Happy belated six months of me working at my current job! This puts it in second place for longest jobs held, ahead of Staples and certainly ahead of Giant.

It's been pretty good! Working at a beer distributor definitely beats working alcohol sales at grocery stores—lower volume of traffic, actual benefits, no purchase restrictions (I could sell you a whole 192oz back when I worked the grocery stores!), no assholes not buying booze who treat me as a human fast lane instead of the designated beer counter, and there's a lot less bureaucracy because it's a small, local business and not a chain headquartered in another state. I have met everyone from the owner to everyone on the sales team to the warehouse guys putting together all the pallets for the rest of the area we service.

I'm making almost double what I did doing basically the same work at the grocery stores, it just feels slower because I only get paid every other week instead of every week. That money has piled up, though. Being as frugal as I am (even when I do get spendy, like over Christmas, I still came out in the black for the month), I have the better part of $10,000 saved up, which is my current car budget. I don't intend to pay that much, I just want to cast the net as wide as possible when we do start looking for a decent ride, which I guess should be soon. That's after having used this job to pay off both of the student loans in my name (to the tune of almost $5,000 each) and almost the one in my mom's name ($400 left on that, which would be gone today if she didn't get really touchy about me blowing through my savings to kill off loans).

Better yet—it's tax season here, and my tax guy has over $1300 on the way for me, effectively 12-13 days of extra pay the government owes me back. That puts me around $7,000 sitting around right now. Pretty sure this is the most I've ever had saved up at once.

I'm finally almost financially prepared for the next phase of my life. At a base level, not having to worry about how I'm getting to and from work is a boon, but then you get into the freedom to run errands, sell off extraneous games and junk lying around, go and do things in the community, visit record stores and arcades and friends, visiting friends! Yearly Somnol crossover episodes! Caby will be able to visit me if I can get her and I places!

Admittedly, all of this hard work in setting up the last chunk of my life in the US comes with the fact that, well, it's hard work. I definitely don't have the free time and energy that I used to, even at the grocery stores. Just that extra ten hours a week, plus our store's pretty reasonable hours of late morning to early evening every day, makes every day worked feel pretty much like an all-day affair (and Saturdays really are, open to close, nine-and-a-half hours). I'm still working retail, albeit specialized retail. It's still customer service, and selling a lot of cases of cheap beer to husky backwoods trucker dudes and construction workers. It has led to moments where I feel a lot more absent from my hobbies with games and music, my creative work, Somnol, and Caby than I want to be (not to mention my alarming regularity for falling asleep without saying goodnight to anyone). My memory, I'm pretty sure has gotten worse since I started working here—it's not dementia, it's just a lack of energy and more often missing things.

I definitely have grander ambitions in life than working restocking and cashier work for a store, even one as decent as this (I'd hope so, hard to get a work visa on retail associate experience). I do fantasize about the final day I work here, but it's really not due to anything bad about the job itself—I get along pretty well with everyone here, even though they're all personalities in their own right, and it's so slow often enough, I've been able to get a lot of writing work done while on my shifts (like this journal entry!), which helps me to feel productive even when I just want to relax at nights. It's just that idea of having the car, having the certs, this job having finally paid off the last of the financial damage college did to me six whole years ago now, even if it's just going from nice retail to entry-level helpdesk tech work or whatever, and finally being able to focus on what I really want, to focus on getting into Wales and starting my life where I should be. That's intoxicating.

But I am super glad to have this job, and I'm happy to be here as long as they have me. I know how much worse it can be out there, and savings are pog. Other than the long hours, this ain't too shabby. And hey! Easy access to a pretty decent selection of beer. I've got plenty waiting at home, a lot of it I got for free. Can't beat that.

By the way, I believe we have a lock on the next Wales trip. More details to come, but Caby and Cammy may be getting their first taste of proper domesticore. That wakes a Cammy up any day.

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Y'know, it still feels incredibly weird to refer to myself as having mental health issues. I think it comes from years of having enemies trying to fuck with me and me going "well, I'm not about to give you the satisfaction of watching me suffah". In all truth, mine are not so bad I can't get up and go to work and have hobbies and friends, but sometimes we careen between the rabbit and the hare ends of the spectrum, to use a niche reference.

