Hey, I'm busy preparing art for the stream tomorrow and listening to Semisonic (life comes at you fast), but promise you'll be there? We'll be showing off marfGH features and brand new charts publicly for the first time ever, and I'll be doing it on my real PS2 with a guitar I've been practicing with for a couple weeks now.

It'll be a real good time. Be there. Come hang out. Watch me barely be able to play Expert.

I have fallen way, way behind on the journaling thing—I'm starting to miss it. You know I had to serve on a jury last month, and I just didn't write about it? (I'm not going to, it was a pretty downer outcome to the case, not fun at all.) I've bought so many cool toys this past month, for me and for others, I still wanna recount my adventures in Quake II, I've got my feelings about the end of 2024 to write about!

As happened last year, I'll be doing some daily, ideally smaller updates with the journal to catch back up. We still have one bit of unfinished business from November to write about—all the packages! The rest of the group (and even some people outside of it) received some CDs recently, personalized CD copies of the anniversary reissue of Last Summer, the mtlx EP that I wrote back in the fall of last year, and a mix CD of songs that I loved and have given me funny feelings since getting back into discovering new music post-lockdowns. Now that Connor and Savannah have gotten theirs, I can finally recount putting it all together.

Here's what a year of on-and-off arts and crafts will get ya...

Last Summer: Special Anniversary Edition

I overdo projects a lot. Some of it is innocent—I just think it's cool to have something feel super official and fully complete, but I'm sure some of it is just my weird issues as well. In the case of the Last Summer set, I wanted to have this disc feel like an official, major label CD, nicer than some of my mass-produced indie label CDs even. I wanted a glossy booklet, I wanted a back inlay, and I wanted bonus tracks.

On the music itself, I tweaked some of the melodies and mixes on a few tracks and suffixed the final EP with four early demos of the songs, most from 2020 but one from mid-recording (when "Siestas" was faster and I was still trying to track it with percussion). Honestly, it's really cool listening back to these now that they truly are demos. I remember not knowing what to do with them back then, and Caby's since told me she didn't really get 'em either, but now, with the context of the final release, you can hear where certain song parts got expanded on and where sounds got carried over from my initial experimentation. (I also mixed in subtly variable flavors of tape hiss, like they came from different old late 90s cassettes. Someday, I'll do an actual run of Last Summer cassettes for funsies.) I'm very happy they have a proper home now that isn't just in the Scratchpad's archives.

This adventure started not long after I finished the album—January was when I made my first test copy, which was only a few days after I got the test prints. At the time, I still worked at Staples, and all my time spent doing Amazon returns in the Print Center exposed me to the wonders of 80lb gloss, which feels almost exactly like CD booklet paper. I did up a back inlay and an eight page booklet (and thus a front cover) in Paint.NET, got the test copy printed, adjusted it a bit further, and sent in a print order for 22 copies of each page on 80lb gloss. This all cost me roughly $70, and while the Staples printers aren't meant for graphics, I really like how it all came out, just that little bit scrungly, but still really official feeling. (The copies are all numbered, out of twenty total. We're up to 9/20! I'm pleased at how much of the pile I've been able to give away. I'll list them on my Bandcamp probably in January.)

I intended to put it together over the slow February nights, using their guillotine slicer and long stapler over in Print on my lunches or days off, but getting the unceremonious "quit or we'll eventually fire you" in January put a damper on that. Even after getting back from Wales in March, I was more focused on settling back in, losing weight, and finding another job than putting together elaborate CD packaging at my former workplace. August came, I'd waited long enough, and while the faces had changed a decent amount (turns out the store basically imploded after I left, mwah, the drama, magnifique), enough remained from when I was there that they let me behind the counter to access all their sharp objects. Three or four hours later, phase one of the Last Summer reissue was completed.

But then the project got bigger—I wanted to personalize each copy. I figured this could double as my Christmas card for the year, and I wanted to draw people stuff they'd be really excited about, and that meant OCs over sonas like would've been easy for me (because again, I have a bad habit of overdoing it). dcb got his Neopet lad Cedrus, Caby got her perturbed Caerpinwyd greengrocer skunk Azurite, Connor got a kittyfied Moritani (I was apparently the first to do anything with his hatred of lettuce :omegalul:), and Savannah got a goat version of her witch boy Micah, because humans are scary. I was also shipping one of these out to Mr. Midwestern Dirt in Chicago, and I wanted to include a note in with his like I included for all the Somnolians, so he got a Colton in his jewel case. These were done digitally and then printed out on my home inkjet on nice blue and pink cardstock on the same template as the booklets were done on, and then slotted in behind the booklet as you open the case.

This is really what made the packages take so long. Not one of these characters, I'd drawn before, so the nerves about getting them right were there, and while I love how they all came out (Cedrus is probably my favorite of the lot and one of my favorites of the year, if I'm honest) and while it was all completely worth it—well, it was a lot of work. A lot of weeks of me hinting at things to people, because I'm terrible at keeping secrets.

Here's the full-sized digital versions, if you're curious (obviously click the thumbnails, doof):

marf's mix 2024

Mailing out mix CDs has been something we've been talking about in the group since Devon was still around. As I mentioned, during the lockdowns, my desire for any music that wasn't the warm, comfy, familiar confines of licensed video game soundtracks from the mid-2000s about disappeared completely, so my mixes didn't come out very good (least, not that I remember). 2023 and 2024 have been killer for my discovery though, and instead of writing out some long post about the music I loved this year or something, I figured I'd make it a mix CD. Let me not tell you about this song I love, let me let you listen to it.

