Ah, it feels good to be busy again. I said I'd do this journal post two days ago, but then I got working on starting up the ACNES compatibility list project again, I'm streaming again tonight, I've been chatting with people and actually enjoying it again (protip, mute and hide all the channels you're not interested in in any public Discord you're a part of and your life will instantly feel less cluttered) and I've been going on walks again. Every period of being antisocial comes with a burst of being social afterwards. Swings and roundabouts.

Nevertheless, we have a Quake map to discuss! I've been itching to do some Quake mapping for a long time now. I used to be very active at it back when the place to be was Terrafusion instead of the Quake Mapping Discord (no, I am not in that), but life took me other places and I was still recovering from being a little shitflinger who got shit flung back at him. Honestly, it feels silly to even let it continue to be a topic of discussion. Looking at the names on the Quaddicted submissions now, I don't even recognize most of them. Everyone's moved on, I'm an adult now, I'm sure I could shoot the shit with the people who had issues with me now if we did cross paths and there'd be no problem, and most importantly, I don't get into fights anymore and I suck less at mapping.

I don't recall if I talked about this back when I started working on it (no mention of it on the journal from around then, so I suppose not), but back in Spring 2023, a month or two before the first Wales trip, I was playing a lot of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and found myself drawn to what I've since learned is still a fairly popular custom map in that game's cult following, dm_lostvillage. It's a simple and fun two-level layout with some center hallways, but it's pretty apparent the person who built it wasn't much of a level designer. The texture work is one step above hideous, there's a lot of line-of-sight issues (I'm not sure it was even vis'ed), it doesn't make much sense as a place—but it's fun. The layout is good.

I wanted to take that layout and rebuild it in Quake as an idbase deathmatch level, making it make at least a little more sense as a place and also tailoring it to a game with a more fluid feel to combat. As much as I like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, the Source engine was starting to tip heavily towards realism, the gunplay wasn't as fast and furious, and the thin catwalks and chunky, undetailed building facades that were the bread and butter of hardcore clan level design for Quake and GoldSrc were no longer cutting it visually. It's probably why the game has only had cult success despite my enjoyment of it—people who like fast and fluid gunplay a la arena shooters have no use for its limited sprint and weapon cooldown, and it's very classicist and limited as far as its modes go (basically entirely deathmatch, no CTF, no control points, no last man standing, no vehicles, etc).

I got roughly 30% into the level before the first trip to Wales knocked me out of it, and despite all the castles we visited on both trips inspiringly me great to map for Quake as soon as I got home, I just never returned to it. (In all honesty, I had to refactor one of the center hallways to make the layout work, and that was just, like, so much effort. That's why I dropped it for so long. When I got over it, it took about a half hour.) I guess during this recent bit of moping, going back to what I was doing as an angsty teenager felt comforting, so I finished it up in about a week. Have some screenshots at long last:

While I kept true to the overall layout, I did make a few changes in connecting some areas to others where they originally weren't, and I expanded out the dinky little combine metal hallway in the far east of the map into an additional little sewer bit with a lift. One thing I'm always hungry for in my levels is making them feel like believable places, places that sprawl beyond where you're actually able to go. I did that a little bit with this level, decorative doors, a slipgate area, catwalks high above the playable level area, and I think it looks terrific. idbase also feels like putting together Lego after a fashion—layering wall textures separated by chunky metal supports that occasionally act as key light sources, it all just makes sense to me.

As far as lighting goes, this is very ericw, all bounce, automatic skylights, basically no fill lights, colored lights to separate various areas (warmer in rooms, colder in the hallways, and pale blue from the sky, and red to mark special areas). Fog is so huge for atmosphere in both drawings and levels; a slight bit in the distance makes any level feel instantly colder (or stickier!). Especially with the software simulation in Ironwail cranked, I think it's gorgeous. Dimension of the Past is a perennial inspiration for me as far as base stuff goes, and I don't think I've fully mastered that episode's design language, but I think this is closer than I've ever gotten.

