Having five years worth of somnolescent.net backups really does pay dividends sometimes, especially when I'm trying to resurrect things for archives. Rather than relying on spotty Wayback grabs, I simply pull from the copy of each site I made five years ago, patch the links (each archives site has links across the site network changed to the contemporary version on archives, so Cammy site in 2019 goes to Caby site in 2019 and not the live caby.somnol), and upload to its own directory on archives.

Occasionally, though, some assembly is still required on top of that. I think it's time to get a little technical, but first, the actual news here: you can now view the original version of my Scratchpad circa late 2019-early 2020 and the original version of Letters From Somnolescent circa most of 2018, as they were, janky early layouts and all. tesserae_v1 is also now a thing—this was the original, pre-rewrite version from back when we were still on Neocities that wasn't as visually appealing, functional, or accurate as I would've liked, but amazingly, I've never brought it to archives until now. That was the easy one; again, just grab from my files and upload and done.

The blogs were tougher. This was all motivated by me trying to reorganize that subdomain ahead of the redesign it's been getting, as I wrote about the other day, and I figured that, if the final static copy of the Scratchpad was on mari_v3, the original mini.css layout before I switched to nonzero for a theme should be with mari_v2, which it was contemporary with. I'd also thought about resurrecting the original Nucleus-generated version of Letters and stashing it in blog_v1; while there's not a lot different about it, there kinda is? It's a little hard to explain, but that was how the group blog looked when it matched somnol_v2, so even though the theme got more refined in time but stayed roughly the same in layout, it felt wrong to have one up, but not the other. In any event, it's all Somnolescent history that would be nice to have for the purposes of other sites on archives having correct-looking pages to link to.

The Scratchpad resurrection took a few hours to get settled, but I roughly knew the process. There's a plugin called Simply Static that will generate static HTML pages of your entire WordPress site, so once I had a functional blog again, I could simply run that, download the render, patch the links, and upload. I'd done this with the Scratchpad itself when I retired it. This would be the same process, simply with the original theme active and with all posts, pages, tags, and categories before the nonzero switchover deleted to avoid being anachronistic.

I was surprised at how easy it was to redeploy a WordPress install. Every time I backed one up, despite it being a ton of files, I'd grab the entire install instead of just, say, the image uploads. To redeploy from a backup, you just...reupload the entire install. And then preferably update WordPress. All our databases still live on the backend, and the backups all still have the config information to get into them. I still needed to do a little bit of debugging because I uploaded everything to a new subdomain I could immediately delete instead of to mariteaux.somnolescent.net/blog/ where it originally lived, and that gave WordPress a bit of heartburn, but it was manageable.

It was that goddamn Nucleus install that had me up to some galaxy brain shit.

If you've never heard of Nucleus, it's another PHP/MySQL blogging platform I'd wanted to try out out of curiosity and because I'm a contrarian and used to be infinitely worse about it. It's been in and out of development by different teams for years, with the most recent updates coming entirely from the Japanese folks who still love it and still maintain it. Nucleus was a huge pain in the ass to work with, even at the time; after about eight months of using it, our user account logins for it just up and stopped working, necessitating an emergency migration to WordPress that I documented, funnily enough, in one of the first posts to the Scratchpad.

Because I wanted to go with my known good files instead of trying to force the old database onto a fresh new install of Nucleus, I simply uploaded my backup of the old Nucleus install and waited to see what would happen. At first, it seemed to work! If I tried to read any of the posts, however, or go anywhere other than the front page, I'd get a blank 500 error with no indication as to the issue. Even with error display on, you still don't get anything on the Web-facing front. DreamHost requires you to dig into your logs to find out why.

The 500 errors were apparently due to a long-deprecated now-stub function that Nucleus relied on called get_magic_quotes_gpc being totally removed in PHP 8.0 (when we were using Nucleus in 2018, PHP 7.0 was the newest version). DreamHost, to avoid you using old insecure PHP versions, hides your ability to use these earlier versions of PHP in your admin console, though you can still access them if you force a specific PHP version in your .htaccess.