Truth be told, it's probably the project this year that's felt the least like work. I already get into the weeds of music sequencing, mastering, lyrical content, and the like when I'm just casually enjoying a record, so it was just fun to pick out all the songs that spoke to me the loudest this year and arrange them in a proper running order. I remember really trying to dig for songs that got me emotional, or songs I've fantasized to. I really got into the details, normalizing song volumes, trimming silences, creating seamless segues, interludes (two of 'em to separate out the two halves of the mixtape, courtesy of The Conet Project), and even trimming one song slightly to make a sort of unofficial radio edit. Seriously, I wanted this thing to play as its own piece, even if it was other people's music I was using to paint.

On song choice, this frankly could've just been 15 Superdrag songs in a row. I lived in Regretfully Yours for months, the droning, desperate infatuation of "Truest Love", "Carried"'s angular, anthemic low self-confidence, "Destination Ursa Major"'s ode to drunken abandon. It only got better when I discovered The Fabulous 8-Track Sound of Superdrag, with a lot of the same lyrical focuses but with an even grubbier, growlier, low-end sound. "Sugar" would be the opener to my mix CD for 2024.

The rest of the songs all came from CDs and digital albums I've bought in the past two years. The Raconteurs, two songs from Adwaith, Matchbox Twenty (I am just ready for my Rob Thomas arc, yes), Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Ted Leo, Built to Spill, Ash, Remy fucking Zero—a mix I enjoy quite a lot. The vast majority were bought in Wales with Caby standing next to me, which makes it especially odd when one of them reminds me of her. I guess it is a little strange to have such strong, personal emotions (not exclusively for her—"As Sure as the Sun" was more me thinking about people who left the group more than anything) wrapped up in songs that got mailed to the people they make me think of, but consider it more like a time capsule of my own neurosis more than anything about them. I'm just an insane person on the Internet.

On a positive note, there are plenty of optimistic and more lovey songs on the disc, and I'm happy to have embraced my love of Brad Sucks again, especially his newer material that just didn't really interest me during the lockdowns, of which two songs feature.

But this all begat another leg of the project! I needed cover art for the mix CD! Initially, I was gonna do another character illustration (just of Cammy, possibly including marf), but after doing five of those already on a similar canvas, none of the ideas I had were all that interesting to me, so I cleared out my head by digitally painting for the first time instead. I took a screenshot of the Minecraft Alpha world I was playing a lot at the timeand tried to paint out a weird, dreamy, sunset version of it, kinda paradise but also kinda isolated and lonely. It isn't very good, but the fun thing about indie rock is that bad and amateurish art is a staple of the genre's entire look, so somehow, it all worked out.

What worked out slightly less was that this was the moment I figured out my cheap shitty Canon inkjet can't do duplex (double-sided) printing, not even manually—the print won't line up! I gave up on the nice, decorative, typed insert design I had in mind and simply handwrote the tracklist in very tiny scribble on the back of the cardstock prints five times, pen mistakes and all. Boo-womp. (But that's its own vibe, I suppose, so no big deal.)

Shipping and handling

Then came mailing it all out! I got a pack of bubble mailers one night and reinforced them on both sides with sliced up cardboard from my current job. (If the boxes there are good enough to transport beer and glass in one piece, my CDs will make it there just fine.) dcb got a whole box of CDs from me, a signed Shaimus CD I ordered for him years ago and never passed on (sorry lad), a few duplicates from my collection I figured he'd like, half my print copies of the spring 2024 SomnolZine, the mix CD, and of course the Last Summer CD he helped springboard in the first place. Everyone got something a little different! Discounting the personalization, I gave more copies of the zine to Caby because she spilled coffee on hers, Mr. Midwestern Dirt didn't get the mix CD because I figured he wouldn't be into all the 90s pop/alt stuff I had on it, and there was another guy in Virginia on Reddit who wanted to do a mix CD trade, so he got the mix CD and an unpersonalized copy of Last Summer. Lots to keep track of! Addresses!

Shipping in total cost me roughly $100. (You see why I wanted to include the mix CD with the Last Summer stuff now?) I had all the customs forms printed out, fixed to the envelopes, dcb's box was all packed up nice—now the last leg of the journey was just hoping it all got there! dcb, Patrick, and the Reddit guy in Virginia all got theirs within a week, makes sense, none of those are too far from here. Caby got hers within two weeks, big excellent, international shipping is iffy sometimes.

Savannah and Connor got theirs December 19 and 20, respectively. Canada Post's Christmas-nuking strike caused the packages to stop right where they stood three days after I mailed them out. Thankfully, that's most of the way from Somnolescent HQ to Ontario, so they got them a day and two after the strike ended, but the fact that I could've hand-delivered theirs in an evening as opposed to waiting almost forty days to not only see their reactions to what I drew, but also to be able to write this very post and put some closure on the whole project, definitely derailed the end of the year vibes for a bit. On the bright side, Christmas miracle!

Oh yeah, and the reactions were absolutely worth it. Hope you guys don't mind me posting these here for posterity:

Closure

I realized halfway through all of this that this was an absurd amount of work, and in a way, I put more into it in return. It feels like a nice tribute to my tendency towards excess. Like seriously, just handmaking a CD, or doing up a mix CD for friends, or mailing out six different packages at once, would be quite the undertaking—and I did all of those at the same time.

