I'd like to start off this journal entry by eulogizing the PhotoCam. Just—my entire saga with it has been a shitshow. I literally had a working one eat itself on Tuesday.

Let me list off all the attempts at getting a single working camera so far:

1. The first one didn't power on and had a battery door that wouldn't stay closed.
2. The second one was never shipped and eBay wound up refunding my purchase automatically.
3. The third one was a Pretec DC-600, and its battery door won't stay closed, but at least it works? It takes pictures? But without a reliable means of transferring them off the camera (PhotoRec on the CF card usually does the trick, but sometimes shots are inexplicably not recovered despite existing on the camera), it's a crapshoot if I can retrieve what I took.
4. The fourth one, another PhotoCam, finally powers on and has a good battery door! Then I formatted the memory. And it failed the format. And now the camera reads actual corrupted data in trying to retrieve photos, save photos, or even just get the amount of shots left in the roll. Sometimes, it fails to even survive the boot.

At this point, I'm just convinced I'm not supposed to have one of these, and that's okay. I finally got to see what kinda pictures it took, roughly (the Pretec and the PhotoCam Plus do not take exactly identical shots, the PhotoCam definitely has a better sensor with much better indoor capabilities). I suppose if I had a microsoldering setup, I could try to open up the first camera and transfer its flash memory chips to the fourth camera. I'll probably have something like that someday, so I'm keeping it all in the same box and waiting until then. Not like I can break either of them further.

If I do want a retro camera (and believe me, I still do), I think I'm better off aiming for something slightly newer. Something natively USB, something a little less odd and esoteric. It's not gonna be as ~aesthetic~, but oh well. Honestly, just as cameras, the Canon Powershot series has always appealed to me. I now have the S30 on my radar, especially since it can do manual white balance and RAWs, which is mind-blowing to me in a point-and-shoot. (And apparently it can take 640x480, in case I still want to LARP. Obviously, it has a much better sensor, so it'll still look nicer than the PhotoCam, but hey.)

In much more productive news, I've been writing again. I don't know if I've ever addressed this publicly, but Pokémon has been on my mind again, back when I used to write fanfic for it in 2015 or so. Some of my first (not so great) moments with being creative came from my work on, and the reaction from friends to, Pokémon fanfic. It was all a little bit unfortunate. Being creative is hard and emotionally taxing enough without someone blatantly only being interested in your characters if they can get their drowning kink from it. Definitely not the nicest way to dive into writing and characters at a young age.

I've been wanting to do a fic that's sort of a gigantic tribute to my old characters, me as a teenager, and the music I liked back then for a few weeks now, and I wrote 1,500 words, the entire first chapter, over a few hours into yesterday morning. It was easily the most automatic and least effortful writing I've ever done. The shame of ~writing fanfic~ is well past me, and I can't be happier about it. The lads all loved it too. I'm getting to bring back some of my oldest characters, Woopers and Minuns and Totodiles, and finally do them justice in a way I wasn't quite able to do almost a decade ago.

At the moment, I don't really have a great place to share it. mari.somnol really needs that redesign before I can start getting art and writing back on there, and I'd need art before I can submit the lads to toyhou.se (oh yeah, that's something else I gotta do more of...). Maybe I'll try for an invite to AO3. I've always thought it's a good looking site, even if I still can't navigate it for shit. Mostly, I'm looking to write it and put it in Somnol. The rest of the internet can read it or not. If Somnol likes it, I'm happy.

And so we begin a happy new year, random visitors to cammy.somnol. I know the people at the store are ringing in 2023 in style; had a guy sitting in the cafe for three hours drinking Natural Ice and nursing a bottle of Xanax, pacing very bizarrely and apparently buying lots of cigars. There was another one at the store today (day off but we had to run in for milk) pressed up against the glass window in the front, staring and making faces.

I'll admit, I did not end off 2022 the healthiest camper. I've built up a lot of bad habits in the past year, some behavioral, some dietary, some mental. 2022 was very much the year of necessary change and a lot of good news that never quite felt like good news. A lot of that was due to a lot of extra stress I put on myself, and a feeling of not being able to finish anything. It felt like I was doing a lot and never getting anything good out of it.

2023 is the year of all that stress and hard work paying off. The past few days have been great. Very free-feeling, no stress, and things are starting to feel very real and warm and gooey between me and Caby again. Stuff is moving! I got my photos done today, but the actual passport filing requires an appointment we didn't know about, so I'll be going back on the 10th for that. I like to think this is all a very good omen for the rest of the year.

I've made it a point several times to myself, Caby, and the lads that the only things we have to do are our real-world obligations and everything else is a hobby. As I alluded to in a previous journal, I'm going to be moving a bunch of my subsites to archives and calling them finished. I did the last round of backups with them as active sites last night. I want as few things as possible up in the air, and even if they weren't a focus, having them officially done is honestly quite the mental pick-me-up. I've found that my favorite part of any project is when you cut half of it out to be able to officially release it finally.

For new stuff, I have some pages for this site I'm slowly completing, and I'd like to get back into the art thing after taking a few weeks off to destress. Really, I'd like to do everything. I have a story idea in my head and decently thought out (just need to get it down), site pages looking promising (some returning from the old cammy.somnol, some brand new), a new mari.somnol that really takes the Mac OS 8 concept and look to its logical conclusion (plus just features way more of me than even v2 did), music???? God I'd love to make some more music. Perhaps I'll do an EP. Four tracks, in and out.

Have a card from Caby that finally came last night!! (There's a goddamn essay written inside with another Cammy, but that's just for us~) Look! She made this in her dining room and I'm holding it! She's real!

Oh my gosh I love this boy, I need to find a good way to start displaying cards. Orange Cammy is kind of a vibe,,,,