After this, the Nucleus install sprung to life, but there was still an issue. WordPress has very nice URLs for posts and pages that match up well to static directories. Nucleus URLs are hideous and rely entirely on HTTP GET variables on top of index.php to navigate basically anything on the site. Of course, that presents a small challenge; while I'd be able to get a static copy of the site using wget, trying to access any of the pages would make Apache think I was trying to view index.php?itemid=44 (that is, index.php with some GET variables on top) instead of a page literally named index.php?itemid=44, with a question mark in the file name.

The solution for that was to percent encode the question mark in all the links. Of course, making it more fun is that Windows does not let you use a question mark in your file name, so to patch anything on the static wget copy, I'd have to

1. Make the changes with the files being named stuff like index.php@itemid=44
2. Upload them
3. SSH into DreamHost and run a bash script to replace any @ symbols with ? symbols
4. Test to see if there are more changes to be made
5. If there are, delete all the files on the site and begin anew

So it's good to know that Nucleus is just as much of a pain in the ass to work with now as it was in 2018.

But still! It's all returned to the Internet at long last. I'm still a little precious about Somnol history and all our hard work, so even if this isn't the most exciting thing to see, I'm glad to have it around for when I'm feeling sentimental, and I'm sure the group does too. Seeing my old Scratchpad layout again especially pleases me—I haven't looked at that thing, let alone used it, in years, and aside from the wonky spacing between elements, it's actually not too bad to browse! It definitely feels right to click around mari_v2 and have that be the Scratchpad and not the later one with all my 2022 posts on it. Small details only I could love, that's what I'm here for.

(Brief aside before we start: Happy six years of us talking, Caby—8/18/18 <3)

One of the less-exciting and less-visible aspects of the archives overhaul is that I'm trying to reorganize the subdomain some in the background. I made it in 2020 with purposes slightly different than what I have in mind now, and as a result, things that shouldn't be on there are on there, things are in places I prefer them not to be in, and my methodology for storing what is staying on there has changed a bit as I've developed it out more.

To give you some examples:

• archives was used to reduce the size of our seasonal Somnol site network backups in ways I don't like now. FLAC copies of my music were in a directory called /marfmusic/ on archives; I want those back on my actual site now, size of the backups be damned. Those aren't archives and have no reason to be on archives now that it's not simply a place to dump shit.
• archives has occasionally been used as, not just a file dump, but also a dump for website archives that don't pertain to Somnol. I have an as-complete-as-was-able-to-be-grabbed scrape of the site for the Internet 1996 World Exposition that I think dcb did in /web/. It was never meant for Somnol, but it went on archives for lack of a better plan.
• Sometimes I separated out component parts of sites in ways I don't like now. My Scratchpad and dcb's 32-bit Patio, our personal blogs, went in their own directories in /web/ because they were meant to be site version agnostic. Now, I think it's just messy, and they can both be matched to versions of mari.somnol and dcb.somnol where they most fit in the timeline.
• To reduce redundancy between grabs, I'd also split out subsites that didn't change across a series of site revisions into their own subdirectories and simply edit all the links to point to the split version. dcb's The Many Faces of Mozilla archive was like this. I hate that now, and I'd rather have the redundancy.
• Each of the file dumps were simply in directories in the root of archives, which is super messy to me now. The root directory, in my head, should be files that make the site itself work, and any content should be sorted accordingly.

Resorting and getting rid of stuff is easy, but with it comes the risk of link rot. These days, when I build a site, I try to plan everything out so there's no chance I will ever want to reorganize the files. Anything that gets moved runs the risk of breaking links someone dropped in a Discord somewhere, or on a forum post or in a Reddit comment somewhere, and I don't want any of that. I want links that will exist in ten, twenty years. For archives, this is extra important to me. All Links Are Permanent.

