Ah, man, I think I'm getting better. When the journal goes quiet, you know I have zero desire to write shit for it. I took a week off of some of my vices, and I'm starting to save money again after using them to finish off my student loans. It's not perfect still, still a couple things haunting me even as I write this, but I've got lots creatively that I'm feeling comfier with and work especially is very calm right now. By mid-February, I will have $10,000 banked up, and I'll be around $23k in savings or so by my one year mark here. This place is gonna make the next five years for me financially possible, and I can write journal entries on the clock!

I'll discuss all that more in time, but I figure it's time to dust off the journal proper with something more fun: I played all the Quake mission packs recently! I've only owned them for like over half a decade now (or at least, uh, had copies of them?), and I've become fuzzy for the idea of gaming through time again, beating games as they came out and seeing the rapid march of technology and design innovation, so now seemed like an ideal time to finally get through them.

I started with the base game, which I'll call id1 for my ease of typing, and then moved onto Scourge of Armagon, hipnotic for short, then Dissolution of Eternity, rogue for short, and finally I threw in the unofficial third mission pack Abyss of Pandemonium, or impel, for shits and giggles before I moved onto Quake II. (The shortnames all refer to the company that worked on each game, id Software, Hipnotic Interactive, Rogue Entertainment, or the Impel Development Team. I'm just so used to calling them by their shortnames that I regularly confuse and mix up their real names.) I intended this to only be one post, but since I wrote so much (well over 3,000 words!), I'll be splitting it into three parts.

Summing up id1

Quake as a game starts a lot better than it ends. I breeze through the shooting galleries of the first three episodes, enjoying their weird level layouts and how I have everything memorized, and then Episode 4 presents a certain roadblock, and that's because the entire episode was designed by Sandy Petersen. Sandy's work is divisive. He was originally a tabletop RPG developer with a background in games like Call of Cthulhu, and id brought him on for Doom and ultimately Quake. Some folks, like NewHouse, really like his inventiveness. His focus was on strange and unique level setups and gimmicks, not action like the rest of the team. Other folks find his levels to be the most obnoxious of all the classic id levels to play because said ideas don't usually translate to fun gameplay.

Episode 4 starts out pretty decent. I like E4M2, The Tower of Despair, with the windows that open up in chunks and the focus on miniature sections of the level that act as teleporters to bigger sections of the level. See? Good ideas, Sandy! It's really E4M6, The Pain Maze, and E4M7, Azure Agony, that live up to their names. Overly long, too many spawns (exploding, very fast moving bouncing blobs), all ambush encounters in tight quarters, thus negating the usefulness of your explosives, no thanks. I skip through most of that shit. Worse yet, the final level, Shub-Niggurath's Lair, is just a long, annoying line of shamblers up a cliff face with an admittedly fun subversion in how you actually kill Shubby: not with your firepower, but with a well-timed telefrag, just like is fun to do to people in deathmatch.

On the whole, it's a little bit of an unremarkable end to one of my favorite games. Let's see how the mission packs do at solving that.

Summing up hipnotic

Scourge of Armagon is the mission pack I have the most experience with. I've almost made it through it a few times, but this time, I really wanted to see it through to the end. I'd say it's the strongest of the three. Both of the official mission packs add onto the base game in their own way, and hipnotic adds rotating entities, gravity fields, earthquakes, and a nice variety of weapons and enemies to make base levels (which the entire first third of the mission pack consists of) more satisfying and difficult to play.

hipnotic is similar in story to Half-Life 2, where a force called Armagon takes over Shubby's existing invasion infrastructure with aims of attacking Earth, and it's up to the jannie who swept it up the first time to sweep it up again (as jannies are good at). Spoilers! But the fight against Armagon is actually pretty decent for such a simple game like Quake. It feels like a throwback to Wolfenstein 3D's bosses, where you enter an ominous, open arena as the boss makes his presence felt, and unlike Shubby, sitting there like a pulsing pustule until you pop it, he is very fucking aggressive with his rockets, so brush up on your circle-strafing. It's fun! A good boss really helps to punctuate an arena shooter, an exclamation point on the end, and Scourge is probably the best of all the official bosses in the Quake universe.

