Sunday night, I began a project I've wanted to do for years now, but kept putting off because of its sheer size and scope.

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So when I released In Free Fall in 2019, it was actually meant to be a two-pronged thing. I had this album of remastered and reworked older tracks as my debut as aphrodisiac, and then album #2 was gonna be all newly-sequenced stuff. This album was gonna be called Isolated Together—which predates the lockdowns, so you know. It was more a reference to being stuck at college without friends while all my friends and my new girlfriend (six years ago, we started dating, see my previous post) were online. We were isolated together.

If you're a hardcore longtime diehard Somnolescent follower, you might have read the post I made back then called "How a Fusion Drive Ate Our Gopher". I've told this story a billion times now, but for the final time:

I had two Macs, the 2013 one I was bringing to school (and my daily driver still to this day), and a 2017 Retina iMac that had a "Fusion Drive" in it. Fusion Drive was an unholy abomination of Apple stopgap marketing back when SSDs were expensive and hard drives were too slow. There's a small SSD and a large mechanical drive that get summed together in software as a "logical volume" (as in, it only exists in logic, not in reality). The SSD acts as cache for the hard drive, so it feels snappier than a hard drive, but has a lot more space than an SSD. Following me?

The issue is that any difference between the two causes the entire logical volume to fail spectacularly. I was using that computer to work on Isolated Together, run servers, store my music library and childhood YouTube videos and a ton of downloaded art, including some of Savannah's oldest drawings. Even though I was working on In Free Fall in school, I didn't bring the Isolated Together projects with me because they relied on the newer version of GarageBand on the Retina Mac, not my slightly older one on my 2013 Mac. I also wasn't keeping backups, so the project files and the uncompressed AIFF renders of those songs were just on that computer, no spare copies of anything.

So calamity strikes circa Easter 2019, the Mac boots up to a prohibitionary symbol (which means "I can't find a boot volume"), and the Internet Recovery tool shows that the entire drive is unformatted. Now—the data was still there, as some of my recovery attempts proved, so it wasn't that the drives failed. Some kind of power failure nuked the partition table or something similarly low-level, and I blame this on the Fusion Drive. I've had many many power failures with my first iMac and now the eMachines Box, and they just boot back up with no problem. The only time I've seen anything like this is with a Fusion Drive, which again, have to be perfectly synced lockstep at all times, not possible when sometimes the power goes out.

Here's macoclock on Medium saying something pretty similar:

Fusion drives present a merged volume container between the SSD and HDD. Without either one, the data is unreadable. Basically if either the SSD or HDD failed, your entire data is basically gone forever. Fusion drives have a history of mechanical failures. The most widely observed cause is the disk reading mechanism on the HDD is somehow worn or broken.

The true problem data is stored between drives instead of a full file on either drive. Therefore making it more difficult to recover your data in its enclosure. And if you have a mechanical / hardware failure, software data recovery would allow you to see your file structure, but you won’t be able to retrieve the data because it cannot read the complete set of data.

I tried a couple things, including rebuilding the partition table using TestDisk (no dice, and possibly made it worse) and brute force recovering data using PhotoRec (absolutely not what it's meant for, and mostly grabbed random junk cache files instead of my actual files). Worse yet, GarageBand project files are not files, they're technically folders in Apple's bizarre "package" format, so without a working folder structure on the drive, all PhotoRec could ever hope to give me were the random innards of some of those projects, and nothing I could conceivably use.

By this point, I was exhausted and fucked up over the loss of a ton of really important shit to me, so I simply formatted both drives and split them to be two physical volumes (as in, the SSD and HDD were now separate). Surprise, the computer has been fine ever since. I suppose I could've saved some more stuff with a more targeted PhotoRec search, but I just wanted my computer working again.

Fusion Drives haven't been included on Macs in five years now because SSDs are large enough to be someone's entire internal storage without issue. Good riddance.

If you hate reading: a power outage ate not all my data, but the way the computer knows that data exists, and I wasn't able to recover it. This is absolutely due to the special (as in bike helmet special) drive setup Apple came up with when SSDs were too small and hard drives were too slow. Fuck you Apple.