Thankfully, Apache (and DreamHost accordingly) support the use of .htaccess redirects. I can simply have the old links redirect to the new locations and then manually update links as I find them to reduce the need for the redirects. The stuff that's getting deleted, I just have it redirect 410 or target another page where the same information can be found, if necessary. Also nice is Notepad++'s Find in Files function, which lets me do a find and replace across an entire directory of files. I can just do a search for, say, /web/scratchpad/ and replace it with /web/mari_v3/blog/ and thousands of references are now updated to point to the right spot.

It takes a lot of work to maintain eternity, but technology makes it possible at all.

I gotta start making these journal entries smaller, or I'm never gonna update this thing. I've been putting this one off anyway because I didn't want to call a very good thing before I was confident in it, but now I am!

There's a lot I didn't say or post here with regards to my last grocery store job, because it was just bad all around. The people were nasty, the management was sketchy, communication was hilariously nonexistent, managers would literally ignore you when you needed their help. I had to learn of my own disciplinary action through other associates who overheard things, and when they wanted a sit down struggle session over said (two-week-old) writeups (which were about me not doing things I was literally not told I should be doing), I walked out. Fuck 'em. $13 an hour, or any amount of money, isn't enough for that shit.

So... here's really good job news for once.

I got a job at a beer distributor. My mom saw the position on Indeed, and the day I quit, I went to apply for it and found it gone. I emailed them.

The next day, they said to send my resume over. I did, and I got a call. "We love your resume, would you like to come in for a sitdown interview?" Of course I said yes.

I interviewed. They were impressed with how much I already knew. Three hours later, I get an email offering me a position with them. Full time, a couple dollars more an hour for the same work, basically, just bigger items.

I went, in a week, from being employed at a grocery store where people didn't even say hello to me when I walked in to being employed at one of the vendors of that store, a family-owned place where you know everyone and all communication is done face-to-face and on checklists. I am now making what I made in a month there in two weeks. No stupid purchase limits, no ringing up groceries. I have consistent days off again, so I can start streaming again (and did last night!). I can listen to my weirdass 90s rock while I work!

It's phenomenal.

Of course, my shifts are a lot longer. I've never worked full time before. Days before were six-and-a-half hours tops; today, I did nine-and-a-half. I'm good with that! It's a bunch more heavy lifting, and I do feel it when I come home. I'm good with that! I was fully expecting to have a car (only the car) financed by maybe late spring 2025; now I'm gonna have my loans fully paid off and the car by February of next year. If I stay a year, I'm still looking at over $10,000 in savings on top of that I can use for the next Wales trip and whatever else. This has so massively sped up the timeline for my move to Wales and me as a person, and it's in a place where I finally feel valued in what I do.

This does mean the creative stuff has slowed a bit, but I'm still quietly working on the archives overhaul, and I'm hoping to have Last Summer CDs made up and sent out in September when dcb's back at school. Obviously, that's no big deal. Real life, work, and money come first. For now, I'm just taking it easy and looking forward to my forthcoming first paycheck.

Got a lot of really exciting real world stuff that's gonna make me a lot of money going on, but I'll save that for another post. Let's talk my August creative plans! I meant to make this post a week ago, but then I spent it playing Gran Turismo 2, watching that boxset of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! I got from the library sale back in June, and recuperating instead. I need to shut off more—2025 will absolutely have more of that.

So back in May of last year now, I picked up a grey cat adopt from Caby that I named Miranda. She designed her to be sold obviously, but I just couldn't let her go to someone else, especially not when I had such a great idea for how to use her: a mascot for archives. archives was initially designed in a couple days in 2020 and themed around the Archives level in Goldeneye on the N64, but as cool and recognizable as that theming is, I wanted something more for it. Something more unique, something more personality-filled, and something with a little more meat and context than simply a list of download links and browseable old Somnol sites.

