Journal! Why have I forsaken you. I don't particularly want to dump a load of really personal shit out onto the Internet, but I have been going through one of the most unstable mental health episodes I've ever experienced. My mood has been a fucking yo-yo. For extra hilarity, I also decided to start a strict diet and temporarily quit drinking to gain some mental clarity, and while I ultimately think those were a good call, short term, I am down two things that I quite enjoyed in a period of already not feeling great. I have the timing of a drummer.

That out of the way, I have been fairly busy with some legitimately cool things, so let me quickly get March summed up on here as I look forward to a much more stable April...

The marfGH repo

marfGH continues to be sharp in my mind's eye. I have a handful more songs to finish for Volume 1, I want all the menus to get retextured (and the lads are interested in helping, bless them, and I'm interested in paying them for it, yes), and I've been working on a few new script features to really separate marfGH from the rest of the pack. Some of these (Jukebox Mode, manual camera cut authoring) have long been implemented and I've just been cleaning up how I wrote them, and some (like a make a setlist mode to play any number of songs without having to menu dive each time) are taking experimentation and knowledge to put together right now.

As such, I have started a GitHub repo for my chart testing disc. These feature all of my working scripts in DTA (plain text) format, no songs or milos included. I know the audience for this is fairly limited to only the handful of people in the community that can read, build DTAs into the tokenized format the game actually uses, and debug any issues, but it makes me happy to see. This also gives me version control in case I ever really fuck the dog in the ass and end up with a nonfunctioning disc somehow.

One other big script project: cleanup of the entire game's internals. marfGH uses very few of GH2's menus or features—no Career, no memory card functionality, no splash screens, etc. I've been working a lot on stripping out unused features as they pertain to my disc, mostly so I don't have to work around a lot of vestigial scripting should I want to write more features into the game. With milos, I've dropped 10MB of disc space and removed a couple UI scripts entirely from the equation, so I'm very happy with the weight reduction.

A new plan for sketches

I kinda lost steam on art at the start of the year. Caby has a saying that, if you find yourself creatively frustrated, that often means a breakthrough is coming on, and I think I've had one lately. I've been very exacting and careful with my sketches in the past. This made sense in 2022 when I was just trying to make a cat look like a cat, but I'm now three years in, and all the tons of layers and going slow has done is, well, slow me down. I know roughly how to draw a humanoid body, I don't need to be so scared of it.

I've been retraining my hand and brain to draw lighter and quicker as a result. This lets me sketch on one layer (and hopefully eventually paper) without having things become an unreadable mess, and I've been trying to rely more on simple shapes to block things out than worry about complex detailing in the sketch stage. I think it's already paying off nicely. Here's a handful of sketches I've done in the past two weeks:

Two of these are Caby and Savannah's superkitty OCs (superkitties being an open species of sorts I made to group Miranda and Prince as the thickly-maned anthro cats they are), one is my girl Miranda taking a look in a book, and then there's a Cammy holding a marf that I sketched out for the home page of hifi that I will hopefully line and be able to get the site out soon. Also, there's some Sebs. I drew those before I started experimenting with pen pressure, mostly to remember how to draw him because he was on my mind a lot. I'll get back to that.

I really like all of these! Drawing is a lot of fun when I let myself have fun with it. Caby also suggested I do more aimless doodling and not worry so much if I can use things for specific purposes (game graphics, site graphics, toyhou.se profiles, etc), and that's been a big relief too. Caby is always right.

And here we are, nowhere

I've also been dancing with writing stories again. Another thing I lost steam on going into 2025 was my character work. That's a whole other story that, again, I really don't want to dump online, but it sucked. I've been missing my good lads, and I realized how many stories I want to write that I haven't yet.

So things started with Seb, as they once did. I've been wondering about his past, and since Pennyverse proper is still a bit fragile (a lot less now that I've been writing), I thought I'd start with his college years. It'd give me a chance to revisit him, now that I see him as this socially fearful, timid shut-in as opposed to the big angy armadillo he used to be, and pour some of my own college experiences into him in the process. I wrote some brief snippets of story and a fake IRC log of him logging into a school chatroom and making a friend, funnily enough a Japanese badger. (I've yet to visually design him, but his name's Kirin, I think.) That got me thinking about his arc over those four years and how he has his first run-in with Pennyverse's true, unsung antagonist, the settlement guardian for The City (rename pending).

