I have fallen way, way behind on the journaling thing—I'm starting to miss it. You know I had to serve on a jury last month, and I just didn't write about it? (I'm not going to, it was a pretty downer outcome to the case, not fun at all.) I've bought so many cool toys this past month, for me and for others, I still wanna recount my adventures in Quake II, I've got my feelings about the end of 2024 to write about!
As happened last year, I'll be doing some daily, ideally smaller updates with the journal to catch back up. We still have one bit of unfinished business from November to write about—all the packages! The rest of the group (and even some people outside of it) received some CDs recently, personalized CD copies of the anniversary reissue of Last Summer, the mtlx EP that I wrote back in the fall of last year, and a mix CD of songs that I loved and have given me funny feelings since getting back into discovering new music post-lockdowns. Now that Connor and Savannah have gotten theirs, I can finally recount putting it all together.
Here's what a year of on-and-off arts and crafts will get ya...
Last Summer: Special Anniversary Edition
I overdo projects a lot. Some of it is innocent—I just think it's cool to have something feel super official and fully complete, but I'm sure some of it is just my weird issues as well. In the case of the Last Summer set, I wanted to have this disc feel like an official, major label CD, nicer than some of my mass-produced indie label CDs even. I wanted a glossy booklet, I wanted a back inlay, and I wanted bonus tracks.
On the music itself, I tweaked some of the melodies and mixes on a few tracks and suffixed the final EP with four early demos of the songs, most from 2020 but one from mid-recording (when "Siestas" was faster and I was still trying to track it with percussion). Honestly, it's really cool listening back to these now that they truly are demos. I remember not knowing what to do with them back then, and Caby's since told me she didn't really get 'em either, but now, with the context of the final release, you can hear where certain song parts got expanded on and where sounds got carried over from my initial experimentation. (I also mixed in subtly variable flavors of tape hiss, like they came from different old late 90s cassettes. Someday, I'll do an actual run of Last Summer cassettes for funsies.) I'm very happy they have a proper home now that isn't just in the Scratchpad's archives.
This adventure started not long after I finished the album—January was when I made my first test copy, which was only a few days after I got the test prints. At the time, I still worked at Staples, and all my time spent doing Amazon returns in the Print Center exposed me to the wonders of 80lb gloss, which feels almost exactly like CD booklet paper. I did up a back inlay and an eight page booklet (and thus a front cover) in Paint.NET, got the test copy printed, adjusted it a bit further, and sent in a print order for 22 copies of each page on 80lb gloss. This all cost me roughly $70, and while the Staples printers aren't meant for graphics, I really like how it all came out, just that little bit scrungly, but still really official feeling. (The copies are all numbered, out of twenty total. We're up to 9/20! I'm pleased at how much of the pile I've been able to give away. I'll list them on my Bandcamp probably in January.)
I intended to put it together over the slow February nights, using their guillotine slicer and long stapler over in Print on my lunches or days off, but getting the unceremonious "quit or we'll eventually fire you" in January put a damper on that. Even after getting back from Wales in March, I was more focused on settling back in, losing weight, and finding another job than putting together elaborate CD packaging at my former workplace. August came, I'd waited long enough, and while the faces had changed a decent amount (turns out the store basically imploded after I left, mwah, the drama, magnifique), enough remained from when I was there that they let me behind the counter to access all their sharp objects. Three or four hours later, phase one of the Last Summer reissue was completed.
But then the project got bigger—I wanted to personalize each copy. I figured this could double as my Christmas card for the year, and I wanted to draw people stuff they'd be really excited about, and that meant OCs over sonas like would've been easy for me (because again, I have a bad habit of overdoing it). dcb got his Neopet lad Cedrus, Caby got her perturbed Caerpinwyd greengrocer skunk Azurite, Connor got a kittyfied Moritani (I was apparently the first to do anything with his hatred of lettuce :omegalul:), and Savannah got a goat version of her witch boy Micah, because humans are scary. I was also shipping one of these out to Mr. Midwestern Dirt in Chicago, and I wanted to include a note in with his like I included for all the Somnolians, so he got a Colton in his jewel case. These were done digitally and then printed out on my home inkjet on nice blue and pink cardstock on the same template as the booklets were done on, and then slotted in behind the booklet as you open the case.
This is really what made the packages take so long. Not one of these characters, I'd drawn before, so the nerves about getting them right were there, and while I love how they all came out (Cedrus is probably my favorite of the lot and one of my favorites of the year, if I'm honest) and while it was all completely worth it—well, it was a lot of work. A lot of weeks of me hinting at things to people, because I'm terrible at keeping secrets.