With regards to how it plays? I don't know yet. I gotta set up a little QuakeWorld server and get some tests going. It's nice having access to both seasoned deathmatch players and Somnolians who don't play these games as much as I do, because it means I can see how people from all skill levels handle it. I'll probably do a couple rounds with both, some with me playing and some with me just watching to see how it pans out. As an aside, while I didn't intend for this to be a singleplayer level, once I sent NewHouse the level to run around in, he immediately wanted to do a singleplayer remix of it. He's apparently very close to being done with it, and I asked him to not send me any screenshots so I could see what he did with my work blind.

Glad everyone's liked how it looks! I can only hope it plays nice as well—and either way, it's just nice to still have it, and really have it better than ever, with my level design abilities. Many games I'd like to map for in the future, some more complex, some less. (And I will return to the Source engine someday. Parts of it are a disaster, but it's a disaster that feels uniquely like home.)

This past week, and really the month as a whole, has been odd. Frankly, I was wondering if any of this making-stuff-and-posting-it-online business was still worth it. To be clear, it's been a mixture of things—the 25 year itch (I'll be 25 in June), folks in Somnolescent being busy or stressed out with life on their own, alternating indecision and disinterest in my art and writing, my own struggle at finding a job—but the last straw, and where this affects the Internet, a place I'd really like to go to have fun in all honesty, was seeing the way the groomer Discord server leaks got discussed.

If you don't know, this month, a site called spy.pet popped up selling access to the logs of publicly-accessible Discord servers. Some of them were, really, a thinly-veiled child grooming operation using cute memes and anime boys as a way to gain access to and prey on teenagers, getting them to take photos of themselves and all that, I don't need to go on. The spy.pet guy joined the Kiwi Farms to post his discoveries publicly, and folks closer to home than I would've liked had...difficulty with the news.

Predators are an upsetting enough topic, but when I saw people in servers I'm in desire violent revenge on that guy for shining a light on the shit currently being done to teenage boys, boys just like I was—insecure, from dysfunctional homes, figuring they were just so precocious for their age—I was alienated. If you don't know, and I'm about to put this very not delicately, so be warned: I was a grooming victim. From age 14, I had an older woman encourage me to write snuff for her, violent, painful snuff. She withheld her affection for me until I gave her something to shlick to. She preyed on the stuff that I was into. We roleplayed both, and then she handed all the logs over to another underage person to humiliate me publicly with. She wanted me to move to Canada someday, pretending to be a deeply sick person with about every condition under the sun so I'd feel bad and take care of her forever.

I don't let any of this affect me these days, but that's where I'm coming from. It's a topic very close to home, and seeing people unbelievably fold the kinds of abuse I took under the umbrella of "queer servers"—phenomenal, just the community I want to be associated with, as someone who's learned not-so-quietly over the past year that he might just like dudes as much as chicks. That's all this is, being queer! And not pedophilia or anything.

You can think that's retarded, you can tell me I'm projecting, you can tell me to stop paying attention to the news, but it was everywhere I went. Sheezy had a discussion, boomer shooter Discords I was in had discussions about it, I think it might've even gotten posted in Protoweb? Naturally, folks were worried their own messages had been posted publicly, but the more concerning, and frankly more telling, reactions of fury and upset let me know that I was sharing very different air than I was when I first joined Discord. That's the Internet I share with people? That's who tell me they "worry" about me poisoning their social well? People not upset that kids were being targeted, but that someone decided to show everyone what was happening to them. That's the bad guy.

The classic tale of people seeing two different movies strikes again. I kept my mouth shut through all of this. All it'd do is get me banned and more people cursing the meanie old mariteaux once again anyway for having a heart about the fucking kids and not wanting them to get preyed on or anything. It all fed into a feeling of "maybe I should just leave". "I don't fit in, shit is different now, this isn't my Internet, I'll figure out something else." That's not the only reason I felt that, like I said. I've been more and more aware that the folks on Discord and IRC, even servers about retro tech and old video games, really stuff you'd expect adults to be into more than kids, never get older, but I do. I'm lucky to have Somnolescent, a tight-knit group of people my age who share my interests and I love talking to, because goddamn, that shit is hard to come by out there.

