(Conversation fear.)

Let's do a site content update, because it's been a bit. I finished up that Setter and I'm starting to get my photo galleries online! I've got two for you so far, shots from some of my local parks and scenes from the West End Fair, which is a week-long gathering in my area for produce, animals, crafts, history, and lots of fried desserts. You'll wanna see the rabbits especially. I do have more galleries I wanna put together—one for the zoo trip I took back during cammy_v1, one for a batch of truly ancient night/long exposure photography from a summer camp I went to back in 2011, and one for a ton of miscellaneous photos I've taken since 2017 or so. If you're wondering about the trip diary, I still wanna do another BunnySetter illustration or two for it first, but I promise you soon. I've shown the group and that's all I really care about right now.

The galleries are meant to be pretty easy to produce; I've gone with a full-color Setter up top that I can just replace the text and the background on, and then I just have to produce thumbnails and arrange the page. Since I can't escape Windows 10, I've set up a VM on my Mac just to be able to run paint.NET, which I need for its alpha mask plugin (that's how I keep the XP Paint dithering effect on all my drawn assets while still maintaining the transparency—see my behind-the-scenes page for more on how I put all this together). The pages are assembled on the eMachines Box, which is quite comfy to put together site stuff on and can connect to the home server and to DreamHost/Macintosh Garden no problem.

Speaking of mari@macintosh.garden, I have also unearthed, reformatted, and added onto all thirty of my Rediscovering entries from the old Scratchpad. This was started probably back in August, but I wanted to listen through most of the pile one last time to see if my opinions had changed at all—remember, 2020 and 2021 were the dark ages when I was stuck inside, so that fucked with my head something chronic. Post-having a job and especially post-trip, I've been able to think a lot clearer, and on the whole, I like both the winners and the duds more than when I initially did them, or at least, I'm more fair now.

I'm on day three of five between days off at my job. I keep oscillating between thinking I'm about to fit in there and then getting reminded it's still retail, and retail with a group of folks my age not like me, and therefore sucks. At least it's been quieter, and the $400 a week gets me closer to a car and the eventual move to Wales bit by bit.

Hope everyone's September is going swell so far. I'm really keeping my head down and working a lot, and it's paying off. Customers dropping $2200 my store in one go tonight. My manager was impressed, and after I learned he's just hard to read and doesn't actually hate me, I've been a ton more comfortable in my job—and I mean, that's what you need in retail, to feel good and be able to chirp at customers. It helps that I'm a lot more excited about what I'm selling now than I was about beer—though I do miss beer. Haven't had a Yuengling in months now.

I've dragged myself back over to using MacOS! I'm not proud of it either. I've been wanting to toy with music again lately, since my last couple of music projects all ended in tragedy and I just plain want to put something better than my high school noise escapades out there. I had the most trouble getting my tablet to work; since it's so old, the drivers really aren't meant to work on Mojave, so I have no ExpressKeys! I've had to resort to remapping the shortcut keys in FireAlpaca to the numpad to get the buttons I rely on in a configuration sorta like what's already on the tablet. Guh. But the rest of the setup is comfy. I've been really in the mood to draw my girl lately, so have a guinea pig herder Caby and a Bunny looking all soft and sheepish.

And more typically from me, a Setter I'm gonna finish up for the photo gallery headers on this here site (so I can actually post some goddamn photos I've taken?):

Speaking of high school, tonight especially has been a Quake and Failure sorta night. I've been really into J.F. Gustafsson's custom levels—he's the guy who made the semi-official (and I guess official, as of KexQuake) Dimension of the Past 20th anniversary Quake episode, semi-official because he works for MachineGames, the company working on the new Wolfenstein games. Honestly, I'm a bit jealous. He's everything I really wanted to be in a mapper, perfectly replicating that imagination and magic that id had in their original levels, but just polishing the shit out of it. Revisiting my old levels for the rewritten postmortems on mari@macintosh.garden has been a humbling experience. Even in the 90s, when J.F. was still a hobbyist, they would've been a bit crap, or I guess nothing special most charitably. I'm taking it on the chin; they're old, everyone's long forgotten about them, and I know I've got a lot better in me. Eventually. When I get back to Quake. He's definitely gonna be a major inspiration, though, I love his work.

