I've been meaning to write this post for literally a week now! I'm just...really busy at this point. And likely to fall asleep the moment I get out of work.

I haven't talked much about my job on here because I think everyone around me is a little sick of the "Cammy doesn't like his job" carousel even though this one probably legitimately deserves the complaints. At my last two jobs, I was at fault, really—a lot of me being a baby for no reason, a lot of issues with customers and other employees that were on me, a lot of autism—and I regret complaining so much because I enjoyed both of them for what they were. In the case of my first supermarket job, which I've been trying to get back, people still get excited when they see me come in and ask me if I'm coming back! So many people have asked me how Wales was, both regulars and associates. That's a sign of a good job right there.

With this store, though, everything from

• Breaks (when I get them, if I get them, if I even get a choice to take them or not)
• My schedule (no consistent days off, no consistent shift times, don't know what next week's schedule is until the previous Friday)
• Employee discounts (got explicitly told we didn't get one, turns out, we do, but they don't want people using it, so they just tell people it doesn't exist and you have to go out of your way to set it up)
• Managers (some are alright, but I have had plenty of people talk to me like this is my first job and I don't understand how a store is run since I started)
• Store protocol (I got told my register would be used exclusively for beer, not groceries, with the word of both the hiring manager and the beer lead behind that, and the moment I attempted to use it, I got an earful from a customer and a third manager saying "actually that's not a rule, you have to take them anyway", so that was two people who lied to me or were also misinformed)
• My federal goddamn taxes (didn't get the necessary forms for dependents/withholding during onboarding, got lied to about when they go into effect by the store, got lied to about the paperwork being filed, had to go to associate support to get a straight answer, and had to spend another start of another shift filing it again)

has been an absolute flip-flopping fucking nightmare. Nothing is consistent whatsoever. Stuff I took as a given very much isn't here. Even the beer register pinpad has been broken for four months now, and they can't get anyone to fix it. I kinda don't know how this store stays functional. I've had customers, plural, come up to me and tell me how much their experiences working for the store or having family and friends work for the store suck as well. I know it's not just me this time, and this all started happening within my first week of working there, so I don't even think I factor into it. This is just how it happens here.

I was originally going to spend the rest of the year working on my IT certifications, but then I realized that I'd be more likely to find something in that field that'd hire me locally (locally meaning within a few towns of me), and I'd need a car for that. That's my story. I'm here saving up for a car and perhaps some more driving lessons so I can finally be mobile and go on fun vacations and bring Caby over here. This is car money and not much else.

Thankfully, no one bothers me over in beer most days, so I'm free to just take customers (who are frankly a good bit nicer than some of the managers), clean up a bit, and be on Discord the rest of the time. I've gotten pretty good at this customer service thing, so it all runs smoothly and no one ever has any complaints (aside from that one lady, but we made up the next time we saw each other, so I'm just gonna chalk it up to her being crazy and Puerto Rican). I'm looking at the rest of my year here, and I've accepted it. This is an opportunity for me. It's not a lot of money, but it is an opportunity to save up and make the things I want happen. I'm not squandering it.

Days go fast at this point, provided I'm not spending six hours at a time bagging people's groceries. Now that I'm not New and In Need of Training, people generally leave me alone. Before I know it, it'll be the end of the summer, it'll be getting cool out again, and I'll have been there three or four months. Then six. Then it'll be 2025 and I'll have a nice little nest egg of savings, and I can fly back to Wales for a month, get my car, get my driving lessons, and be free of it. I'm looking long term here. Right now, this is what it's like, but that's okay. I have a five year plan to blow this popsicle stand and get with my girlfriend finally and not have to deal with the living online, the shitty jobs, the no money—all of it will pass, and I will make this happen.

I mentioned Art Fight! I feel bad about not being in the right state to participate in the last two fights, despite promising Caby I would, so all my free time over the last week has gone towards drawing refs so I can actually take part this year. What motivated me outside of just purely making it up to Caby is that there's a large amount of not just mutuals and potential mutuals I've come across, but old-time and new-time inspirations of mine participating. I'm pretty sure I could actually carve out a little niche of friends and mutuals for myself here! I'm not gonna be able to get all the characters I want up on my profile drawn and before the start of the fight, but I can debut with three, I think, and then get the next two up at some point within the next week.

