Whoops, I fell asleep before I could write that post last night. Here's the fun stuff!

So, I've said this many times now: whenever something creative I made becomes massive out of date, be it sites or stories, I have a hard time looking at it. The Somnolescent Gopher server absolutely, 100%, fit this criteria. The last time it was seriously updated was 2021, back when borb and mon were both still in the group. That's legitimately ancient. There were talks of making a GitHub repo and us collaboratively updating it, but that fell through and I've come to realize I literally do not take on projects anymore without first thinking of everyone else around me, which isn't great.

So I've been rebuilding it myself. Direct link for clients that support Gopher, proxy link. Have a looksee:

Click for full size. Ahem.

Firstly, menus (which is what you'd call pages in Gopherspace) are a lot more graphical now. Back in 2021, I was really on this "pure Gopher" kick where I thought menus shouldn't have informational selectors (which aren't a canonical Gopher itemtype, so some bad Gopher clients that don't understand them just discard them), so our menus were very plain to look at and browse through. I recently saw some grabs of the original 2018 Somnol Gopher (courtesy of The Potato), and our menus used to look so fucking swag with the ASCII art and the decorative dividers, it was nuts. I brought all that shit back, with fallback text files so those using said less robust clients can still understand what's going on.

Secondly, alongside updating what was already there, we're adding new menus to show off everyone's work in various mediums. The big thing has been a Gopher art gallery with some personally-selected highlights over the past few years, but I'd like to do the same on a new menu called the Grand Playlist featuring both my music and Connor's. Old-school file formats are still being taken into consideration here: there's small versions of each of the art pieces in GIF or JPG, and I'm gonna have 128kbps MP3s and 8-bit WAV files for the Grand Playlist for computers that can do MP3 playback and ones that can't, respectively. Lots more on the way, really loving how it's coming out and having an up-to-date Gopher server again.

Finally! I've saved the most exciting bit (to me) for last: Somnolescent now has a CCSO server, at gopher://gopher.somnolescent.net:105/2/.

CCSO is an absolutely ancient database lookup format first developed in the late 80s at the University of Illinois for their Computing and Communications Services Office. You can store anything in a CCSO server, but it was mostly used for looking up your professors and other staff through a command-line interface. There's less than ten known CCSO servers still in operation, most of them for colleges who probably don't remember they even have them, and some of those using LDAP-to-CCSO translation layers, not even proper CCSO servers.

Somnolescent is now running its own CCSO server. I had this idea back in 2020, 2021 or so to not only use it to list us, as is obvious, but also be a full database of every single character we've got (and we have a few!). dcb wrote a Python script for it back then, but I didn't like how it worked and I wasn't bright enough to realize I could just rewrite and add onto it either.

Anyway, that's all been deployed now. I've been working on the server code for the better part of a week now (here's the repo if you wanna see it, feel free to shoot bug reports), and you can search by name, universe, species, character creator, and affiliation for people's friend groups, guilds in Pinede, Somnolians, etc. I'm still adding people to the database, but SomnolCCSO is available through our Gopher server to anyone who has a CCSO-capable client, no authentication needed. Netscape 4 works quite well. The above screenshot was taken with the most recent version of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, you can use Lynx or telnet if you've got those lying around, and I've even gotten this old neat freeware Windows 3.1 Ph client working with our server, after some additional command scrubbing:

This is such a highly specialized, hipster, niche nerdy toy that I expect no one but me to fool around with, but I am beyond delighted for Somnol to have it. One of the last ten still in existence, and my knowledge, the only new one that's been deployed in the past five years. I really think there's a lot of life still left in CCSO, at least as much as there is in Gopher; Tildes and clubs could use them for member lookups, as an example. Just needs more client support, really. Ideally, when dcb gets a permanent home for Gopherlens, he'll add CCSO support through that so you can do CCSO lookups through the web instead of needing an extra program for it.

Click for full size!

