For those of you who have access to the testing version of this site, I've gotten all the old scorekeeping pages back up in the underground section and updated (rewritten the text, added the new scores where relevant). I'll link them here for those folks. (I'm still really fond of that Minesweeper page, that's a classic.) Header images are the holdup for the rest of you. I'll get back to drawing tonight, maybe.

Honestly, save for the photo galleries and the little Nobody's Watching tribute (and the pages getting moved to mari.somnol, like the game recommendations and the PS1 hardware reference), the site is pretty close to parity with cammy_v1. I remember back when I used to be so embarrassed by that thing. Felt like such a LARP, I hated using Composer (it might create valid HTML4 Transitional markup, but it's still just <span> soup), I hated how formless all the pages came out, but I just hated how little of an identity it had most of all. It could've been anyone's site.

This feels entirely my own, handcrafted, from scratch. Fun to browse! Fun to look at! I genuinely adore it. I cannot wait to have this done and to turn my attention towards mari.somnol and getting myself a proper, fleshed-out portfolio site, ready for the avalanche of new shit I want to build (see last month's "The long-term Cammy content strategy" journal entry for all that). I want to rewrite all my stories, revisit all the ones I hate and try them again. I want my sites to feel impressive again.

So glad things are moving again, lordy I am. Feeling like 2019 again. Getting back to that.

We're entering the final week before the trip, by the way. By this time next week, I will be on a plane, barreling towards Montreal for a brief layover before I fly out to London. I'm obsessively reading every first-time flyer and TSA guide I can on packing my stuff, guidelines on what to bring and what not to bring, what information to have handy, and just making sure this goes as smoothly as it possibly can.

If I've played my cards right, I will be sleep-deprived in a city I've never been to with a girl I've never been with in person by the 18th. I can't think of anything more romantic, frankly. I will try to take as many DSi pictures as I possibly can for you all.

Basically spent all day in FireAlpaca, because I want to bring you more pages! Here's the first one for the underground section, comparing the outputs of seven different MP3 encoders and explaining why seven programs that all say they do the same thing come up with completely different results. It's a spergy rabbit hole, but hey, there's cute animal people. Everyone wins. (It's one from the old site, but the text has been completely redone and there's a new song being compared. Give it another read.)

If you're wondering what pages are currently started and what state they're in, here's where I'm at:

• The Games That Shaped Me (aboveground): Text is finished, header image is finished. Needs a bunch more flavor illustrations.
• The Albums That Shaped Me (aboveground): Text is started. Very preliminary.
• Cammy's MIDI Stockpile (underground): Text is finished, just needs a header illustration.
• Various other pages from the old site, like the scorekeeping pages or the photo galleries: No header images just yet, probably text will be rewritten. Port jobs are a lot easier than new pages though, so once I come up with something good for Setter to do on them and I draw it, you'll see them not long after.

cammy.somnol is now on the fast track to being possibly my favorite site I've ever built. Spent so long admiring sites like Caby's that have a lot of personality and aren't terribly technical or complex, and now I've got that with my own name on it! Very pleasing. I've also been redoing some of the illustrations and images, relining them, fixing inconsistent Setters, making sure they're at the ideal dimensions like I haven't originally been making them at, so yeah. The polish is starting to build up. I think I got something really good going.

It's only a shame I'm really starting to get into a groove with drawing right before I take this big, long trip, so I'm trying to make the most of this headwind before the 17th. The good news is I'll still have a few weeks of sitting at home while I apply and look for new jobs when I get back, so hopefully I can keep the streak going into July when I come back. (Course, then is Art Fight, and I still have refs to do... I'll fit it all in. I'm enjoying the sprint.)

And the aboveground/belowground update is complete. I held out for months because of that aboveground graphic with Bunny and Setter (drawing my girl! scary!), but then I came up with an even cuter and most importantly simpler way to draw it and now I adore it.

I've actually got site content for you finally! This is the first section I completed for the site, a look into all of my consoles and tech gadgets as the list grows, and it's been done for, again, months, just sitting and waiting to be uploaded. There's nothing quite ready in the underground section just yet, but I already have one page's header (the one on MP3 encoders) lined and drawn, just gotta color it and shade it. Same goes for some more of the aboveground section; pages are written, they just need the graphics.

By no means is this cammy.somnol completed to my liking, but at least it's not embarrassingly far behind like it's been since early this year. I should just be able to do it one page at a time now.