Guh, speaking of Failure, I meant to have a First Draft on Magnified on the blog last month, but I just never got around to finishing the mostly done draft I had for it. I can't post it this month, because the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot First Draft is supposed to come out on the 18th in celebration of the album's 22th anniversary, so the end of the Black Album First Draft makes no sense now. That's alright, it'll be for October. I've had a lot going on and I'm still only a month and change into this job, so I'm allowed to not be hyperfixated on website stuff for an indeterminate amount of readers. (Speaking of, I got a nice email from someone lurking the site network since 2020 asking to join! We don't really accept random people like that, but it is nice to hear from you if you're out there. You'll shoot us an email sometime, maybe?)

So, as you've probably seen in some of the photos I've been posting lately, the eMachines Box finally has its own setup. I already had the PS/2 keyboard that went to this machine, and I bought a cheap wired mouse from work partially because I needed another mouse, partially because I needed a spare even after I upgrade this one, and partially because the cheapness of the mouse seems to complement the low-end nature of the eMachines Box anyway. I also needed to get an extra long ethernet cable from work to be able to hook it into the router with the way my desk is set up now —this computer's from 2006, it doesn't have a wi-fi module, and I wouldn't want wi-fi on it anyway.

But it works! I'm actually typing and uploading this post entirely from the eMachines Box. This is a far more comfortable setup than before—no more having to share a keyboard and mouse and thus having to choose between my modern computer and Discord and the eMachines Box being, let's be real, locked off from most of the visible internet, and especially no more having to twist my neck to see the CRT placed way off to the side. I can sit facing the monitor now, and that's just astounding.

I wrote this thing off for gaming before I had upgraded it at all, but I'm learning now it actually can play some of my games really well! Granted, those games are minimum five years prior to when it was manufactured, but the fact that I can buy games off GOG, use the offline installer on XP, and then play those games on this setup with this CRT just like when they came out—that's so juicy. If you're curious, the eMachines Box has an integrated graphics chip called the Radeon Xpress 200, which is based on some of ATI's lower-end cards from 2004 or so. Good for media playback and DVDs and all the things this computer was sold to do, but up-to-date gaming is iffy.

Here's some of what I've tested that does work great though! From least surprising to most surprising:

• DOSBox: 32-bit XP can run some DOS games directly without an issue, but GOG always packages DOS games with DOSBox, and the version you get from the offline installer runs the games great. Must play through Tyrian.
• Doom: Chocolate Doom 3.x just locked up the entire PC, but I fell back to a 2.x version and it runs great. The music is obviously iffy, with either a very quiet OPL emulation or using the built-in XP MIDI stuff (and thus the crappy Wavetable GS Synth). I'll look into switching it out for VirtualMIDISynth, which is what I use on 10 to give myself soundfont support when playing MIDIs.
• Quake: I've been trying out various source ports; DirectQ had some horrific model stretching issues (gigantic piles of flesh! horrific, but not quite conductive to fast-paced action), DirectFitz ran okay, but regularly dropped below 30FPS for some reason, and Mark V, my former go-to anyway, runs great but can only play MP3 soundtracks (which have awful latency and crash the program occasionally) and CD audio directly out of the CD drive on the PC. The CD audio is speedy and stable, though that of course means wear and tear on the drive and my CDs (and I wasn't able to use Daemon Tools to trick it with a bin+cue). I'll just burn some CD-Rs and let the drive work as it will though, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.
• Quake II: Knightmare Quake II has been a really good XP-supporting source port. I still need to tweak it to get it perfectly visually accurate to the vanilla game, but performance is really good. I still need to beat Quake II; maybe this is the ideal opportunity to do it.
• Unreal Tournament 99: New to me! I grabbed the GOTY edition off the Internet Archive (I'll eventually buy my own copy too, no worries), and it installed quick, didn't even need a CD key, and played super slick. I only played one match with bots (because I was exhausted from work yesterday), but it was 60fps the whole time, smooth sailing. I actually really liked some of the maps I was playing, and I have a feeling I'm gonna get really obsessed with this one the more I play it. (I also got another Unreal 1 game going, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, mostly because I have such fond memories of the PS1 version. It makes me giggle, not the least of which because all the voice actors are still the knockoffs from the PS1 version, and hearing such familiar voices talk new lines at me is bizarre. The castles still fuck though. I wonder about streaming it.)
• Half-Life: The big one! I got the WON version and patched it for play on the community-run WON2, which seems to mostly be Counter-Strike 1.5 these days, but there's a few Half-Life deathmatch servers going on at any given time. Got into one with bots and felt all the grease, the grease, of connecting to some server in Europe and having your controls and aim be all funky and delayed because of server latency, like any good Half-Life deathmatch in the Current Year should. It was so good. dcb wants to get set up on WON2 too on his HP Media Center PC so we can hop in servers together sometime. Of course, WON2 also supports all the various Half-Life mods, so y'know, anyone wanna do WON2 Deathmatch Classic or Ricochet? Let me know. mariteaux@somnolescent.net. Let's play together. (All this implies that GoldSrc games as a whole run great on this thing; I'm also looking to give 007: Nightfire a shot, since any third-party Valve tech games make me intensely curious and I could always go for another Bond FPS.)

