Well, I am again unemployed. This is the first time I've ever actually gotten fired from a job instead of leaving. If you're asking "well, what did you do?", so am I. I got broken up with over a thirty-second phone call that just said "we're making some changes and your services are no longer needed" at noon on my day off. That was it. Wasn't like "hey, was good working with you", no explanation for why, just "Okay? Alright, bye." And no, there were no writeups, no paper trail for any incidents. This just isn't how you fire someone, but that's how it was done.

My first reaction was one of anger, honestly, at how bitchmade a fucking firing over phone call really is. I stayed positive about it for the rest of the evening and through last night's stream, thinking how that job made me a bunch of savings and paid off my student loans and how now I have so much more time per week to catch up on creative stuff, but something sad hit me last night instead, and that's kinda been the feeling ever since. I'm just sorta left to wonder what it was that was sealed the deal—and it really could've been as simple as the trust fund kids who own the company don't like me. Everything I can think of that they might claim was firable, someone else there was openly doing and saying as well, and usually multiple people. Maybe that's like how it's always been though, where marf bad even though everyone else is also doing the same thing.

See, what's funny is that they said they were hiring for "part-time help with the summer coming up" in the days leading up to my firing, and they've been training a new guy over the past week. They would've just gotten done showing him how to tear down trucks yesterday when I got the call, and that was the end of his training to my knowledge. It's not out of the question that was actually my replacement, and if that's the case, that's some hardcore bitch shit. Nothing was amiss. No goodbye for the night was out of the ordinary. I just left on Sunday, hung out on Monday, got the call Tuesday. She waited until I was far enough away to say "see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya" and then ducked the fuck out in under a minute.

I wonder if I'll still be able to peek at people's schedules through the app for a bit—if he gets promoted to full-time, I suppose I'll have my answer.

Yeah, I think that's the gayest part. I specifically asked during the interview back in August of last year if I was actually going to get told if something was a problem, and I got emphatically told yes, and the answer turned out to actually be no. This is why, for all the bad shit at Staples, I felt connected to my GM, an honest dude who understood me, explained a lot of shit to me, and told me to get out of the way before it was too late. I have gotten infinitely more honest answers from my first grocery store job where I was making $11 an hour as the asshole beer counter guy than I did from the cowardly fucking store manager here, two years in and infinitely better at the work and the social skills.

Fuck 'em.

For me going forward, the plan is pretty simple. I'm not gonna look for work ahead of the trip, because that would be stupid. I have the savings, I can just hang out at home for a couple months and work on art and marfGH stuff like I've really wanted to anyway. Then I'll do the trip, stay probably a month and a half (I'll ask Caby what's the longest she'll tolerate me, not like staying longer costs more), and find something when I get back home. I think I can finally start chipping away at my various music and reading backlogs and getting ahead on the things I've been wanting to do without standing around, waiting for HVAC workers with missing teeth to sell cases of Busch Light to. You enjoy your flagging store because your owners are too concerned with bringing in craft NA beer no one drinks and spending thousands trying to win glorified AB display lotteries for the princely sum of about half of what currently sits in my bank account as a peasant. Eat shit.

(Sidenote, I saw a post on Tumblr a few weeks ago where someone was bizarrely confused at the idea of a gaming/etc backlog? Like no, most people's backlogs are not like a business trying to hit quarterly earning goals—you just have a lot you wanna play and finite time to get to it all. It getting turned into a neat list only makes sense. I imagine backlogs probably don't make sense to people who only play three games, but y'know, whatever. Just a stray thought.)

I'll try to get this journal moving more as a result of all the extra free time. Buckle in. It's nice out.

I might sound insincere 'cause I'm
Wasted all the time, I've
Thought it over and

It's over

I'd like to thank you, my dear
In less than a year

It's over

Well, what is this? A drawing from your old pal Cammy? Yeah, turns out Warring with my Mental Health doesn't stop me from drawing a fucking picture, because I don't suck dick on the weekends, so instead I lined this sketch of Bunny and afan from last year and shaded and colored it all sunny, because happy Easter, you fucks! Good times.

Completely unrelated story: sometimes it takes a dragon spitting in your mouth (while fruitily whispering into your snoot how much you like it) for you to realize how precious life is. I had this really hot Carolina Reaper jerky from Mythical Meats, the jerky we sell at the beer store I work at, on Friday, and my stupid ass, told plenty of how this jerky was A Little Excessive, kept popping piece after piece of just the 2oz bag of it, waiting for the truly mythical heat to kick in until I finished the whole bag. In the mouth? A little nose running, need a drink. In the stomach? I was still doubled over at 2AM, and you bet I hibernated for 12 hours and had to go super Saiyan the next day.

Don't fuck with the Carolina Reaper. That shit will sue you in Australian court for $300,000, and it will win.

Anyway! It was good jerky, and people IRL speculated it was the cause of my absurd energy on Saturday. In reality, I think I'm just tired of being down bad, and I think I'm ready to start embracing how I work and the good things I have to offer the world. It's just the fact of the matter—I work fast, I do everything, I'm here to get my ideas out and not to be gifted in any one medium. I want to celebrate that more. This is the first time in history I've really been able to appreciate my specific, well-rounded gifts, and somehow it's all flown under my radar until now because I'm a sperg who has perpetual tunnel vision.

I visited some comic shops on Monday with Logan, who came down for a visit. Got myself some PS1, PS2, and Wii games, plus an unplayably battered vinyl copy of The Doors' self-titled and a much better condition copy of Cream's Disraeli Gears. Both are very good, the former I thankfully only spent $4 for the privilege for, and the latter $10. I liked 'em both quite a bit. I'll have to replace the Doors one sometime soon. Keep an eye on the album reviews for more random record store pickups I've been listening through at random soon.

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.