If you're looking for some more art from me, try this kitty girl I adopted from Caby! She drew her based on a Beanie Baby (don't know what her name originally was, I've taken to calling her Miranda), and I just loved the design too much to let someone else have it or to sit unused in a FurAffinity submission. I'm aiming to have her be the mascot to an archives redesign I wanna do later in the year, now that the thing is fuckin' bursting at the seams with content, none of which has a visual guide to browsing it, nor context beyond a version number...

(I've been loving the shit out of this pseudo-watercolor style thing. It makes my stuff look so much more legit, it's cute, and it's so easy. You just shade with the colors and leave the highlights white. Actual life hack.)

Speaking of archives, if you want a little shortlist of cool stuff to see on it, have something else that was lying around that I just finished today! A group blog post on five cool things you should revisit (or visit for the first time, potentially!) on the Somnolescent Archives. Telling you, I have a lot started that's cooking up, and now that it's starting to roll out, you can expect a real nice avalanche from me like old times.

I'm feeling so much freer now that I'm just doing everything again like I used to (oh also no job, that helps). Everything's exciting me again! Jake and Connor are now in Somnol! Eight hour group calls every week! Good times, gamers. We'll talk more soon.

I walked out last night. It was a guy asking my manager "and what will be done about" me after I gave him a stupid answer for a stupid question. And after he loudly and obnoxiously sang in my section for twenty minutes straight. And after I'd already gotten two aggressive customers that shift. I'd already put in my two weeks on the 29th, but I've been coming into work every day wondering who would try to fuck with me that day, a manager or a customer, and $12 an hour is not worth that level of stress.

There was this implication by the end (never to me, of course, over the associate headsets I refused to wear) that I was just awful to all my customers, which is completely unfounded. Most of the complaints they got about me were from me having to tell people no—"sorry, I can't get your grocery cart full of items here, this lane has to stay open for alcohol purchases". "No, you can't buy that much alcohol, 192oz is your limit." Funnily enough, each of these instances happened with no one around but me and the customer, all of whom are cool with lying about low-level retail workers to make themselves look better. In not one complaint was there ever "well I didn't help by giving him shit". It was always my fault. Why does the beer guy still have a job?

No one ever hears about my return customers who like me, who want to buy me drinks, give me money. Beer and wine isn't even on the receipt survey, so they couldn't put in a good word without manipulating the form anyway. No one ever hears about, for example (names and identifying details filed off)

• That dirty blonde girl who always buys the sauvignon blanc Frontera who had a nice five minute chat with me last night about how grueling working retail can be and gushed about how nice Wales is after I told her I was going there
• The old lady who keeps trying to get me to work at her store instead because there's not enough people like me around
• The waitress who gave me $5 or her change whenever she came in, along with a "nice seeing ya hon"
• The couple who'd buy slushies all the time and would tip the "bartender" whenever they did so
• The guy carrying his baby around who'd ask me for beer recommendations and outright bought me a mixed six pack one time because he liked me so much
• The old hispanic dude with his grandkids who was amazed I remembered his phone number for his rewards card (wasn't on purpose, just happened to be one in a million that made it into my memory) and would come in several times a week to buy Fosters and chat
• The other old hispanic trucker dude who always bought Heineken from me and called up HR specifically to put a good word in when he learned I was being harassed by managers
• The black dude with the walker who would talk to me endlessly and would tell me how much good I got ahead of me, who would always give me advice, was amazed at how confident and figured out I sounded for being not even 24 yet

Most of these people, I've seen in the past week. I don't need to dig back into the grey matter for these encounters because they were still happening all the time. No one ever hears about those people, nor do they hear about all the people at my store who thought I carried my department, were excited to see me whenever I entered their field of vision, tried to get me to aim higher than a grocery store clerk because they thought I was too bright for it.

Tell me again customer service back here sucks.

And no, I'm not saying I haven't been flippant to customers before, nor that I'm a perfect employee, but what motivation do I have to try and sweet talk people for $12 an hour and zero reward and plenty of shitty fucking comments from managers about how I supposedly don't like dealing with customers (can you blame me, and you don't either)? Or how about the incident that got me to put in my two weeks in the first place, where a repeat asshole customer was upset I wouldn't serve him, called me names, tried to get other customers to harass me with him, and then I got a half hour-long struggle session about how I didn't handle it right and how a customer buying a $13 six-pack of Guinness (more than I make an hour!) was more important than my dignity?

