I'm gonna be honest, I'm going through it a bit right now, hence the lack of journal posts. It's alright, everything is fine—strictly speaking, work is a grind but a pretty positive one (I got a really nice thank you card from one of the other employees for helping them out so much, and I think I am selling more ESP than anyone else still, a month on, so I feel pretty confident in myself), and the group is chatty as always and I think pretty close?—mostly just working on a lot of really cool things I can't share with everybody right now, and that's making me feel disjointed and disconnected from my normal routine of posting on here and keeping everyone in the loop. Maybe I should just tell everyone everything, let the closets empty, relieve the pressure, but dammit, that would be a lot less cool. I'm at a loss.

Back when I wrote "eMachines Box update!" in August, I said this:

And part of indulging is also realizing that this machine, and everything on it, is both fleeting and also renewable. I was worried about wearing out the CD drive, but it's not a Mac where I can't switch shit out if need or want be. There's a million other CD drives I can put in here if it dies. I have that power now. Hell, if the motherboard dies or something catastrophic, I can just replace it with any number of period-appropriate motherboards and reuse the case and all the components.

Well, Cammy found out about that. The eMachines Box started running awfully, weirdly slow a few weeks ago. I started looking into ways to speed it up (wasn't a fragmentation issue, wasn't running a lot of processes, wasn't a lot more than usual going on at bootup), and the thought of it being a failing hard drive definitely crossed my mind, but I put it out after running chkdsk and seeing "0KB in bad sectors". Admittedly, I should've checked the SMART data for the drive as well, but this runs XP, which doesn't have a way to check that built-in and I don't have an external tool for checking it. Will get one.

Thinking it was still something on the drive itself slowing it down, I ran the Disk Cleanup wizard—which took four days and never got past "compressing old data". I tried to stop it, it didn't seem to respond to me—and then I turned around, caught it restarting, and up came a really lovely message after it tried to network boot:

Amusingly, showing this to a guy at work made him go "oh, we had that monitor!". He's a bit older than me, so.

So the hard drive has failed. Now thankfully, data loss really isn't a concern this time—I've been backing up to my flash drives, so I lost, at most, a prototype for a site I'm working on and all the games I installed. Mostly, it sucks not having an eMachines Box to use! I peeled it open (it is still vile inside, thank you kindly Nicole) and found it had a 120GB Western Digital Caviar drive in there, so I have a 250GB replacement, same make and model, coming on the 17th. Before it gets here (today is day five of five for this work week, I have two days off tomorrow and Friday the 17th), I'll be taking all the compressed air I bought from work last night and deep cleaning it out on the deck. I wanted to save this for when I did the proper upgrades I have in mind on it, but meh. Make it easier on myself when that comes in the spring.

When I get the new drive installed, assuming it works, I'll be putting Media Center Edition on there instead of Professional, which is what I mistakenly put on there back when I did the reinstalls on it back in 2020. Media Center 2005 is what came on it, but I'm gonna be upgrading it to SP3 because of course. The new drive is also bigger than the old one, so I think I might get some more of my (ever-growing) music library on there, we'll see. Only suits. Also, the march of reinstalling all my games!

It's a weird feeling—dunno if I'd really call it melancholic because it's only a few days downtime, but I'm so used to hearing it whir under my desk, and at the moment, it's silent and everything's off and, I dunno, that was my computer, man. Loved that thing. It was also the way I wrote journal entries and responded to GenetQuest, so I'm not doing any site stuff or writing at the moment. That sucks a bit too. I had to WebFTP into cammy.somnol to update the journal this time since I'm on OS X and don't have my site stuff set up on this install.

Here, on a positive note, do check the art gallery on my temp site at mari@macintosh.garden. I got everything I drew in October uploaded, including another Cammy I did and, probably the best thing I've ever drawn, an experimentally-shaded Devon I did to practice smaller cats. Really settling into a style here, which is nice! I'm also uploading over on FurAffinity and Weasyl now as CoffeeColoredBadger, so if anything's really good, you can expect it posted over there too. Feel free to follow.