I was feeling encouraged, so I pocketed all those for the moment and switched back to a story I'd started writing a while back but didn't get very far into, Nowhere. Nowhere was meant to be a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon fic and tribute to me as a teenager, back when I wanted to draw and make OCs and was too scared of being shit at any of it to. Nowhere is about this human girl who panics her way into the Pokémon world and wakes up a Cyndaquil, and she has to travel far north with an especially stupid Wooper named Gilbert to learn the way back to the real world. Each chapter is themed after a specific song on the Ride album Nowhere, which I definitely used to listen to back when I was 15 and would idly fantasize about PMD OCs on car rides. (I feel a link between the worlds of shoegaze and PMD that no one but me does, but Caby says it works, so that makes me happy.)

I've only gotten two chapters and change into it, but I'm doing my best to get going again. I feel like, especially if I pinned some illustrations to it, I could have something that other folks online would like as well, not just in the story but in the fact that it's weirdly a PMD fic that's not very tied to the games. Normally, PMD starts with you turned into a Pokémon, and you and a partner starting a rescue team and going out and, well, rescuing, but I've got very little of that going on. Miki (the Cyndaquil) and Gilbert will end up in dungeons, sure, but they're not multi-floor affairs with Skarmory at the top, they're just story bits that play out in caves and in woods.

It's been nice to reconceptualize a lot of my old OCs as well. Just about everyone important in this story has been a character I've had in mind since I was 14-15, and it's been nice finally giving them a home because I couldn't do it back then. Hopefully, it won't be forever before you guys see anything of it.

A reading rainbow

hifi mari.somnol is perpetually ten minutes away from launching. I just need to line that Cammy and marf, basically, before I feel comfortable launching it proper. It won't be feature-complete, but it will be complete enough that I can start showing it off and updating a whole ton of links that currently go to lofi.

One of the things that won't be present at launch are my stories, for one thing because I have very few that I'm happy with sharing super publicly at the moment. I did put Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure up on nofi, but transferring that to HTML only made me realize what a fucking nightmare maintaining three copies of every single story will eventually become at scale. I started planning out a PHP/MySQL-based solution for delivering stories (which I wrote about in my last journal entry and then completely forgot about), but that felt like a lot of work, and there'd need to be quite a lot of finding and replacing to deliver HTML 3.2 <font> stuff to nofi, less semantic HTML 4 and CSS to lofi, and normal semantic HTML5 and CSS to hifi.

So, I went looking for markup languages that can produce books instead. There's plenty out there—LaTeX, AsciiDoc, FictionBook, and the one I've started looking at, DocBook. My goal is to have each story as a document that can be rendered out to the three sites with zero extra work needed on my part. If I need to fix something, I fix it in one place, rerender, and reupload.

DocBook seems to meet my needs quite comfortably. It's XML-based (which means it's written nearly identically to HTML) and can be converted to HTML through a language called XSLT. XSLT, in simplest terms, controls how a program turns an XML document into another format. This sets which elements turn into other elements, how certain patterns of elements should be handled, all that kinda logic-y stuff that normally I would do by hand in my head. DocBook is meant for technical references, but nothing really stops it from being used for stories. It can do pages, books, chapters, articles, paragraphs, quotes, and again, with three different XSLT files, I can turn one DocBook XML file into three sets of HTML pages for nofi, lofi, and hifi—no database required.

I will keep everyone updated on how learning DocBook goes when it comes time to start putting stories up on the site. I doubt it'll be very complicated.

Somnolescent streamer house

On a very brain off head empty note, everyone's been streaming every week! Me on my channel on Tuesdays, and Caby and Savannah over on Twitch on Sundays and Fridays, respectively. It's been a lot of fun watching folks get through games and revisit old favorites, and on my end, it keeps me playing games, which I've been known to neglect in the past. At the moment, I'm maybe halfway through Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando (I played the first one on stream last year), and I'll be onto Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy when it gets warmer out and we're all in the mood for something lush and light.

Catch our streams! Seriously, they're a lot of fun, and we will chat with you. Provided you're not a total loon. Please don't be a total loon.

Anyway, I'll keep up with the journal stuff better, promise. I think things are stabilizing, and writing in this thing definitely keeps me a little more grounded, like having to consciously commit things I've done to long-term memory as opposed to them being immediately forgotten the moment they get posted to Discord, as I am known to do. See you around, lads.

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I have had this unexplainable sense of impending doom over the past week or so. It always gets disproven, I know these thoughts are usually pretty silly, and I've experienced enough emotional upset in my life to learn to ignore it pretty well. Still, vividly imagining my getting terminated at work or spending this morning pondering how all my backups would be completely fucked in the case of a house fire, of course. (Tossing out all my working creative methods to try and make it easier on myself in the future has had the exact opposite effect in the short term, also.) I swear I've been having much weirder dreams than usual lately, but damn if I can remember them now.