Here's the full-sized digital versions, if you're curious (obviously click the thumbnails, doof):
marf's mix 2024
Mailing out mix CDs has been something we've been talking about in the group since Devon was still around. As I mentioned, during the lockdowns, my desire for any music that wasn't the warm, comfy, familiar confines of licensed video game soundtracks from the mid-2000s about disappeared completely, so my mixes didn't come out very good (least, not that I remember). 2023 and 2024 have been killer for my discovery though, and instead of writing out some long post about the music I loved this year or something, I figured I'd make it a mix CD. Let me not tell you about this song I love, let me let you listen to it.
Truth be told, it's probably the project this year that's felt the least like work. I already get into the weeds of music sequencing, mastering, lyrical content, and the like when I'm just casually enjoying a record, so it was just fun to pick out all the songs that spoke to me the loudest this year and arrange them in a proper running order. I remember really trying to dig for songs that got me emotional, or songs I've fantasized to. I really got into the details, normalizing song volumes, trimming silences, creating seamless segues, interludes (two of 'em to separate out the two halves of the mixtape, courtesy of The Conet Project), and even trimming one song slightly to make a sort of unofficial radio edit. Seriously, I wanted this thing to play as its own piece, even if it was other people's music I was using to paint.
On song choice, this frankly could've just been 15 Superdrag songs in a row. I lived in Regretfully Yours for months, the droning, desperate infatuation of "Truest Love", "Carried"'s angular, anthemic low self-confidence, "Destination Ursa Major"'s ode to drunken abandon. It only got better when I discovered The Fabulous 8-Track Sound of Superdrag, with a lot of the same lyrical focuses but with an even grubbier, growlier, low-end sound. "Sugar" would be the opener to my mix CD for 2024.
The rest of the songs all came from CDs and digital albums I've bought in the past two years. The Raconteurs, two songs from Adwaith, Matchbox Twenty (I am just ready for my Rob Thomas arc, yes), Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Ted Leo, Built to Spill, Ash, Remy fucking Zero—a mix I enjoy quite a lot. The vast majority were bought in Wales with Caby standing next to me, which makes it especially odd when one of them reminds me of her. I guess it is a little strange to have such strong, personal emotions (not exclusively for her—"As Sure as the Sun" was more me thinking about people who left the group more than anything) wrapped up in songs that got mailed to the people they make me think of, but consider it more like a time capsule of my own neurosis more than anything about them. I'm just an insane person on the Internet.
On a positive note, there are plenty of optimistic and more lovey songs on the disc, and I'm happy to have embraced my love of Brad Sucks again, especially his newer material that just didn't really interest me during the lockdowns, of which two songs feature.
But this all begat another leg of the project! I needed cover art for the mix CD! Initially, I was gonna do another character illustration (just of Cammy, possibly including marf), but after doing five of those already on a similar canvas, none of the ideas I had were all that interesting to me, so I cleared out my head by digitally painting for the first time instead. I took a screenshot of the Minecraft Alpha world I was playing a lot at the timeand tried to paint out a weird, dreamy, sunset version of it, kinda paradise but also kinda isolated and lonely. It isn't very good, but the fun thing about indie rock is that bad and amateurish art is a staple of the genre's entire look, so somehow, it all worked out.
What worked out slightly less was that this was the moment I figured out my cheap shitty Canon inkjet can't do duplex (double-sided) printing, not even manually—the print won't line up! I gave up on the nice, decorative, typed insert design I had in mind and simply handwrote the tracklist in very tiny scribble on the back of the cardstock prints five times, pen mistakes and all. Boo-womp. (But that's its own vibe, I suppose, so no big deal.)
Shipping and handling
Then came mailing it all out! I got a pack of bubble mailers one night and reinforced them on both sides with sliced up cardboard from my current job. (If the boxes there are good enough to transport beer and glass in one piece, my CDs will make it there just fine.) dcb got a whole box of CDs from me, a signed Shaimus CD I ordered for him years ago and never passed on (sorry lad), a few duplicates from my collection I figured he'd like, half my print copies of the spring 2024 SomnolZine, the mix CD, and of course the Last Summer CD he helped springboard in the first place. Everyone got something a little different! Discounting the personalization, I gave more copies of the zine to Caby because she spilled coffee on hers, Mr. Midwestern Dirt didn't get the mix CD because I figured he wouldn't be into all the 90s pop/alt stuff I had on it, and there was another guy in Virginia on Reddit who wanted to do a mix CD trade, so he got the mix CD and an unpersonalized copy of Last Summer. Lots to keep track of! Addresses!