And look! Caby finished that Setter wallpaper I commissioned her for! Look how well it matches XP Media Center Edition! He's such a ditz and I adore him and I adore how this came out. Thanku Cabyyyyyy~

If you're not keeping up on my streams (shame on you! Sundays at 7PM EST, they're lots of fun), you might be wondering what's been going on with me as of late. There's kind of a lot, as to be expected when Cammy doesn't write any journal entries for two weeks, but really, I needed that time off to go indulge and explore some things. As such, I'll be doing daily entries until we're all caught up. Let's get the real life stuff out of the way first, and we'll talk about the fun stuff tomorrow.

So I am no longer employed by Staples. I was a tech there for just over six months, and I resigned. I did not get fired! This one was on sadder terms, and really, given the gigantic internal shitshow that company is undergoing right now (I can confirm from where I stood that a lot of what gets posted to r/staples is very much real), I both wasn't surprised and wasn't too hestitant to jump ship.

Long story short, I seem to get into it with a customer at least once a week—not even because I say anything at this point, because they just seem to read me as an asshole and get uppity about it. Now that Caby's been with me, she notes I have a very flat affect a lot of the time and I put things very straight, which to some, uh, challenged customers, reads as being an asshole. That's just part of being autistic. Folks take you weird. (I'm sure there's people who have seen me online who will imagine I was out here making fun of customers to their faces and saying edgy shit—I would've been gone a long time ago if that was the case. I know better when my employment is on the line.)

Staples prides itself on its customer service (because it has literally nothing else to offer people besides free Amazon returns), and I was already on my last warning for some shit that happened back in, what, September now? So with all the complaints (my GM estimated it to be about five a month), HR was looking for a reason to terminate me, and I wasn't about to give it to them and lose my ability to use my GM as a reference in the future (which he straight up offered, provided I resign). Plus, hour cuts—not just for associates, even corporate got reshuffled due to being so overbudget that the execs couldn't get their bonuses for 2023—already had me down to three days a week. Is $180 a week worth fighting that battle for? I didn't think so.

Of course, if you're an avid journal reader, you'll know it took me a while to really feel comfortable at that job. Staples held me to a much higher standard than my last job did, which taught me a lot, but was a lot more stressful as well. I'm already odd socially, and I left my last job due to being targeted and lied to, and it felt in a lot of ways like that was continuing but worse here (and I've since learned some things that corroborate my fears, but I'm well over it by now). Keep in mind, for all the complaints, my ESP numbers were consistently really good. I got a lady to buy an extra $240 worth of toner on top of a printer by offering to take $30 off the printer. I got some nice market baskets while I was there. It just took me a long, long time to get over those feelings of being out of place, and it was maybe too little too late in the end.

So yeah, I tried my best, I performed as best as I could, and it lasted about six months. I'm still happy with that, though. I didn't think I'd make it out of my 90 day probationary period. My GM stressed to me on the way out that I shouldn't doubt my technical ability, because I could fix PCs with a deeper grasp on their weird issues better than most, I could explain stuff supremely well to customers, and I was really good at getting extra shit on top of the sale. Corporate wants a very specific associate, and the weird and easily stressed kid who can dig through log files to find exactly why someone's PC isn't booting is not that. Sad, but it's just a retail job at the end of the day. I'll be replaced and I will find something better.

In the meantime, I'm going back to Wales. I always figured I'd go every time I cycled out of a job, and flights are bonkers cheap this time of year (I got this one for $620 round trip) and Caby and folks were okay with it, so back off to the UK I go! I won't be doing a gigantic trip diary this time, probably just a gallery of sketches and photos. Something a bit more collage-y and easier on me. I'll be gone February 8 to March 7. So hey, we'll be spending Valentine's Day together—makes up for being apart for our anniversary this year.