I went above and beyond for that section, because I'm passionate about what I'm selling and because I buy beer there and I want it to be as good an experience as possible. Sure, they'll replace me. They'll find someone else to work that register, but will that person pull expired beer? Will that person refill the make-your-own-six-pack cooler, let alone with shit people would buy? Will that person wipe down and sanitize the cooler door handles? Will that person consistently show up for work? Even that was not guaranteed with the caliber of people they hired.

I missed one day, by the way, and it was because of weather. Every other day, whether it was slippery roads or being outright sick, I at least came in even though I knew I was leaving early. I was late maybe twice, one of those the other day, and by one minute. Literally exemplary attendance. They used to tell me I was the most reliable associate in the store. So many no-call no-shows—and again, I cannot blame a single one.

I have more stories about how that store fucking sucks, just on the customer end (ask me about the ravioli kit with green spots on it that was out for sale sometime, or how many times we discovered expired dairy left out for sale), but I've made my point. Time to relax in total NEETdom for, I dunno, two months maybe. We'll see.

Dude weed lmao

The final draft of Kevin and Theo wrapped on Tuesday! Bunch new scenes in it, things are better fleshed out, they make more sense, and characters and dialogue just hit better, more vibrantly, more sensically. Much happier with the new draft. We did agree to go through and switch all the US spellings and names for stuff to their British equivalents, but I'm gonna let her do that, because I don't know the full extent of what I'm looking for. Caby's nearly done with her illustrations too; all that's left is the poster, which will also be the book cover.

I'm really happy with the way it all panned out. This is really the first in the new wave of Pennyverse stories (a term I am endlessly frustrated I couldn't use in Kevin and Theo itself), which has changed a lot since 2019, in tone, in the strength of the writing and the maturity and the likability, frankly. Not a lot of that's gotten online since it's mostly been ideas and talks as we've stopped working on it for a few years, so it's nice to have the new era officially begun with this story.

To elaborate on that last point: I stopped working on Pennyverse for a while in part because I felt being a more empathetic and better-adjusted person would help me do the material better justice. I'm not particularly proud of the early days of the project. It was funny how "saccharine" and optimistic it was made out to be back when we started it, because we still joked lots about characters dying horribly, and I sure wrote a lot of miserable things with Seb and especially Colton (who I regret putting through so much despite him being a fictional teenage raccoon), miserable to the point where they basically made no sense. (So many adults bullying this kid, despite him being literally orphaned and probably malnourished. He'd be the first everyone would protect.)

I've stopped regretting it quite as much as I used to, but really, I won't rest until it's all the way it should be. The first step towards that was just growing as a person myself, and I'm happy to say I feel I very much have, but it does mean the flow of new Pennyverse media dried up for a while, and what is there (like the toyhou.se bios) is woefully out of date.

I'm pretty fond of it all again, all the stories and music and level design and site building and art I've always gotten up to, so to focus my attention, I've been thinking of it in phases. These aren't set in stone, they bleed together, they're months-long, and there's no deadlines, but my time gets more limited, I have more I want to do, and I've gotta start picking. Here's how I've been thinking of it:

1. The first phase involves my websites. I fell off of sitemaking over the lockdowns, and like Pennyverse, the way I presented myself (like my dislike of about pages or only having sections for what I feel people would care about from me) doesn't sound right to me anymore. cammy.somnol is just the cute little hobby and interest site, but I'd really like to have mari.somnol redone, nice to browse, and filled up with damn near everything I've made for some kinda audience before I go and make more of it with (currently) no place to put it.

2. The second phase involves my writing, both the stories themselves and the meta media around it. My toyhou.se is both barren of my new lad ideas and very out of date of my old lad ideas. Colton's updated personality, where he's less "vulnerable kid" and more "vulnerable teenager trying to make it look like he can handle himself when he has no idea what he's doing", isn't up there. Seb's totally overhauled personality, less "grumpy" and more "socially anxious to the point of defensiveness and basically ashamed of it", isn't up there. I'd like to make the actual profiles more visually appealing as well—the infobox thing is still cute, but it's a little stale by now.