Obviously, I'd still like to upgrade it, and the PC and the keyboard need a deep clean still (coming from the borb household, are you surprised?), but right now, I just want to spend all day on it. I've come to the realization that a lot of my contrarian nature since my teenager years has come from being deprived of all the cool stuff I want to do (usually due to some combination of being poor and being stuck inside without a car), and every time another domino falls into place, I find myself excited for shit again. I'm just a boy who likes old computers is all, and tinkering with this one, installing Plus! XP on it, using MSN Messenger (Somnolians! hop on more blease), installing a buncha games on it, and eventually getting to those upgrades—more RAM, a proper graphics card, another hard drive, a secondary Vista install—I'm finally getting to indulge. Literally standing at work on the regular now thinking about this goddamn computer, excited to come home to it.

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. I want to use it now, not wait until some future date where it's perfect and then worry about it fucking up or needing more repairs. The tech might be subject to entropy, but that doesn't mean that there isn't life after death for it. If anything, that's half the fun.

I'm almost ready to post the trip diary. The pages are all done, and the group's already seen it. We're about three-and-a-half months past my departure, but all that's left is for me to finish up some BunnySetter drawings I'm doing for it (two more to do, one finished, one currently being lined right now) and everyone can come see it.

This has been a far bigger project than anyone could've imagined. 22 days, nearly a whole month, catalogued thoroughly with logs, doodles, lots of photos, project ideas, and whatever else was on our minds and wherever else we went. I'll save my final thoughts for when it's done. I just wanted to post some acknowledgement of how close I am. Work isn't wearing me out as hard, I've finally started physically getting used to it. Lots of Cammy projects will be rolling off the line soon. Thanks for your patience.

Dedicated journal readers, I am typing this at you from the comfort of my brand new desk I have spent the evening with my mom struggling to put together. It is so choice.

Peep the setup:

Click the image! You'll want full-size for this one.

I've been on the hunt for a new desk for literally years now. My old desk was a very cheap, very shitty, falling apart particleboard mess—the legs were particleboard, the top was particleboard, and the bottoms of the built-in drawers were like, flimsy sheets of wood. It was my sister's desk, and given how she abuses everything she touches, those drawers had already collapsed in on each other, the fake finish was wearing off the top, and the vinyl was peeled off in spots by the time it got to me. I dutifully stuck with it though, partially out of a lack of money but also partially because I don't like to replace things until they're literally unusable.

That said, the big reason I wanted to upgrade was because I needed a desk that could handle two PCs. The eMachines Box needed its own setup so I could use it at the same time as my main PC (currently an iMac, probably also getting upgraded in the next year or two), so not just any desk would do. I saw this one on the floor at my new job, and my heart was pretty immediately set on it. I mean, it looks phenomenal, it has built-in outlets and USB ports for charging stuff, the legs are much slimmer metal ones as opposed to full particleboard pieces, so I can clean around them very easily, and, oh yeah—it's an L-shaped desk. Those are cool anyways, let alone handling two PCs no problem at all.

