I keep forgetting to make this post, but it's only been a few days, no harm done. No, not the Justin Bieber song, though that certainly is on brand given that 2010s nostalgia is ripe in the group these days. A chance encounter at a thrift store! With sixteen burned copies of a student film from New York:

I don't normally go to thrift stores. I don't have anything against them, but they've always felt a little sad to me, a reminder of what extreme poverty looks like. Is what it is. After a really successful flea market outing about a month ago, though, my mom suggested we go browse the CD selection there, and I like adventuring.

These uncurated selections have definitely piqued my interest this year. At a record store, you largely know what you're getting, and you'll be paying for that guarantee, but at a flea market, thrift store, library sale, or any place not specifically built to sell you music, you could find anything. Lots of garbage of course—I found a copy of Cher's Believe in just about every bin I looked in at the flea market, and you bet there was plenty of gospel and karaoke CDs at the thrift store, but then there's not garbage! Then there's indie rock CDs, copies of Windows Me, sealed blank CD-Rs you pick up for a dollar entirely for the novelty of having a 1999 Verbatim blank you burn Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 for the PS1 onto! That's not even counting all the mix CDs, home movies, and strange locally-released albums I found in the shelves.

And then we have Baby. We naturally took our time going through the bins in the back of the store, cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs (where stray PC games like to hang out, but nothing all that great this time), and tons of used monitors and TVs, all of which I'd much prefer to deal with over a shitty smart TV you buy new. (Can you believe our cheapo Onn Roku TV requires you to enable the composite inputs in the settings before you can use them? What the fuck?) I found a box of circa 2005 HP slimline jewel cases that I thought were unused, and not realizing I had a ton at home already, I picked up the whole box.

Before we'd even paid, though, my mom and I looked closer. There were discs in these cases! Each DVD-R looked exactly the same, a screenshot from some kinda independent film with some text reading "Baby" on them. They were dated 2008, by "Muse Productions". (Better than Passion Project Studios, I suppose!) Now her and I were immensely curious. What was on these? A really low-budget indie film? Porn? They came with the box of jewel cases, which was $6, so we were gonna find out one way or another.

As it turns out, it's a student film! It's about nine minutes long, probably multiple people's final, and absolutely reeks of late 2000s Final Cut Pro goodness, even down to the DVD authoring. Ithaca College in New York is thanked in the credits, and there seems to be a decent-ish cast to it. It's not all that interesting of a short film, but it is pretty competently mixed, edited, and structured, so I hope whoever was involved with it got a nice grade. (We didn't want to stalk the names we found too hard, but of the two girls who got top billing, we found one has been working as a head of production VFX artist at the same place basically since graduating in 2008, so that's a happy ending.)

If you're curious, I have uploaded Baby to The marf Collection on YouTube. Like I said, it's not really that interesting—some light commentary on quick hookups that aren't all that appealing the next morning. I suppose we'll see if anyone involved awkwardly finds it in a few years and asks me to take it down. I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed about, though. Certainly a lot better than the result of my attempt at a film degree.

That does leave me with one final question, though: what were sixteen copies of Baby doing in my thrift store 150 miles away from the college they're attached to? It's one thing if, say, twenty copies were made and then given out to production staff and professors, I totally get that. These are untouched though, and not only that, in the cases, they were aligned perfectly upright, meaning they were placed very intentionally and then never touched again. Were these intended to be given out and then they just didn't get around to it before graduation? Did one of the girls or production people bring them back home to here in town and then they just went to the thrift store? If you're curious, the DVD-Rs varied in brand, which tells me they were using the college's media to burn onto, and as I said, the HP box branding was copyright 2005, which means they went into these jewel cases at the time and just have not been unearthed since then.

I'll keep a copy for myself and then, as I need cases, recycle the rest or something. What a bizarre and fun find.

Brief moment before we begin: Go check out hifi's game review section! I just spent an evening capturing a ton of screenshots from real hardware for a bunch of games, both ones I've streamed and ones I haven't, and I'll be posting new ones on Fridays for the next few weeks until the pool runs out. Use the RSS feed to your advantage, and stick around for more to come.

So as I alluded to in the post from the other day, there's one other idea I've had for the cammy.somnol refresh that I've started working on. If you check the footer as of writing this, you'll see that the link designated "Elsewhere" is marked as an unimplemented link. That's because, up until now, I've not been quite sure how to use it.

It's pretty typical when you have a personal site to link to other people's sites. This was what I did all the way back on Neocities, linking to the sites of my friends and acquaintances and, funnily enough, a couple people who dislike me now. (Lempamo, babe, call me, let's catch up.) That was originally the idea for the /elsewhere/ directory, having a big long imagemap of the Somnolians peeking out of various stone portals, each of which would take you to their sites. Naturally, I never implemented this.