   For the proper story end of things, I'd still like to do that PMD fanfic I started, Gonzo has a few more prequel stories in him (I was imagining one based on the Centralia mine fire, which isn't far from me, as a way to explore settlement guardians in greater detail), Under the Rain Shadow still needs its rewrite and illustration pass, and I'd love to start an in-character blog for Seb now that I have a good reason for him to make one. (I think he'd rather enjoy talking and talking about himself when he opens up a little.)

3. The third phase involves music. I would really like to return to guitar, get myself an amp, get a professional looking at my cheap Strat clone, take some online lessons, and actually be able to contribute that playing to my music. I haven't made a true attempt at an album since I was working on mtlx stuff in 2020, and all that feels rather stiff to me now. I know I have so much better music in me now, both using the sounds I've created for myself in these various projects and in new, yet-to-be-discovered sounds, and I know Caby would love to contribute her art skills to working on my album art and sleeve designs.

Art and level design aren't up there because they're not true focuses of mine. I fucking love them both, but they're much more "hobbies" than the rest of the stuff on the list, which feel like things I truly want to pursue and get better at and show off to people. Art is a means to an end (that being a way to get my ideas for cute animal people out into the world) and a way to blow off steam between bigger projects, and while I've been toying with TrenchBroom again and playing a bunch of Quake, I'm never going to be a professional level designer, so I don't really see that as being a focus of mine at current. Maybe someday! (That being said, while I'm at it, you can probably expect me to branch out into other games—can you imagine a Cammy Doom WAD? It's more likely than you think.)

This is really just a brain dump and a bunch of waffle about some plans for the future. I haven't even gotten to all the new stuff I'd like to do, like start up some kind of YouTube presence doing comfy retrocomputing videos and rambling into a MiniDV camera, or all the travel I'd like to get up to once I have a car. I've got that trip coming up! The next era in my life is truly starting soon, and it's going to be a busy time, so I figured I'd just lay out a few priorities on here for all my hobby stuff as I attempt to keep it all in check.

Jesus, stuff got busy! I'm a bit better about updating this journal, but so much is going on that I always come home ready to rest instead of report in on the day's events. It's all been seriously fantastic, though, this spring is shaping up to be the best in a long time. Here's a small recap...

• Got my KTN! In like, two days tops. Thanks, government, thought that'd take a while.
• Flight booked, I'll be gone May 17th to June 7th. I got it for a damn good price, just under $750 including traveler's insurance. Amusingly, the trip there will have me going into Montreal for a few hours layover. Didn't think I'd also be heading to Canada this trip, but life comes at you fast.
• A lot of shopping, a lot of preparing. Got some nicer clothes, new shoes (and new work shoes, unrelated but still appreciated), and also buying gifts for Caby! You are gonna be so hype to see it, my love, I know it <w<
• I've been doing a lot of work on archives, so keep an eye on the group blog for a little highlights reel of some fun stuff from Somnol's past you should go and browse. I also did a full backup of our sites for this season, so no worries, even the weird, splintered state our stuff is in at the moment is preserved. (It will be less splintered shortly, am sure...)
• Keeping on with the rewrite for Kevin and Theo! Caby's an absolute mad lad, so immediately after going "man I am so overwhelmed by all I have to do", she's knocked out like five or six illustrations in 3-4 days. It'll be going to the presses very very soon, and we'll be making copies for everyone in the group, plus ourselves. My writing in print for the first time! Wack.
• I know I said I wouldn't workpost on here anymore, knowing who's watching and all, but I've amusingly stirred up my entire department by, uh, writing lists to management about how no one is doing shit. Listen, if I have to tell customers to not buy stuff because it's expired, that makes me big sad. I work hard so I don't have to work hard, so I'll be spending this weekend cleaning up other people's messes and gloating.
• In better news, they finally changed the music in there! So I get to listen to Garbage and Counting Crows and Nada Surf and Beck and Matchbox Twenty while I work, and that's just amazing. It's through work that I've realized my music tastes broadly fall into "90s adult alternative", which I think is pretty sweet.

I posted this on Blips this morning, but I'm not overwhelmed at all by any of this. No, I'm feeling motivated, at long last. I'm not avoiding things, I'm jumping right into them again. I'm glad to finally have momentum. Hopping from project to project, reminiscing, talking too much, kicking ass, making plans—things are finally feeling pre-lockdown again. This was all stuff we were talking about and doing back in 2019, and I made it my goal in 2021 to get back to that.

It took some time, but I'm finally feeling like I'm getting back there. Just you all wait until I have that car, see if I don't have some photos and videos for you...