Visually, hipnotic is a nice step up from id1. I can't fault how bad the texturing in id1 is, because it had a first of its kind level editor and the game was meant to run in 320x200 anyway, but hipnotic definitely polishes up the bases some with particle force fields and big showy multi-part doors. The bases about halfway through start to take on a mining camp feel, complete with cave-ins and sudden lava pits twenty feet below you--some pretty memorable stuff. The later levels are cool too; it's pretty hard to forget Ancient Realms, HIP2M1, with its cool non-linear multi-level castle (and now I've been in some real ones!), the gigantic working clock and that Jesus mural that fires lightning at you in The Black Cathedral, HIP2M3, the elevator ride over the shores of Hell in HIP3M1, Tur Torment, or all the coffin iconography into the third episode.

For new monsters, you get the centroid, a cybernetic scorpion with a nail attack apparently also known as the Scourge (yes, the Scourge of Armagon, roll credits) and gremlins, tiny lizard fuckers that steal your active weapon (annoying) and revive dead enemies (fuck you). I didn't find any of the new weaponry or power-ups all that exciting or useful. As cute as the idea of the Horn of Conjuring is, summoning a monster to fight for you instead, usually they just get stuck on the scenery downstairs instead. I did like the rapid-fire laser cannon, with its pleasing firing rate and silly pew-pew noises. Really, none of the gameplay additions in any of the mission packs can touch the loadout and enemy variety of the base game, but a couple of those fucking weird teleporting nail scorpions definitely help to break up the monotony of 200 dudes with shotguns and laser guns.

hipnotic isn't perfect, of course. Given what I heard online, I expected rogue to have all the really annoying traps, but hipnotic's are far worse. Anyone who's played it remembers the rock tumbler bit in HIP1M3, The Lost Mine, and if you haven't played it, when you find it, save right before! You will be reloading that save over and over, as dying in it is completely random, and you need to get through it to finish the level. There's also the spike mines, which are effectively gigantic and even more dangerous vorepods. They lumber towards you through the air, and you better hope you can wipe them off like boogers on the scenery, because otherwise your limbs will be in different dimensions. I fucking hate spike mines. All my homies hate spike mines.

Scourge of Armagon is definitely worth a play and maybe a few. I had a lot of fun with it, and there's plenty of cool sights to see that elevate Quake's otherworldly feeling with more actually recognizable locales like churches and mining camps. You gotta at least sorta have the feeling these are real places, or else they just feel like game levels. hipnotic is good at that, not in a way that makes it feel realistic, but in a way that makes it feel like the real world, but desecrated, turned odd and warped. Good expansion.

I guess it had to happen sometime! My iMac display has officially given and now only displays streaks:

This started happening intermittently yesterday evening after it woke up from sleep, and now it's just not displaying anything period. Really, it's no great surprise. This computer celebrated ten years of daily service this year (don't ask me for a specific date). Yeah, I've been using this computer since I was 14 or so. I'm now 25. The fact that it hadn't developed issues sooner (outside of being slow to start up) is a testament to how good of a computer it was and how well I took care of it.

To be clear, the computer still works. My stuff is safe, the speakers in it still work, and I have my cheapie old Emerson HDTV (with all its horrific overscan issues) hooked up as a monitor at the moment. This is very much an annoying temporary solution, though. It's time for a new one. I knew that time was coming years ago. I simply wanted to take this Mac as far as it'd go, and I accomplished that. That's my statement against e-waste: I used the same computer for ten years, and I'm proud of it.

Everything has its day sometime, though, and this computer's has come. If this were a normal tower PC, I could just replace the display and call it good for a little bit longer, but given it's an iMac, not having the display function means it has an absolutely obnoxious footprint on my desk, and again, plugging in my little HDTV means I'm stuck with the edges of the screen either cut off or slightly cut off. It'll work for now, I can make do with it—but I need to replace it.

I'm pretty adamant about never going with another Mac for a daily driver again. Windows is a requirement for me, and the fact that Macs now run on ARM means no native Windows. I'm not gonna do the Parallels dance to get Windows stuff to run next to MacOS stuff, either, because I fucking hate dealing with MacOS. I think MacOS is ungodly sluggish, I hate Gatekeeper, I hate Apple dropping 32-bit app support—it's just not an ecosystem I ever want to invest myself into again. Keeping a retro Mac around for GarageBand and maybe iPod syncing? I'd love that, but as a daily driver? Never again. It was only because of Boot Camp that I was good with Macs for so long anyway.

Jake suggested I look at some prebuilt gaming PCs through IBuyPower, and I'm honestly really tempted. Even their $1100 special (not counting any further deals) is still light years ahead of what mine can do right now—a Ryzen 5, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, a GeForce RTX 3050—even that feels like a lot of power that I might not need. I don't know!