Some people will cut you 'til you're bleeding
But not me, 'cause I just wanna do it to myself

I'm just checking it up
Baby, one more time for you
Checking it up until the pile hits the sky
Well, even the best years are a waste of time
But baby, I'm a big star now

All these seasons, all this time
Spinning past 'til they leave you far behind
Lay me down in the circle where the spotlight shines
'Cause all this pleasure gets me high

I think I've felt every single emotion there is to feel in the past 48 hours. I've been so manic today, my word. I think I've been up since 4AM?

I will say, I just passed my 90 day probation at my job, so I feel comfortable mentioning what I do here explicitly and a little more often without worrying about someone trying to fuck with it: I have graduated from selling your grandparents cheap alcohol to fixing your grandparents' dirty, dusty Toshiba Satellites. I've learned a lot there so far; it's definitely a lot more pressure than my last job, but I enjoy it. I've finally settled in and I'm doing a pretty killer job, if the ESP numbers are anything to go by. (This has nothing to do with the Counting Crows song, as it's just a boring retail job. I just really like that one lately. The manic feelings, maybe closer to being related.)

Here, have a Cammy I drew this morning because I was fuzzy and missed him. I think, since Setter has the t-shirt and jeans comfy look going, I'll dress Cammy up a little more and make him a bit sleepier-looking to boot. This one didn't come out very large, so I can't do much with this drawing, and the sketchy coloring I did I think needs more practice—but then again, so does the way I draw Cammy period. I think it's super cute, and certainly a lot more solid than the last time I drew him in December of last year. Hooray for vaguely understanding heads now!

Alright, I gotta go get ready for work! On that saving money grind, yo.

Today marks one year of the journal, and thus, one year of cammy.somnol! I intentionally brought the site back up absolutely bare bones, with nothing except this journal, to see how it would grow on its own. It's been slow, but super rewarding.

There's still a bunch of pages ready to go over on the home server beta site that just need a Setter in the header. This includes the score pages, the MIDI stockpile, and one of the timelines (though that one's inverted, the Setter is already done, I just have to get other graphics for that page down). I have some other flavor graphics sitting around as sketches, and I'd like to edit or redo some of the others to make them more consistent. I've improved really dramatically in my art in the past year, and July brought huge, sweeping improvements to how I draw snoots and shape my heads, so you get a weird mix at the moment of the old Setters with the slight bump on the side of the head and the ones with proper snoots. Some of the Setters have eye shinies, some don't. That sorta thing.

My motivation has been a lot healthier this year. I'm done feeling like I need to prove myself, which was a big thing that drove me forwards in the past, but also caused me a lot of stress and a lot of burnout when stuff didn't turn out exactly as I liked. That's why I haven't been rushing to get any of that done, though it is still on the to-do list; I'm making this for me, and I like what we've got live already. I'm not feeling any great rush to get the rest up in case someone thinks the site is too barren. The photo galleries alone brought a lot to see back to the subdomain, and the Wales trip diary being finally done makes for nearly a full month of daily content, art, photos, fun stories, vibes, and future Cammy plans to read.

In short: it'd take anyone who isn't in the group a night to a few days to go through all this already. The rest will be done when it's done.

I've said it before, but cammy.somnol is the site I've always wanted to make, but never thought I could make. I never thought I'd be able to draw period, let alone illustrate a personal site, but I've found I not only enjoy it a lot, but I'm a lot better at it than I figured I'd be. Not, like, amazing or anything, but I'm already drawing all the animal people in comfy clothes I've ever wanted to, so how far I go is just a bonus to me. My confidence is growing. I feel like I'm getting more ambitious with my poses, and my lines are more flowing and solid. cammy.somnol has not only given me immense joy on its own, but it's also given me several new avenues to take any future site plans I have.

And let me tell you, if any of this sounds complacent, it's very much not. My aim is to have cammy.somnol up to parity with cammy_v1 by the end of the year. That's a few more Setters and a few more pages, really. Once that's done, I'm going to start cracking on the new design for mari_v4; the content is already done, it's up on mari@macintosh.garden, I just need to finish up the Mac OS 8-styled thing I started last year. The illustrations for that one will be less intense, less like full pictures and more halfbodies, a few fullbodies, probably just lineart. Something clean and cute. I had an idea to make them animated GIFs lined a few times to simulate Squigglevision. I still think that's a banger idea. Caby sorta did that with caby_v2 in spots.