I've obviously learned to trim it back next time, but thankfully, I've also learned a lot about prints and CD artwork to expedite the process. (Basically, print it at Staples if it needs to be double-sided, and a booklet, while cool, is overkill and a simple two-sided insert is more than enough.) This was an adventure in handmade CD-R releases, and it came out fucking cool, and I am glad I did it and everyone loved it. I'm also glad, especially given that this definitely won't be the last CDs I ever send to people, that I know now to make it a lot more manageable for myself.

The Canada Post strike really disrupted me more than it probably should have. There was almost a year of building excitement for those Last Summer CDs, and all the time I spent drawing things for them, only to see the ones for Savannah and Connor freeze three days after I send them right along the border. Almost a month later and they still haven't moved. I had journal posts about putting it all together ready to go that I just wasn't able to post. I was gonna put the last dozen copies or so up for sale on my Bandcamp and maybe use Reddit to advertise some handmade CDs—desire to do that disappeared for a bit. I meant to take some time off to relax, but it kinda became more of a depressive streak than relaxing from a busy year, not just because of the strike, but that definitely didn't help.

Good news! The strike is expected to end next week, not because Canada Post and the union came up with a solution, but because the government has had enough of the billion dollars lost and millions of Christmases ruined as a result of not having a functional fucking postal service and they're forcing people back to work until May of next year. Hopefully an actually better solution that suits the workers better can be found—but this just can't continue like this. I heard from Savannah they were gonna do rolling strikes (where only certain areas would strike at a time)—that probably would've gotten people's hackles up a lot less if the mail service was just slower and not nonexistent. Tactical error, I dunno, I just want my friends' gifts to get there, and thankfully they should be there sometime within our lifetimes now.

I wanna dust off the journal with a more fun post though! I recently procured an MX4SIO card for my PS2, and I am supremely excited about it. Seriously, it's reinvigorated my love for console gaming. If you have no idea what an MX4SIO card is (and the name is stupid), it's effectively a MicroSD-to-PS2 memory card adapter that lets you boot games through the memory card slot, no disc needed, provided you have a way of running homebrew on your PS2. It is fucking cool.

The PS2 softmodding community has gone absolutely nuts in the past few years, coming up with new ways to boot games, getting online in games going again with custom servers, the works. For some definitions, softmodding means hacking the console through non-hardware means. Hardmodding would mean something like a modchip soldered to the motherboard, softmodding involves usually exploiting some software update function, a built-in Web browser, something you can feed bad data to to give it your own instructions. The goal of any of these exploits is to run homebrew, which are custom applications written for the PS2, and ideally, backups of games. Softmods are easier and usually free, so they tend to be preferable to hardmods.

Back when I first got into Guitar Hero II customs in 2014, we already had Free McBoot, which is a cute little exploit that lives on a memory card and uses the DVD player firmware update function to let you boot whatever code you want on your console, but nowadays, there's also FreeHDBoot, which only needs a hard drive and a Network Adaptor to do the same thing as Free McBoot, and FreeDVDBoot, which can boot homebrew using only a specially crafted DVD-R. It's wild. Some of these only work on specific PS2 models, but every single PS2 model can be exploited in one way or another.

So back in 2022, after I'd gotten this PS2, I dove into trying to get hard drive loading games working, because that's considered the fastest and most reliable way of booting backups, and I wanted to start testing my GH2DX and marfGH stuff on a real console. It was a disaster. I was using a Network Adaptor that I couldn't even verify worked properly, I switched out the IDE board inside with a SATA board using an upgrade kit, so who knows if that was the issue, the PS2 itself feels rickety with its slightly loose and spotty card and controller slots, and at the end of the day, Open PS2 Loader (which is the application that lets you run backups of games off a variety of media) never saw the hard drive. The whole thing was a dud, and I wound up returning everything but the bag of Torx screwdrivers I ordered for the project. My PS2 was still stuck playing disc games—and anyone who plays old disc-based consoles know that eventually, their lasers and disc drives wear out and you end up with no easy way to play games.

I have a couple streams coming up that call for playing some hacked PS2 games, and I didn't want to emulate them with all the issues that come with running PCSX2 on my slowass old iMac, so I figured it was finally time to buy an MX4SIO card and try it out. $30 got me a 128GB MicroSD card (a Samsung, whose cards seem to work the best anecdotally online and I can confirm it worked well for me) and a MX4SIO card from Bitfunx off Amazon. I'd already had the Free McBoot card from when I was toying with customs in 2014, and I've been using it to backup and restore saves, mostly. That's all you need to get it going, honestly.

Preparing the MicroSD card is the hardest part. OPL requires a specific folder structure and games to be named a certain way, with the disc ID as the first part of the name and the display name as the second. CD and DVD games have to be separated out. You can get art for each game to decorate OPL with. All of this can be automated with OPL Manager, thankfully. You just put the ISOs in the right folder on the card, and OPL Manager will rename the games and fetch art for you.

The MicroSD card came formatted as ExFat, so I needed to install the newest beta of OPL to take advantage of it. (You should do that anyway because OPL is always improving in compatibility, stability, and features.) ExFat is useful as well because it allows you to store games over 4GB without having to split the files, which is another thing OPL is picky about.