What I do know is that I'm happy to treat myself a bit once I get the funds. I should be able to replace this by mid-next month. My student loans are paid off, and now I just need a few weeks to cobble together the $1300 or so to get myself a nice new monitor and something that'll comfortably play TUNIC or Doom Eternal or whatever. If a laptop in a 27" case carried me ten years, I imagine a decent gaming PC with my interest in new games not quite what it used to be (and it was never there too much to begin with) will last me into my mid-30s. Emulation performance is what matters more to me, and anything will emulate PS2 games better than what I've got.

Both a lot and not a lot has happened in computing in the past decade. I could continue to use this one because 8GB is still an okay baseline that most software respects, and I don't play a lot of heavy modern games that would tax the 2013-era laptop-grade GPU in this machine. (I remember streaming Doom 2016 on low settings back in the day!) That said, USB-C is now dominant, AMD took the top spot in CPUs from Intel, and SSDs, even big ones, are pretty much standard now. The world this Mac came to be in no longer exists, and that's socially and that's technically.

It is sad to think that my time with this computer is coming to a close though. I'm a sperg; change is hard sometimes. I've been using iMacs since I was 10. Computers like this one have been with me across four different houses, as far back as middle school. This one in particular has been across state lines to stay with me with family, it's been to college, it's gone far. I made every song on In Free Fall and on Last Summer on this machine. All of my websites have been built on it. Every stream I've ever conducted has been on this computer. Save for anything I drew in Wales, this has been my art machine.

And it's starting to go on me. It's still here, and I'm making sure all my stuff is safe in case it does go completely, but it is a loss. What will come after it will be more powerful, but it won't be the same. I'm alright with that, but yeah, damn. I don't have the highest opinion of Apple products anymore, and I know plenty of people who never did, but this was one of the good ones.

Getting rid of it is gonna be a fucking chore too, but that's more a family issue than it is a computer issue. Come on, car!

So because I gotta remember that all the people who see what I do only see about 10% of it each, let's start off with some news: this evening, we started streaming Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves! Given that I was able to get through the first two, it felt wrong not to finish off the trilogy, and now that I have consistent days off from work, here we are! It wasn't as exciting or high energy as I would've liked, I was a little out of it, folks were a little sleepy, but that's okay, they get like that and we made it through. Fridays at 6PM EST! Watch out if you wanna catch me live!

Now onto a bit of pondering. If you don't know, way back in the Neocities days, I had looked out onto the world of Web development documentation in despair. It felt like you had two, neither especially satisfactory approaches to beginner documentation, references and tutorials. References are great if you know what you're looking for, but they're not very good teaching tools. Tutorials are good at teaching people, but they either focused too much on "do this to make this happen", which is simple but doesn't give you much context, or just weren't very good in the first place (see: old W3Schools, or GeeksForGeeks, which asks me to do the needful and give Indians my Google account just to scroll through one of their pages, and no thanks).

I thought I could do better and came up with Tesserae. Tesserae was meant to teach people concepts, stuff that would explain why Web pages are built and work like they do, arranged into courses by complexity and topic. A tutorial can give you a valid HTML page to start with, or can explain how to set margins on an element, but I wanted to put concepts like block vs. inline elements, page flow, page structure, and the box model in people's heads. These are the glue (the why) around all the real physical pieces of attributes and elements and CSS declarations that you'd actually implement on your site (the what), and it's what makes using them effectively make sense. My initial version of this from late 2018 got decently far, but I decided it didn't look particularly great and wasn't 100% accurate, so I started over with a layout I built using mini.css.

While Tesserae hasn't gotten an update since May 2022, and before then November 2020, I've always had bigger plans for it, including branching out into JavaScript and PHP and adapting Alexi (star of nofi) to be its mascot. It's never been too terribly popular, which is a contributing factor to me not doing much with it in a while, but the people who appreciate it (like Savannah) definitely seem to appreciate it, and I feel like I'm a good technical writer with an ear for clear, concise explanations. It felt like a good "eventual" project.

Fast forward to me browsing Reddit this morning. I found this post on r/neocities recommending a site called The Odin Project. This is an open-source Web application development site organized by courses, starting with foundations like choosing a text editor and setting up Git repositories for site backup and versioning onto HTML basics, lists, links and images, onto block vs. inline elements, the box model, and even a nice section on flex. I had a read of some of the material, and it's very well written and very well organized and goes into a lot more detail than Tesserae does—and they have the benefit of it being open source and people being able to fix bad or outdated information. Even for folks not building Web applications, the foundations course would be a very good resource for getting started building sites from absolute zero, which was also Tesserae's starting point. There's even "further reading" sections after each topic, just like Tesserae.

