Hello! I notice you're using Netscape (or other CSS-noncompliant user agent—in which case, consider this an easter egg) to view this journal. Because Netscape is so titanically shit, I have disabled image viewing on Netscape specifically. If I didn't, you would notice random images being replaced with each other and similar such strangeness. The posts are still visible, but you'll be missing the images, which are half the context of these posts.
You should use RetroZilla if you can; it runs on Windows 95 and up and gives you a perfect cammy.somnol viewing experience, plus more comfortable Web browsing on retrocomputers in general. Failing that, Internet Explorer 3 (which amusingly also displays this message, since it doesn't support the display
CSS property) and up will also work perfectly fine for seeing my journal posts.
We're getting somewhere with all of this
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.
Cammy has a cooler site than you
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.
Putting a six-year-old specter to bed
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.
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.)
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.
Since my girl loves matching icons and we needed new ones,,
Happy six years, Caby <3
It's been a strange last couple of years as life re-enters the picture and we get busy and don't just have time to hang out all day like we used to, but I'm really happy to say I'm less clueless now and understand her better, and she understands me better as well. Our discussions don't turn into argumetns anymore. It's been well over a month since we last fought, which maybe doesn't sound like a long time, but it's the most peaceful we've felt in a very long time.
It's been fun as well! Fun making her giggle on stream, fun watching her liveblog watching One Piece, fun drawing for her again. I'm very much optimistic that we're gonna settle into a nice, comfortable groove now. Next year, she graduates university at long last, and this year, I get a car and a license. The next trip will be in September. I think this is the most positive things have ever looked for us, doubly so now that I know to keep my weird neurotic moments in check.
I'll have a bigger post about a project I just started last night tomorrow. Today is a day of rest, and also group calls. I have something fun to test with everyone tonight that might just massively increase the number of games I can stream on real hardware.
He's afraid of the dark alright
First drawing of the year finished! January is Wynuary, as is tradition, and I wanted to add to the weirdly large pile of "Wyn exploring the dark with a flashlight" drawings. Mine has some shitty layered fog though, ooooh!
Yeah, first time painting fog, and I think it came out...interesting. I used the bleeding watercolor brush in FireAlpaca and then smudged it. There's five different layers of darkness here, some on top of the boy, some underneath. It does give it a nice sense of depth, at least. I kinda like it.
I'm on the fence about posting my art out on the big sites again. On one hand, I am seriously proud of where I've gotten and what I've accomplished in the past three years (check out my old attempts at Wyn if you dare), and waving it in people's faces always feels like a good idea, but then my emotions about art get complicated when other people, inferiority, and social anxiety get brought into the picture. My new year's resolution is that if I'm not wholeheartedly into the idea on my own, I'm not doing it, so I think I'm happy just posting them here to the journal. Keeps this place going! If my heart changes, I'll just have a nice backlog of stuff to post is all.
I am working on stuff in the background, at the moment a blog post and trying to get back on the art horse. Trying to leverage the eternal slow season at work for writing journal entries and blog posts so I can focus on stuff I can't do standing around waiting for customers or shit to clean up at home, like more art or playing FreQuency. I had a bit of a rough patch at the end of last week into this one, but I'm alright now. More to come!
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