Fuck all that though. hifi is being built!

hifi is the final boss, the final frontier of mari.somnol. This is the full fat, responsive, totally modern version of the site with bells and whistles that wouldn't be remotely possible on nofi or lofi. It's gonna have everything. It's gonna look nice on all your devices. It's gonna have themes, so you can pick your favorite retro Cammy site layout and it'll remember it, and you can pretend it's still 2018/2019/2020, or perhaps a far-flung future where Cammy built a site on Bootstrap.

And although it's only partially implemented at the moment, this is all working right now.

This current push has been motivated by, of course, marfGH, and the realization that I'm not too comfortable directing people to download an ISO on a half-finished site. Although I'm still super happy with lofi and I don't mind people seeing it, it's not mari.somnol. It's lofi.mari.somnol. It's a little less accessible, a little less user-friendly, and when I've already had issues keeping my discs accessible to the public, I want to put as little as possible between them and my work. Although I had an .htaccess redirect to lofi going on the main subdomain, I disabled it because it wasn't working right and I was too lazy to fix it (but not too lazy to build an entire site, yes).

This is the first time since before the Retablening in 2020 that I've had an eye towards building a mobile-friendly responsive site, and it's been a lot of fun and quite refreshing. It sounds like a lot of work at first, that you'd need to build two layouts, but you actually only need to build the one layout—your HTML without any CSS is already a mobile-friendly tower, so you simply sweeten that a little and load all your desktop declarations through a media query on top of it. In my case, I'm using a mixture of grid for the structure and flex for anything that I need to reflow from row to column on mobile, like navbars. This has meant what I normally use tables for, like grids of thumbnails, I simply set as flex containers and let the browser figure out the organization of based on the available space.

This is also what makes the theme switcher possible. The HTML is very agnostic on layout, and with very little extra bloat or duplication of elements, I can recolor and rearrange the page into any number of configurations by simply loading in a different stylesheet. As of writing this, I have two themes implemented, the mari_v3 theme and the mari_nc1 theme, which I affectionately refer to as the "platypus" theme. Already, I find these unbelievably trippy to play with. They're not using the literal styling of the old site designs, they're much cleaner recreations to match my functionality goals for hifi, but the assets, the overall layouts, the colors, they're straight from the originals. It's this bizarre mix of my modern site content, my new art and maps and music, with the look of my first ever Neocities site—it's bonkers and I think I love it.

Admittedly, this is not perfectly put together right now. I still need to implement the cookie store and check to remember which theme you prefer and set it on page load, and at the moment, I'm loading in image assets for all themes regardless of which theme you're using. That one, I think I can fix just by loading certain assets through JavaScript instead—which normally I am completely against because it unnecessarily makes your site reliant on the Devil's Language, but the theme switcher only works if you have JavaScript on anyway, and the site is fully functional with it disabled (since the mari_v3 theme is a fully functional theme on its own, obviously), so I'm perfectly okay with extra code to ease the overall load of the site for those opting into using it.

There's still a lot of work to go on the content end of things as well, implementing the other themes (I think I'll defer a few until post-launch) and porting over the rest of the pages from lofi, which isn't hard, just tedious. I'd like to build a minerteaux and dark v3 theme to complement the existing two, and after launch, I'll figure out reimplementing mari_v1 and a goofy meme Bootstrap theme a la dcb_bootstrap. That covers all the old site designs and ideas I had in mind—v2 was the basis for lofi, so count that in the mix even if it's not in the theme switcher.

Really, I'm just stoked to have finally done it. The website to end all websites. Barring HTTPS nonsense that I washed my hands of in January, I have finally made a universal website, and not just one that pusses out and is super mumblecore and simplistic and goes "that's a motherfucking website"—I mean it looks and works nicely everywhere. It's the playground for everything I've made so far and everything I will make going forwards. I parked mari.somnol back in 2023, and here we are in 2025, finally fully settled back into my true place on the Web, able to use any layout and any browser I want to look at my shit. Absolutely bananas.

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