Were these songs anything brilliant? Not really. At the time, yes, the Isolated Together stuff was my best material to date, and the upset about me losing everything was what discouraged me from working on more music. In Free Fall on its own looked like a consolation prize for not having any new songs—and that's actually what I believed it was until I started looking back through old logs and found that I'd been working on both in tandem in January 2019.

But yeah, nowadays, the mtlx stuff from 2023 proves I can do a lot better. That doesn't mean I am not still deeply sentimental about what I made, though, and that doesn't mean I'm not still angry at having lost it. (Now I take a neurotic approach to backups, surprise surprise.)

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Now, these songs still exist. Sort of. They exist as the lossy renders I had posted to mari_v1 and also sent to folks on Discord. I cannot use these on a release because the sound quality is degraded. I'm autistic about finding out someone else, even major labels, gave me MP3s on a CD or uploaded MP3s to Bandcamp, and I'm not about to do that myself. Nevertheless, I released them as The Lost Sessions on my site and pledged to one day recreate the songs in full so I could use them, either as they are or as a springboard for more refinement.

That brings me back to this project. Now that I'm working on new music again, it's time to recreate Isolated Together along with it.

Now, I could simply redo the structure, beats, and melodies of each song and have this done in two weeks. These are not complicated songs. What I want, though, is as close to a recreation of those lossy renders as possible. That means the samples, loops, and patches I used, the automation I programmed, the layering I did, the mixing, the panning—they all have to be recreated by ear, as close as possible.

This takes a lot of detective work! In the case of the first song, "I Don't Give a Fuck About the New Smash Bros." (I'm sure that was a working title, maybe), just the main melody line had me figuring out which patch I had used, then figuring out how exactly I had the smart controls on it set (the exact amount of harmonics, shape, depth, reverb, glide, etc.), then trying to recreate the pitch bend curves by ear that creates that weird "siren" effect, again, as closely as possible. For the drums, I know I have two different drum machines going, but I swear I hear a third as well, but I can't place if it's a tweaked Neon or if it's another drum machine patch entirely.

Thankfully, a lot of my custom patches were shared between my two Macs. A lot—not all. Some patches, specifically the bizarre wowing "glob" lead in "Abduction", I don't have, and those are going to be the hardest ones to recreate. Even if it's the same sound, the way it sits in the frequency spectrum isn't going to be the same, or the tonal qualities will be different. Even though I know the lead in "Smash Bros." is the Screamlead patch, my attempts so far don't have the exact bassy "throaty" quality the one on the render has. I was able to increase it by turning down the harmonics knob, but some harmonics are still necessary because of the nasal quality that sound also has, which disappears when you turn it all the way off.

This is gonna take a lot of doing, but I am up to the challenge. This is something that's been on my mind for years now, and it's already been very rewarding. A lot of people would go "well, if they're not even great songs, and you can do better now, why not just make new music?"—and yes, that is the rational play here, and I am. I have a collab project with Connor going, in between him working on the second MoriHime album, and I'd love it if I could get a new aphrodisiac EP or something out this year, just to put all those cool noises I came up with in a musically much more interesting context, especially for ten years of the project (Here Come Monsters was to be released in late 2015!).

But I still want these songs. It's the pride of the thing, the potential, the way it makes me happy to hear them again, and the way they were stolen from me. The same way I wanted to finish the mtlx stuff, itself an idea from 2020, because I'd been putting it off for years, I want to finally put this loss behind me. I was proud of these songs, and I will rebuild them and use these reconstructions to take them to another level.

And then back up the reconstructions. C'mon, I know better now.

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Happy six years, Caby <3

It's been a strange last couple of years as life re-enters the picture and we get busy and don't just have time to hang out all day like we used to, but I'm really happy to say I'm less clueless now and understand her better, and she understands me better as well. Our discussions don't turn into argumetns anymore. It's been well over a month since we last fought, which maybe doesn't sound like a long time, but it's the most peaceful we've felt in a very long time.

It's been fun as well! Fun making her giggle on stream, fun watching her liveblog watching One Piece, fun drawing for her again. I'm very much optimistic that we're gonna settle into a nice, comfortable groove now. Next year, she graduates university at long last, and this year, I get a car and a license. The next trip will be in September. I think this is the most positive things have ever looked for us, doubly so now that I know to keep my weird neurotic moments in check.

I'll have a bigger post about a project I just started last night tomorrow. Today is a day of rest, and also group calls. I have something fun to test with everyone tonight that might just massively increase the number of games I can stream on real hardware.