So now I'm conflicted, and I don't really have a good answer here. I've found a site that's effectively doing what I wanted to do with Tesserae, but over a whole community with folks ready and willing to spend all their free time maintaining it. Even if I wanted to go forth working on it, I'd have to start devoting a few hours of my day (which is effectively an entire block of my free time either before or after work) to writing and structuring and decorating pages, when there's other sites that do this same thing with a similar level of accuracy, more detail, and with a much bigger reach.

It might be time to retire Tesserae as an idea. I'm not doing it just yet in case anyone can see some import to me having another site like that online, but man, it's six years old already and I haven't even reached content parity with tesserae_v1. Seeing as I'd like to do more Creating and less Teaching these days (with virtually no one outside Somnol I'm interested in teaching anyway), it'd be a lot of time spent on something that is absolutely cool and I'd be happy with in the end, but something I'm just not sure is worth the time investment at this point in my life. I could reorient Tesserae to be a guide to building sites for retro Web browsers like I like doing, but that's a big, messy, even more technical world that has an even smaller audience.

Thoughts, anyone? Email me if you've got an opinion one way or another.

Having five years worth of somnolescent.net backups really does pay dividends sometimes, especially when I'm trying to resurrect things for archives. Rather than relying on spotty Wayback grabs, I simply pull from the copy of each site I made five years ago, patch the links (each archives site has links across the site network changed to the contemporary version on archives, so Cammy site in 2019 goes to Caby site in 2019 and not the live caby.somnol), and upload to its own directory on archives.

Occasionally, though, some assembly is still required on top of that. I think it's time to get a little technical, but first, the actual news here: you can now view the original version of my Scratchpad circa late 2019-early 2020 and the original version of Letters From Somnolescent circa most of 2018, as they were, janky early layouts and all. tesserae_v1 is also now a thing—this was the original, pre-rewrite version from back when we were still on Neocities that wasn't as visually appealing, functional, or accurate as I would've liked, but amazingly, I've never brought it to archives until now. That was the easy one; again, just grab from my files and upload and done.

The blogs were tougher. This was all motivated by me trying to reorganize that subdomain ahead of the redesign it's been getting, as I wrote about the other day, and I figured that, if the final static copy of the Scratchpad was on mari_v3, the original mini.css layout before I switched to nonzero for a theme should be with mari_v2, which it was contemporary with. I'd also thought about resurrecting the original Nucleus-generated version of Letters and stashing it in blog_v1; while there's not a lot different about it, there kinda is? It's a little hard to explain, but that was how the group blog looked when it matched somnol_v2, so even though the theme got more refined in time but stayed roughly the same in layout, it felt wrong to have one up, but not the other. In any event, it's all Somnolescent history that would be nice to have for the purposes of other sites on archives having correct-looking pages to link to.

The Scratchpad resurrection took a few hours to get settled, but I roughly knew the process. There's a plugin called Simply Static that will generate static HTML pages of your entire WordPress site, so once I had a functional blog again, I could simply run that, download the render, patch the links, and upload. I'd done this with the Scratchpad itself when I retired it. This would be the same process, simply with the original theme active and with all posts, pages, tags, and categories before the nonzero switchover deleted to avoid being anachronistic.

I was surprised at how easy it was to redeploy a WordPress install. Every time I backed one up, despite it being a ton of files, I'd grab the entire install instead of just, say, the image uploads. To redeploy from a backup, you just...reupload the entire install. And then preferably update WordPress. All our databases still live on the backend, and the backups all still have the config information to get into them. I still needed to do a little bit of debugging because I uploaded everything to a new subdomain I could immediately delete instead of to mariteaux.somnolescent.net/blog/ where it originally lived, and that gave WordPress a bit of heartburn, but it was manageable.

It was that goddamn Nucleus install that had me up to some galaxy brain shit.

If you've never heard of Nucleus, it's another PHP/MySQL blogging platform I'd wanted to try out out of curiosity and because I'm a contrarian and used to be infinitely worse about it. It's been in and out of development by different teams for years, with the most recent updates coming entirely from the Japanese folks who still love it and still maintain it. Nucleus was a huge pain in the ass to work with, even at the time; after about eight months of using it, our user account logins for it just up and stopped working, necessitating an emergency migration to WordPress that I documented, funnily enough, in one of the first posts to the Scratchpad.

