren't shitheads. I wish Somnol didn't have that gigantic trail of dismissals lagging behind it, because losing people sucks. Again, it's not the people—what good would having prengle back be? He'd insult me, himself, and everyone constantly, give us some MS Paint scribbles and a Sentridoh MP3 and go "here's my great idea for a Morrowind mod", and we were all supposed to act graced with that edgelord genius. Or Cheren and Neo, now that they're off drawing Pikmin pornography on Mastodon? It's not the people, it's the fact that something good could've come of it and we all got our hopes up and what came out of it was disappointment and social trauma.

Of course I'm aware of the thread running through every single incident, me. Of course I was a shitty, shitstirring teenager, of course I said the thing that would bother people the most because I thought it would be funny—but there's more to the story than that. There's why I was like that. My own insecurities, my own ego I was hiding behind to guard against my fear that I was untalented, my own feelings of being deprived and not being able to make all the cool modding, music, and artsy stuff I wanted happen—and also the folks around me encouraging it. Brianna encouraged it. Even Somnolescent encouraged it for a while. Was it fun destroying Hyperlink? Yeah. Was it fun destroying that Garry's Mod Steam group Discord and both VDU Discords? Yeah.

What did it amount to though? A big list of people I still regret making enemies with, just because making enemies fucking sucks and is stressful. I wasn't just destroying things, I was trying to build them up too, make friends, show people where I was coming from, be reasonable, and, well, in short, you don't shit where you eat, and I did.

I think a lot about how there was a happy, dumb little kid there before all this happened. He was sitting in his room, relearning how to play Guitar Hero with a regular controller after the wire snapped off his SG, listening to Soundgarden and thinking about the idea of having Pokémon OCs for the first time, and that kid became me. I got away from the adult that kid should've grown up to be and came out of the other end socially anxious and jaded, wondering who the next person I really wanted to like me and then didn't will be.

The past few years have been me trying to re-establish contact with that kid. Not become a kid again, but become better-adjusted again. Again, become the adult that kid should've grown up into. I think I'm on the right track; just being able to draw has made me feel so much more whole, so much less frustrated with what I'm personally capable of. Everything is within my control, what I'm capable of, how I conduct myself, and how I feel about myself. I can be exactly who I want to be, and if I need love and care, I can just vocalize that, I don't have to act out to get that attention like I used to. Sure, that means facing a lot of very uncomfortable realities about myself—but I've never been one for lying anyway.

Like I said, there will be a much lighter lookback on 2023 over on Letters, either before the end of the year's out or the very start of 2024. That one's gonna be about me drawing, because I've gotten a lot better at it over the past year and it well and truly brings me a lot of joy. I've always been supremely jealous of people who can draw, and now I can! And I'm drawing exactly what I want to, how I want to, and I have a million ways to grow from here. I'm really enjoying it. We'll talk more soon, gamers.

Apologies for still being sporadic on the journal front! Not really been up to a ton a ton? I did finally finish the gigantic group drawing for five years of Somnolescent back on the 20th—which I should probably post more places because it's the first group pic I have ever done and completed and it came out really cute. There's a message from me on there too with some ideas for where we're going in 2024.

Big thing is that I'll be streaming Vib-Ribbon again tonight at 7PM! Folks have been clamoring for another Vib customs stream since I did the last one last year, so I'm making it a Christmas tradition. The Sunday closest to Christmas, I gather up a ton of unmarked audio files the Somnolians send me and package it up into a disc image to blindly play through. I have no idea what to expect, other than dcb tried to get me to play "Albuquerque". And then forgot to remove the album art from the MP3. Good showing.

I feel cloistered—more than usual. I haven't really been updating this journal, truthfully because I don't have a lot to update about! I've gotten back into art, and I feel much faster at it, more confident, and more ambitious than ever. It's perhaps a little early to look back and start sharing 2024 plans, though I do have them, and those will be going up on Letters.

Beyond that, work, work, work. I went from a socially anxious mess when I started this job to proving myself in a big way to frankly being over it. It gives me $350 a week—and that's about it, really. Whenever the bottom drops out, I will be scheduling another flight to Wales and staying there for a fucking month this time. Maybe two! One entire sixth of 2024 spent next to my girlfriend would make my year. Caby says I should be looking into certifications and higher skilled tech jobs without the retail part of it—because the retail part really is the worst part. I'm autistic. I can handle it, but I'm really not built for it.

Beyond that, though, this holiday season is going a lot better than expected. I don't know if I mentioned this, but I got selected for jury duty back in November—and turns out they selected everyone they needed without me even needing to drive an hour away to get interviewed. Home is peaceful, unlike last year, work has laid off the Christmas music onslaught to a comfortable level, and all the Somnol Christmas presents are starting to make their way across the world right now. I'll have stuff mailed out soon too, hopefully by January. I just got back from a nice dinner paid for by work where I ate a big burger-fried egg monstrosity and drank a spiked cream soda with rum (work did not pay for the liquor, but that would've went hard). That was all delicious. Life is good!

I'll be heading back to (creative) work—watch the main somnolescent.net domain for that. For now, go read Savannah's really fuzzy fun 2023 retrospective over on Letters (more to follow from other group people and myself) and peek at this wonderful Setter I commissioned Caby to draw! I wanted a new wallpaper for the eMachines Box, and here's the wandering Setter fullbody that'll be on it >:3c

Last Summer is officially out now on my Bandcamp! We're having a listening party for it tonight at 8PM EST, so if you're available in the next few hours of this post going live, come hang out with me and the Somnolians! I'll be sharing some fun tidbits about how I made the album and all that good stuff. (It's also streaming now on YouTube, if you prefer to listen to your music as videos. No word on if I'll publish this one through RouteNote like I do my normal aphrodisiac stuff, though that would be pretty killer.)