Of course, I'm not leaving. I got blackpilled for a bit, but I'm coming to my senses. I have good chats with people, especially on small Web forums these days, and I'm contributing more and more to Protoweb—it's been really nice to have an outlet for my specific skills and interest in early Internet development. (I wrote a NoSQL CSV database and search thing in PHP for my bleem.com restoration! That didn't even get a journal post, sadly, but you can read a little about the process in the writeup I did on the Protoblog.) Most folks are alright. Quirky, but alright.

And hey, let's continue rolling with the good news, since I got the exorcism out of the way. I meant to announce this on here when I was officially at 160 (maybe I'll focus on it more in another post), but I'm now 18lbs lighter than when I started trying to lose weight in January! I was never super heavy, but I was a couple into overweight territory, and after a Christmas season of a lot of chocolate and booze, I was curious how much I could truly lose, since I'd never really given my diet much thought. It really became apparent today, after an interview I had (which I'll hear about how I did tomorrow, hopefully it's good news since I think I did well)— all of my nicer clothes are a size too big now, and I have to do my belt one notch tighter to fit my work pants as comfortably as they did at Staples. That's wild to think about.

Finally, creatively! I've got a plan for cammy.somnol now; not too drastic as far as changes in the content go, but I have in my head an idea for a new, much fancier front page graphic featuring Cammy as opposed to Setter, plus everyone else's sonas. (Setter will be moving to lofi.mari.somnol, as part of the three-pronged "support all browsers" approach I want to take for that, so no worries, the puppy will not be without mascot work!) I've also decided on a new page banner style, something a lot tidier and a lot less work than the fullbodies I've been doing since the site started. (I gotta get back into drawing, it was something I wasn't much in the mood for lately. Is a shame—another thing I've come a long way on and rather enjoy.)

Oh yeah, and I've been working on a Quake map! It's a little thing for deathmatch I started last year before I went to Wales the first time, but finished it over this oddball period where I didn't want to do much else. I'll save the full details for a post I'm gonna write tomorrow. For now, have a crunchy screenshot:

So yeah, kind of a heavy post, but I'm coming out of the other end. Good timing too; Caby just finished the last of her schoolwork last night, so I'll be hanging out with my girl more! (After she gets in a nice nap, of course. Lots of twelve hours days and not a lot to talk about other than schoolwork, rough times...)

I haven't been posting many journal entries lately! That's partially because I've been a little bit wayward, certainly bouncing between projects waiting for something to stick me, and maybe double-thinking basically everything I do creatively. (Those jobs were a bust, by the way. One never got back to me, and the other rejected me not through a rejection email, but through an update on a helpdesk ticket for a broken form on their website. I then got an automated email later that same day asking me to complete registration anyway, again, using the broken form. It's a fucking comedy.)

That'll probably sound like a lot of Anxiety and Self-Doubt, but it's really not. I'm not despairing, I'm pondering. I think the trip really flipped around a lot of my priorities, and now I'm wondering what I want to do, why I want to do it, and what I wanted to do, past tense, as I go back to being an Internet gremlin updating my websites and doodling between shifts at Whataburger. (I've never been to a Whataburger, but it's a funny name.)

It's probably best to go over each field in its own blog post (and some of this, I've discussed previously anyway), so let's start smaller. My album reviews. Back on Neocities, I did two paragraph album reviews of either stuff I liked or stuff people said I should cover. I started doing these again last year, and it's been a lot of fun. They take no time at all, and I get to talk about music I like. That part hasn't changed.

