October's been a tricky month for me. It's been hard adjusting back to life at home, and more often than not, I've just felt like people don't really need to see more from lil old me, really. I started just playing PS2 games all day instead, and that was cool, but I knew I had to get back on the horse sooner or later. (It calls to me. It goes "neigh neigh" in the night.) I've also been having really irritating, bruised soreness in my writing hand thumb from a tendon issue (exacerbated by games). Sometimes, even typing makes it act up, let alone drawing. That's not helped.
Thankfully, my thumb is healing (stretches!), blue skies have started to come out again, and I have to get excited about making stuff again. I want to make music again, I want to learn bass and start playing, and I want to indulge myself in my characters and all their weird, neurotic behaviors that feel so close to home to me again. It's not just therapeutic for me, I think it'd help me reconnect with people again. Friends like seeing it, and random people online get invested in it. I need more of that. I need more actual connection. (Fuck Reddit, amen.)
Despite everything, I have kept on working on at least something or other most days, so I have a little back catalog of stuff to update the journal on. Roundup time!
marfGH: Volume 1: two months to release
Lots on Volume 1 has happened. I'd been stuck on customs since even before I flew out ("Layla" is just so goddamn long), but I powered through it and now have two of the final three customs in the bag. I have the last one, The Tragically Hip's swampy noodly "New Orleans is Sinking", tempomapped and ready to be charted out. After this is a few bugfixes (and lots of checking over) the existing charts and two Rock Band DLC ports, which each take a couple hours instead of about a week each. I left them for last as a way to chill out after all the heavy lifting authoring from scratch.
Embedded video in the journal! I'm so fancy. If you see nothing with your retro browser, click here. Video is in MP4, so hope you've got K-Lite installed.
I still have to fix some moderate bugs in the custom features and retexture a dozen or so screens (yay thumb!), but I think if I buckle down, I can make it work, especially with the help of my more-skilled artsy friends. At the very least, if I can't get everything I want redone, I can get the big screens redone and somewhat intelligently allocate the remaining effort to where it won't be too conspicuous what's a vanilla GH2DX menu and what's one of my new ones. Then I'll just get the remaining screens in with the Volume 0 reissue in the spring and silently update Volume 1 with it. I really just want to get it over the finish line for Christmas.
Work on the Wales 2025 trip diary (and cammy.somnol refactoring)
I realized I was avoiding even looking at the photos I took over the trip, and that's not great. I don't want to be sad it's over, I want to be ecstatic it was so lovely when it happened. I've been aiming for a page a day and managing it, especially since I already sorted the photos by gallery slightly after I got back. It's been really nice seeing it all again, honestly. Such good memories, and something nice for Caby to look at while she braves her last year of uni. (It's not just photos; I did scan in the artwork for all the games I've picked up at CEX, all like 24 of them, and made a nice little table with them, plus I've got some rambles about how great Red Dwarf is to write.)
There's always extra little projects that crop up while you're working on the big stuff, though, and cammy.somnol is no different. The thing's needed a redesign and refactoring for a long while now. In various places I've found Netscape Composer junk from cammy_v1, Netscape 4.0 bugfixing and JSSS hacks from when I was foolishly trying to support it, the art is old and kinda all over the place. I remember initially I didn't want to use AutoSite for more of a handcrafted flavor, but when the site's as big as it is, you kinda need it.
Not only is it all generated by AutoSite internally now, it's also all been converted to Markdown input pages—this means I write site pages the exact same way I write these journal entries. Literally! HTMLy and AutoSite even both use HTML comments at the start of each page for metadata. What that means for you is very little, since the pages will outwardly look the same (aside from the improved graphics, which are almost done, again, yay not being able to draw!), but it makes things a lot faster for me. As for those graphics, I've switched to PNGs over GIFs and given up on the whole "making it grain" sorta deal. I really don't want to be spending days on site graphics anymore. They're not that exciting and I also can't really share most of them in my art places. Lots of work, little payoff, I can't be doing that shit anymore.
Assembling my 2025 mix CD
What I can be doing more of is mix CDs! You might remember when I mailed out a lovingly crafted mix of songs to friends in November of last year, only to remember that only me and dcb even have working CD players. Whoops.
Anyway, I really liked doing that, so I've decided to make it my annual tradition. I did have one for 2025 mostly finished before I flew off, but as much as I still like it, it wound up being a little miserable, so I completed it, shelved it for now, and started work fresh. It's finally come together in the past two days or so in sequencing and interludes and mastering, and I'm pretty thrilled with it. I have to wait on a single coming in for a weird radio edit of one song I'm using (at the moment, I'm just working with a low quality YouTube rip), but I think that's all that's left on the mix itself.
Stay tuned on the marf Collection channel also! I'll be posting these mixes, seamless transitions and all, for everyone to hear. I'm even gonna work on lyric videos for them, it'll be so fancy. It should make it easier for the Somnolians to listen through them as well.
Call of Duty, but no lobby to say slurs in
Finally, while I wait for my thumb to feel good enough for actual drawing work (I had to take a break writing this because it started acting up!), I've been winding down playing the PS2 games and started playing some of what I bought in Wales finally! The OG Call of Duty sounded like a fun place to start, and it was! I had to crank the settings way down to get it to run decently on the eMachines Box, but that's authentic. (Game is from 2003, so it's right at the tail end of what the eMachines Box, anemic as it is, can play.)
I wasn't expecting it to be as intense and realistic as it was! I know that sounds funny with a 22-year-old game, but seriously, you really gotta use your tactics and be vigilant for where enemy gunfire is actually coming from. The first village has you parachuting into Normandy, clearing out Germans, and then planting plastic explosives on their big guns. Your squad actually isn't too bad or dumb for being AI squadmates, you get told exactly what to do by a squad leader, which I appreciated as an idiot, and accuracy very much matters, so don't fire constantly and go prone if you have to to take someone out from a distance.
Anyawy, it's been a lot of fun, and interesting to compare it to Day of Defeat, which was the Half-Life WW2 team shooter that came out around the same time period. Apparently the first Call of Duty was made by some alumni of the Medal of Honor series, so that might be another to look into if this kinda thing appeals to me.