Anyway, that was it! You flip Block Objects to Auto in the settings, enable MX4SIO support, and it sees the card and lists your games, ready to play. How is the speed? Honestly, if it's slightly slower than the disc drive, I haven't noticed it. I'm pretty well accustomed to how quickly GH2 loads songs, and over MX4SIO, it felt as quick (or slow, however you wanna look at it) as disc or emulator. Compatibility is not perfect, but pretty close to it. I got Amplitude going no problem, NFL Street 2 worked great (and the spreadsheet said that was one of the non-functional games as well, so that's even better), my custom demo discs worked a treat, and of course, GH2 customs worked great.

Having a way to finally play my charts properly, on hardware, with a guitar even (which I still have to look around for, gonna check Marketplace after work and see if I can avoid eBay prices), or just any game I want to play, has gotten me totally reinvested in the PS2 ecosystem and also in working on marfGH. I'm aiming to have a nice half-dozen new customs done before the year's out, Connor wants a tie-in MoriHime GH track pack, PadGH is still partially finished and on the table—and now I can test these exactly as you'd actually play them, and more than that, I can actually enjoy them properly myself, not just tapping notes out on my keyboard. I have unfinished emulator saves for SSX 3 and Need for Speed: Underground that I can continue without dealing with any of the slowdown and glitches I get on PCSX2. It's just really fun to play with—and believe me, I have a ton of disc PS2 games I want to play as well, but this is a nice backup for those as well when my PS2's laser eventually goes, like it did on Caby's recently.

About the only limitation of any PS2 backup booting solution is that they can't boot PS1 games using the PS1 hardware in the console—they have to rely on POPS, which is Sony's bizarre software PS1 emulator for the PS2, and compatibility and performance is not great, as you might imagine. That's alright though—I have a Tonyhax International save for Crash 2 I can use to boot burned PS1 games if I ever get a hankerin' for some PS1 backup action.

That's another thing I toyed with briefly, the whole Tonyhax thing, another softmod solution for booting games that just so happens to work on all PS1 and PS2 consoles. I couldn't use my actual Tony Hawk discs for it because my old slim left the discs absolutely knackered with how much I played them (the ribbon cable for the laser assembly on most slimlines scratches the games up over time), but I have many Tonyhax capable games, thankfully. I don't have any CD-Rs on hand that don't make my PS2 screech in agony, just my Verbatim novelty vinyl ones I was using for the Last Summer CDs, but I can pick up a pack on Amazon when I want to play a PS1 game next, that's no big deal.

Video games are fun! I'll talk about Quake II soon, since I'm still doing some gaming through time type stuff, slowly but surely.

Expect these in your mailbox soon.

You know, if you ever wonder why some piece of physical merch you special-ordered got delayed, just ask me. There are so many steps involved with just putting together a couple CDs for some friends, let alone getting a whole factory to make them, assemble them, and ship them out to the right places. I've had the cases assembled since August, but it's taken me until now to get all the drawings and stuff done, and now I'm also shipping my end-of-year mixtapes with them too, so that's actually two CD packages to assemble, graphics and all, and then burn and package up.

I've been burning discs since yesterday. It's been ages since I've burned a music CD, and it's caused me to think of such wonderful things as CD-Text and DAO vs. TAO burn modes that I haven't thought about in forever. I will play each burn to make sure they work throughout before you guys get them because I obviously prefer working CDs, but I think only me and dcb have CD players or disc drives anymore anyway.

I bought the bubble mailers on the 30th. My mom was mildly annoyed at me buying them from my old Staples (which, shoutout to Staples, is down so fucking bad, they literally can't keep the lights on anymore), but as if paying $5 for packing materials versus $9 for packing materials really matters to me. I'll work an extra hour and remake what I spent double over, it's fine. Speaking of work, I took some cardboard from work for packing filler to keep the CDs safer in transit. These are nice, sturdy boxes, I think rated to withstand 35lbs in edge crush tests? Bring it the fuck on, USPS. If it's good enough to ship glass and alcohol in, my stupid little CDs will be fine.

Even after all is assembled and marked, I still gotta do the customs forms, as three of these are leaving the country. I think it'll cost me like $65 total to ship it all, though that doesn't factor in that dcb is getting a big goodie box with a bunch of other CDs from Shaimus and Silversun Pickups and the like. Sharing is caring! And probably has to be sent flat rate. Such is life.

This really is my last celebration of the cool-but-excessive projects that I've put myself through over the time that I've been mariteaux. Building whole websites, CDs to mail out, gigantic group drawings, trying to keep Caby's crazy pace during Art Fight, fucking flying international first time by myself—I just kinda did all these things without thinking about it, and I'm proud of the results! But I'm also ready to relax for a long while. My 3DS is gathering so much dust right now, gamers—all my gaming stuff outside of my PS2 is, and that's entirely because of my streams.

I'll leave more detail for closer to the end of the year so I don't change my mind, but yeah, Cammy's gonna be a slightly different person from here on out. I think you'll like me more. Packages soon.