One of the albums I picked up in Wales was the self-titled debut of Remy Zero, a little band best known for doing the theme to Smallville on their way out. This was one of the first CDs I dug into getting home, and I found it to be a neat-sounding, definitely warped and a bit unpredictable, but not particularly memorably written alt rock record. I'll quote myself, since I don't think I'll be posting that review as it is:

This Alabama quintet produced the kind of album that Internet music fans seem to fawn over, rock music as sound exploration, a set of ten mood pieces that prompted Radiohead to bring them along on tour, but they're still a pop band at heart. By writing a 90s rock record without hooks, they don't please casual listeners, and the capital-D Discerning Music Listeners find this style old hat anyway. Another one through the cracks.
[...]
Remy should've leaned more on the vocals, really: the best songs on here, "Descent" and especially "Twister", are powered by the same deeply aching vocals as "Save Me" that'd fit them snug on a thousand teenagers' wallowing playlists. If you give this album a few listens, though, you start to grow warm to the ether-tornado-through-a-dusty-attic sound Remy Zero craft through their harmonies and acoustic guitar misery on tracks like "Gold Star Speaker" and "Shadowcasting". It's a cool album if you like eerie mope music—just don't expect to remember most of the songs by name.

I wrote the review, gave it a Good, and called it an evening.

And then I listened to it some more, and it grew on me, like a lot. There were days where I had it on repeat. I now have lyrics from it as my public Discord bio, and I might still rebrand the journal after the title of "Chloroform Days", because goddamn, does that describe my life these days. It's still not a perfect album, mostly suffering from a really slow ending, but yeah—it was never bad, just not immediate. And you might say "well that's great, Cammy, it grew on you", but that's the thing. It moved up from a Good to a Great—and I give fuckin' everything a Great.

That got me wondering what the point of even rating the record is when most things wind up a 4/5. Of course, I know why, it's to mark the album when it's not a 4/5, to praise the stuff I adore and to put lower the stuff I thought was lacking. I don't consider it grade inflation very much because I'm not elevating the stuff I find mediocre; I genuinely do really like every record I've given a Great. I suppose part of it is selection bias. I listen for pleasure, and I mostly cover albums I listen to. Of course they're all gonna skew upwards. If I was being asked to review more Bjork and Wolf Parade albums, they likely wouldn't clear the bar.

But then that got me wondering if you can truly give an album a negative review for being fine, but just not doing it for you, and if that's really the album's fault or the fault of the artist. I'm a big believer in John Peel's philosophy of "if a record gets made, it's because someone felt it needed to be made", and unless a record is truly disgusting or truly a gigantic misjudgment, someone's gonna find that record appealing. Then again, who decides what's disgusting or a gigantic misjudgment? Is it the band? The band is too personally attached. Is it the fans? They like it. Is it critics? They listen to 500 albums a year and get jaded from it.

Of course, everyone knows that an album review is pure opinion and that there's no objective metric you can use to measure albums, and in that sense, I wonder if my album reviews are more like curations, what you might like if you like this and so on. Thing is, I'm a weird listener who crosses all these boundaries, and I like a lot of things that don't really seem to cross over with each other when we're talking other people's tastes. Does that impact it? Can someone use my recommendations effectively if, in my head, two very different things go together, and they're not likely to like both of those things? (I'm leaning towards yes on that question, because it's my taste, and there's always more people like me than I figure. Still something I wonder about.)

So that goes back to the original question: if I just like most things I cover, does that render my scores meaningless? Most review sites and reviewers have given quite a few albums I really like very middling or negative scores, and is that disconnect between those scores and my routine Greats because of differences in purpose in covering the record, or is it because I'm a fan and not a critic? Can you give a negative review to an album you like? If I give Remy Zero a Good because it's so diffuse, does that betray my true feelings of really liking the record even though that might be a more accurate measurement of the album's objective merits?

I don't think it's fair to say that being a reviewer means being negative. I think it means being discerning—and I'm certainly that. I mull over aesthetic decisions and if an album has the songs or not, but I don't poke at records because I'm thinking of what they're not, I talk about them because I'm thinking of what they are. Going back to it, what Remy Zero is is a tidy slab of moaning, ghostly alt-rock that leans more on sonics than songwriting. It's not immediate, and I can see someone being underwhelmed at first or feeling it has no longevity. You do have to listen a few times for it to start really catching you.

