archives_v2 is finally live! (plus Stroudfest photos)

Happy September, everyone! Hope all my fellow Americans had a nice Labor Day weekend, and all my fellow not-Americans had a nice weekend anyway.

The big announcement of today: the archives redesign is finally live! The original variant of archives was always meant to be pretty simple and quick, and I think five years living with it has been long enough. It's still up, funnily enough, on archives. You can probably see why it needed to go at some point, being just a gigantic list of links. Charming! Nice for what it was, I still find the GoldenEye theming fun, but given that it changed aims from a file dump to a whole browseable museum of Somnolescent sites and history, it just wasn't doing it anymore.

It was back in mid-2023 when Caby originally designed Miranda that I intended for her to become the mascot to archives, but it took me another year or so before I was finally where I wanted to be artistically to make it happen. And then another year to make it happen period. I know, so two years into her existence, and she's finally got a spot where she should've been all along. Never say I don't make it happen, chat. It's just slow goings sometimes.

Really, it was just two graphics and some more work on that timeline page that kept it all these months from getting finished, so I just swallowed the frog yesterday and knocked it all out. It was a fun reminder of how much I've grown artistically, even from last year, having to consciously mimic my old sketching style and detail level with the Miranda you see on the hoards page because my art's just changed that much from when I started working on this in August 2024. I'm pleased though. Very cute.

This really just leaves cammy.somnol as my last truly outstanding Web project, really, period. There's some graphics for mari.somnol I've still been wanting to do and have half-started, and cammy.somnol too is all graphics. Next year, I promise, I'm going back to actual creative work and not just building websites. All of this is very nearly settled, and I'm proud of it, but it very much wasn't meant to be the main course. We're getting to the main course, I swear.

Have some photos I took on a Kodak EasyShare during Stroudfest over the weekend. That's a big street fair in my town for Labor Day weekend where they have a band play and local artists and businesses sell their food and craft. It's a pretty fun camera to use, and the crunch on it is nice, though I really need to get batteries that aren't alkalines for these, because it was being sketchy while we were out, hence the reset timestamps. (To be fair to the Kodak also, I did give it the used batteries that were in the PowerShot and being used for the last two weeks or so of the Wales trip.)