I've been hesitant to link my profile out and follow people until stuff is ready, but the good news is that I feel pretty fuckin' good about my art these days. It's a nice feeling that what I'm drawing now won't look dated in a year, like I'll have to redraw a ton of refs again come next July. Extra nice is that these refs double as illustrations for toyhou.se! I was aiming to have a fullbody on the toyhou.se profile of every character of mine, and the ref drawings are a perfect match for the aesthetic I want, once I color in the lineart. All this work is killing two birds with one stone, which is the kinda efficiency I really need as life gets crazy.

As a final note, I do technically have lofi.mari.somnol up on that domain, looking all lovely and all compatible with retro browsers as intended (seriously, this might be my favorite site I've ever built), but I haven't announced it anywhere because there's still a few missing pages, mostly in the writing section. I have a nice, tidy list of stuff to bugfix or missing words and misspellings to correct on nofi as well once lofi is sorted, and then I just need to draw a ton of Alexis and Setters, respectively. That might have to wait until August at this rate.

Like I said though, that's soon. August hits and then we're not far off from fall 2024. I will hopefully have hifi sorted, now that I know what it'll look like, by the end of the year, and that's huge. I'm working on lots of things so someday soon I can relax and enjoy them instead. Things are shifting. The end of an era of my life and the start of a new one is in sight. I can feel it. I'm making this happen. Stay tuned.

And a small little update to finish out my back catalog of them—the library was having its annual used book and media sale over the weekend, and we went twice to check out what was up. You'd be surprised at the selection, at least at the start of the sale. The CDs and DVDs especially fun to pick through, and the DVDs in particular gave me intense wistfulness for the Cardiff CEX, because the selection and prices were really similar.

Among other things (including a copy of Buddha, the first blink-182 record, of all the ones I could've found, two Smash Mouth CDs, and a little curated boxset of episodes of Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, which I used to watch reuploaded YouTube copies of all the time as a kid), I now own a stack of fucking Redwall audiobooks in hard plastic cases. These come on 10-12 CDs apiece, and yes, all of them are in there. If they'll play, I have no idea. Probably. I'm mostly impressed I found so many of them. One of these isn't Redwall, it's another fantasy looking book from Brian Jacques, but it was half-price day, so I took it. Will let you know if it's any good.

All this came out to about $13, most of that for the audiobooks. CDs in particular were a dollar apiece. I have thought about this Onion video basically every day for a week now.

I don't normally talk about movies much at all, mostly because I don't watch a lot of movies. I find it hard to watch them by myself. When I'm around people, it's a social experience, so there's someone to discuss it with during and after. If it's just me though, and I have to park myself in a spot for at least 90 minutes, probably two hours, maybe longer, and not do anything else but pay attention, I just don't do that naturally. As a result, there's lots of times in my life where movies have come up and the person I'm talking to goes "what do you mean you've never seen that???"—Star Wars, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, any of the big 80s and 90s cultural staples, dead zone for me. I'll watch them someday when I don't have shit I'd rather be doing instead.

This is also the kinda post I normally make on Letters, but I've been the only one posting to it recently, and I don't want to make this into a really formal review of the movie anyway. I just saw it casually with my mom because I've been a Garfield fan since I was a small child, and we wanted to go out together because we're both constantly working and don't get a lot of time to do things together. We did mean to see it in May, but the theater had a big oopsie-poopsie fucky-wucky that meant the goddamn projector in the theater it was running in didn't turn on that day. We got free rescreening passes to use whenever we wanted and a refund and came back two weeks later.

This is an oooold Garf Caby drew. I wanted to include it because I dunno if she's ever posted it anywhere.

I dunno if I've ever talked about my love of Garfield online before! I owned many, many of the books as a kid, and I have the full run of Garfield and Friends on DVD that I've hung onto even after a lot of my other Garf merch has gone to the thrift shops. It's just a wonderfully, slightly surreal take on one of the most reliably reliable comic strips that has ever run in the history of anything, and it makes ya think the 80s babies had a point about their toy tie-in shows. I have a small Pooky beanie baby sitting on the CRT of the eMachines Box as I write this.

