I woke up early this morning with a feeling of deep peace. My huge project for 2025, getting the marfGH base settled and Volume 1 out the door, not only happened on time, but has actually gotten the best first day reaction of any video I've posted in the last few years, in views and comments. It tops even the MoriHime custom, whose own reaction made me see there was still plenty of interest in what I can offer these games. It all feels very vindicating. Me and my friends pulled off in four weeks what I've been putting off for over a year, and I'm so proud of how it came out, and people really seem to love it.
In all that rush to build a monument to my childhood obsession (one of them), I've left a couple other interesting things not written about here. Let's get the journal back to business.
Volume 1 stream!
One last marfGH thing to mention: as I did at the end of last year, I will be streaming the whole of Volume 1 on New Year's Eve, hopefully with Caby in the navigator's seat as before. This is part of how I see my Decembers going forwards—Vib the Tuesday before Christmas, a new marfGH volume dropping on Christmas, and then playing through it the last day of the year.
With the disc base and art done, it's all just a matter of cooking up new customs and replacing the songs, which is thankfully the easy part. I had the setlist done before December even hit. Working on it sporadically throughout the year, I wouldn't be surprised if I get it done long before then, even, and just have time to sit on it and relax.
Christmas
Christmas was great. We went to my cousin's, had lasagna, and opened some more gifts. In just highlights, I now own the entire original run of Red Dwarf (complete with so many extras, unlike the Just the Shows set Caby and I watched through earlier this year), a new drawing tablet (courtesy of Caby!), a really adorable Alexi Caby drew me (I'll post it here in case she doesn't post it anywhere else), a bunch of delicious chocolate, a weather radio that I was not expecting but inadvertently had on the Amazon list I sent my mom (I just like the drone, but we are expecting heavy snow this afternoon), and from my cousin, a couple old-to-very-old cameras that I'll be looking to see if they still work. If they do, I'll have a Hi-8 camcorder in my toolbox for the first time ever.
Every time Alexi gets drawn, he becomes a bigger and bigger stuffed animal. Thanku again Cabyyyyy~ (Remember to post all the gift lads you've drawn to your socials! They're really good >:3c)
I'm already pretty backlogged on games and stuff to listen to, but I was honestly really happy with everything I got this year. What a great Christmas.
Grokipedia
Like most people who aren't lazy or don't have money in Anthropic, I don't like generative AI. I never had a use for it, I don't need my shit summarized or analyzed, I have yet to see proof it will actually disrupt anything other than the stability of the economy, and I'm starting to see quite a lot of investor shakiness, which makes me feel the wheels to this gigantic invasive RAM-consuming environment-exploiting freakshow bubble are finally about to fall off next year.
That said—I do find this funny still. I am cited on Grokipedia.
Because everyone needs a glorified chatbot with a stupid name coined by a man microdosing ketamine, Grok is Twitter's, and given that Wikipedia's leadership is quite explicitly given to consensus over accuracy these days, Grokipedia is an attempt to generate a Wikipedia using Grok that's more fact-focused. There are no contributors, only the bot, though humans can suggest changes to it. (Reminder that generative AI doesn't just hallucinate inaccuracies, but hallucinates the truth also. It doesn't know anything. It is a text predictor. A correct guess is still a guess. You should not rely on it for anything you want to be right about.)
Of course, Grok needs to get its information from somewhere, and I happen to be a regular writer about semi-obscure music stuff I find interesting. Cue me scouring my Google Search Console backlinks one day only to find that a lot of my First Draft blog posts have been cited on Grokipedia!
Now, of course, I'm not (intentionally?) putting inaccuracies in my music writeups, but it is funny that the big nasty Twitter bot is citing lil old me and my random-ass backwoods group blog for information about Failure's Magnified and Silversun Pickups' old bandmates. Most of my information is cobbled together from other writeups, band interviews, stuff like the Golden documentary, and obviously as a fan, I have an interest in getting it right. I'm also just me, on Somnol, with nothing guaranteeing anything I'm saying isn't just made up to fuck with people. (To be clear, I come from the school of "don't believe anything you read online". Everything is fake, everyone here is gay, I wake up every day and there's another psyop. Stay woke. Get that gucci breakfast.)
For Magnified (1994), production began with home demos recorded on a 4-track cassette machine in bassist Greg Edwards' apartment, incorporating drum machines to program intricate patterns due to the absence of a permanent drummer. These demos featured double-tracked vocals for added fullness but lacked ambience, prompting a full studio re-recording with live drums by John Dargahi and Edwards, supplemented by machine-generated kicks for precision. Co-writing involved exchanging instruments like bass and guitar, integrating production decisions into songcraft from the outset.
As for the quality of the pages themselves, caveat about spicy autocomplete aside, they're fine. They're overly wordy and kind of dense with details, stuff that's good if you have an interest in the topic and not great if you want a primer, but I found them highly interesting, as anything is when it's stuff you wrote read back to you. It's definitely amusing and kind of surprising to see it pull stuff like "Failure used the drum machine kick drum on the final album for some songs" from my text and put it in a Wikipedia format. I did see some stuff that was inaccurate about Silversun Pickups (Grok repeating the literally-never-was-a-thing "Couple of Couples" old band name, maybe it should read my old Misery Inspires interview archive too), but most of what else I skimmed through seemed close enough. (This is less a glowing review and more "I'm surprised it was only a little fucked up, like you definitely totally want from an informational source".)
Just something I found funny. dcb also happens to be cited on there about ChromeOS Flex and Gopher, which he found a great honor. Definitely totally.
Gran Turismo
Ending off with something feel good, I beat another game 100% before the year closed! Since I played through my childhood copy of Gran Turismo 2 last year, I figured I'd give my childhood copy of the first one a good spin too. I don't believe I ever played this one before this year, honestly. I do get around to these things eventually.
I have a full review of the game going up on mari.somnol tomorrow, but once I found the two really dominant cars (my fully kitted out Mitsubishi GTO '95 and the Dodge Viper RT/10, which I think is the fastest stock car in the whole game), it was one big joyride. Not as deep or as well-groomed as the second game, but it still had the same magic to it in the races. All but one of the first game's tracks ended up in 2, so I was in familiar territory once I bought myself properly competitive cars. (That said, I did miss Red Rock Valley Speedway and Rome Circuit while I was playing. The tracks they added for 2 are better than a decent handful of the ones they brought from the first game. Seriously, do we need both Trial Mountain and Deep Forest?)
What a badass car. Tuned exactly to my schizo driving style.
I would like to keep up my streak of beating games this year in the next. It brings me a lot of satisfaction to take a game I've known forever and truly beat it. I don't beat every game I play, and of those I do, I don't 100% all of them, but the ones I do 100%, you know I really enjoyed.