So while I ease those thoughts by working a little harder on the clock and looking into a BackBlaze subscription, let's dust the journal off with some Web talk like I do best.

I intended to have hifi finished by the end of last month, but aside from my lack of desire to work on it, I have hit a certain road block in site structuring that requires some planning and PHP. Keeping three sites in sync is not easy, doubly so for sections with a ton of static pages, like my Guitar Hero modding tutorials or my stories. Each version across nofi/lofi/hifi has roughly the same page content, but differences in markup and image handling that make them kinda completely nightmarish. nofi uses no CSS at all; lofi uses no HTML5, and thus much fewer semantic elements. hifi alone uses <figure> and <figcaption> for styling images and their associated captions. All three use similarly-named images in different file formats.

The worst part? Each page, multiply it by three. If I have 19 tutorials on my site, I'm actually maintaining 57 pages on the backend. This is not realistic on myself.

My stories present an extra challenge, page length. My old stories on mari_v2 were short enough that they could go on a single HTML page each, but if I ever write anything longer (which is a definite possibility in the future), page weight and ease of reading become a concern. I'm catering to Windows 95 computers with 64MB of RAM running Netscape 3.0 alongside your phone or gaming desktop. With one longer story, I can easily make that machine eat shit, or split up to make it happy, annoy people on modern machines who want an uninterrupted reading experience. Or, perhaps, people do want things split into smaller chunks! Does that mean they'll be forced into using nofi with none of the creature comforts of lofi and hifi having actual layouts and page widths and shit?

Here's my proposal. I'm writing this for my own use as much as your enjoyment--explaining the solution is the first step towards implementing it. (I get none of this is particularly fancy and I'm potentially overexplaining things, but I'm also writing for friends and people who don't work with databases. Not everyone can be as smart as you, Greg.)

I've already been making good use of PHP and MySQL stuff for my album reviews, and I think they're the answer here as well. If you don't know, a SQL database isn't just potentially one chunk of data. They can have any number of database tables in them. Databases contain tables, tables contain rows, rows contain as many individual cells as needed, and all of these are easily identifiable and are a really excellent way for organizing big slabs of data.

The plan is to have a database where each "bundle" of reading material, whether that be a tutorial section, a story, or a collection of stories, is its own table, and each row is an individual (HTML) page and associated metadata, like page descriptions or if each row belongs to a larger chapter. I can then use PHP to get rows and tables on demand and manipulate and format them as desired, using find and replace to save me having to maintain each version of each page separately, or joining rows together to have a story on one, unbroken page.

Obviously, for larger stories, the appeal is obvious. I write the markup once, and PHP can, all on command, return the whole story on a single page or return the nofi version with CSS classes for character dialogue color coding replaced with <font> tag soup all without me needing to do anything. PHP offers some really nice find and replace functionality, like accepting arrays for both the find and replace in an operation. I just have a list of what to replace with what for each site version, and it brings it to your browser without me touching anything.

For smaller collections of stories, each row can be its own stort. With what I've currently been writing with Pennyverse, that can be a prose snippet, a chatlog, a typed up fake news article, or frankly any way you can tell a story in a chunk of markup, like individual pictures for a comic. Point being, all of these tiny stories are nicely organized together, but can be returned separately. Tutorials work the same way: all tutorials are collected in one place, and I only have to write them once and do the find and replace for each mari.somnol version.

As a nice bonus, .htaccess trickery lets me do this completely invisibly in the background by rewriting the actual, messy links to the PHP script that does all the heavy lifting with HTTP GET variables and the like into nice, clean, static-looking URLs. Something like stories.php?story=kevin-and-theo&page=2 becomes stories/pennyverse/kevin-and-theo/2/ and back as well. .htaccess silently redirects a request for the latter to the former, the script looks up the correct row in the correct table, returns the text, formats the page, and delivers it to you at the latter URL without you ever seeing the redirects. Pretty neat, huh?

I'm going to soft launch hifi without any of this having been done hopefully within the next week. I can't do any database work on my home server copy because DreamHost obviously doesn't accept offsite database requests. I'm sure WampServer packs some kinda MySQL solution into it that I can use (hence the M in "Wamp"), but I never set anything like that up and frankly, I'm okay with just deferring it. It's better to have it online over perfect, and it's better to let people enjoy what I've done so far than make them wait even another week for me to implement another feature, even if it is a very cool one. I really have to start downsizing and chunking my projects more, so I think a soft and incomplete launch is just what the doctor ordered.

That, and a full Somnol Discord server backup just in case something happens. Did I mention I've got a weird sense of dread lately?

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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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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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