It's normally a $290 desk, but I was able to get it for $235 thanks to my employee discount (and mandatory rewards account, thus giving me another discount on furniture). Our mild incompetence and impatience meant it definitely didn't go together perfectly—the angles are a bit wonky on the legs, though it's definitely sturdy as far as what I'm putting on it goes. Could not be more excited to get the eMachines Box back up and running; I'm using the eMachines keyboard it came with now, and I'm gonna get a temporary USB mouse from work tomorrow to complete the setup. Getting a new desk so I could set it up was phase one in its new life, and phase two will be accruing the parts for a build upgrade late this year into next year, most likely. So excited. The life really is full-screen Windows XP gaming on one computer and listening to YouTube videos on the other.

(Oh, and in closing: this did come with a little side stand and drawer unit, but I still need to clean up my room, so it's not in the shot here. That one, I'll stash our router and stuff on, most likely. Currently, they're on the floor, as I still need to clean up my room. Too busy using my new desk.)

So our power was out for two days! A popup storm on Monday littered the area with trees and branches and took out power for some 22,000 people at the peak, and 13,000 for two days. I was one of the 13,000. (At the moment, according to poweroutage.us, only 31 people in my county are without power, so all is back to normal just about. Rest in peace to the gamers in York County, though, they've still got 6,700 outages.)

This sure sucked! We have electric water, so none of the showers, toilets, or taps worked. We had to use water dispensers bought from the store to wash our hands, five gallon buckets to fill the cistern to be able to flush, and the part I like the absolute least, I had to pour jugs of spring water on myself to shower yesterday because I was prodded into going to work anyway. On the plus side, it might've been the fastest shower I've ever taken, 15 minutes to brush my teeth, get clean, and get dressed—but that's because the water, even at room temperature, was ridiculously cold, and I was gasping and laughing (I'm one of those weird people who laughs when they're in pain) and wondering if God was gonna turn the power back on right after I got out, just to be a dick.

The boredom was pretty bad too—lost an entire day off I wanted to use finishing up the trip diary or the Rediscovering ports to mari@macintosh.garden—but the power was back by 8 last night, so that's good at least. We had a generator, so at least our fridge was safe and we could charge our phones or whatever. I'm still kinda in a daze about it (not helped by me overworking myself at work to keep my mind off the power being out, so my body is a bit sore), but slowly I'm coming back online as well.

Lots of good news in the pipeline, though: aside from all the site stuff, I'll be bringing home a new desk from work, a really nice one which will replace my awful shitty old desk my sister destroyed before I even got it. It's an L-desk, so it should ideally accommodate two computers—and that means a dedicated spot to set up the eMachines Box, and that means I can finally get to cleaning that thing out, upgrading it, and using it again! Get all the games I bought at CEX in Wales imported, slap in more RAM, a GPU, and a spare hard drive, get a Vista dual-boot going, and finally enjoy some retrocomputing action like I've wanted to for, well, forever now, certainly since I got it in 2020.

Long time no see, journal readers—life's been good lately. My job is panning out nicely so far, though I'm by no means in any sort of comfortable groove with it yet. In fact, my body was screaming in agony last night after clearing two u-boats at the end of four days straight of standing all day working. I'll adapt, no worries.

I got trapped in my bathroom today! That was a lot of fun. It's been so heavy and humid lately that the door actually got stuck and I couldn't open it from either side. I had to climb in and out of the window to get in and out, and I wound up using a spare insurance card slid between the frame of the door and the latch to finally get the fucking thing open. I didn't even have my phone on me to text for help! Good thing I'm not morbidly obese and could fit through that window. (This isn't directed at anyone, I'm just glad I could get out.)

In more online news, the Wales 2023 trip diary is finally almost complete! I've got two days left, aiming for one left by the end of the night, and the cute cammy.somnol banner for it to draw. The supplemental photo galleries are already live on cabycammy.somnol. Consider it a nice primer for what's to come, not to mention just a lot of photos and materials that didn't make it into the full trip diary. I'm super stoked with how it's come out, and it's really gonna be nice to send it out to, ooh, everyone I know? Even if you were there, you probably don't remember everything I've unearthed, because I certainly didn't.