Well, I'm now a felon. I got fingerprinted and everything yesterday.

Not quite. I went for my TSA PreCheck stuff! Was an hour drive both ways for five minutes of being run through paperwork, getting my prints taken (with a cool tablet!), and paying. Yay for our nearest IdentoGo not doing TSA stuff. Either way, I'll know my KTN in a few days, hopefully, and then the flight will be scheduled. I'll then have concrete dates for the trip to hand out.

The excitement is starting to build. So many things I want to do over there! Visit shops! Play vidya (and hack her consoles—my 3DS is now on Luma and yes hShop is actually incredible)! Watch lots of British TV! I don't even think of it like I'm seeing my girlfriend at the moment, I'm just flying out to hang out with my best friend and do shit. Obviously the girlfriend stuff is there, but it feels more like early 2019 where it was mostly just a lot of "let's nap together and hug a lot"—which I'm totally cool with right now! I need more of that. Your girlfriend should be your best friend, really.

So...now onto what the title of the post is about. Something that's been on my mind lately.

Also yesterday: I restored mari_nc2 from the weird, altered, hidden one that was on mari.somnol back in 2019 back to what it actually looked like and contained when I left Neocities. I linked to a few juicy things in my bio there, none of which were grabbed by the Wayback Machine, so I dug into the Somnol Discord's chat backups to find either what was being referenced or suitable replacements. The backup of the #neocities room was roughly 300MB of chatlogs and screenshots, a lot of which is a lot spicier than I remembered. More importantly, though, I might have the only copies of this stuff left in existence.

There's this adage online that the internet is forever, but it really isn't. It's only forever in the sense that any publicly-available data can be copied and preserved. Discord servers are basically ephemeral. People get locked out of admin rooms and stuff gets deleted all the damn time. Even site stuff has gotten lost. The Wayback Machine probably hasn't preserved my older site designs, despite its better efforts. I was going to move the post-move mari.neocities backup to mari_nc3 and have mari_nc2 be one of my September-November designs, but not enough of the content, and in fact not even the layout of the one I really wanted (the 800x600 two column layout, if you remember) survives.

It's bigger than the logs and the sites, though. It's the people. All the names that routinely cropped up in these logs—jcbug, antillion, Mia, wastebin, heathsy, thundercat, Grinchie, vas, strata—I don't know where the fuck they are. I have no clue what became of them. Maybe, if they were real consistent with their usernames like I am, I could find where they are now in a Google search or through their (probably abandoned) Neocities, but some of these people rebranded. Sometimes they're just outright fucking gone. I kept ahold of a few and the rest just disappeared.

It's even bigger than the people though! It's me! We looked through a lot of logs yesterday, and the resulting feeling was just how much more willing to outright insult people we used to be. I forgot about the hostility. A lot of giggles, yes! But a lot of reminder that, yeah, technically I'm still in the same room doing mostly the same thing I did back then, but the context is so much different. I'm a different person, you're a different person, and we're feeling differently than we did five years ago. That is weird to me.

It's the same feeling I got when I was digging through some old furry webcomics I used to read. Now, as a middle schooler, I was not interested in reading big, long stories. I did like cute art and gags, though, and the rest I was just aware of. There's a comic, now seemingly-concluded but the guy behind it is still active, called Newshounds, and a splinter story of Newshounds involved a small side character, a computer hacker named Manny (who was a mink), getting horrifically murdered and living on through his computer, I think. It was called Manifestations.

Cue me rediscovering Newshounds and wanting to actually give this weird, dark, cyberghost story a go.

Only the index page still exists. The Wayback Machine didn't grab it, because it was a thing you had to pay money for back when it was running on the Newshounds site. It also did not grab the free, public rerun of it from a few years later. To my knowledge, it does not survive in any public capacity.

I do plan on actually asking the guy behind it (once I find a good way to contact him) if Manifestations is still around somewhere, even in a printed book (he's got a few of those collections, I'd buy it to read it), but for now, it's just left me with this eerie chill of something I knew about and saw back then is fundamentally gone forever. That's my point, I guess. We're jaded into thinking nothing ever changes, but goddamn does stuff change, even when you're not looking.