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First drawing of the year finished! January is Wynuary, as is tradition, and I wanted to add to the weirdly large pile of "Wyn exploring the dark with a flashlight" drawings. Mine has some shitty layered fog though, ooooh!

Yeah, first time painting fog, and I think it came out...interesting. I used the bleeding watercolor brush in FireAlpaca and then smudged it. There's five different layers of darkness here, some on top of the boy, some underneath. It does give it a nice sense of depth, at least. I kinda like it.

I'm on the fence about posting my art out on the big sites again. On one hand, I am seriously proud of where I've gotten and what I've accomplished in the past three years (check out my old attempts at Wyn if you dare), and waving it in people's faces always feels like a good idea, but then my emotions about art get complicated when other people, inferiority, and social anxiety get brought into the picture. My new year's resolution is that if I'm not wholeheartedly into the idea on my own, I'm not doing it, so I think I'm happy just posting them here to the journal. Keeps this place going! If my heart changes, I'll just have a nice backlog of stuff to post is all.

I am working on stuff in the background, at the moment a blog post and trying to get back on the art horse. Trying to leverage the eternal slow season at work for writing journal entries and blog posts so I can focus on stuff I can't do standing around waiting for customers or shit to clean up at home, like more art or playing FreQuency. I had a bit of a rough patch at the end of last week into this one, but I'm alright now. More to come!

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So in case you missed it over New Year's Eve (boo! you suck dick), I streamed a whole bunch of WIP features and charts from my vaporware series of Guitar Hero custom discs called marfGH. I've been practicing, readying charts, and working my ass off to get it as presentable as it could be for the stream for about a month before the stream...and then I drank! And thus sucked at the game. It was a lot of fun, and I super enjoyed it, and so did everyone else.

It's all led to a small resurgence of excitement in myself for rhythm games and modding them, and I have a good feeling I can finally release a disc this year for people to play and enjoy themselves. 2025 has me still in a small pocket of total clarity, which will probably wear off, but right now, everything feels so fresh and full of potential, and that includes my mod work. While we enjoy the slowest Thursday ever recorded by scientists here at work, here's a journal entry for what all I'd like to do with it next.

Market research

It might seem funny to start off "here are my plans for this project" with something other than working on it, but it's true. marfGH is only partially my charting work—the other half of each setlist is curation, and you can only curate as good a setlist as your knowledge of rhythm games will allow, and unfortunately, mine is a little lacking. My own charts are definitely a lot of fun, but I want to seal the deal with well-done ports of songs recognizable to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band communities.

I have my guitar now, and that means I can go back and replay all the PS2 plastic instrument games—my childhood copies of Rock Band and its Track Packs, downloaded copies of the rest of them, Guitar Hero III (which I haven't played since I was a little kid), and Aerosmith (which I never played at all). (I could play most of the later GH games as well, but by World Tour, I remember the PS2 backports not being very good, and I just have no real interest in those right now anyway.) By my estimation, I have available to me about 500 songs I can play right now, maybe 350 of those never having been in the GH2 engine specifically. (Although it'd take a port job to play any of them, all 6,000+ Rock Band DLC and Network tracks are also up for grabs by me. I can have it all!)

I want to find the fun charts and hidden gems—and not just that, I want new songs to play myself! This year, I do want to play more games and just enjoy and absorb things, and of course that means revisiting Amplitude, FreQuency, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band on actual console, all games I love a lot and have deeply influenced my music taste and what I like in games. Even if I don't like GH3 any better as a game (I feel like I probably would look on it more kindly now), at least that's a whole setlist of songs to either steal outright or rechart, and a lot of people have major GH3 nostalgia, so it's an outright ace in the hole. If I do like it more as a game now? Gravy. Cammy has fun with a new game.

Shoring up my existing customs

Obviously, my methods and knowledge of the game and implementation of the new features I've added have changed over time. Sometimes, a mix doesn't come out sounding right, or it's a particularly old custom and I didn't know how to get the volume right without incurring distortion. Sometimes, I'm too lazy to add in some minor feature I need for my goal of a fully-featured chart. My lead/rhythm songs need bass in singleplayer, because my old way of doing it (two mix charts, lead-heavy and rhythm-heavy) led to some really bizarre and stupid charts.