Once my sites are back to fully working order, I will be at full power. My focus will return entirely to my projects. I have stories started. I have albums started. I'd like to start making proper YouTube videos on a new channel, something combining all my loves of music and technology and wandering rambling vlogs. Even outside my personal sites, I'm gonna be building caby.art for Caby so she can get back to doing commissions and having a place to link folks instead of doing all her business over her private Discord account, and Meowcities and the archives redesign are also half-finished and stuck in the pipeline. I'd also sorta like to redo my toyhou.se completely, hide all my characters, draw them all, rewrite their profiles, get my new lads up there too, and especially redo the (at this point very outdated and very wonky) Cammy and Somnolians assets for my profile.

It's kind of become a rethink of my entire internet presence, now that I have this ability to draw. It's going to take a lot of work, but I'm living for it. This is the most satisfied and most coherent I've ever felt as a person. I realized at the start of this year that I needed to focus less on bandying words with randos in Discord servers and more on creating and getting back to showing everyone how it's done. I think it's already paying off immensely. All of my hobbies, all of my music, all of my games are back to making me super excited—and after the two long years spent waiting for shit to reopen? That's all a badger boy could ever ask for.

As I was settling into my desk chair after a long day of working the store, I realized that there was no easy way to see what the most recent update to cammy.somnol was. You have my journal, but that's more like a diary with some other project stuff thrown in. mari@macintosh.garden (soon to be mari@somnol) has the front page changelog and the older updates page, but I had that on cammy_v1, and I don't think a changelog matches the friendlier, more personal vibe I'm going for on this site.

Easy fix: go to the front page. There's a breaking news bar up at the top. That's the most recent site update. No more guessing.

It's raining and I'm gonna go play Minecraft and listen to Mad at the Internet and whatever's in my sub box until it's time for bed. I'm experimenting with new ways to keep myself interested—apparently roleplaying as a bitter, exiled gardener rabbit who's gonna make the most gigantic fucking farm you've ever seen is that.

Remembering the warm summer nights
Everything is gonna turn out right
All the answers lie behind your eyes
Everything is gonna turn out right

All I want is to see you smile
All I want is to see you smile

Answers always are waiting there
You give me feelings that I used to get
Remember things that I had forgot
Get the feelings that I used to get
Remember things that I had forgotten long ago

You can read the trip diary now. It's properly done, posted, public. I held off for a few months because I wanted to get a few more BunnySetters done for it, and they're drawn now. Twenty-two exhaustively long pages detailing every single interesting thing that happened visiting Caby, and a lot that I'm sure isn't very interesting to people who aren't me. I'll be sending this out to both our families; hopefully it'll still be worth the read to them five months on.

I am posting this one everywhere. I am IN LOVE with how this came out.

I do this thing in my head where I always size down very big things like they're nothing. I did three new, full-color, shaded dual fullbodies for this trip diary, itself already probably an hour-long read, because it wasn't quite finished to me without them. Same thing happened with going to Wales in the first place; her dad told me I was a braver man than he was, making two long connecting flights as my first-ever flight, but I didn't even consider that, because I was so focused on being with my girl that I'd pay any price to do it. I struggle to swim long distances because I get tunnel vision for the shore ahead. It's occasionally bad for my health, but I think that's kinda cool, being conditioned to aim high like that. It's given me an incredible pain tolerance as well.

The trip diary still stirs up such strong emotions in me. I think it's awesome, I think it's a lot of fun to read, it's so vivid, it puts me right back on any given day (we were still pretty active on Discord throughout, which helped me gather up the details and logs as they happened)—but it also fills me with such a sad longing to return, to be with Caby again. I read it, and I'm back on June 7th, landing in that thick, worrying plume of smoke that had all the maps reading Hazardous for air quality. I'm hopping on a train to New Jersey, smelling of smoke, tasting smoke, and catching up with my mom about what all just transpired and how it's been back home as she holds the plushie Welsh dragon I got her in her arms. That's the road that's led me to today, finding a new job, getting absorbed in it, and all the good and bad that's came of it—but at the cost of leaving my girl behind.