Working forty hours a week still kicks my ass some days u_u

I had to do some bugfixing of my album reviews section this morning (had to do with artist altnames, which were still buggy), so I took the opportunity to lay some groundwork for some features I wanna implement and polish up some of what was already there. You see, now that I have over a hundred of these things and no intentions of stopping any time soon, I want to turn it from a simple "Cammy talks about albums" section into a way to turn people on to stuff they like outside of simply my opinions. Discovering new music can be a little hit-and-miss, so I've come up with some ideas based on how it usually works for me.

(I'll be linking to the lofi version of mari.somnol through this journal entry, but all these features work on nofi to the same extent they currently work on lofi, just in case you were curious.)

Improved browsing of years and scores

So here's the easy one. I think it was when I was porting everything from nofi to lofi, I refactored what was formerly a single PHP script into three, an index, a review page, and a browse page. This browse page was what was bloating everything up before, because it pulls multiple duties. It lists artists and albums, of course, but sometimes, you're looking by year, sometimes by grade, and sometimes by artist name.

Before this, the only actual navigation on the browse page was artist alphabetical, which doesn't help you if you want to browse by year or by score. So now, it does some checking for which you're looking for and gives you a timeline view with decade skipping if you're browsing by year, and a grade-based navigation if you're browsing by rating.

There's probably a ton of different ways to glitch this out with fuzzy inputs or combining different HTTP GET variables, but it works if we're all playing nice. Some other time, I'll handle the checking better.

Cammy's Pick

Here's where we get into stuff I only have on the backend right now. If I go to anyone for album reviews I actually believe, it's probably AllMusic. They have many different writers on staff, but a lot of them seem to agree with me or at least use my methodology for rating albums. (Meanwhile, I've never had much luck with Pitchfork, who seem to write entirely based on what will get the most attention, and Sputnikmusic is a total crapshoot on whether or not the reviewer can even write a decent review. We don't go to RYM.)

AllMusic has an "album pick" function that lets you see which album from a specific artist's catalog the AllMusic staff has designated as the best, and I rather like this, so I added another column in the database for a "Cammy's Pick" flag, which will display on the artist page and probably in the artist browse as well. It's not visible yet, but the browse.php page is already set up to allow searches based on which albums have the Cammy's Pick flag.

I'll only be giving the Cammy's Pick designation for artists whose back catalog I'm really familiar with and therefore can judge a "best album" from, or artists who have albums I like so much, I doubt they can really be topped by future digging. More the former than the latter, a bit of both.

Mood search

Here's the one that'll take the most work and the most research from me—but it's definitely doable. Pandora continues to be the only streaming service that actually gives me relevant recommendations, and that's because it has the best classification system of any streaming service. Spotify and Apple Music rely on playlists and guesses based on what listeners of [x] band also listen to, but Pandora recommends music based on how similar its musical traits are to what it knows you like. They call this the Music Genome Project, where a human will listen to a track and give it "genes", stuff like "heavy use of syncopation" or "minor key tonality".

I love the Music Genome Project, because it completely removes genre (a classification nightmare that I could write a book on how much it sucks on) from the equation. Instead, you set up an artist station, it knows which traits are most common in that artist's music, and goes based on what traits that artist shares with others. This is how, as a preteen, I could create a station like Brad Sucks Radio and end up with artists as varied as Greenskeepers (who Brad has since covered, curiously enough), Fischerspooner, and RL goddamn Burnside. I like 'em all! The songs played on this station all have that same beat-heavy, muted vocal delivery, loopy, slightly electronic thing, despite the artists being indie rock, electroclash, and a salty old bluesman who got hooked up with hip hop producers shortly before his death, respectively.

I want to implement something similar for my album review section. Nowhere near as in-depth (and although they'd never actually go after me because I'm nobody, I'm obviously not trying to directly clone somebody's patented technology), but similar enough to where someone can say "I want textured, hooky, female singer rock" and would immediately be led to Last Splash by the Breeders, or "downbeat dreamy acoustic" would give someone Mutations by Beck.

Now, here's where this gets tricky. I rely on a MySQL database for my album reviews. This is great, and it's really simple to go "all Nirvana reviews", find the Nirvana entries under the artist column, and send those to the reader. How do you do a tag search though? If you're simple like me, you might just think to stuff all the tags in CSV into a new column next to all the other data pertaining to that review and then search through, but this is a really bad and slow idea, and I'm interested, at least a bit, in doing this right and thinking in terms of scale. What runs fast with only 116 reviews in a database might be a fuck of a lot slower with 500, or 1,000 reviews in a database.

Tag searching led me down a rabbit hole, but here's the plan I hear everyone recommend, roughly:

1. You have the normal review database. Each review is given a number, which starts at 1. They call this the primary key, because it's the way your reviews will be addressed from now on. This is quick because it's easier to match numbers down the line than it is to match text.
2. You have a second database that gives a primary key to each tag. At current, I have about 30 tags, ranging from singer qualities (male, female, gentle, extreme) to instrumentation (acoustic, ambient, strange) to the way the album was recorded and mood.
3. You have a third database where the primary key of reviews and the primary key of tags get matched up. In my head, I assumed I would need [x] number of fields for each row so I could attach multiple tags to one review, but no. You have a new row for each tag attached to a review. Say review #1 has six tags, you would have six entries in that third database, each one with the same review ID, but a different tag ID.
4. You then do a "database join" (which effectively temporarily makes a brand new table) that merges all the previous data together. You can then search this new, joined, phantom fourth table in a really efficient way and return all albums that have the tags you're searching for.