If there's one thing I'll do more immediately with marfGH, it's go back through everything I've finished and make sure it's all as I'd like it to be. I did a bit of this the day of the stream, actually—my custom of "Very Ape" by Nirvana was missing camera cuts, I thought the lighting was weak, and I thought the mix was quiet and weird (it came from the original unmastered 24-track master tape and I never quite figured out how to tame it), so I quickly fixed it up in about an hour and a half. I figured, it was such a fun chart, I couldn't just have bits of it I wasn't pleased with with my initial public demo of the chart.

Some finished charts that need a bit of extra work that come to mind:

• Like I said, lead/rhythm stuff is a bitch. In vanilla GH2, they merge the two multiplayer guitar parts into one chart, and I'd have the second playable guitar part in singleplayer be the exact opposite of which parts are played by the normal singleplayer chart. Problem is, that means there's a "fun parts" and a "not as fun parts" chart, with guitar licks sometimes cutting off mid-lick. These songs are just better suited by having a singleplayer guitar mix chart and then bass alongside it—at least the bass is a whole part, even if it's not very fun. My port of "XLR8R" by Orbit from FreQuency and my "Ventura Highway" custom come to mind.
• My "Code Monkey" custom is from 2020, pre-DX, and I hadn't quite figured out how to mix audio for the game yet, I just knew it had to be loud. I made this one too loud, though, and it audibly distorts. Nowadays, I can always get things just about right and sounding clean on the first shot, so yeah, that one should get redone.
• Kinda combining the first two issues, my "Dear Kate" custom is a lead/rhythm track that, firstly, is too quiet in-game (I had to put the sound effects way quiet for the chart demo video), but also predates the singleplayer second-instrument play that Deluxe added, so it actually crashes DX discs like marfGH is based on for lack of a second instrument in the singleplayer channel mapping array. The tempomap for this one is also terrible (this is the last custom I tempomapped in FeedBack before switching to Moonscraper for that) and I seem to recall me feeling like a lot of my pitches and stuff were off in the chart itself, so yeah, just the whole thing should probably be redone. It's worth it, fun song, shoutout to Ben Minnotte.
• I have a port of Sunny Day Real Estate's "In Circles" that came from a Bluzer rip, and it was legitimately so obnoxious to make that I wrote a Scratchpad entry on it back in the day. (Amusing seeing how I describe the workflow back then, because it is so much quicker and more efficient now.) Nowadays, I can start from the official Rock Band Network audio and chart, which should make it a lot less icky to me than Bluzer's toyed with, second gen, wonky rip I was using.
• General punch ups here and there, very minor things that make me happy.

Menu retextures

Art is the big thing keeping you from playing a new marfGH disc next week. I don't expect anyone to be blown away by my drawings populating the GH2 menus, but I want the disc to have custom styling and theming, somewhere between "nicely rendered marfs in various styles" and "I drew bunny ears and a big mane on Edgar Allen Poe for the part select screen because it was funny to me". When I first started taking marfGH seriously in 2022, I was about five months into learning how to draw, and I was too scared of drawing ferals to illustrate much of anything, but the story is different now!

In general, I miss art. Art Fight last year took so much out of me that I don't think I have a single properly finished and lined drawing post-July. This year, for my comfort and Caby's sanity, I'll be sitting it out, but that doesn't mean I don't miss drawing my silly animal people and don't have a bunch of ways to apply it! This month, I'm really focusing on art for Caby, because it's our anniversary month and because I just feel I've neglected her a bit over the past few months and I'd like to make up for it. marf stuff will be in there, though. marf never really goes away.

More songs and ports

That one's obvious though, yeah?

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Happy new year to everyone reading my journal! I have a really good feeling about 2025. Like, really good. There was a lot to be proud of last year, but just as often, I learned I was just as sick if not a little more as the people around me, and, at my worst, I feel like I neglected my friends and my girlfriend. I forgot that, if you want good times, you have to make them. No one can do that for you or to you. It wasn't on purpose or anything, but that doesn't mean it's right.