Speaking of that, I did do something for it, but it's not ready to go live yet. I'll give more details in a few days, but it's a site dedicated to CabyCammy and all the projects her and I get up to together. I took a break from working on it this past week to indulge, as I said, but I will be getting back to that along with all the other web stuff I'd like to do this year. Stay tuned for more regular blog posts! I'm getting back into the swing of things.

Stream tonight has been rescheduled for next week. My cold had gotten significantly worse—it's a bunch better today, but I still sound pretty stuffed up and I didn't want to be hacking up a lung constantly and chancing screwing up my voice by having to talk for two-plus hours straight. Consider it another week for folks to know I'll be going live soon.

I'm still chopping away at some private projects, but I decided to poke at a smaller one this evening: upgraded my Nirvana boxset! Back in 2021, back when the Scratchpad was still a thing and I could document my progress there, I put together a Nirvana demos and rarities boxset called Nirvana: Sound of Dentage that I felt was of better quality than the With the Lights Out set we got officially. Writing about that boxset was one of the first things I did on the group blog in 2019 (twenty years of WTLO this year—guess I should advertise that post around some in November), so it only felt fair to assemble my own thing after doing so much armchair quarterbacking with the official one.

I'm still pretty damn proud of Sound of Dentage, but since I've gotten my hands on a few more discs that could've improved the original set had I had them back in 2021—better sources, more songs, all that. I've gone ahead and added them to the Internet Archive, though it'll take until tomorrow for all the derives to be made and all the new stuff to be properly accessible. Knowing that site, some of the old files will still float around anyway, and the new ones probably won't be available through the torrents. Such is life.

If you like Nirvana and you didn't hear about me putting this one together back in the day, feel free to give it a listen! I suppose I should advertise the boxset around some too, given how much of my time it took up and how much I still like it and still occasionally listen to it myself. I'll have more from me to show off with the world soon.

Well, with four different people at work sick recently and my sister also having fallen ill, I guess it shouldn't come as any surprise I caught something too. Not too bad, thankfully—I have to keep clearing my throat, but as long as I do that, that doesn't hurt too much, and I feel fine otherwise. I was rather proud of myself for not having gotten sick the entirety of 2023, despite working two different retail establishments, being in four different airports several times and in close proximity to people on three plane rides. I figured that meant I'd be sick starting 2024, but again, thankfully, stuff's been manageable.

And lots to work on! Stuff sorta piled up around the time I got a bit of the holiday depression leading up to Christmas, one of which was a new cammy.somnol page! Since I'm playing Animal Crossing on the GameCube now, and since that game has a fully functional NES emulator built to run any game, not just the twenty or so that the game shipped with, I figured I'd try to test the entire US-released NES library on it, well over 600 titles in all. I'm through with the A's right now, moving onto the B's.

I haven't logged into my town since the 23rd, so I'm expecting a lot of weeds when I get back. I will start testing again tomorrow, though, and this page will update over time with my new findings.

Beyond that, keeping busy—got Last Summer submitted to RouteNote so you can hopefully eventually stream it on Spotify and Apple Music and wherever else you get your music streams, got the art for Last Summer printed and ready to be assembled into jewel cases to mail off (and one of those twenty copies can be yours soon!), working on an anniversary gift for Caby, and I've been toying with writing again. Gonna try to burn through my big backlog of ideas and stuff and keep the cool shit coming for you guys, whoever out there is reading. I much appreciate the interest.

Little minor update—I've gone through all my old streams and given them new thumbnails. Check it out:

I've also gone through and standardized the descriptions, so they have proper lists of games, intro songs if present, and a link back to mari.somnol (gotta always be linking places, right?). It's a weird feeling, going back through these old streams and seeing all the names of people who popped in and I don't talk to anymore. Definitely some good times had on those streams, though; I'd like to go back to some of my greatest hits (the Boohbah stream comes to mind, which was much funnier than I remember it being) and do little edited highlights reels for those who didn't catch 'em or did and wanna reminisce. I'm optimistic these new streams will make some memorable moments as well.