Because I wanted to go with my known good files instead of trying to force the old database onto a fresh new install of Nucleus, I simply uploaded my backup of the old Nucleus install and waited to see what would happen. At first, it seemed to work! If I tried to read any of the posts, however, or go anywhere other than the front page, I'd get a blank 500 error with no indication as to the issue. Even with error display on, you still don't get anything on the Web-facing front. DreamHost requires you to dig into your logs to find out why.

The 500 errors were apparently due to a long-deprecated now-stub function that Nucleus relied on called get_magic_quotes_gpc being totally removed in PHP 8.0 (when we were using Nucleus in 2018, PHP 7.0 was the newest version). DreamHost, to avoid you using old insecure PHP versions, hides your ability to use these earlier versions of PHP in your admin console, though you can still access them if you force a specific PHP version in your .htaccess.

After this, the Nucleus install sprung to life, but there was still an issue. WordPress has very nice URLs for posts and pages that match up well to static directories. Nucleus URLs are hideous and rely entirely on HTTP GET variables on top of index.php to navigate basically anything on the site. Of course, that presents a small challenge; while I'd be able to get a static copy of the site using wget, trying to access any of the pages would make Apache think I was trying to view index.php?itemid=44 (that is, index.php with some GET variables on top) instead of a page literally named index.php?itemid=44, with a question mark in the file name.

The solution for that was to percent encode the question mark in all the links. Of course, making it more fun is that Windows does not let you use a question mark in your file name, so to patch anything on the static wget copy, I'd have to

1. Make the changes with the files being named stuff like index.php@itemid=44
2. Upload them
3. SSH into DreamHost and run a bash script to replace any @ symbols with ? symbols
4. Test to see if there are more changes to be made
5. If there are, delete all the files on the site and begin anew

So it's good to know that Nucleus is just as much of a pain in the ass to work with now as it was in 2018.

But still! It's all returned to the Internet at long last. I'm still a little precious about Somnol history and all our hard work, so even if this isn't the most exciting thing to see, I'm glad to have it around for when I'm feeling sentimental, and I'm sure the group does too. Seeing my old Scratchpad layout again especially pleases me—I haven't looked at that thing, let alone used it, in years, and aside from the wonky spacing between elements, it's actually not too bad to browse! It definitely feels right to click around mari_v2 and have that be the Scratchpad and not the later one with all my 2022 posts on it. Small details only I could love, that's what I'm here for.

(Brief aside before we start: Happy six years of us talking, Caby—8/18/18 <3)

One of the less-exciting and less-visible aspects of the archives overhaul is that I'm trying to reorganize the subdomain some in the background. I made it in 2020 with purposes slightly different than what I have in mind now, and as a result, things that shouldn't be on there are on there, things are in places I prefer them not to be in, and my methodology for storing what is staying on there has changed a bit as I've developed it out more.

To give you some examples:

• archives was used to reduce the size of our seasonal Somnol site network backups in ways I don't like now. FLAC copies of my music were in a directory called /marfmusic/ on archives; I want those back on my actual site now, size of the backups be damned. Those aren't archives and have no reason to be on archives now that it's not simply a place to dump shit.
• archives has occasionally been used as, not just a file dump, but also a dump for website archives that don't pertain to Somnol. I have an as-complete-as-was-able-to-be-grabbed scrape of the site for the Internet 1996 World Exposition that I think dcb did in /web/. It was never meant for Somnol, but it went on archives for lack of a better plan.
• Sometimes I separated out component parts of sites in ways I don't like now. My Scratchpad and dcb's 32-bit Patio, our personal blogs, went in their own directories in /web/ because they were meant to be site version agnostic. Now, I think it's just messy, and they can both be matched to versions of mari.somnol and dcb.somnol where they most fit in the timeline.
• To reduce redundancy between grabs, I'd also split out subsites that didn't change across a series of site revisions into their own subdirectories and simply edit all the links to point to the split version. dcb's The Many Faces of Mozilla archive was like this. I hate that now, and I'd rather have the redundancy.
• Each of the file dumps were simply in directories in the root of archives, which is super messy to me now. The root directory, in my head, should be files that make the site itself work, and any content should be sorted accordingly.

Resorting and getting rid of stuff is easy, but with it comes the risk of link rot. These days, when I build a site, I try to plan everything out so there's no chance I will ever want to reorganize the files. Anything that gets moved runs the risk of breaking links someone dropped in a Discord somewhere, or on a forum post or in a Reddit comment somewhere, and I don't want any of that. I want links that will exist in ten, twenty years. For archives, this is extra important to me. All Links Are Permanent.