I've known how it should look since the beginning of this year, but it's taken me until now to do it. Part of the issue is I've never been too happy with how I draw Miranda, or any housecats really. I couldn't shape their heads correctly, I couldn't position parts of the face correctly, Miranda's got long hair like I was never all that great at drawing, I was experimenting with what details I wanted to put on them, and it was just a big fiddly mess that didn't come naturally, which is funny given how many kids get into drawing through drawing lots of cats and dogs. Just didn't come naturally to me!

Thankfully, developed skill and a lot of practice during Art Fight has made me much more confident in my ability to draw all of the above, and so now, I'm ready to start developing a better archives and give Miranda her home finally. Take a look:

Click for full size!

If you read the 2023 Wales trip diary, you can see an example of the redesign prototype from a year ago, and the moment I landed back in the US, I just stopped liking it. Aside from how much I didn't like the Miranda in the header, I wanted archives to be open, borderless. Initially I had an idea of doing a very 70s orange thing with thick white lines around design elements, but that was never very sharp in my head and I'm not a design sperg, so I just kept it simple and went with this HTML 3.2 table layout thing. Realizing that tomb theming would be kinda cool with the sandy background, I pretty shamelessly stole the icons from the old PopCap game Alchemy and guzzied them up on this 90s gold-marble surface courtesy of XFader.

I'm still surprised at how much I actually like the Miranda illustration, honestly, not just because of how tricky I've always found her to draw, but because I actually didn't line it. I realized doing so much art for Art Fight that a lot of the wonk in my sketches has been due to me trying to figure out limb thicknesses and extra poof from clothes in the same step, and normally, I hate my sketches for that reason. This time, I did my skeleton stick figure pose, then a nakey pose for the character proportions on another layer, and then finally drawing Miranda and her clothes on the top layer. It worked really well, and because the final size for the illustration was about half my sketch size, I didn't feel the need to line it. I might go back and touch it up and add the second guinea pig, but the experiment was a success!

This new iteration of archives is gonna have a nice timeline of Somnolescent history (projects/joins/leaves/events), a proper way to browse through the various versions of our sites with thumbnails and dates, and of course, more of this kitty woman I'm still really fond of. Expect it out later in the month, and that'll be one more thing I wanted to do officially off my list.

As for the rest of that list, I'm still aiming to have the Last Summer CDs finalized and ready by September or so. I still have to actually make the CD master, and I'll likely go back and tweak levels and some of the melody parts on some of the songs while I'm at it. It's one thing if it's some Web copy I can replace anytime, but once it's burned and mailed out, it's burned and mailed out. I want to make sure I'm totally satisfied before I do. I also intended to send art out with it, which has admittedly been the real holdup. Again, I wanna do it right, like it's been in my head. I have to wait for dcb to go back to school first anyway so he can actually receive packages.

Beyond that, the only real thing I'm aiming to do is have all my mari.somnol stuff settled. lofi still needs Kevin and Theo finished, nofi has a nice list of bugfixes and features it's behind on since I started working on lofi, and I need to build hifi. They all need illustrations. If I can pull this off before 2024 is out, I'm taking the rest of the year off. I don't remember the last time I just wasn't working on anything. I think I've fatigued a little bit (I honestly don't even know if this journal entry is particularly coherent), and I just don't have a lot to prove like I used to. I think time away from constantly Making Stuff will let the idea bucket start to fill up a little bit too, which is super important if I wanna spend 2025 entirely on my stories like I do.

Oh yeah, and stories—Savannah might have some really fucking good ones for you soon. Watch Letters for the announcement.

Well, August 1st would normally mean the end of the annual art trading extravaganza Art Fight (here's my profile—note that all Art Fight links require a login), but they extended it to the 3rd this year! Turns out deploying features mid-event causes people to not be able to submit attacks. Still, I'm bowing out at the normal time because I've accomplished everything I want to, and I really had to upend a lot of my routine to make it happen. It was intense, sometimes rewarding, and sometimes really deflating! Wasn't bad though, definitely a nice first year with a lot of positives.