On the user end, this is implemented with an HTML form with checkboxes and the like. This is where you'd give it your aforementioned "textured hooky female singer rock" search. I can add an additional filter as well for rating, in case you only want albums of a certain score to appear in your search.

This is going to majorly improve the way someone can actually use my music recommendations section to find music that's relevant to their tastes. Everyone can think of a specific musical trait they like, like "I really like music with gentle singing", and now, any albums with that trait that I've covered, you can pull up and immediately find. Read a few reviews, see what sounds most interesting to you, go and listen—Cammy has helped you find some new music ya like.

That's also a lot of work, but I'll definitely make it happen at some point. Right now, I'm really focused on getting through the last couple pieces of art I'm sending out with copies of Last Summer, which now will include my 2024 mix CD in the package to save me having to spend another $60 to ship out a mix CD to all the Somnolians in December. I can make that October 31st deadline I've set for myself, I know I can! And then I can just play Alpha Minecraft for two months. (Did I mention I've got old Minecraft fever lately? So cozy. I love this game.)

Y'know, this is the kinda morning where I look out my window at a half-barren patch of trees and something just feels correct. I love familiarity. I think part of the reason I still blog about shit, even when no one else does, is because it's my little way to keep the mundanity of the Web I grew up on alive. I've been reading a lot about old Minecraft versions—perhaps I'll spend the day drawing and playing that.

I own two second generation Kindles, neither of which work. They both have flat batteries. I've been wanting to have an e-book reader around for dinking with and maybe even reading more, and while I know e-book readers have gotten fancier since the late 2000s (apparently Kindles can now take ePub files :omegalul:), I'm not a big fan of e-waste, and they worked perfectly fine otherwise, so I'm trying not to buy a new one if I can help it.

Instead, I ordered a new battery. And everything went wrong.

Getting into the thing was a chore. The first step is to take the plastic bit on the back off so you can work the metal backing off and gain access to the battery. A lot of places will tell you to wedge a spudger between the metal and plastic bits, but they're flush on both my models and I didn't want to scuff up the outsides if I could help it. The real way to do it is to press your thumbs on both sides of the Kindle logo, slide them up gently onto the plastic bit, push down, and then push the plastic piece off.

The plastic bit came off easy, but being an idiot, I completely wore down the soft plastic spudger that came with the new battery trying to get the clips holding the metal bit on. (In fairness to me, this spudger really was a piece of shit. You could wear it down scraping it along a piece of drywall.) I then noticed I took out the wrong screws. Even when I removed the correct ones, though, I still couldn't make any progress with those clips! Eventually, I got the metal backing off using a small flathead screwdriver to push the clips down, because nothing else could fit in there and I was scuffing up both my hand and all the cards in my wallet thinking one of them would do the trick.

I mentioned that I own two of these units—one belonged to my older sister back when the Kindle 2 was new, and the other, I ordered used because that one's battery had already eaten shit. I opened up the first one, I guess out of curiosity if there was anything still on it, and discovered the original battery had swelled pretty dramatically. This is what they in the trade call a "spicy pillow", where a lithium-ion battery swells to the point of being convex, like a pillow. A mildly dangerous one. In my case, I can actually see what I think are glue strings where the outer cover of the battery was attached to the metal chassis.

This is where I discovered I ordered the wrong sized battery! The one you can easily find on Amazon is for a Kindle 3, not a Kindle 2, and Cammy didn't check his model numbers. While I was able to return the battery within a few hours for a full refund (Kohl's dropoffs sure are quick!), looking around, I discovered that the Kindle 2 batteries are so outdated, you can only get them as made-to-order parts with a three week to potentially six week turnaround time. I was able to get free shipping on the order, and it was roughly the same cost as the Kindle 3 battery I bought, so price isn't the issue. It's having to wait yet longer that's the issue, and with it being that far out, it's not out of the question that my order will just get canceled outright at some point. I've had it happen.

Worst case scenario, I'll just recycle these at the Staples I worked at (free electronics recycling to try and get people into the store, woo!) and order a later gen used Kindle or something. The new ones are much fancier with backlit screens, bigger batteries, and can actually buy books from Amazon—apparently these older ones are blacklisted from receiving downloads if attached to an Amazon account. I've never really looked at where else I can get e-books from outside of Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and toying with getting my own or friends' stories onto it, which probably doesn't help my inability to stick with the habit.

That said, I definitely think I could make use of a Kindle in the same way I use Pandora, as a way to try out books before I order proper copies of them. That appeals to me. I'll keep you posted.

This is a couple days old now, but I gotta post it here, it's big news! And I've been bored at work, and bored at work is ideal writing time. Two years to the day of my last Guitar Hero II chart demo video, I've posted another. It's for one of Connor's tunes off the self-titled MoriHime album I did a joke review of for my music recommendations sections, "Shooting Star". Check it out here.

I'd do a YouTube embed, but I'm trying to be mindful of retro PCs that don't swing that way. A screenshot will suffice.

I've been getting the warm gooey insides for GH2 modding again this year, but nothing compelled me to dive back in until Connor handed me some stems for "Shooting Star" and told me to go nuts. I figured this wouldn't just be a good way to indulge my love of modding probably my favorite game ever made, it'd also be good promo material for his record, so nuts I went.