Thankfully, things have been healing. I recently got back in touch with one of my high school friends, who dropped by the area, took me to lunch, we caught up and then we bought a ton of CDs together (Logan's trying to get me into Deftones, and he might just succeed). The last couple streams I've done, especially last night's demoing marfGH features and charts with Caby as cohost, were a blast. Seriously, even my mom told me how loud I was and how much fun I seemed to be having last night. Gonna say that's a pretty damn good way to spend New Year's Eve, online with a bunch of people watching you drunkenly play your custom Guitar Hero songs and chatting together.

I feel like, in a lot of ways, creatively and personally and emotionally, I'm starting over from scratch, but that's exciting and relieving, honestly. I want to heal things. I know I gotta take care of myself and the people around me better. I'm ready to get back to having fun and doing the things that made people like me in the first place. I really have thrown the rulebook out for 2025. I have no requirements and no idea what all I'll get up to, and I'm very happy about that. No doubt it'll be something good.

On that note, have that Quake II ramble I've been trying to write for weeks now!

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So slowly but surely, I have been doing a thing I've been calling "gaming through time". It's no big secret my favorite eras for games are the late 90s and early 2000s, and thanks to the trips and CEX, I've started amassing a nice collection of PC games, complete in box (albeit not big box, which doesn't really break my heart to be honest with you) from that time period. With the revival of the eMachines Box thanks to my new desk and the new hard drive I put in it in 2023, I've got a surprisingly really satisfying setup for playing them on. All the individual components are pretty low end, but next-gen low end, meaning they run last-gen games silky smooth.

Given that I do still want to upgrade it eventually to run mid-decade XP games, I've been starting with my older games, many of which I've never beaten, and finally beating them in chronological order and seeing the improvements in graphics, worldbuilding, and gameplay as I get to each next one. You might remember when I beat Quake and all of its expansions back in October or so, and obviously, Quake II was to follow. Here's a belated ramble about it.

Summing up Quake II

Let's address the name before we continue. This is not a sequel to Quake. This is, at best, a spiritual successor. The story goes that id, newly without its star game designer John Romero, wanted to take a less fantastical, more science fiction direction for their next game, couldn't come up with a suitable name, and Quake II it became. Quake II also makes sense in that John Carmack, who had recently taken operative dictatorship over id in the split of The Two Johns, believed more in iterating on what was known to work, the linear key-and-gun arena shooter formula, rather than coming up with new big ideas for id's next game. I'll come back to that thought throughout this post.

Carmack was known for his disappointment with Quake's development. He believed he took on too much at once, with Quake featuring a fully 3D rendered, self-occluding world, polygonal 3D models for everything, and a TCP/IP networking model for multiplayer being a really tall ask for maybe less than two years of development time. It suits that Quake II, technologically, only makes smaller improvements to Quake's existing tech stack, like colored and texture-based lighting, full skyboxes, DLLs for modding as opposed to QuakeC, and working towards the ever-approaching 3D accelerator takeover with better OpenGL support than even GLQuake had (naturally, I played using the software renderer, because I like crunchy).

So what all does change with Quake II? The story focuses on a race of cybernetic aliens called the Strogg (pronounce it like stroganoff), who have come to subjugate Earth, and you're the last guy who can slip inside their main bases and sabotage them from the inside. Like I said, if you're looking for anything to do with Armagon, or Shubby, or any of Quake's Lovecraftian mythos and themes, they're not here. This is about as connected to Quake as TimeSplitters is to Goldeneye on the N64—they share a similar engine, core gameplay concepts. and most of the same developers, and that's about it. Is that necessarily a bad thing? For me, Quake is definitely the moodier, more interesting game, but Quake II's setting isn't bad. If anything, its military bases are probably more visually defined than Quake's bases, and definitely neater built.

That said, the lack of visual variety very much doesn't help the game, since it's now about three times the length of Quake with about the same depth. Each of the eight Strogg bases in the game give you a major objective that amounts to "find the button and press it", whether that's to disable a satellite array, render a Big Gun inoperable, things that feel less substantial than they should, even with the satisfyingly gooey polygonal explosion you get each time. Even the pickups, data CDs and commander's heads, are just renamed and reskinned keys like we've been picking up since Doom. Even some of the textures, especially the liquid textures, are literally reused from Quake, as are some of your player sounds.