I mentioned in that post that I was pondering Arkm-style choose-your-own-adventure site navigation for cammy.somnol, but ultimately decided against it. I still think the idea is cool as fuck (much like Mario), and I didn't want to abandon it completely, so I decided to apply it to the still-vacant /elsewhere/ and turn it, indeed, into an exploration into elsewhere: you can use it to browse the rest of the site, you can explore other Somnolescent sites with it, or you could visit the various creative worlds of Somnolescent with it.

If this is sounding a little familiar to the longtime Somnolescent viewers, you might be remembering something I built in 2019 called "Colton's Adventure". "Colton's Adventure" was meant to be a CYOA-style way to explore Pennyverse's Apricot Bay, the two paths terminating in short stories I wrote. I don't mention "Colton's Adventure" much anymore because I really don't like how it came out. I just think it's mean-spirited and weird in spots, I don't much like the stories it went with, and I sat with it too long. There wasn't a sense of jubilation in the group when I finished it. In fact, it kinda went quietly. Not great.

It wasn't the format that was the problem, though. It just needed something better to come along and take advantage of it.

That brings us back to Elsewhere. When I built "Colton's Adventure", it was done entirely in static HTML, figured out by hand with flow maps on paper. Charming for sure, but clunky, and no doubt in the six years since then, I could come up with a better way to structure a CYOA section, yes?

Indeed. In twenty minutes at 4:30 in the morning after a night spent drinking (I sleep weird when alcohol is involved), I implemented a simple little PHP-and-JSON thing that completely trumps my old setup. Yes, it came that quickly.

JSON, if you don't know, is a plain text data format meant to be written by humans and read by computers. It consists of a long list of nested objects, arrays, and name-value pairs that, when put together, structure whatever you need the data for. In my case, I needed a list of objects, each one representing what would've been an HTML document under the old setup. From there, name-value pairs represent where you are, the description of the scene, and the scene ID, concluding with a list of scene IDs you can visit next.

"1": {
    "world": "island",
    "location": "Cammy's front yard",
    "bodytext": "<p>You stand in the yard in front of the large cluster of stone buildings that makes up Cammy's house in the sky. A marble fountain with many little jets of water spewing out in a circle stands between you and the house, though what water feeds it, you're not sure. A garden shed free stands to your left, and around the taller silo attached to the house to your right is a set of stairs descending into the ground.</p>\n<p>Cammy is probably inside the house, up to something or other. By the same token, though, there's plenty to see outside as well. Where do you go next?</p>",
    "directions": [
        {
            "destination": 4,
            "text": "Enter the house."
        },
        {
            "destination": 0,
            "text": "Approach the garden shed."
        },
        {
            "destination": 0,
            "text": "Take the staircase down into the earth."
        },
        {
            "destination": 2,
            "text": "Look around at the other islands and floating ephemera around you."
        },
        {
            "destination": 9999,
            "text": "<i>(What exactly is this?)</i>"
        }
    ]
}

PHP has a json_decode function for exactly this. Given a valid JSON file, it'll break objects into a list of associative arrays that you can manipulate from there. In twenty minutes, I had a decoder that would take a scene ID, print out various bits listed under its heading, and list out various other scenes to progress to next. Another hour to pretty it up, and I had the programmatic equivalent of "Colton's Adventure". If I want to add more scenes, all I have to do is add them to the JSON and link them up by ID to the existing ones. The PHP end of things takes an HTTP GET variable for the current scene, fetches it from the JSON, and parses it out.

I'm routinely impressed with how easy and fun PHP is to work with, I really am.

Now, the grind is writing out all those scenes! I've got plans for roughly four paths, more depending on how much the Somnolians want to help: a Cammy path, where you explore my house in the clouds and it takes you to various pages across mari.somnol and cammy.somnol, a Somnolian path, where you can visit their sites through Elsewhere, a Pennyverse path, where you can interact with the citizens of Apricot Bay, and a Pinede path, taking you a bit around probably Caerpinwyd (way too big a world to let you roam it freely, that could be a CYOA game all on its own). There's potential to visit other Somnolian worlds, but I'd need Caby and Savannah's help with those, and they can be added at a later date. My focus is on something shippable right now.

I'm convinced "Motorcycle" by Remy Zero was written for folks slightly under the influence. "Too much wine has crossed my mind" indeed.

So my website focus over the past year or so has been returning mari.somnol to prominence, and on all accounts, we're there. It's not even basically, all the important stuff is in place, plus a ton of the non-important stuff. Everything I wanted, the three flavors for any browser, the theme switcher on hifi, PHP album/game reviews, stories for all three sites that can be built from a central document, they're here. Aside from a few drawings and more content, mari.somnol is complete.