Speaking of! I have settled on 7PM EST on Sundays for streams. The most recent run of them have been a hell of a lot more comfortable than the old streams were, more casual, less stressful, less focused on being a good streamer when it's really only my friends watching anyway. That said, if you want to drop in and say hi and chat a bit, we'd love to see you there. Here's the direct link to the next one coming up on the 14th. (Obviously, if you're reading this past the 14th, that'll be a direct link to the stream VOD instead.) We're about a third of the way through the first Sly Cooper, and it's been nice playing something familar and doing it on real hardware this time too.

By the way, yes, my CDs were retrieved and redelivered. You can expect a review of Isn't Anything to drop in the Somnol zine in the spring (and on my site eventually after that).

I've been playing too much Unreal Tournament

Caby finally shipped over the games I bought in Wales! It was a lot of fun sitting and installing them to the eMachines Box from disc, punching in the CD keys, the whole ritual. It's not convenient, but neither is the eMachines Box. It's fun! I'm very happy that the eMachines Box actually offers a much better gaming experience than I initially pegged it for—just so long as those games are five years older than the box itself. As Caby said once though, that's not really a negative since it's all retrogaming anyway.

So alongside 100%ing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for a third time (fourth if you include the PS1 version!), I've found a new favorite mental shutoff game, Unreal Tournament 99. Not one of the ones I bought, admittedly, but I downloaded an ISO on a whim and now I'm absolutely sold. The eMachines Box runs it great, the movement and guns are phenomenal, and the bot AI is damn good. I've actually found myself admiring and being humbled at all the built-in maps. Looking at them, it's clear to me how limited my ideas on how to build functional, beautiful levels really have been. I've been taking a lot of screenshots—Caby suggested I put them all in a room in my paste server on Discord for inspiration next time I make a level, and I really should take her up on it.

(If you're curious, my favorite level by far is DM-Agony, and my favorite gun alternates between the Shock Rifle and the Flak Cannon. So satisfying.)

And listening to a lot of old favorites (and fighting the post office for them)

As happens around Christmas, I found myself with a few gift cards in hand. I elected to start buying up some of the records I used to enjoy the most back when I was a teenager, but still never owned a copy of. Usually, these were torrented back in the days of Kickass, listened to over and over, and then lost and never rebought for one reason or another. Here's a small list:

• The Black Keys' Magic Potion: Old, old favorite of mine. This was one of the first Black Keys records I ever owned, possibly the first if that wasn't Brothers. Unfortunately, my copy developed some nasty, stuttering audio glitching possibly from the manufacturing of the discs not being the best, so I had to chuck my original copy. It's taken me four years, but I've got this one back in the collection, freshly unsealed, and it still fucking rules. They make such big sounds for being two guys, and Dan's guitar parts are surprisingly intricate at times. My essential pick for the moment, probably "Modern Times".
• Pixies' Bossanova: Only missing Trompe now. It's not uniformly strong like Doolittle is, but it's got its own weird, distant, creepy atmosphere and some real bangers, so that makes up for the occasional weak track. I still fucking love "Is She Weird".
• Blur's self-titled: God, I forgot how great this record was. I love the sounds, I love the varied songwriting, I love how it's a forerunner to Gorillaz' as a whole. I like the back end of it a lot more than I did back then too, and "Strange News From Another Star" is super underrated. My copy is a US one, so it came with a surprise extra hidden track, "Dancehall"! Which I fell asleep to last night. It might be noisy and woozy, but you can nod off to it as well, if you're insane like me.
• Josh Joplin's Useful Music: This one defined late 2019 into 2020 for me just as much as, say, Earlimart's Hymn and Her, but buying it slipped my radar for a long time because I refused to spend any money during lockdowns. Now I got it! There's some really goofy genre exercises on here, but Josh Joplin is a super strong pop songwriter, and songs like "Matter" and "Here I Am" are so early-2000s sounding, they're just awesome. Still really like this one.
• Superdrag's Regretfully Yours: The newest (to me) of the lot, this one's mostly notable for the fact that the Discogs seller included an extra CD in the package! This was a total surprise to me: it's apparently an early-2000s post-rock record called Finally We Are No One from an Icelandic group, Mum. I've yet to listen to that one, but I really should. I discovered so much cool shit in my teen years just from listening to absolutely everything, as I've been discovering looking through my Discogs wantlist, and I feel like I should dive back into doing that.