I've been intending to participate in Art Fight since I took up drawing in 2022, but I really wasn't in any shape to, in terms of my confidence or my abilities. Really the hardest part was that I didn't have the characters I wanted to have on my profile, and "June Rushed Reference Syndrome" is hard enough when you're an established artist, let alone six months into your art career. It definitely led to a lot of stress between me and Caby, promising things and then not being in any position to deliver (even if rightfully so), and I swore this year I'd give her a good showing until the end. Thankfully, I was able to get Maldwyn, Cammy, Colton, and Nicholas up for people to pick from. Really plenty of choice for how few defenses I wound up getting, and all ones I'd be pleased getting art of!

Then came the actual fight. I'm not a particularly quick artist, but Art Fight really sped me up. I was getting an attack done every two days at my quickest, nine attacks in total over the whole fight, while working 30-36 hours a week! I never want to half-ass a drawing for anyone, because there is no feeling worse than knowing your character was only picked to give that person points during the fight and up their battle ratio. I couldn't give a fuck about my ratio. I want every attack I do to potentially be someone's favorite of the whole fight, or at least one of them, and I want pieces I'm proud of, ones that expand what I can do as an artist. To that end, I only do fullbodies, and they were all full-color and shaded and most involved props of some kind.

And sometimes I just had fun with these drawovers! This is from a real photo dcb took on Lake Michigan with the DSi Camera app running on a 3DS. Super adventurepilled.

On the artistic end, Art Fight 2024 definitely grew me. I learned how to draw digitigrade legs finally. I finally got into a shading and highlighting style I like. I've drawn amps, I've drawn easels, I've drawn Pokemon attacks! I'm so much more willing to dive in and draw designs I've never attempted before, even species I've never attempted before, like Umbreons and Azumarills and African wild dogs. It's a really phenomenal feeling. The artistic growth this year has been strong, and I owe it to my participation this year. I also just think the attacks I came out with are really cute, and I've definitely gone out of my way to show people them after they're done, where before, I was a lot less willing to. Part of it's confidence, and part of it is just that I think I'm at a skill level where it's not just art Caby likes because she's supportive of me, it's genuinely appealing stuff.

And the mutuals! Outside of Somnolescent, of course, it was really nice to see both Olaxis and a fellow named Nasiloo actually attacked me first, right at the very start of the fight. I was at the tops of their lists! That was really cool, and I made sure to work extra hard on their revenges in return. (Actually, Olaxis got me into a little chain with him, and that was really fun. Plus I got an extra Cammy when he drew Wren for Caby, with a nice note about how much of an inspiration we've been attached. Very glad; you've been really cool to have in our little orbit.)

Admittedly, though, to produce at this rate has eaten up my normal routine. Most of the month, I didn't emerge from my room until two hours before it was time to leave for work, and it was to eat and get ready for work. I stopped doing my album reviews, and I haven't even touched the books I got for my birthday, or the audiobooks and DVDs and albums I picked up at the library sale, or most of the review requests from a week ago. I haven't played a game in weeks. There were many days where I'd get up, do art until it was time to go to work, go do my shift, come home at 10, and do more art until I was too tired to stay awake at 2 or 3 in the morning. Some attacks took literally days on end of that, and you have to ask to what end it was for, and sometimes, it was lovely, and sometimes it was crushing.