I do wish I clicked "Download entire site" a few more times back when I was on Neocities, but I can say that about a lot of things I've worked on, YouTube videos I've uploaded, stuff I worked on in school, and so forth. Maybe someday I'll magically get the chance to re-experience that stuff, but that's why I'm so tied at the hip to archives right now. It's my way of keeping these old friends alive, because that's what I consider the experience of looking through Caby's old sites or dcb's old sites or anyone's old sites. Old friends.

Here's a rare mari Caby drew back then that I didn't even know existed, nor had saved obviously. I'll be keeping all these sites and somnol.net itself up for as long as I possibly can. The domain will be in my will if the internet doesn't collapse first.

Yes, peep that header! There's plenty more finished where this came from, I just gotta get the aboveground/underground update done to push it out. There is an embarrassingly wide gulf between the beta version of the site and what piddling little I have up on the main site now, so I'm gonna try to get that last little thing I've been putting off drawn so I can push it out finally. (It involves Bunny and it's also snuggly, so it scares me to death to draw. But I know I gotta.)

I've decided against quitting. It's just a logistical nightmare to try to find another night job (that's when I can work with the transportation I have) at some other place and deal with no money coming in for an indeterminate period of time when I could just mark myself as unavailable for the three weeks, fuck off for the three weeks, and come right back to having a job I really don't mind, all things considered. Quitting was still kind of a byproduct of when stuff at the store as shaky and I felt really targeted. I honestly don't anymore. Getting hassled about shit was a byproduct of the previous manager.

I'm over the $6,000 threshold, and I'll probably be hovering around $7,000 by the time I can get my physical and stuff done to clear me to take the written test (and thus get my permit again). Hunt down the car, get the permit, take the road test, get my license, and that's a major milestone taken care of. Can drive down to the Jersey Shore or wherever whenever I want, visit friends, do hobby stuff in the area (ham radio!), do the Uber Eats/gig economy thing, find work further out of town, be available whenever, or just joyride at night. It's only a few months away.

Been quietly realizing that a lot of my contrarian nature over the years has probably been the result of just being deprived as a teenager. Easy to slag off new games or stuff people like when you can't be happy or indulge in your hobbies due to being poor and family and so on. I've never even taken a vacation. Been stuck in one place for almost 24 years now, man. Am happy that's due to change soon. I'll have so many more interesting stories when I'm free to go.

Also, starting to get warm out again! It's almost midnight and my window is still open. Hot stuff. Will be a good summer.

So I've been intentionally coy on what this story thing I'm working on with Caby is outside of, well, what I've already said. Partially, that was out of practicality. It wasn't really far along enough that I could be or wanted to share much of it with the world.

I just got the first draft of it done before work this afternoon. Just over 4,800 words, spread out over three weeks. The story's done regardless of what happens from here, and Caby draws too much for the illustrations to not follow at roughly the same pace. I intentionally put all else I was up to (including site stuff) on pause more or less to make sure I was focusing all my creative energy on it. Think it's time to share some about it.

Somnolescent has this thing called the Greater Somnolescent Multiverse. I wrote about it for an earlier version of cammy.somnol and that post got rewritten for the blog, so the details are there if you wanna read about it. Essentially, it's this big, undefined void that sits between all our worlds (Pennyverse, Pinede, Wyn, Wisp, Aidew, the real world, etc.). Some characters could survive in the vacuum of the Multiverse, some can't. Some can survive it so well, they know about it and can hop across it at will.

Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure is what happens when two Multiverse jumpers want to go to another world, but have no idea how to get there. It's two characters, Kevin from Pennyverse, who's a big stupid aardwolf who acts like a big stupid dog instead, and Theophrastus, short Theo, who's Apricot Bay's elderly librarian rabbit. Theo is actually originally from Pinede; in Caerpinwyd, he was a prodigy mage and ravenous bookworm who discovered immortality, then discovered the Multiverse, and set up shop in another world to collect and bring home exotic books.

(Theo on the left, Kevin on the right in the doorway. You'll want to fullview that one. 4.6mb download, careful!)

Over a holiday weekend, Theo decides to bring Kevin home to his big home on the shores of Caerpinwyd, but discovers in having not come home in a few months, he's forgotten where in the Multiverse it's located. Kevin is a stupid dog who was born of Multiverse noise and climbed into Pennyverse, where he was found in a dumpster in The City and had to be told what species he even took shape as.

Theo rested on his back on the island underneath the bubble. Mercifully, he was clothed, but his patience was growing threadbare. "This has been an absolute waste of time!" he growled. "There's more worlds in this Multiverse than I know what to do with."

