hifi finally went live two days ago. I've honestly been looking at it all day, on every single computer, phone, and device I can get in my hands. I'm not just thrilled, I'm satisfied. There's still lots to be done, but I've reclaimed a huge part of the way I present myself to the world, one that's been a two year plus process.
I'm still pretty beat from another forty hour work week, and I've been misspelling every word I type here, so I'll keep this brief. (Update from post-writing: I did not really keep it brief.)
I don't have an exact date, but by the time 2023 started, I was pretty well dissatisfied with mari.somnol. I was split between identities, what I thought I could share with the world as mariteaux (my music and modding stuff) and all the furry art and writing stuff I was really into that I felt I could only do as someone else. It kinda sucked. Initially, I used mari.somnol for the former and cammy.somnol for the latter, but it felt like having two halves of me split across different domains. That just wasn't gonna do.
In June, I parked mari.somnol proper and started from scratch over on Macintosh Garden's Web hosting. I laid out everything you see on my sites now, a proper clearinghouse of everything I made and wanted to show the world. Art, music, reviews, essays, you name it. I started unearthing stuff that I'd done on the Scratchpad or the group blog that had gotten buried in time and finally gave it a place on my site.
It was great, and I was really happy with it, but it wasn't on Somnolescent. It was never meant to be permanent. It just sucked having to link people to this place that wasn't the somnolescent.net domain I've been coveting since I was 14.
Come mid-2024, I developed the nofi/lofi/hifi idea and started planning ways to maintain three different websites feasible. My time with Protoweb introduced me to how much I love writing PHP, and nofi launched in May 2024. lofi launched shortly thereafter.
They were great, and I was really happy with them, but they still weren't mari.somnol. This whole thing was to rebuild mari.somnol, my place on the Web, the place I've posted everything to since December 2018. hifi was the final step, but it was going to be the most complex of the three, and life and jobs and other projects meant putting it off. It just sucked having to link people to something that wasn't mari.somnol.
In February, I said "fuck it, I'm tired of waiting", and went for it. I started work with a few pages, and then the layout switcher. Even when it was working, I still had to tweak the pages and how I was building them to accommodate multiple layouts. There's potentially still a lot more work on that front when I unveil the minerteaux and mari_v1 themes. I didn't care. Finished over perfect. It would go up soon.
I drew a really adorable marf and Cammy, lined it, made it wobble like the Alexis and Setters on nofi and lofi, and it was ready to go. hifi went up on April 4, 2025.
The return to mari.somnol, after years of having it parked with that same wonky early lofi layout, is here. It's responsive. It hits all the checkboxes. That Cammy and marf may be my favorite thing I've ever drawn, period. It's not just satisfying for how it came out, it's satisfying for finally having reclaimed my subdomain, a place that was quietly unused for literal years despite being the one with my name on it. I can go home now. I can bring people to my home now, and show them the cool things I'm up to. Yes, I am sentimental about this.
There is still work to be done, but I don't care. It's so rare for me to finish things anymore that, when I do, I look at them more than anybody. I think it's a good sign when you can make something that you personally enjoy. I like my old music more than anybody else. I read my album reviews more than anybody else. I don't think it's narcissism, I think it's making something so good, your target audience goes nuts for it—and as a hobbyist, your target audience should be you.
I'm damn proud of what I do.
I think I'm coming back up, after a really shitty month last month. Not periods of mania, but learning to be self-sufficient again. Everyone else is weird and they have their own things going on. Only I can always make myself happy. That's a whole journal entry in of itself, but it's a lesson I've needed to learn for well over a decade now, and I think I'm finally getting it.