Again, it all goes back to Carmack's desire for iteration than innovation. It's not that that's bad, but so much feels like its predecessor, the sounds, the gunplay, the fact that it retains secrets and a kill count per level, that it's impossible not to compare the two, and Quake pretty much always comes out the more satisfying game. For its design and feel, Quake was the ideal length. It was really difficult to get lost in its levels, and the variety in texture themes, from idbase to terracotta, swampy wizard to runic, gave you a nice sense of progression that Quake II really doesn't. Worse yet, the increased size means I had to consult StrategyWiki twice to discover the single passageway forwards I happened to miss, which never happened with the original.

That's not to say there weren't some genuinely memorable and chilling moments while I was playing, though. Quake II has sections featuring your fellow soldiers as they get tortured and medically experimented on by the Strogg, and yes, these sections are all interactive! Even with the game's 1997 graphics, seeing a soldier get dangled above lava in a cage, with an option for you to dip him yourself provided you can kill the aliens first (and you get rewarded with a spare gun, even), is seriously disturbing and quite effective. Other times, you'll pass through a holding area of delirious soldiers all mumbling to themselves or getting sliced up on tables, and it's freaky. Quake II definitely does its setpieces well, even if the level design is on the whole only alright.

How about the gunplay? It's not bad. The game starts you off with an infinite ammo peashooter laser gun and slowly introduces two flavors of automatic, a machine gun and a chaingun, two shotguns, a grenade and rocket launcher, and a few energy weapons up to the BFG 10K (obviously an upgraded version of Doom's BFG 9000). Like in Doom II and Quake, the double-barreled shotgun really steals the show for daily use, with the Hyperblaster not far behind, and the Railgun being a satisfyingly piercing supersonic cannon that always leaves body parts flying on the business end of the weapon. Seriously, if you remember how overpowered the rocket launcher was in Quake, the Railgun is that for this game, and it is very nice to have in the toolbox when the big guys on robot legs start to rain shit on you.

A lot of the other guns, though, really don't feel like they do enough damage, especially next to Quake's excellent balance where you could basically count how many shots you had left before an enemy dropped. I hate to keep going back to the original for comparison, but even when the guns are directly comparable, like the grenade launcher, I just felt like I had more power and better aim with the Quake version. Seriously, not to give you spoilers, but the final boss of the game went down way easier than the enemies that preceded him.

It sounds like I didn't like Quake II, and that's really not the impression that I want to give, because while it was on, it was decently fun. Each of the sections, preceded by an FMV cutscene giving you a briefing on your mission objective, I pretty much breezed through, and the soundtrack is a shift from the creepy ambience of the first game to some pretty gnarly (if only sporadically memorable) industrial metal tracks. Like I said, I do really like how it looks! There's plenty of atmosphere between the rusty pipes, rock walls, crushers, drilling machines, sawblades, and cybernetic jail cells as you monkey around the decaying infrastructure of the Strogg, clearing out mooks and reducing everyone after death to meaty chunks (which I recommend doing, the bodies draw flies and it makes my skin crawl).

But, that said, I'm probably good on playing it for a long, long time.

Really, where Quake II is most interesting is in comparing it to Daikatana, the high-profile failure John Romero oversaw at Ion Storm after his departure. Quake II has all of the technological solidness and none of the imagination. Muscly dudes and big robots with bigger guns is what ya get, and as I've been saying, if you've played Quake, you know the exact gameplay of Quake II as well. Daikatana on the other hand, comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, a place where "design is key" was practically an unofficial slogan of Ion Storm. Daikatana had a lot of cool ideas, a main character with a gigantic sword and two AI sidekicks traveling through time, and was notoriously buggy, choppy, and badly put together, stemming from it switching to, funnily enough, the Quake II engine from the Quake engine halfway through its long development.

Carmack was Romero's rock. Romero was Carmack's flights of fancy. Carmack would develop a crazy engine feature, and Romero would make sure it was front and center in his levels. They were young, and hubris split them apart. Each subsequent id game would be less and less noteworthy, save Quake III: Arena and Doom 3, and Ion Storm's more successful games like Deus Ex and Anachronox largely had nothing to do with Romero. Quake II and Daikatana are the perfect examples of why they needed each other, and how they helped each other excel in the end.

Anyway! Onto Half-Life—which I've since discovered I cannot play seriously whatsoever anymore, as I try to bhop across Black Mesa, usespam and sequence break all the NPCs, and generally act like a crackhead. That's all part of the fun though.

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