Thankfully, Apache (and DreamHost accordingly) support the use of .htaccess redirects. I can simply have the old links redirect to the new locations and then manually update links as I find them to reduce the need for the redirects. The stuff that's getting deleted, I just have it redirect 410 or target another page where the same information can be found, if necessary. Also nice is Notepad++'s Find in Files function, which lets me do a find and replace across an entire directory of files. I can just do a search for, say, /web/scratchpad/ and replace it with /web/mari_v3/blog/ and thousands of references are now updated to point to the right spot.

It takes a lot of work to maintain eternity, but technology makes it possible at all.

I gotta start making these journal entries smaller, or I'm never gonna update this thing. I've been putting this one off anyway because I didn't want to call a very good thing before I was confident in it, but now I am!

There's a lot I didn't say or post here with regards to my last grocery store job, because it was just bad all around. The people were nasty, the management was sketchy, communication was hilariously nonexistent, managers would literally ignore you when you needed their help. I had to learn of my own disciplinary action through other associates who overheard things, and when they wanted a sit down struggle session over said (two-week-old) writeups (which were about me not doing things I was literally not told I should be doing), I walked out. Fuck 'em. $13 an hour, or any amount of money, isn't enough for that shit.

So... here's really good job news for once.

I got a job at a beer distributor. My mom saw the position on Indeed, and the day I quit, I went to apply for it and found it gone. I emailed them.

The next day, they said to send my resume over. I did, and I got a call. "We love your resume, would you like to come in for a sitdown interview?" Of course I said yes.

I interviewed. They were impressed with how much I already knew. Three hours later, I get an email offering me a position with them. Full time, a couple dollars more an hour for the same work, basically, just bigger items.

I went, in a week, from being employed at a grocery store where people didn't even say hello to me when I walked in to being employed at one of the vendors of that store, a family-owned place where you know everyone and all communication is done face-to-face and on checklists. I am now making what I made in a month there in two weeks. No stupid purchase limits, no ringing up groceries. I have consistent days off again, so I can start streaming again (and did last night!). I can listen to my weirdass 90s rock while I work!

It's phenomenal.

Of course, my shifts are a lot longer. I've never worked full time before. Days before were six-and-a-half hours tops; today, I did nine-and-a-half. I'm good with that! It's a bunch more heavy lifting, and I do feel it when I come home. I'm good with that! I was fully expecting to have a car (only the car) financed by maybe late spring 2025; now I'm gonna have my loans fully paid off and the car by February of next year. If I stay a year, I'm still looking at over $10,000 in savings on top of that I can use for the next Wales trip and whatever else. This has so massively sped up the timeline for my move to Wales and me as a person, and it's in a place where I finally feel valued in what I do.

This does mean the creative stuff has slowed a bit, but I'm still quietly working on the archives overhaul, and I'm hoping to have Last Summer CDs made up and sent out in September when dcb's back at school. Obviously, that's no big deal. Real life, work, and money come first. For now, I'm just taking it easy and looking forward to my forthcoming first paycheck.

Got a lot of really exciting real world stuff that's gonna make me a lot of money going on, but I'll save that for another post. Let's talk my August creative plans! I meant to make this post a week ago, but then I spent it playing Gran Turismo 2, watching that boxset of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! I got from the library sale back in June, and recuperating instead. I need to shut off more—2025 will absolutely have more of that.

So back in May of last year now, I picked up a grey cat adopt from Caby that I named Miranda. She designed her to be sold obviously, but I just couldn't let her go to someone else, especially not when I had such a great idea for how to use her: a mascot for archives. archives was initially designed in a couple days in 2020 and themed around the Archives level in Goldeneye on the N64, but as cool and recognizable as that theming is, I wanted something more for it. Something more unique, something more personality-filled, and something with a little more meat and context than simply a list of download links and browseable old Somnol sites.

I've known how it should look since the beginning of this year, but it's taken me until now to do it. Part of the issue is I've never been too happy with how I draw Miranda, or any housecats really. I couldn't shape their heads correctly, I couldn't position parts of the face correctly, Miranda's got long hair like I was never all that great at drawing, I was experimenting with what details I wanted to put on them, and it was just a big fiddly mess that didn't come naturally, which is funny given how many kids get into drawing through drawing lots of cats and dogs. Just didn't come naturally to me!

Thankfully, developed skill and a lot of practice during Art Fight has made me much more confident in my ability to draw all of the above, and so now, I'm ready to start developing a better archives and give Miranda her home finally. Take a look:

Click for full size!