That brings me back to this site, cammy.somnol. cammy.somnol has always kind of had a rough go of things. If you don't know, it was born out of the digital garden thing that dcb and Devon got into back in 2021 or so. Devon's not even in Somnol anymore, lince.somnol was retired, and this too didn't really work for me. It felt kinda larp-y, where I had this retro-ish 90s furry sorta site with my art and my stories and any fixations I felt were a little too personal for mari.somnol, and then that was explicitly music, mod work, and stuff that I thought the Internet at large would like. In short, I was kinda embarrassed by the whole thing, the flavor was wonky, there wasn't a clear split between the sites, and each felt like they represented only half of me.

cammy.somnol was reborn in late 2022 then when I came up with a new way to lay it out. mari.somnol would be my portfolio-ish site. Anything I make, regardless of who it's for, would go on there. cammy.somnol would instead be an interests site and more devoted to who I am day to day. This worked really nicely, and still does! Issue being, 2022 was when I was still trying to find my footing as an artist. I couldn't draw Cammy, the badger namesake of the site (and of course my sona), so I settled for Setter instead. Setter is a secondary sona who was meant to fit into a world of domesticated animals that Caby's had in mind for a long time (same as Bunny for her), and because of the lack of snout, he was naturally a lot easier to draw.

Fast forward to 2025, and I now draw Cammy way more than I do Setter, and in fact I'm not sure how I like to draw Setter at the moment. Setter is now the mascot of lofi, so I don't feel bad replacing him here, and really, all the cammy.somnol art was done at a time when I had far less of a clue what I wanted aesthetically and what I was doing technically. It needs a refresh.

But truth be told, I've been pondering over the past month how extensive that refresh should be. I wasn't sure if I was gonna even keep the aboveground/underground sorting, or the island aesthetic. I thought maybe I'd go for a choose-your-own-adventure site structure, you go find the content! (Hold that thought.) It was all very up in the air, but I decided to hold off on saying much out loud or putting anything into action until it became a little clearer in my head.

Then I remembered more recently that a big inspiration for cammy.somnol in the first place is the still-wonderful still-in-action platypuscomix.net (which has apparently started redirection to platypuscomix.com when I wasn't looking, hmm). It was the long days of browsing pages on Garfield and Friends and the U.S. Acres comic strip (I was a Jim Davis kid, alright) or obscure as fuck cable networks or scary logos (I am also severely autistic, but you knew that) as early as 6 or 7 years old that still stick out in my mind. Back then and now, I decided I wanted cammy.somnol to be my own little small tribute to that, less on the cultural mirror front but no less on the personal fixation front. Why should the end result change all that much? The mission statement is still the same.

To talk a little more about Platypus Comix (because really, when the hell else will I be able to?), to this day, all content pages are built in FrontPage Express. FPX is a truly vintage 90s WYSIWYG page builder program that Microsoft regularly included with Internet Explorer starter kits and suchlike. I imagine this was to compete with Netscape Composer, the equivalent truly vintage 90s WYSIWYG page builder attached to Navigator. I've used FrontPage Express, and while it's got a nice, pleasant WordPad-like interface, I hate the markup it produces. For that matter, I hate Composer's markup. I don't care about the markup of other sites, not even our friend Peter Paltridge's, but my own? Again, I'm a sperg, and I care immensely. cammy_v1 was built with Composer, and I hated it.

All that said, I think the plain text and images aesthetic of Platypus Comix is still beyond reproach, and I'm very glad I didn't decide to change it.

So now, I've decided on what all I'm gonna do. cammy.somnol will be getting a visual refresh. Not gonna play with the formula, the site will be structured the same, I'm just gonna start updating the visuals. I learned a lot, trying to illustrate all those pages, and I'm ready to give it a second go in a more sustainable way. Here's my aims:

• Setter's going to get replaced with Cammy. This was the intention even back then.
• I need simple. Back in 2022, I was so green to art that whatever came out came out. A Setter could not be a chibi Setter or a detailed, highly anthro Setter, it was just Setter. I also probably felt I had to put all my available skills on screen back then, and now I have enough art lying around that it's okay if a Cammy in a site graphic has dot eyes and stubby limbs. If anything, the simplicity works a lot better for that.
• To the end of simple, I'm also dropping the visual gimmicks. I'd do lettering by hand for the banners because I wanted the edges of the letters to have the same texture as the lines of the drawing, and I just fucking can't do that anymore. Good lining practice, but really not worth it.
• I'm also going to be getting rid of the MS Paint GIF dither. While I still think it's kind of a fun look, it definitely noises the shit out of everything (doubly not great for stuff like backgrounds that text sits on), and because Paint doesn't support transparency, there's a whole process of running it through Paint and then making an alpha mask out of the original to make the dithered version transparent as well. I have to repeat this process every time I want to update the banner. I need to start making this stuff easier on myself. If I want some grain or a specific palette, I have a Python palettizer script I can use that'll respect transparency just fine.
• I'm dropping Netscape >6.0 support. I used to grapple with JavaScript Style Sheets (yes those were a thing) and CSS hacks to get pages to look right in pre-Gecko Netscape alongside everything else, but it was never worth it, and 4.x still chokes on the journal anyway for all my effort. cammy.somnol should be built clean, because that's what I prefer. nofi supports 3.x and 4.x just fine, and there's far better period browsers to use if you want that (IE and Opera come to mind—but really, just use RetroZilla).