Shipping in total cost me roughly $100. (You see why I wanted to include the mix CD with the Last Summer stuff now?) I had all the customs forms printed out, fixed to the envelopes, dcb's box was all packed up nice—now the last leg of the journey was just hoping it all got there! dcb, Patrick, and the Reddit guy in Virginia all got theirs within a week, makes sense, none of those are too far from here. Caby got hers within two weeks, big excellent, international shipping is iffy sometimes.
Savannah and Connor got theirs December 19 and 20, respectively. Canada Post's Christmas-nuking strike caused the packages to stop right where they stood three days after I mailed them out. Thankfully, that's most of the way from Somnolescent HQ to Ontario, so they got them a day and two after the strike ended, but the fact that I could've hand-delivered theirs in an evening as opposed to waiting almost forty days to not only see their reactions to what I drew, but also to be able to write this very post and put some closure on the whole project, definitely derailed the end of the year vibes for a bit. On the bright side, Christmas miracle!
Oh yeah, and the reactions were absolutely worth it. Hope you guys don't mind me posting these here for posterity:
Closure
I realized halfway through all of this that this was an absurd amount of work, and in a way, I put more into it in return. It feels like a nice tribute to my tendency towards excess. Like seriously, just handmaking a CD, or doing up a mix CD for friends, or mailing out six different packages at once, would be quite the undertaking—and I did all of those at the same time.
I've obviously learned to trim it back next time, but thankfully, I've also learned a lot about prints and CD artwork to expedite the process. (Basically, print it at Staples if it needs to be double-sided, and a booklet, while cool, is overkill and a simple two-sided insert is more than enough.) This was an adventure in handmade CD-R releases, and it came out fucking cool, and I am glad I did it and everyone loved it. I'm also glad, especially given that this definitely won't be the last CDs I ever send to people, that I know now to make it a lot more manageable for myself.
The Canada Post strike really disrupted me more than it probably should have. There was almost a year of building excitement for those Last Summer CDs, and all the time I spent drawing things for them, only to see the ones for Savannah and Connor freeze three days after I send them right along the border. Almost a month later and they still haven't moved. I had journal posts about putting it all together ready to go that I just wasn't able to post. I was gonna put the last dozen copies or so up for sale on my Bandcamp and maybe use Reddit to advertise some handmade CDs—desire to do that disappeared for a bit. I meant to take some time off to relax, but it kinda became more of a depressive streak than relaxing from a busy year, not just because of the strike, but that definitely didn't help.
Good news! The strike is expected to end next week, not because Canada Post and the union came up with a solution, but because the government has had enough of the billion dollars lost and millions of Christmases ruined as a result of not having a functional fucking postal service and they're forcing people back to work until May of next year. Hopefully an actually better solution that suits the workers better can be found—but this just can't continue like this. I heard from Savannah they were gonna do rolling strikes (where only certain areas would strike at a time)—that probably would've gotten people's hackles up a lot less if the mail service was just slower and not nonexistent. Tactical error, I dunno, I just want my friends' gifts to get there, and thankfully they should be there sometime within our lifetimes now.
I wanna dust off the journal with a more fun post though! I recently procured an MX4SIO card for my PS2, and I am supremely excited about it. Seriously, it's reinvigorated my love for console gaming. If you have no idea what an MX4SIO card is (and the name is stupid), it's effectively a MicroSD-to-PS2 memory card adapter that lets you boot games through the memory card slot, no disc needed, provided you have a way of running homebrew on your PS2. It is fucking cool.
The PS2 softmodding community has gone absolutely nuts in the past few years, coming up with new ways to boot games, getting online in games going again with custom servers, the works. For some definitions, softmodding means hacking the console through non-hardware means. Hardmodding would mean something like a modchip soldered to the motherboard, softmodding involves usually exploiting some software update function, a built-in Web browser, something you can feed bad data to to give it your own instructions. The goal of any of these exploits is to run homebrew, which are custom applications written for the PS2, and ideally, backups of games. Softmods are easier and usually free, so they tend to be preferable to hardmods.
Back when I first got into Guitar Hero II customs in 2014, we already had Free McBoot, which is a cute little exploit that lives on a memory card and uses the DVD player firmware update function to let you boot whatever code you want on your console, but nowadays, there's also FreeHDBoot, which only needs a hard drive and a Network Adaptor to do the same thing as Free McBoot, and FreeDVDBoot, which can boot homebrew using only a specially crafted DVD-R. It's wild. Some of these only work on specific PS2 models, but every single PS2 model can be exploited in one way or another.