To be clear, if I really wanted to, I could fly back over there right now. I have about four grand banked up, and I'm sure it's no more difficult to find retail work over there than it is here (maybe easier because of the trains). It wouldn't be a very good idea, since I've got a job currently (hunting always sucks) and I'd be living with her folks, and while they'd be more than happy to host me (they've said so, literally unprompted, I'm not assuming this), their house is full enough as it is. I don't want to take advantage of their generosity. My life strategy right now is just to work and have fun creatively and squirrel money away until Caby's bringing in a decent second income off her art (and I'm optimistic she will, given that there's lots of opportunities for an illustrator in her area as she's seen through university), then we pay for an apartment together, I start the immigration process (probably getting married along the way), and I go back to school over there myself.

Beyond the sadness though, this trip still brings me deep, life-affirming joy, something that was totally missing from my life for years when everything was at a standstill, or even when I was working to finance the trip. I met my girl! We hit it off! We were loving together, we were napping together, we were exploring together, and we proved every single motherfucker who's ever cocked an eyebrow at me "having a girlfriend" in another country that I've never even met wrong. Now, people ask me what the plan is, if she's coming over here or if I'm going over there. Her folks talk about the move like it'll happen in the next year or two; my mom has told strangers I'll be moving to another country soon, and told me not to even worry about a car if the move is soon soon.

It's not, but I appreciate everyone's excitement. I want it to be soon too. I yearn to be next to her again. After enjoying us in person, online just kinda...sucks sometimes. I'm without my best friend here in the states, but I felt her while I was in Wales. I would never admit it, and neither would she, but we sure thought in our darkest moments that it would never happen. And we fucking made it happen. And we can make it fucking happen again.

Gah, hearing her voice makes my brain shut off every time. Feelings, gamers. Gooey, lovey, needy feelings.

So my mom and my sister often pawn off tech issues onto me, just because it's quicker and easier if I handle it than if they learn how to do it themselves. I'm alright with that bit, but the one thing I hate is when I have to sit on the phone with customer support of any kind, let alone outsourced customer support. And the past few days, over my days off from work, I have gotten stuck with so much of it.

So I have Consumer Cellular. They've been phenomenal. Their prices are great, they have a large selection of phones (and you can bring your own if you have an unlocked one), international and roaming worked great when I was in Wales, their tech support is entirely US-based—I seriously do not know why they exclusively market themselves to seniors. They're a just plain great carrier and I'm glad to be with them.

Previously, I had Straight Talk, which is a branch of TracFone. I fucking hate Straight Talk. Every single time I have to call them up or try to set anything up through them, it's been agony. My mom and my sister also had Straight Talk, and with Consumer Cellular's recent deal where adding extra lines are free for the first month, they decided to make the switch. After all, their phones are unlocked, and it's just cheaper to use my service (unlimited talk and text + 5GB of high speed data) than it was to keep paying Straight Talk's ripoff rates.

Both phone had their own laundry list of issues—on the Straight Talk side. With Consumer Cellular, I buy the SIM, put it in the phone, and call them to activate the line and port the number over. Couldn't be simpler, outside of not knowing 100% what was needed to port a number over (if you're in the same boat, it's the account number, which in Straight Talk's case was the phone's IMEI, the porting PIN, and the ZIP code attached to the account). I even got the direct number of Consumer Cellular's porting and activation team from one of the representatives, so I didn't need to go through the phone labyrinth for the other number. That number is literally nowhere online, I looked it up. (877-590-1749—am I allowed to post that? Ah well.) That is power.

For Straight Talk? Well.

• The first call to them concerned "port protection" on my mom's number (which she's had since 2002?? Fucking props to her for managing to keep it for 21 years now). That was just the porting PIN, or so I thought, because Consumer Cellular still couldn't port the number.
• Turns out, the porting failed because Straight Talk didn't have our ZIP code attached to that account, hence Consumer Cellular repeatedly using the wrong one. The second call was to figure which ZIP code was attached to that account. Turns out, two, both in Miami-Dade, Florida. We have never lived in, been to, or entertained the thought of entering Florida.
• The third call, this time for my sister's phone, I figured I was prepared—I had called Straight Talk once, got the porting PIN, got the ZIP code (also in Florida), and indeed, Consumer Cellular ported her number first time. I switch the SIM cards, and—oops, the phone is carrier locked! Now, keep in mind, this phone was bought outright from Straight Talk and was under their service for two entire years—there was no reason for it to ever be carrier locked.
• The fourth call, the Indian guy said outright "Straight Talk cannot lock this phone". But they did! So he had to put in an unlock request (for a phone that cannot be locked), and that required me to give him a ton of my sister's information to verify. He said it would take two days, but once it was unlocked, I wouldn't need to call for anything else. He also said Straight Talk would email my sister once the phone was unlocked.
• The fifth call, I actually never got through to a representative. While I was on hold, I had the bright idea to look in the phone settings and found the carrier lock had been removed. Said email never arrived, hence me calling. Switched the SIMs, everything is now peachy, and I never, ever, have to call Straight Talk ever again.