There is one other big idea I've had for cammy.somnol, but I'll write that one up tomorrow. It's 1:30 in the morning, the moon is high in the sky right outside my window, and my eyes are starting to hurt.

Library sale started up yesterday! You might remember last year's post about it where I picked up a bunch of music and Redwall audiobooks, and we went again today. I love library sales and flea markets and the less-traveled end of music hunting, because you never know what you'll find and you'll usually pay a lot less. True, I may stumble into five copies of Cher's Believe, but then you'll find a copy of Editors' The Back Room for $1 and it becomes the best album you've heard all year! Not to mention the weird bootleg mix CDs (today's was Barbara Streisand in an Imation CD-R case) or the bonkers low-quality local releases, you find everything. I do love a good CD shop, I really do, but they're much pickier about what they accept and they know what they have for pricing.

I'm very fortunate to have such good options around me for CD hunting, and the library delivered this year! If you can't read from the picture, I picked up a (probably missing the dust cover but I don't mind, it suits) copy of Mossflower, because fantasy animal autism, William Gibson's Count Zero (no, I didn't buy it because of the Harmonix band Count Zero, that'd be silly, but I am also actually curious about his stuff since he's one of the few authors I recognize), out of shot, but iWoz, Steve Wozniak's autobiography, this funky book on registry hacks and customizations for XP with a still-sealed CD in the back and a December 2004 CompUSA price tag, and ten CDs, all a dollar apiece:

• John Frusciante's debut, Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, in a nice cardboard sleeve
• The Doors' L.A. Woman, because I've been accepting my love of oldies more and more
• The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse, on the gen X oldies front
• The Verve's Urban Hymns, which had me humming "Bitter Sweet Symphony" all day
• Throwing Muses' In a Doghouse, a two-disc set of all their formerly import-only early material
• The Reverend Horton Heat's Smoke 'em if You Got 'em (!!!!)
• They Might Be Giants' Flood (time to see what all the hubbub is about!)
• Return of the Rentals, because fuzz bass and throwback sci-fi are peanut butter and jelly
• Is It...Man or Astro-Man?, who I've been curious about ever since I loved the Jimmy Neutron theme as a kid
• The Juliana Hatfield Three's Become What You Are, because her work on that Lemonheads record was lovely and I'd hear "My Sister" on Lithium Deep Cuts at work decently often

Oh, and all of this was $13.50. And yes, I check the discs are in there and clean, and they were. I also saw plenty of other cult 90s favorites on display—Morphine, Spacemen 3—on what planet should I be allowed to buy the Rev, the Rentals, and Man or Astro-Man? at a library? Apparently this one, and I'm thrilled.

Been working on getting back on the art wagon, so here's some designs! I used to be really skittish about designing my own characters for whatever reason, but something about that's been starting to break recently, and I'm rather excited about it.

I don't know if I've ever fully explained what the whole Superkitty thing is here on the journal, but I ended up with two different anthro cats this year with head floof, namely Miranda and Prince, and started pondering ways I could group them. The Superkitties are a sorta-open species sorta-custom thing? Truth be told, it's just anthro cats with big hair, though with some fun pseudo-RPG perks thrown in that were inspired by a literature class I took in high school. The idea is that a race of mystical feral cats started breeding with one very advanced, scientifically-augmented cat sent into space by a world blowing itself up, and everything sorta spiraled from there.

The Superkitties have a WIP world on toyhou.se at the moment that I'd like to get punched up before Art Fight this year. I'm not participating, but Caby is, and I expect her two Superkitties will be listed on her profile, so I'd like stragglers to have some more context should they want that. Part of that involves giving people some more examples of what Superkitties look like, so here's a few designs! Each of these lads were designed to match a few specific "blessings" (those RPG perks I mentioned earlier), and my aim is to line and color them and use them to start decorating the Superkitty world.

I'll have some more finished art up soon. I spent all of today lining the cutest drawing of Caby and I, and I'm gonna color it up and get it up places soon. Man, being able to draw kicks ass. Big recommended.