If you read the 2023 Wales trip diary, you can see an example of the redesign prototype from a year ago, and the moment I landed back in the US, I just stopped liking it. Aside from how much I didn't like the Miranda in the header, I wanted archives to be open, borderless. Initially I had an idea of doing a very 70s orange thing with thick white lines around design elements, but that was never very sharp in my head and I'm not a design sperg, so I just kept it simple and went with this HTML 3.2 table layout thing. Realizing that tomb theming would be kinda cool with the sandy background, I pretty shamelessly stole the icons from the old PopCap game Alchemy and guzzied them up on this 90s gold-marble surface courtesy of XFader.

I'm still surprised at how much I actually like the Miranda illustration, honestly, not just because of how tricky I've always found her to draw, but because I actually didn't line it. I realized doing so much art for Art Fight that a lot of the wonk in my sketches has been due to me trying to figure out limb thicknesses and extra poof from clothes in the same step, and normally, I hate my sketches for that reason. This time, I did my skeleton stick figure pose, then a nakey pose for the character proportions on another layer, and then finally drawing Miranda and her clothes on the top layer. It worked really well, and because the final size for the illustration was about half my sketch size, I didn't feel the need to line it. I might go back and touch it up and add the second guinea pig, but the experiment was a success!

This new iteration of archives is gonna have a nice timeline of Somnolescent history (projects/joins/leaves/events), a proper way to browse through the various versions of our sites with thumbnails and dates, and of course, more of this kitty woman I'm still really fond of. Expect it out later in the month, and that'll be one more thing I wanted to do officially off my list.

As for the rest of that list, I'm still aiming to have the Last Summer CDs finalized and ready by September or so. I still have to actually make the CD master, and I'll likely go back and tweak levels and some of the melody parts on some of the songs while I'm at it. It's one thing if it's some Web copy I can replace anytime, but once it's burned and mailed out, it's burned and mailed out. I want to make sure I'm totally satisfied before I do. I also intended to send art out with it, which has admittedly been the real holdup. Again, I wanna do it right, like it's been in my head. I have to wait for dcb to go back to school first anyway so he can actually receive packages.

Beyond that, the only real thing I'm aiming to do is have all my mari.somnol stuff settled. lofi still needs Kevin and Theo finished, nofi has a nice list of bugfixes and features it's behind on since I started working on lofi, and I need to build hifi. They all need illustrations. If I can pull this off before 2024 is out, I'm taking the rest of the year off. I don't remember the last time I just wasn't working on anything. I think I've fatigued a little bit (I honestly don't even know if this journal entry is particularly coherent), and I just don't have a lot to prove like I used to. I think time away from constantly Making Stuff will let the idea bucket start to fill up a little bit too, which is super important if I wanna spend 2025 entirely on my stories like I do.

Oh yeah, and stories—Savannah might have some really fucking good ones for you soon. Watch Letters for the announcement.

Well, August 1st would normally mean the end of the annual art trading extravaganza Art Fight (here's my profile—note that all Art Fight links require a login), but they extended it to the 3rd this year! Turns out deploying features mid-event causes people to not be able to submit attacks. Still, I'm bowing out at the normal time because I've accomplished everything I want to, and I really had to upend a lot of my routine to make it happen. It was intense, sometimes rewarding, and sometimes really deflating! Wasn't bad though, definitely a nice first year with a lot of positives.

I've been intending to participate in Art Fight since I took up drawing in 2022, but I really wasn't in any shape to, in terms of my confidence or my abilities. Really the hardest part was that I didn't have the characters I wanted to have on my profile, and "June Rushed Reference Syndrome" is hard enough when you're an established artist, let alone six months into your art career. It definitely led to a lot of stress between me and Caby, promising things and then not being in any position to deliver (even if rightfully so), and I swore this year I'd give her a good showing until the end. Thankfully, I was able to get Maldwyn, Cammy, Colton, and Nicholas up for people to pick from. Really plenty of choice for how few defenses I wound up getting, and all ones I'd be pleased getting art of!

Then came the actual fight. I'm not a particularly quick artist, but Art Fight really sped me up. I was getting an attack done every two days at my quickest, nine attacks in total over the whole fight, while working 30-36 hours a week! I never want to half-ass a drawing for anyone, because there is no feeling worse than knowing your character was only picked to give that person points during the fight and up their battle ratio. I couldn't give a fuck about my ratio. I want every attack I do to potentially be someone's favorite of the whole fight, or at least one of them, and I want pieces I'm proud of, ones that expand what I can do as an artist. To that end, I only do fullbodies, and they were all full-color and shaded and most involved props of some kind.