The Pocono Parks page has been updated with a trip out yesterday to two (three, but one was too small to bother getting photos of) parks that the township refers to as a "park system". That was the good part of my days off; getting to see some nice leaf colors and explore a bit before it starts getting real cold out.

More photo galleries have been posted! We got one old one, the Turtle Back Zoo page from cammy_v1, and one of the remaining pages from the old site which had not been redone for the new site, and one brand new one, a set of long-exposure night photography shots from when I went to summer camp in 2011. These were found on a DVD-R I had in my disc wallets, and I now have them safe across all my backup shards.

There's still galleries for me to make, but all the ones I had on cammy_v1 are now up. I'm seriously gonna celebrate once we're at parity with the old site. I think cammy.somnol is quickly becoming the best thing I've ever made. If I could pull this off back on Neocities, I have no doubts I would've been pretty damn popular for, uh, better reasons.

Man, just a bumper crop of stuff to see on cammy.somnol this month, huh? Back on the 12th, I came home from work and decided to put together a page on some music videos I love—something Caby did way back when on Neocities and a really fun idea overall. That page is finally live! It's not exhaustive, there's other ones that stick out to me (the video for The Rentals' "Friends of P" was one I was enjoying last night), but this is a nice exploration of some of my favorites and my overall tastes in videos.

As I've said previously, a lot of the holdup on pages is getting something drawn for the header. I wasn't drawing anything for a couple days in between finishing that Bunny (which I also haven't posted anywhere, give me a bit) on the 13th and more recently because I was too busy doing data backup stuff and finishing the Wilco boxset post. We're back and I'm working through my little backlog of ideas, thankfully.

As far as cammy.somnol goes, my aim is to finally have all those finished pages posted soon. I have rough ideas for what to draw for the headers, I just gotta go and do 'em. Also, more photo galleries. More photo galleries will be posted soon. I have to sort and assemble all the photos and thumbnails, which is way easier than drawing Setters.

Ever since the Fusion Drive Crash of 2019, I've been eternally paranoid about losing stuff. It sticks in my head at all times. I refuse to ever lose data ever again. I've been making random copies of stuff I feel like I'm gonna lose on random drives for years now, on top of the DVD-R site backups I already do and my two externals filled with random garbage I've been using since late 2019.

Of course, a backup solution is only as good as your ability to find anything in it, and I've just had shit everywhere for years now. I think the last time I really thought out the way I save files was when I was a teenager. Back then, I was able to fit everything I did onto a single Dropbox account, but that was a long time ago. I must've had three different writing folders across multiple machines and cloud storage accounts—it was a nightmare. I stopped saving things to my hoards because I didn't know where I'd put it, and I didn't want to lose it when I inevitably forgot I had it.

So, I've solved both problems. I've reorganized and consolidated all my files, and I've got a multi-tier backup solution that I can use a diffs program like WinMerge to compare copies of between, so I always know my stuff is up-to-date and identical between computers. Here's the plan:

• Tier zero is live storage, internal hard drives that are convenient and provide the working copy of whatever I'm doing at that moment, but can die at any moment, so are untrusted.
• Tier one is a set of twelve shards. Shards are sorted mini-drives and store anything I have in my possession on a specific topic. Writing and scanned books are a shard. My music library is a shard. Somnol's site backups are their own shard, as are my copies of all my site stuff. Shards are stored on the hard drives in folders, and they're copied onto one flash drive apiece. This limits what data can get lost if a flash drive eats shit, reduces the amount of work needed to bring a lost shard back up (buy an equivalently-sized drive and copy the shard over), and I can back up to it pretty conveniently since the flash drives are all stored in a case on my desk.
• Tier two are artifacts. These are extra copies of specific files, stuff at-risk of being lost for being so rare (say, Windows cracks or unreleased music I got specifically from an artist) or completed projects of mine with stuff to go with them (like albums and their project files, or my Quake maps and their screenshots). Artifacts are any other backup media, DVD-Rs, cloud, SD cards, and meant for more targeted preservation.
• Tier three are vaults, my external hard drives. The scheme for sorting these is the same as the internal drives, containing a full set of shards in folders, but because they're not on all the time, they should last longer than the internal ones. If they die, no big deal, vaults are redundant to each other; I can just buy another external and copy a full set of shards to it. I don't back up to the vaults constantly, more like a couple times a month when the mood strikes.

This approach is already paying dividends. I only have one sitemaking folder, and if I'm working on sites over on the eMachines Box, I just copy to the matching flash drive when I'm done and update the other machines/vaults with it. I've already found files I forgot I even had, and now I have multiple copies of each one. WinMerge helps a ton with keeping stuff straight; I check by size and modified date, with some custom filters for ignoring the thumbnail databases and System Volume Information folders on Windows and the resource forks and .DS_Store files on Mac.

It might sound like overkill, but I'm much happier and more comfortable with this setup than I was with my previous. Seriously, it's hard to back things up when you don't even know you have them, or have no good way of finding out which copy is newer and has the right files in it. I'm actually not done yet; for one thing, I'm not particularly protected in the case of a disaster at Somnolescent HQ (at the moment, I don't have a good place offsite to store extra drives, but I'll be fine once I have a car), and I'm still waiting for one more flash drive to arrive, a 256GB SanDisk, for the final shard.

I've also learned through doing this that I just like collecting flash drives. I didn't have the ability to just buy new flash drives as a kid, but I always had one in my pocket at school, and when I'd invariably lose it, that was it until I got another at some point, really. They're cheap and they're all so differently shaped and colored, so I'm happy to indulge now. Some of the other flash drives I've picked up at my store on sale have either gone on to be used as live USBs for Linux, both nostalgic and new, and other alternative OSes (still haven't gotten the chance to play with Ventoy) or become technician's toolboxes for driver installs and other things work should be providing me but don't. Sometimes, I don't have a use for them, but I just find them neat. Flash drives are neat! They make me happy.

One of those fabled long-term Cammy projects has just appeared on the group blog: a First Draft entry focusing on last year's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot boxset, exactly 22 years after that album streamed for the first time on wilcoworld.net. I wrote the majority of this thing back in June, and with that anniversary just a few months off, I knew I had to hold it for today. Paired with that is a boxset and bootleg reference on cammy.somnol, showing you the overlap between each set of Wilco demos.

Going over six wildly different CDs with a fine-toothed comb, all covering the recording sessions for the same album, was absolutely a tall ask, but this one is a really solid set, if you ask me. Read it at your own pace—WordPress estimates the reading time for this one at 33 minutes.

Speaking of seasons, we're starting to wade back into autumn temperatures here. Still been working a lot—fixed four different computers over the weekend, got tipped $50 yesterday in total from appreciative customers, and sold $550 worth of stuff on top of a $600 laser printer. My confidence is starting to solidify, but it never does completely, really. Sometimes at work (especially later in the evenings), I'll just be kind of in a chemical daze about life. I still think it's crazy that people pay me, even if it's just for a retail job, still think it's crazy I can just buy stuff on a whim now, still think it's crazy to see that number in my bank account go up week after week.

A lot of people I know have absolutely hated adulthood, but I'm drinking it in by the pitcher. I was not a happy, functional kid. Everything good I've ever had came from me going out and making something happen myself, whether that's stability at school, finding work, taking the trip earlier this year, or learning to draw or do anything else creative. My life has been going uphill year after year, really. It doesn't feel like it sometimes because I'm more in tune with my emotions than I ever have been, so the bad stuff feels bigger than ever, but it's not. I know and have known plenty of folks with no ambitions that deeply miss when someone else took care of everything. That's not me.

There's power I'm gaining that still takes me by surprise, in a very good way. I guarantee you I'm not gonna know the full extent of the shit I'll be able to do when I have a car until a few years after I've gotten it. Nothing will hold me back after that.