Garfield is just something universal, isn't it? I was reading an issue of LIFE I picked up from work about Garfield, and someone pointed out that you've got the toony sight gags and slapstick to appeal to the youngsters, but then Garfield's pure cynicism to appeal to the adults. It's easy to make fun of (I remember Bill Watterson shat himself in fury over it and especially U.S. Acres because of his high-minded auteur streak), and honestly, the deconstructed fanmade Garf media is a lot more interesting than the strip has been in a long time, but it's still nice whenever I see that orange bastard around.

The Garfield Movie is the story of how Garfield gets reunited in a very strange way with his stray father Vic, who's put up to the impossible task of stealing an entire milk truck to repay an insane Londoner cat named Jinx for leaving her behind during a milk heist years prior. Garfield and Odie are roped into it basically because Jinx likes to see people suffer, and given Garfield's surprising amount of familial trauma over being abandoned as a kitten, she figures the two will eat each other alive before they manage to work together. She also has two stray dogs following the three around to make sure they don't try to scamper off without completing their suicide mission. Along the way, Ving Rhames (who my mom thought was James Earl Jones), likely fresh off recording an Arby's commercial, assumes the role of a Buddhist bull with insider knowledge of the dairy farm they try to rob, agreeing to help if they free the love of his life from her pastoral imprisonment.

Now, Garfield movies are already notoriously a hard sell to the Critic class. Part of this comes down to the fact that Garfield just doesn't lend himself to large-scale stories like this. One thing I heard time and again in the reviews is that The Garfield Movie isn't authentic to the comic strip. Garfield doesn't act like Garfield, the tender moments don't line up with his dickheadedness, and the plot is way too action-y, somehow.

It makes you wonder if Critics realize—it's not much of a movie if the characters don't develop. Garfield spends literally half the movie sounding exactly like you'd expect him to, having no desire for the adventure, eating bonkers amounts on Jon's dime, snarking constantly, and being unshakably egotistical. I don't know what the fuck else Garfield is! If he was like that the entire movie, you'd go "wow, he sure is a rotten cat", and it wouldn't be any fun to watch. A comedy protagonist is nearly always unwilling, and Garfield is as unwilling as they come. This isn't him jumping at the opportunity to hop a train and break into a bottling facility. It's him being forced to do it under penalty of having his bones used as toothpicks. (Anyone complaining about the pacing of this movie as well is a goober. It probably should've even been a little shorter, if I'm honest.)

As far as how he develops as a character, that's where all the interesting stuff happens. It's interesting to see a character so bigheaded, so terminally self-absorbed, so large and in charge suddenly faced with this inconvenient wrinkle in his life, a father figure to dig up years of bad feelings, one he initially fights, then warms to, and then has to contemplate again when the typical mid-kids movie "everything goes to shit" scene happens. It's not deep, cerebral shit, it's Garfield, I get it—but if this cat isn't on the verge of tears sometimes, how can emotional investment on any level occur? If he's not having little revelations, how can a movie move forwards? That never comes up in the reviews. It's just "this isn't Garfield". Okay, then what does a Garf movie look like?

Let me address some of the other bugaboos surrounding the movie:

• Yes, Chris Pratt voices Garfield. I would've liked to see someone else too (rest in peace, Lorenzo Music), but he did a fine job. Maybe I'm just not familiar with him enough to have it take me out of the movie, but it matched Garfield fine enough. Amusing to see people pine for Bill Murray's Garfield, given how negatively the live-action movies were received back in the 2000s.
• There's a weirdly large amount of product placement. You'll see iPhones and Olive Garden boxes. It is probably excessive, but it's meant to be a modern-day Garfield, so I didn't find it particularly offensive. I thought the brick plot device around drone food delivery was cute. It's the kind of thing that'd ruin a headier movie, but given Garfield is already a huge brand, what's a little more really affecting?
• Someone hilariously complained about Garf referring to himself as "G-Money" early on. He's an old cat! He's supposed to be out of touch. That fits perfectly. He's not hip and cool with the kids, he's just trying to be.
• Visually, I thought it was cute. Garfield has looked weird for almost thirty years now, and the movie does a good bit to bring him back from Area 51. It's not jaw-droppingly beautiful, but it's also not direct-to-DVD slop. Animated movies haven't been eye candy since Zootopia anyway. Blame Illumination, The Garfield Movie is just made to the spec of the times.