You want to know how nuts I went? I asked Connor to record himself playing the guitar part and used that as a reference for not just left-hand fretmapping animations (so where on the neck the in-game guitarist places their hand), but as a reference for which chord shapes they should make with their hand as well. I went and upgraded my custom camera cut code for this—now, instead of having to place notes on specific MIDI pitches in the TRIGGERS track in Reaper like I used to, which is slow and annoying and takes an extra pass at the chart that I usually don't come back for, I can place custom text events in FeedBack, my normal chart editor, as I'm working on the chart itself. I also don't usually use this many flares, but I wanted to go big, not go home, so the whole venue lights up real bright on those big hits.

I am so pleased with this chart, days later. This may be the best stage I have ever authored for GH2! Nah—it is. It just is.

What's been great even outside of how well the chart came out and how much fun it's been to come back and work on the game is just how positive the reaction has been to its release. With the sole exception of a GH2 meme chart I did (ironically my last posted chart video in 2022), this video has been the fastest growing video in the history of my channel, hitting 120 views in the first day of it being up, and tons of comments too. What that tells me isn't just that there's still interest in my modding work, even after what happened with MiloHax, but that there's more interest than ever in it.

You ain't seen nothin' yet. B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen n-n-nothin' yet.

Summing up impel

impel is funny. It doesn't officially count for a mission pack, and you can tell because it uses all custom textures that mimic the textures of the original game. This was common for unofficial paid expansions back in the day—you weren't redistributing id's stuff just because your levels worked with Quake, but the textures you use in a level get embedded into the level file, and if you're using id's textures, that is their property. As a result, Aftershock for Quake and the like all had brand new texture sets prepared for their levels so they could sell them.

I actually rather like how impel looks! They're not amazingly unique textures, obviously, but they're appealing and they're used well. Thing you'll learn about impel is everything comes with a catch—so while they're good textures, it becomes clear that they were only developed with the original GLQuake engines in mind. To condense a big Quake source port history lesson, GLQuake (so the original OpenGL-accelerated build of Quake) was notoriously rushed and buggy, and "fullbrights", the sixteen colors on Quake's custom palette that always render at max brightness, didn't work right in it (they'd render at normal brightness like any other color). When they converted their textures into their WAD makers for use in their level editors, they only ever tested these in GLQuake—and the WAD maker (or maybe even the texture maker himself!) mapped some of the colors in the textures to those fullbright colors, leading to unintentional glowing spots on some of the textures, especially in dark corners of the levels. I guess I'll have to fix those manually if I ever want to use them myself (and I really might, I like their overall style).

impel's levels are decent—with the catch that they are pretty questionably designed at times. Health and ammo gets annoyingly scarce sometimes. I hate having to rely on infighting or outright skipping fights just to survive. There's a box room in one of the base levels a few in, and normally, large stacks of boxes hide gadgets and ammo. I hop in behind the boxes, only to discover there's not only no goodies, but it's also a softlock. You cannot get out of this fairly large space without noclip. The impel developers didn't consider this. Another badly designed spot that sticks out is the start of one of the levels where you're immediately attacked by a rottweiler—and then a fucking fiend spawns in seconds later with a chance of telefragging the rottweiler. That's very much not how nice levels are built. This probably makes it sound like impel is badly put together, and I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, it's competent—it's just that all the stuff that sticks out days later are not exactly positives.

impel has some new weapons which range from mildly fun to absurd and somehow useful. The Napalm Gun is just a Grenade Launcher with no bounce, and it causes the enemies to glow and take residual flame damage over time before gibbing. Not bad! There's an electrical weapon sorta like the one in rogue that causes enemies to be spun around as you hit them—that one was a little odd. Finally, there's this fucking harpoon gun that's the silliest thing on the planet. The javelins don't even stick in the monsters and it has an absurd kick, but this thing legit saved my ass a few times in tight spots, even against shamblers. It uses your rocket ammo pool, which makes sense, given it's basically a Rocket Launcher but without the explosions.

The tongue-in-cheek story of impel is that Shubby's highest minion, the Dark Reaper Legond [sic], has taken it upon herself to target you for bringing her down in Dissolution of Eternity (uh, I thought we killed Shubby in id1?), and naturally, she's the final boss of the game. Amusingly enough, however, she's just a woman? Literally just a bionic woman. She's fast and shoots rockets and tries to pull you close to her. Other than being a fast, annoying damage sponge, she wasn't too hard to beat. It was those fucking juggernaut things (giant indestructible robots that lumber around the base levels) crowded around the arena that were a bigger pain in the ass, but she still went down first or second try.

Is Abyss of Pandemonium worth playing? Yeah, I liked it. I'd say it's worth one playthrough, but not two. The levels look nice and are decently designed except when they're not, the new enemies and weapons aren't anything too special, and the sparseness of ammo and health definitely made me resort to cheating once or twice. I don't know how much it cost back in 1998, but I've definitely played better custom free levels from that time—one for the curious and Quake completionists only. impel did get a free 2.0 reissue in 2008 (I presume for the tenth anniversary of its paid release) that proports to patch some of its bugs, and it's a very conservative upgrade. I noticed a few visual bugs fixed, but the fullbrights issue with the textures remain, nothing was rebalanced, and the softlocks are still there. It's definitely the way you want to play impel, but I was disappointed. Don't expect miracles.