I also spent the day working on art for a physical release! I've got jewel cases handy and more novelty CD-Rs on the way, so I've done up a proper eight-page booklet I'm gonna have printed on nice, glossy paper, and I'll come up with a back cover and something for the CD tray another day. The CD release is gonna have the original demos from 2020, which pleases me since it'll all be together in a full package. I'll be making a couple for the Somnolians and then a couple extras I might offer on the Bandcamp if anyone's interested. If not, no big deal. Just a fun, handmade thing to go with a nice, handmade album.

It's been a lot of work, but honestly, I'm kind of enjoying the warm fuzzies tonight. The end of the year has always been my time to make music (my first stabs at stuff as aphrodisiac were done in the back half of 2015, and Isolated Together was coming together between November 2018 and January 2019, thereabouts), so I'm in real familiar territory.

It's nice having something new and, more importantly, much more like real music to show off for all my efforts over the years trying to write music. Again, the itch is scratched for the moment, I think I'll be focusing elsewhere now—but it was damn cool how it happened and I am super proud of how this thing came out. Hopefully, you like it too and you let me know somewhere. My brain is otherwise melted, so I'm gonna relax for the evening.

Hey gamers. I'm a little hung over (Somnolians, let me know if you want a sauced 35 minute rambling Letters From Cammy dropped on your heads), but I've finally got a day off, I've announced it to the group already after it having been a secret for a few weeks off from two months now, I think it's time to announce this one publicly.

Coming December 8th, the first new music from me in four, almost five, years will be coming out: Last Summer, a defictionalized EP from the MP3.com success story mtlx. It's a sorta-downtempo sorta-ambient electronica six-track album that clocks in at 34 minutes long, full of strange sonic rabbit holes through vintage near-disaster space race coverage, bonkers consciousness seminars caught on cheap cassettes, agitated birds out in the rain forest, and one man whose doctors say has the constitution of a horse. It's about being fond of a time you shouldn't be fond of.

I first started working on Last Summer in January 2020, back when dcb and I were both fascinated by the MP3.com stuff. He made up a fake album and tracklisting and I set out to make it real, but I quit a few songs in because I still wasn't very good at all the songwriting stuff, I was trying to fit everything into the short runtimes he made up, and my heart still wasn't quite in the music thing after losing the projects to Isolated Together in 2019.

I started having the itch to do more music back in October and returned to it. I turned the songs I had done inside out, stretched 'em out, gave them lots of layers, made them sound like real music instead, and kept it all under wraps with only Caby, Savannah, and Connor (who contributed a really cool blanket of guitar to the title track!) getting to hear my WIP renders. I finally finished it up a few days ago and have just been playing with mixes and preparing metadata ever since.

I'm seriously proud of it, and I'm kind of in awe at what came out of it. Going into a new set of Cammy websites, I didn't really want my music output to be defined by some shit I made in high school before I really knew what I was doing, so I'm very glad to have something much newer and much stronger to show off instead. I'm also just glad to finally be able to talk about it? I mentioned I'd been working on some stuff in secret, and this was one of those things. Now, everyone gets to enjoy it.

So yeah, December 8th. Watch my Bandcamp, aphrodisiac.bandcamp.com. I'm gonna be scheduling and hosting a listening party on there for it the day it comes out, and anyone can show up and chat and listen with me and the other Somnolians. I'm also planning on doing a run of handmade CDs of it, complete with artwork and an expanded tracklist of demos at the end, both for the Somnolians and also maybe to have a few to sell to any interested parties online. I'll think of some other places to send this thing out and maybe see if anyone's into it.

And yes, dcb likes it a lot. I wanted him to get first dibs on the full thing.

Happy December, happy Bandcamp Friday! I cleared out my wishlist:

Given how the site has been shuddering a little internally lately, I felt it might be a good time to buy a bunch of albums I've been meaning to (I always pay extra because I'm a sap like that) and download them for safekeeping. Was jamming to Vansire this morning.

Got something musical myself on the way in a bit. Stay tuned.

So it's been nearly a year since I last streamed, at least according to YouTube. I used to stream all the time, but I just got so exhausted and I wasn't having much fun with them, so I quit, and I haven't had much reason to pick them back up because I'm either busy or we're having a group call, and that takes care of my "interacting in voice with the group" quota, really.

Jake linked a cheap chinese HDMI capture device he apparently successfully used to stream Xbox Minecraft a few months back, and at like $7 or so, I took the gamble. This wound up becoming a much larger project involving a component-to-HDMI adapter (that I already had) and an HDMI splitter (that I did not have) and a ten foot HDMI cable (that I will be picking up from work tomorrow or so), but this sorta looks feasible, if messy! I tested the adapter this evening, and it works and doesn't add any extra latency to the game, though on my TV, it cuts off the top of the screen, which means I need to play it partially blind. That's something I've experienced with other HDMI devices on this TV as well, so thankfully, it's nothing that you'll see on your end.

At the moment, I've got the Wii hooked up for GameCube and Animal Crossing purposes, though of course, between Wii, GameCube, and Virtual Console, there's a gigantic library of stuff I'd be able to play on stream. And on real hardware! I'm used to just streaming emulators, but there's something special about being able to use a real controller on a real console while I'm streaming. The setup is gonna get incredibly messy, I already know that—but I'll figure out a way to be able to monitor chat while sitting comfortably in range of my game. Probably time to get Streamlabs going as well, and not just rely on my old OBS setup with the popout YouTube chat.

Everything is very tentative, but it's a fun kind of tentative. Stay tuned; you may just be able to chatter with me live again very soon.