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.