As far as my own thoughts on the movie go though? It's cute. I liked it. It's not heady, and it's not fine art, and it doesn't need to be. It wasn't particularly funny, if I'm honest, but it was a satisfying movie to watch, and I really did enjoy the softer moments as Garfield has to eat his assumptions about Vic and about his life time and time again. It's what you want out of a Garfield arc. Odie, frankly, stole the entire show. I think his design is the cutest of the lot, and being Garfield's traditional whipping boy, he always ends up with either the last laugh or seeing coming whatever brick wall Garfield is about to walk into. I appreciate him more and more as I get older.

It really does remind me a bit of a 90 minute Garfield and Friends episode. Those regularly had to drag Garf out of the house on some bizarre adventure, oftentimes involving stray animals or fantastical settings, and the pacing of the movie wasn't too dissimilar to the pacing of those cartoons, just on a longer scale. The wibbly-wobbly fourth wall also felt very Garfield and Friends-esque, if anyone remembers, say, the episode where Garfield makes his own show starring a cat because he doesn't appreciate the representation they have on TV. I actually had to check if Mark Evanier or any of the original writers of the show were on board for the movie—the answer's no, but if you liked the cartoon, this movie isn't too far off from that, just longer.

My only real complaint (other than the lack of truly funny moments) is that the ending is kind of bonkers. The end result is that Vic moves in with Garfield and they throw wild house parties featuring all the other characters, sans Jinx obviously, which is just about the most kid-playing-with-his-toys way they could've possibly written that ending. Vic, I get, since he's family (I figure him preferring to stay outside and come and go is a little more in character for him, but he gets a nice BarcaLounger to match Garf's), but the stray dogs, Vic's old crew (I think?), Otto and Ethel, who are literal barn animals—I just can't imagine Jon letting all these creatures into his house. Maybe a backyard barbecue scene would've been more appropriate if they really had to end off with what felt like five minutes of everyone being happy slappy friends 'til the end.

That aside though, it was nice. I liked some of the nods to other Garf media and trivia throughout (Binky-Os, or Garf's lock screen passcode being his birthday). If you're a lifelong Garfield fan, I think you should see it. You'll either consider it a disgusting use of the IP from all the product placement, or you'll appreciate it as a short and touching little thing about family. That's what's so powerful about it. I don't know how to end off movie reviews.

I turned 25 recently! It was nice. I got to enjoy a game with the Somnolians (more on that in a moment), I had cake with cannoli filling, I got some music autobiographies I'd picked out and my mom paid for (I'm hard to buy gifts for and we were in the bookstore, so we figured that'd be the easier arrangement), and Caby and Savannah drew me some stuff!

Click both for full size! Check out the texture and halftoning on Savannah's! And the Setter PC wallpaper in the Cammy one! That's my real one for the eMachines Box!

Gosh, they're both lovely. Caby wasn't sure what to draw me, and I requested a badger boy because I miss when she'd draw him all the time, and because her and I have been playing our Minecraft modpack Pinede and sharing screenshots of our progress on Murad in the server, Savannah surprised me with a studious desert Maldwyn! I really gotta draw that boy more, but he's absolutely a better fit for the University than guild work, I can say that much.

Gifts aside though, I really wanted to spend some time playing something with the group for my birthday, and I figured it'd be good to finally test MXDM1, the Quake dm_lostvillage remake I started last year and finished this Spring. If you remember the post I did on building this level back in April, I mentioned I hadn't tested it yet and had no idea how it played. I figured it'd be fun, given lostvillage was fun, but Quake is a different game, y'know? Plus, it just needed beta testing anyway, with all the decoration and some of the additions to the layout I did. Who knows if I fucked something up somewhere.