I did buy two more, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, but they didn't turn up in the mail! I received tracking for both of them, and calling the post office with the numbers revealed they got delivered to a very similar address about ten minutes away, where our stuff has been blackholed in the past. They said they'd try to retrieve the packages, but I don't find that very likely. I'll probably wind up just getting my money back from the post office and going and buying them again. My manager suggested having them shipped to the store this time (apparently he does that), and I am highly tempted, yes.

Taking better care of myself

On a more serious note, I have been finding myself on more of a reflective, kinda depressive note lately. There's been plenty of times over the past few months where I've felt lonely, where I've been sad about how I'm still largely living online, and how I don't really indulge in a lot of solitary pursuits anymore. Everything I've done creatively, I've always tried to involve other people in, which is great, but it doesn't leave me with many places to go if stuff happens between friends and I'm just not in the mood to work on stuff with them.

I think I need to appreciate what I have more. I have good friends, a lot going for me creatively, and I'm comfortable. A lot of folks would kill to have what I do. It is hard, going back to dating online after finally not eating alone for a solid three weeks, but that's just how things are right now, and there's much worse fates in the world. I definitely should remember how to enjoy myself on my own more. It's not that I don't, because for example, I love my art regardless of how other people see it, but just that I should really do it more. I don't fully remember how to—or maybe I do it so much, I've just have internalized it and now need a reminder of what that looks like. Either way, I gotta think of myself more, I really do. Indulge more. Draw more Prince, probably.

I've officially typed so much this evening that the corner of my desk has irritated my wrist. Enjoy, everyone! Here's to lots of good shit going on in 2024!

Happy new year, journal folks! Have been getting over the emotional holiday hangover, but I'm pretty close to full speed now. I've had a bunch of things to update the journal about, so to avoid spamming it with a bunch of smaller updates, I'm gonna split it into two bigger updates, one with projects and one with my leisurely pursuits:

mari.somnol is officially parked

I've had plans for mari.somnol for well over a year now (this journal just happens to be from eight months ago instead), so I figured it'd be a good time to make it official by deleting everything on that domain and parking it. Not a lot to say that that page doesn't explain to you, why I'm doing it, what's taking so long, what to expect from mari_v4, but I think the Cammy came out really adorable. Gonna get some site backups going now, methinks.

toyhou.se will be going (temporarily) private soon

I mentioned it in passing at the end of the two-year anniversary of Cammy art post on Letters, but I will be taking all the lads on my toyhou.se private and slowly rebuilding their profiles and drawing them again. I really want my toyhou.se to be something I'm proud of—I love the site, I love all the functionality, I pay for Premium—but at the moment, everything on there is so ancient that I can't be. I actually avoid looking at it.

For specifics, I'd like to draw matching icons for all my lads, update the profiles, get some nice profile art going, and get all the random lad ideas and designs I've had cooking finally posted so people can look at 'em. I'll get this (long-term) project going in a few days, I wanna draw another Cammy for it.

mtlx artwork test completed!

I finally have test prints of all the Last Summer artwork! I had the booklet done before Christmas, but I needed to resize and reprint the back cover/spine art since it came out too big. Now it's all done and I can do the proper print order and get everything assembled! I have a local video if you'd like to see the prototype in motion (H264, 10.8MB), or you can just enjoy these photos:

You'll be able to purchase some of these real soon from my Bandcamp, if you'd like some Cammy music in hardcover. You'll get exclusive demos with your purchase!