After that's done, I'll finish up the few site sections I have half-finished for mari@macintosh.garden (one's all my modding work and the other is an unearthing of all thirty Rediscoverings I did on the Scratchpad over the prior three years, with new commentary and in an easier-to-read format), and get back into drawing after taking a break last month. (Caby reassured me the one evening I didn't need to challenge myself with every single drawing like I'm pathologically obsessed with doing, and that was really nice to hear. Will remember that, promise.) I've been slowly coming to the realization that I was actually up to a lot of cool shit over the lockdowns, and it was just the misery of everything around me that prevented me from seeing it as such. Very glad of that.

(On a related note: I read "Under the Rain Shadow" for the first time since finishing it a week or two ago, and that made me smile huge. I was surprised how good it turned out! I'm starting to really like my stories now, and after many years of being down on them, I've more than earned that. Still would like to rewrite it, not to mention illustrate it, but it's definitely a lot stronger than I remembered.)

Exciting stuff! Three packages showed up for me today:

We got a copy of Minecraft Volume Alpha, to complement my copy of Beta from Christmas, a 3DS flashcart (half for novelty and half because I need it to ntrboot Caby's 3DS next time I go over there), and the best part, another swag package from Patrick at Midwestern Dirt! I just figured he was sending me a shirt, but he actually sent a buncha really cool stuff over, Sayonara guitar picks, stickers, a tote bag—a lot of stuff that they don't sell online since they're just a little indie band, so I'm the only one in Pennsylvania with any of it. Neener neener.

They've got a new record coming out August 18th called Twilight at a Burning Hill, which I've already heard and I think it's their best one, full stop. His new band is incredible, and they've really got a sense of dynamics and push and pull that the old band didn't have. I have a review of this one already written up to go on mari@macintosh.garden, along with a buncha new reviews for the rest of their albums, and I'm really just waiting for the day (or closer to it) to drop it. (You can already go grab some singles from this one for free over on their Bandcamp if you're interested.) Funnily enough, Savannah got recommended "The Aaron Waters Show" on Spotify totally organically outside of this little ongoing friendship I've got with Patrick, so hopefully that means they'll start getting some actual attention and it won't just be me trying to get my friends and whoever listening to them :omegalul:

Some other updates that I can think of:

• I'm really thinking this new job is gonna be a winner. Everyone there's been really nice, they've introduced themselves, shown me how to do things, complemented me on how quick I caught on and how confident I've been, we've chatted about flying and airports and music and old jobs and games, just everything. It's a total 180 from the grocery store I was busting ass at. This place also dies out hardcore at night, so last night I was able to sit in an aisle and listen to Karl Jobst videos under the hospices of dusting shelves (which I also did, I'm not a freeloader :marf:).
• I have been scattered putting together some new pages for mari@macintosh.garden. Two album reviews I did and then never linked anyone (Autolux's Transit Transit and Earlimart's Treble and Tremble), some more catalog reviews I need to finish that aren't posted (the aforementioned Midwestern Dirt one and also one for Beck's back catalog), and then I'm porting over my old Rediscovering posts from the Scratchpad, dusting off the little essays I did, and rehoming them since it was a lot of work to cover those thirty records and a lot of reading that's kinda unfortunately buried at the moment. I've also been relistening casually to the albums to see if a year or three has made a difference in my opinions, and I'm pleasantly surprised to say I like a lot of it more than I did back then. (I've also been reworking my old Quake and modding pages (please don't tell me about broken links, I know)--good lord, I've started a lot of web projects that need to get done. Uh, something something trip diary.)
• Speaking of Treble and Tremble! When I was listening back through that album to write up a review, I was watching a supercut dcb put together of footage taken around his college campus with an old Canon PowerShot and thought the two worked strangely well together. I decided to make my own music video using "Tell the Truth, Parts 1 and 2" from that album and surprise dcb with it, and I think it came out weirdly wistfully melancholic. I kinda love it (and he did too!). I thought it'd be cool going in, but it turned out to remind me of that weird period of time back in 2019 when I was still living on campus, but I knew I was dropping out, so I just stopped going to classes, used my meal plan, wandered a lot, and wrote tons of stories. Hanging out in our own library, using Mini vMac in fullscreen, quietly hoping someone would ask why Microsoft Word got so big and pixelated on my screen before spilling out onto north campus at closing for a walk set to, funnily enough, Midwestern Dirt and Sebadoh. New girlfriend, new characters, trying to grow up a bit and it still taking a couple years. It's a video about being fond for a time in your life you shouldn't be fond of. (I've sent Aaron Espinoza of Earlimart the video, and I'll let you know if he replies and what he thinks. Hope he likes it! 2006 camera, 2004 song, it works out in my head.)
• We put together a new bookshelf! Funnily enough, it was on clearance outside my new job when I went in for the interview. My old music-storing setup was a fucking disaster—I was using these weird wooden garden crates before to store my CDs and records and I was always paranoid about the slats crushing the corners of the sleeves and whatnot. It was also hideous. When I saw this thing, I knew I had to have it. It fits so perfect and it looks great, take a look:

There's still some CD overflow—I'll be buying a little plastic storage crate for all the extras and eventually I'll figure out a way to store them all together and get rid of the CD holders I've been using for like a decade now.

Man, I couldn't tell you where I've been mentally lately. Art Fight kinda didn't go so well (but enough about half the staff quitting, bazinga), so I've just kinda been making some here-and-there progress on site stuff—Beck catalog review in the works, modding section with rewritten Quake level postmortems in the works. I'm excited to say that mari@macintosh.garden is about halfway towards having all the stuff I want on it, which means then I can turn my attention back to design fully and get mari_v4 going proper. Afterwards, whatever is on mari@macintosh.garden will stay on there, but I'll add a banner to the top telling people to go see the new site instead.

Really, I'm just popping in to say hi and also to announce I am gainfully employed again! I'm not saying where just yet (having a mid-functioning pile of cartilage try to get you fired in an act of revenge will do that to you—enemies of the bulb still lurk these parts, after all), but I'm making slightly more than I did at my old grocery store for the same amount of hours and far, far less work in a more specialized retail environment. It's looking seriously tits. It's not what I wanted to do with booze, but that's alright, this is probably better on my back, my joints, and my happiness anyway.

God, I can't wait to get my savings rebuilt. Pay down some loans, build up a warchest again, buy me a new desk and some retro computer stuff, and get my life back on the road after the good long vacation in Wales. (Trip diary also slowly still coming together, I promise. It's like half done and I have to draw a Bunny and Setter for it.)

Oh yeah, and Pokémon Blue! I've been playing a lot of that lately. 115/151 currently, and I have to play through Red to get the version exclusives and a few that I missed (I knocked out both Snorlaxes like an idiot, not realizing they're missable, because I couldn't manage to catch one for shit). I have a CD of the soundtrack arranged for piano coming in a couple days. Seriously, give this a shot. There's something so lovely and wistful and atmospheric about hearing the "Welcome to Pokémon" song arranged for piano.

I've experienced a little bit of a breakthrough lately. Have a look:

Yes, I've finally started putting real, proper eyes on my characters! I've known I really need to do that for, like, the entire time I've been drawing, but it's been hard finding a way to consistently do them that I like. I basically tossed out that Maldwyn ref from a few months ago because I thought his eyes were still too tiny and freaky looking.

Well, finally it clicked. I was toying around drawing Rocco some more, and I thought that if I had enough space in the eye region for two long lines (as I've been used to drawing eyes), I had enough space to turn them into proper eye shapes. Turns out I was right! You take the dot/line eye, draw the cheek dividers extending outwards, and you curve them over. Then just draw a big circle in the shape you made. The only thing that can get iffy is the far eye, but that's where giving lads a proper snoot as opposed to just implying it in the head shape comes in handy.

I've already used this to a pretty crazy reaction on the Kapy I drew for Caby a couple days ago--most of my deviations stall out around 6-8 favorites, and this girl got 22. No doubt that's also because tigers are just adorable and highly recognizable, but my God. Two big things that evaded me for so long with art, snoots and eyes, have both clicked. I'm unstoppable now.

So yeah, expect me on Art Fight in a couple days! I want to redo Setter's ref, as you see up there, and then I'll rejoin and add new characters one by one. It wasn't just the eyes that made me want to redo his ref--back then, my linework was still a lot shakier (I think I was still using a light stabilizer, which I turned off a while ago to great effect) and I just think he's a little rough looking and stiff. This? Oh my God, so lively! So cute!

Super super excited where I can go with my newfound art skills now. Perhaps drawing you gift art soon???