Like I said in my writeup for Dissolution of Eternity, the big disappointment with all the mission packs is the lack of integration between them. Neither rogue nor impel use hipnotic's stuff, and when they each have improvements to the core Quake feature set in breakables, rotating entities, earthquakes, and so on, it really makes me wonder what one big mission pack episode or two would feel like. I know Quoth and Arcane Dimensions have probably taken every idea from the mission packs there is to take, but still—they felt different and unique enough to me that I'd certainly like to see more where that came from.

Hope you enjoyed my several thousand words about each of the Quake expansions! I have actually a few journal posts queued up about my creative happenings this month—things are picking up again. Thanks for your patience.

Whoops! I meant to have this posted days ago! Sorry to leave you all hanging on the next installment of "Cammy reviews Quake mission packs", but such is life. I'm busy and I worked a nine hour shift today.

Summing up rogue

I was pleasantly surprised—I remember hearing from somewhere that Dissolution of Eternity was the one with all the annoying traps, but it was a pretty smooth playthrough throughout. hipnotic is definitely the objectively better pack, but rogue is fun too. One of the most striking things about it is the texture theme—rogue actually uses a cut id1 Aztec temple texture theme (and as someone who has a copy of and has worked with the original id Amiga Deluxe Paint texture sources, I can confirm a lot of these are OG). I hate the idea of things going to waste, and these look great, so I'm happy Rogue Entertainment was finally able to bring them to light.

In fact, lemme rave about the look of the levels some more. I love these kinds of compact, multi-level temple levels. My first attempt at a Quake level was supposed to be a weird lava temple, and it kinda sucked! I mean, I find it charming as hell, but I had no idea of texture themes and I doubt I'd even beaten id1 by that point. I was just enamored that much by the idea of making my own Quake levels, and I suddenly had access to a level editor and zero regard for human life. So yeah, this sorta ominous half-buried temple thing is my jam, and I think rogue nails it. I've heard some people describe it as visually flat, and I think that's a bit unfair. It's true that it doesn't usually have the wow factor of hipnotic's setpieces, but it's clean and compact and flows really nicely. By this point, modders and mission pack developers alike had figured out how to build good-looking and well-performing Quake levels, and rogue is a good-looking and well-performing pack, and that's good enough for me.

As with hipnotic, rogue adds some new weapons and enemies, and these are another big sticking point for folks that I actually liked a bunch. For one thing, you get lava nails, which are tracked separate from your normal nails and completely ignore armor (in deathmatch, in singleplayer they just do more damage). In other words, they take health off the enemy as if they had no armor, and give a nice, satisfying sizzle as they stick in the flesh of your targets. Nice! rogue also adds "multi-rockets"—which shoot four rockets per shot, you'll be surprised to hear. These admittedly make rogue pretty trivial to play through, but I'm one of those people who uses Quake like a stim toy, and I like it when I can breeze through things.

For new enemies, easily my favorite are the Hephaestus, the mini-Chthons. One of id1's two bosses is Chthon, a demon that rises out of lava and lobs fireballs at you, and while you can't kill the first one with your rockets (you have to use lightning bolts in the arena), these, you can, and they're such a striking, fun fight that I wish I had access to them in the base game. There were also the Egyptian Guardian enemies, these Poseidon-looking motherfuckers with lasers coming out of their tridents, and they're tough enough that the game likes to use them as mini-bosses, a couple protecting specific portals between levels. They were fun to fight.

The final boss of the game is, well, a dragon. Wholeass just a dragon. You'd think that alone would be an upgrade over Armagon, but honestly, I found it to be one of the most unfair fights in all of Quake, not necessarily frustrating, but certainly one that took a ton of attempts and save-scumming. It takes place in this cool as fuck lava canyon, but you're not gonna be able to make much use of it because of the dragon's unavoidable, speedy projectiles that pretty much require you to take refuge in the spawn area. If you think the Anti-Grav Belt (another cool but underutilized rogue idea) evens the odds any, you're a fool. It actually makes it much harder to land anywhere that isn't directly in lava and change directions quickly to avoid Dwaggie's shots. Anyway, hit it with enough multi-rockets and it dies and you'll discover all of the cool pickups and powerups that would've been very useful for evening the score, had you not been chickenshit from being browbeaten into hiding and getting only cheap shots in during the fight. Ah well.

As much as I did and do enjoy rogue, and as much as I recommend it, hipnotic is definitely designed a lot better (outside of traps—rogue does actually decent traps like swinging blades and not CBT like that fucking rock tumbler tunnel). rogue introduces a ton of new content, monsters, and weaponry that barely get used, I always had 100 normal rockets in reserve, and secrets, I eventually just stopped looking for because they were laughably obscure. I suppose some of it adds replay value, but I always got the sense, for as much as I liked the look of rogue, that it would be a lot better had someone else been designing all the maps.

In fact, the most perplexing thing is that rogue doesn't use any of hipnotic's upgrades. There's a part in one of the later levels where you have to throw two levers to lower a drawbridge, a clearly good use of hipnotic's rotating entities! Instead, they're generic sliding func_buttons. I yearn for some way for the two packs to be combined, their new weapons and enemies and technical upgrades in tandem to make for a truly unique and brand new Quake singleplayer experience. I also am just happy with what we got. It was fun, and it kept me at Quake for another week or two. Nothing's ever perfect, but Dissolution of Eternity is still just as much worth a spin or two as hipnotic was, even if you do have to cheese a dragon to finish it.