I don't draw solely to get people's approval—in fact, there's been a lot of times where I'm happy just sharing it with the group and nobody else—but Art Fight bakes the socialization into the process. You're there to draw for other people, and especially when it's someone I look up to and would like to make friends or mutuals with, that's a lot of pressure. Easily the attack I spent the most time on was for a guy named Goldie who frankly got me into the whole furry thing when I was a kid, someone I never met but whose work and whose designs I really loved, someone who's knows a lot of people and has introduced me to a lot of great artists through their many many drawing of his sona, and someone who Caby became mutuals with back in 2022 after she added onto that pile. It seemed like such a surefire thing! I worked for four days, referencing his own guitars, trying to get everything super detailed and accurate but still cute, drawing and warping way too many fucking straight lines to fit not-straight lines, losing sleep over the whole thing, hoping I could make a mutual out of him too, told him a bit about how much his stuff meant to me in the private attack description, and—

He politely thanked me at the end of it. No mention of any of the detail I put into it, basically just an acknowledgement that he saw it and didn't find it repulsive. No revenge like he did for Caby's drawing, no mutuals. I've seen this guy be excited about art before, and my drawing just didn't do it for him. It's honestly still hard to look at my drawing. Super deflating, not fun, I almost quit the event over it, and I'm certainly not going back to his comment to get a screenshot.

I dunno. I don't hate him or anything, and I get that I'm not owed a thing from strangers just because I like their work, but man, that's a lot of time to invest in gift art only for it to be very lukewarmly received. Caby can weather that because she just draws anyway, and she can do four attacks in a day, but it takes a lot more of my time and energy to get a single one out, and especially when it was someone who was a big inspiration to me like that, it sucks. (There is a happy ending here: I drew another out of nowhere attack for a girl with a kitty character I've loved since Caby drew him, and while it took a bit for her to see it, she not only gushed about it in a comment, she followed me back and drew the most adorable and amusingly prettiest fantasy Cammy you've ever seen in revenge. It definitely helped to bring some of the magic back to the event, to make me feel like people actually appreciate my hard work when they eat up days of my time.)

So yeah, I think my expectations were set a little too high this year on the social end of things, and paired with it being so disruptive on my life and schedule, it's definitely been a really interesting, emotionally intense, and not uniformly positive experience. I am happy to have partaken, though, proud of myself for what I got done, and I will be back next year. I'd rather draw big things and be disappointed when they aren't taken how I want them to than not draw for others or outright half-ass an attack and sabotage what could be. It's the way I live life. I want to aim high and succeed some of the time instead of aiming low and succeeding none of the time. None of what I do, none of my plans, none of the trips overseas, none of my aims for my work and my skills and who I want to be as a person, would be possible if I were mousy about it. If that means getting hurt or looking ridiculous sometimes, I'm okay with it.

The other drawover I did, and definitely one of my favorites of the whole year. I really oughta do more of my backgrounds in level editors.

I will definitely aim to be less maladaptive with it next year, though. The good news about the Art Fight refs I was doing is that they double as toyhou.se profile fullbody fodder, meaning each one I get up on one site, I can bring back (or bring for the first time) to my toyhou.se! That's the one I really care about still, and the artsy profile I'm the most proud of, so in working on that, I'm also preparing for next year's event. I'm aiming to have a better and more easily discoverable batch of characters for people to draw, and I'd like to start exploring a bit beyond the circles of artists I recognize and maybe make some more friends at my art level (and age—Goldie is at least twice my age, which probably didn't help). Beyond that, I'll start brainstorming some ways to reduce the amount of work I've gotta do, style things where I can maybe bake shading into the lineart and skip a step or two. Plus I'll be a year older and better practiced, so I might just outright be faster anyway. The goal though is to not have it eat up all of my free time so I can still get in races in Gran Turismo 2 and not feel like I'm losing precious drawing time doing so.

My first Art Fight really was a fight sometimes, but I'm also happy folks drew for me and liked what they did from me, and that I grew as much as I did as an artist. It helped me remember why I started drawing in the first place, to illustrate my sites and stories and get the ideas for characters and designs out of my head and into yours. Gotta keep ahold of that. Anything that isn't fun, I won't be repeating. Anything that is fun, or furthers that goal, you can expect me back at it next July.

I'll have my plans for August up in a subsequent post, this one's gone on long enough. Be on the lookout for all my attacks this year on my various art sites!