It caught me, and it'd be cool to have turned other people onto it as well. I just have no idea if my recommendations will be useful because so much of what I cover turns into "it's really good if you're the right kind of listener". You can say that about a lot of records. I suppose that's why I've been calling them "recommendations" and not "reviews", because that's one thing I do know—I like them. (And yeah, for someone's hobbyist music writing, that's all that matters, I know—indulge me in thinking on it anyway.)

If that wasn't the longest pause on journal entries yet, it's probably close. I'm so out of practice with these! For a bit, it was because I genuinely didn't feel like updating it, and now I have a bit of a pileup of stuff to cover, so let's not let that put me off further. I'll split them up into sections. Let's go!

Protoweb!

I've already posted this literally everywhere, but my first Protoweb restoration has been accepted! I restored imax.com, circa 1998. It was in incredibly good shape for a Wayback grab, and it was fun recreating what images were lost and learning how server-side imagemaps work for backwards compatibility. Read the full story over on the ProtoBlog, and look out, because I've already got my next site lined up.

At a crossroads with cammy.somnol

Part of the reason I stopped with the journal entries for a bit is because I've suddenly grown a little dissatisfied visually with it and with the site in general. It's not the aesthetic necessarily (love the cuteness and the textures), and it's not even that the art is approaching two years old now in some cases. It's just that I draw Setter differently than I used to, and that makes any new pages with him not match the old ones unless I intentionally stick with some of my old, wonky ways of drawing, say, his ears, or the dot eyes.

That leads me to ponder that, if I do redraw everything, if I should stick with Setter or replace him with Cammy as was the original idea (I just couldn't draw him yet, and now he's got a design I love drawing). Aesthetically, do I want everything to stay hand-drawn, or do I mix in some Bryce 3D primitives and lattices for the islands? Do I stick with fullbodies, or do I go with proper bordered banners a la Netscape's old site (or Districts)?

I'm still feeling out what I want to do, but I probably will redraw everything and finally get everyone else's sona on here like I've been meaning to. Back when I started illustrating cammy.somnol, everyone was very drawn out in full, head to toe, no real stylization, no effects on anything, and I dunno, I might be in the mood to do something a little different. Plus, the posing fullbodies as decoration was roughly what I had in mind for mari.somnol, now that that is coming more into focus for me, so giving cammy.somnol something unique might be in order.

Various server shenanigans (ZNC, vhosts in Apache)

Whatever I decide to do with cammy.somnol, I've started to expand out what I use my little beta testing home server for. Apache can actually support running many servers on one instance through what are called virtual hosts. I've been meaning to set up more of these for a few months now, because it's actually really fucking useful for site debugging in ways that editing local files isn't. For one thing, you can experiment with .htaccess settings or anything without disturbing your live setup, but you can also run link checkers and spiders across your site to find broken links, which came in super handy when I was working on imax.com for Protoweb.

I also put together a cute little index for easily linking people to all the sites that I'm currently working on. Not everything has been uploaded yet (because I haven't started those projects, generally), but my next Protoweb project is up there, ready to be worked on, plus cammy.somnol as before.

As a bonus, now that I'm spending a lot of time in IRC, I figured it'd be a good time to finally set up a bouncer! Bouncers let you share one IRC login across multiple clients and keep track of chat history, even when you're not connected to it. Basically, it makes IRC feel a little more like a modern group chat app, but in the ways you'd want and none of the ones you wouldn't. I'm quite pleased with the setup; now, I can close MegaIRC when I'm playing a game or off to bed and not miss anything that happened while I was offline, and no one can tell I'm not there. Win-win!

Whoops Cammy might be working two jobs soon

I'm leaving details of this a little vague until stuff starts landing, but it just so happened that I've applied for two jobs, one in real life and one remote, that are both interested in hiring me. I've never worked two jobs, and both of them alone pay better than Staples, so hey! Infinite money cheat??? (I'll see how I like both jobs and the workload of having two jobs once I've got them. It sure would be cool to be making so much money though. I'll finance that car and those certifications I swear I will focus more on in a bit in no time, with money left over for stupid shit and computer upgrades, maybe! My daily driver is turning ten this year, I should eventually look into a properly new PC...)