Kevin stood at his side, having returned from patching another world hole. Theo barely looked in his direction. "Aw, it's here somewhere, Theo," the aardwolf encouraged. "Maybe it'll be the next one we try!"

"I don't even recall which one leads back to Apricot Bay." Theo picked his heavy head off the ground, sitting up with a few spine cracks. "We are pitifully lost."

"I know which one it is!" Kevin put his hand up to point to one before stopping. "It's—um—I think it's that one—"

The bunny sighed. "We will try one more world bubble. If by some occurrence there isn't a large bird trying to eat us in that world, we'll find somewhere to rest for the evening. Maybe we'll return to Apricot Bay before the holiday is through."

It takes them a few tries.

In truth, any time I write something in multiple sittings, it feels disjointed to me. It doesn't help that I really don't map things out too much as I go along. Seriously, parts of that description, I just came up with as I was describing it. I don't think about tone too much, and I'm not good at "zingers"—those moments people really tend to remember from a story. I do plan to rewrite this in a few days. It's good, but I know I can do better. Everyone in the group likes it though, and Caby was especially grateful, since she had no idea what to do for a final school project otherwise.

There's some real neat plans for actually distributing this sucker floating around. We're gonna do a digital copy for all of you to read, and the Somnolians are going to get copies of it mailed to them, since Caby has to print everything out anyway. And of course, her and I will keep copies for ourselves. My work! In print, technically!

Seriously, when the rest of the illustrations are done and it's all assembled, it's gonna be like nothing we've done before. Caby's drawn stuff for my stories before, but not in a while, and never while I've been writing it, so this is both new territory and real exciting territory for me. At the moment, now that the writing is tentatively completed, I'm gonna go back to getting cammy.somnol's aboveground/belowground update ready to go live and probably work on some Quake level designs on paper before I get to mapping. Did I mention I don't plan too much beforehand?

I lied. I'm not conscious of saving money anymore. I've probably spent $200 on the 3DS eShop before it went down today, and $70 of that in the past week. Been squirrelling away some more games to play now that I'm in the mood for new ones. Have a list:

• HarmoKnight
• Star Fox 64 3D
• Rhythm Heaven Megamix
• Kid Icarus: Uprising (this one necessitated a quick upgrade to a bigger SD card)
• Pokémon Picross (if you spent $30 in it, you get future Picrites for free, eShop being extent or not)
• Yoshi and Poochy's Woolly World (this one was in physical because it wasn't much cheaper on the eShop than it was on Amazon)

There was also supposed to be a copy of Ocarina of Time 3D in there, but that's getting shipped in April. That means I'll probably never get it, in my experience.

And on the Virtual Console side:

• Balloon Fight (NES)
• Mega Man 2 (NES)
• Pokémon Silver (GBC)
• Mario Bros. (NES)
• Pokémon Puzzle Challenge (GBC)
• Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (GBC)

But Cammy! Why not just grab all this stuff off hShop for free??????

Oh my God, I've gotten so sick of getting asked this. Every time I've mentioned the eShop in some Discord server or on Blips, someone has brought up hShop. Look, buying stuff makes it more special. It's just true. I've downloaded tons of Wii WADs and ROMs and then just never actually played them. Easy come, easy go. Every game or album I buy, though, I feel obligated to really dig into it, and usually I get pretty damn close to it in the process. Plus, it's just cool to be able to say I used the eShop while it was still around.

I'm a fairweather fan of Nintendo; download or pirate if you like. But like, y'know, you're not cool for doing it. Everyone does it. I've done it. I've gotten stern warnings from my ISP for torrenting shit. (Yet I never bought that Harvey Danger album. Hm. Maybe that warning wasn't so effective after all.) It's not cool, it's not a way to show up the man, it's just a thing you can do. And I chose to buy a bunch of games instead.

I think I need to stop hanging out in places where 15-year-olds congregate, mostly.

So yeah, I'm gonna go back to playing Pokémon Puzzle Challenge now. Fun game! (Protip, if you have an XL, hold Start or Select at game boot. Like with DS carts, it will keep the original resolution of the game intact and not stretch it, and in the Virtual Console's case, you'll get a console-specific border around the game instead.) Excited to dig into it all, really. A lot of this is stuff I've never played, but have been thoroughly curious about.