So back in 2022, after I'd gotten this PS2, I dove into trying to get hard drive loading games working, because that's considered the fastest and most reliable way of booting backups, and I wanted to start testing my GH2DX and marfGH stuff on a real console. It was a disaster. I was using a Network Adaptor that I couldn't even verify worked properly, I switched out the IDE board inside with a SATA board using an upgrade kit, so who knows if that was the issue, the PS2 itself feels rickety with its slightly loose and spotty card and controller slots, and at the end of the day, Open PS2 Loader (which is the application that lets you run backups of games off a variety of media) never saw the hard drive. The whole thing was a dud, and I wound up returning everything but the bag of Torx screwdrivers I ordered for the project. My PS2 was still stuck playing disc games—and anyone who plays old disc-based consoles know that eventually, their lasers and disc drives wear out and you end up with no easy way to play games.
I have a couple streams coming up that call for playing some hacked PS2 games, and I didn't want to emulate them with all the issues that come with running PCSX2 on my slowass old iMac, so I figured it was finally time to buy an MX4SIO card and try it out. $30 got me a 128GB MicroSD card (a Samsung, whose cards seem to work the best anecdotally online and I can confirm it worked well for me) and a MX4SIO card from Bitfunx off Amazon. I'd already had the Free McBoot card from when I was toying with customs in 2014, and I've been using it to backup and restore saves, mostly. That's all you need to get it going, honestly.
Preparing the MicroSD card is the hardest part. OPL requires a specific folder structure and games to be named a certain way, with the disc ID as the first part of the name and the display name as the second. CD and DVD games have to be separated out. You can get art for each game to decorate OPL with. All of this can be automated with OPL Manager, thankfully. You just put the ISOs in the right folder on the card, and OPL Manager will rename the games and fetch art for you.
The MicroSD card came formatted as ExFat, so I needed to install the newest beta of OPL to take advantage of it. (You should do that anyway because OPL is always improving in compatibility, stability, and features.) ExFat is useful as well because it allows you to store games over 4GB without having to split the files, which is another thing OPL is picky about.
Anyway, that was it! You flip Block Objects to Auto in the settings, enable MX4SIO support, and it sees the card and lists your games, ready to play. How is the speed? Honestly, if it's slightly slower than the disc drive, I haven't noticed it. I'm pretty well accustomed to how quickly GH2 loads songs, and over MX4SIO, it felt as quick (or slow, however you wanna look at it) as disc or emulator. Compatibility is not perfect, but pretty close to it. I got Amplitude going no problem, NFL Street 2 worked great (and the spreadsheet said that was one of the non-functional games as well, so that's even better), my custom demo discs worked a treat, and of course, GH2 customs worked great.
Having a way to finally play my charts properly, on hardware, with a guitar even (which I still have to look around for, gonna check Marketplace after work and see if I can avoid eBay prices), or just any game I want to play, has gotten me totally reinvested in the PS2 ecosystem and also in working on marfGH. I'm aiming to have a nice half-dozen new customs done before the year's out, Connor wants a tie-in MoriHime GH track pack, PadGH is still partially finished and on the table—and now I can test these exactly as you'd actually play them, and more than that, I can actually enjoy them properly myself, not just tapping notes out on my keyboard. I have unfinished emulator saves for SSX 3 and Need for Speed: Underground that I can continue without dealing with any of the slowdown and glitches I get on PCSX2. It's just really fun to play with—and believe me, I have a ton of disc PS2 games I want to play as well, but this is a nice backup for those as well when my PS2's laser eventually goes, like it did on Caby's recently.
About the only limitation of any PS2 backup booting solution is that they can't boot PS1 games using the PS1 hardware in the console—they have to rely on POPS, which is Sony's bizarre software PS1 emulator for the PS2, and compatibility and performance is not great, as you might imagine. That's alright though—I have a Tonyhax International save for Crash 2 I can use to boot burned PS1 games if I ever get a hankerin' for some PS1 backup action.
That's another thing I toyed with briefly, the whole Tonyhax thing, another softmod solution for booting games that just so happens to work on all PS1 and PS2 consoles. I couldn't use my actual Tony Hawk discs for it because my old slim left the discs absolutely knackered with how much I played them (the ribbon cable for the laser assembly on most slimlines scratches the games up over time), but I have many Tonyhax capable games, thankfully. I don't have any CD-Rs on hand that don't make my PS2 screech in agony, just my Verbatim novelty vinyl ones I was using for the Last Summer CDs, but I can pick up a pack on Amazon when I want to play a PS1 game next, that's no big deal.
Video games are fun! I'll talk about Quake II soon, since I'm still doing some gaming through time type stuff, slowly but surely.