Anyway, I spent a few hours learning how to set up a QuakeWorld server and configuring EZQuake for dead simple "download this and type this command and you're in" play (since Somnol isn't exactly made up of boomer shooter deathmatch aficionados), dropped it in the chat, and here's some screenshots:

It was a lot of fun! We went three rounds, all of which I captured for posterity on demos. I did surprisingly poorly and my software-rendered, hyperaccurate QuakeWorld client running on the eMachines Box got a nice solid 25-30fps throughout, but I was just happy to hang out and fire at people. Caby, Savannah, dcb, and Connor all got in on it, and Savannah and Connor basically dominated. Amusingly too, because the server package I was using announces your server to a master server, we actually got some random QuakeWorld people dropping in right at the tail end of our session, so we went for another twenty minutes with some slightly more experienced players in the mix.

I did find some things to fix in the level, and I got some further feedback in a deathmatch Discord server I'm in from one of the regulars. The big thing was that the level was too dark. I used very little minlight, no fill lights, and set the _bouncescale to 0.5, and paired with the _bouncecolorscale setting in ericw-tools, which multiplies the lightmap with the colors in the textures for some gentle extra colored lighting and results in somewhat dimmer lighting thanks to Quake's overall dark palette, it was a little hard to see when you have your game brightness set to minimum. I preserved that in the screenshots for posterity, that's fixed now. I also heard from that Discord guy that my 3D trim was likely to prevent people from bhopping through the level, and I've since decided this is a feature and not a bug. Playing with bhoppers sucks ass.

Beyond that, it was mostly fixing and tweaking the lifts, preventing some stucks, and adding more item pickups on the ground. This wasn't so much a thing to fix, but I learned nQuakesv's FFA mode has powerups (Quad, Pent, probably biosuit) turned off by default for some reason (or maybe I accidentally disabled them and didn't notice?), and it was only through ten minutes of digging through commands after playing that I found the way to put them back on. That kinda sucked—I had a fun slime area with a Pent and some other powerups scattered about that just went unused during the session and tarnished some of the map's luster. Ah well, we know better for next time.

And yes, next time! Now that the infrastructure is all set up, over time, I'd like to build up a small rotation of custom Quake maps for a SomnolQuake server. There's something extremely gratifying about building the game world that you and your friends play on, and Quake is excellent whether you're playing with ten people or two. It's all about what the map supports—and I could probably have a good 1v1 map cranked out in a week or two. Small projects always please me greatly. Really, more games with the group in general would be nice. I've been trying to consciously set aside time to spend time with people again and do things, because it's easy to let them grow distant over the Internet otherwise. Gotta get out there and make good memories!

I'll also likely be porting MXDM1 to Deathmatch Classic. I haven't played on Mr. Maxwell's servers in a hot minute, but he's said he'll run any maps I make for him, and this is as good of one as any. Given how similar the games are, I doubt it'll be a big job.

Expect this one for download on mari.somnol soon!

Gah, journal stuff gets away from me. I have a big pileup of stuff to write about, and then I go off and play Gran Turismo 2 or live life instead. No worries, you'll be seeing more in the coming days. Here's a quick one before I get to bed, I got work in the morning:

After six long months of sitting on my floor, I have finally gone back to Staples and assembled all twenty physical copies of Last Summer! You might remember when I showed off the test copy on the journal in January, and thankfully, about half of them look better than that one, so I'd say it was a smashing success. I had extras of the back cover and booklets printed because I knew a few would come out wonky (and they did) and I could substitute in the extras done at the end when I knew what I was doing for some of the worst ones done at the beginning before I knew what I was doing.

I'm damn pleased for something I did entirely by hand. Took me about three-and-a-half hours in total, and only four customers mistook me for a Staples employee in the process! (I debated breaking into my "helping Print" speak the next time someone asked just for a laugh, but then no one else asked.) Now it's just a matter of mastering the CDs and getting things mailed out. They will be numbered, by the way—which one will you get???

This has also definitely given me some things to watch out for and take into consideration next time I want to do a run of CDs in jewel cases for any purpose—for example, stapled booklets are bullshit and you should not do them. A folded insert will look terrific and work far better.