And sometimes I just had fun with these drawovers! This is from a real photo dcb took on Lake Michigan with the DSi Camera app running on a 3DS. Super adventurepilled.

On the artistic end, Art Fight 2024 definitely grew me. I learned how to draw digitigrade legs finally. I finally got into a shading and highlighting style I like. I've drawn amps, I've drawn easels, I've drawn Pokemon attacks! I'm so much more willing to dive in and draw designs I've never attempted before, even species I've never attempted before, like Umbreons and Azumarills and African wild dogs. It's a really phenomenal feeling. The artistic growth this year has been strong, and I owe it to my participation this year. I also just think the attacks I came out with are really cute, and I've definitely gone out of my way to show people them after they're done, where before, I was a lot less willing to. Part of it's confidence, and part of it is just that I think I'm at a skill level where it's not just art Caby likes because she's supportive of me, it's genuinely appealing stuff.

And the mutuals! Outside of Somnolescent, of course, it was really nice to see both Olaxis and a fellow named Nasiloo actually attacked me first, right at the very start of the fight. I was at the tops of their lists! That was really cool, and I made sure to work extra hard on their revenges in return. (Actually, Olaxis got me into a little chain with him, and that was really fun. Plus I got an extra Cammy when he drew Wren for Caby, with a nice note about how much of an inspiration we've been attached. Very glad; you've been really cool to have in our little orbit.)

Admittedly, though, to produce at this rate has eaten up my normal routine. Most of the month, I didn't emerge from my room until two hours before it was time to leave for work, and it was to eat and get ready for work. I stopped doing my album reviews, and I haven't even touched the books I got for my birthday, or the audiobooks and DVDs and albums I picked up at the library sale, or most of the review requests from a week ago. I haven't played a game in weeks. There were many days where I'd get up, do art until it was time to go to work, go do my shift, come home at 10, and do more art until I was too tired to stay awake at 2 or 3 in the morning. Some attacks took literally days on end of that, and you have to ask to what end it was for, and sometimes, it was lovely, and sometimes it was crushing.

I don't draw solely to get people's approval—in fact, there's been a lot of times where I'm happy just sharing it with the group and nobody else—but Art Fight bakes the socialization into the process. You're there to draw for other people, and especially when it's someone I look up to and would like to make friends or mutuals with, that's a lot of pressure. Easily the attack I spent the most time on was for a guy named Goldie who frankly got me into the whole furry thing when I was a kid, someone I never met but whose work and whose designs I really loved, someone who's knows a lot of people and has introduced me to a lot of great artists through their many many drawing of his sona, and someone who Caby became mutuals with back in 2022 after she added onto that pile. It seemed like such a surefire thing! I worked for four days, referencing his own guitars, trying to get everything super detailed and accurate but still cute, drawing and warping way too many fucking straight lines to fit not-straight lines, losing sleep over the whole thing, hoping I could make a mutual out of him too, told him a bit about how much his stuff meant to me in the private attack description, and—

He politely thanked me at the end of it. No mention of any of the detail I put into it, basically just an acknowledgement that he saw it and didn't find it repulsive. No revenge like he did for Caby's drawing, no mutuals. I've seen this guy be excited about art before, and my drawing just didn't do it for him. It's honestly still hard to look at my drawing. Super deflating, not fun, I almost quit the event over it, and I'm certainly not going back to his comment to get a screenshot.

I dunno. I don't hate him or anything, and I get that I'm not owed a thing from strangers just because I like their work, but man, that's a lot of time to invest in gift art only for it to be very lukewarmly received. Caby can weather that because she just draws anyway, and she can do four attacks in a day, but it takes a lot more of my time and energy to get a single one out, and especially when it was someone who was a big inspiration to me like that, it sucks. (There is a happy ending here: I drew another out of nowhere attack for a girl with a kitty character I've loved since Caby drew him, and while it took a bit for her to see it, she not only gushed about it in a comment, she followed me back and drew the most adorable and amusingly prettiest fantasy Cammy you've ever seen in revenge. It definitely helped to bring some of the magic back to the event, to make me feel like people actually appreciate my hard work when they eat up days of my time.)

So yeah, I think my expectations were set a little too high this year on the social end of things, and paired with it being so disruptive on my life and schedule, it's definitely been a really interesting, emotionally intense, and not uniformly positive experience. I am happy to have partaken, though, proud of myself for what I got done, and I will be back next year. I'd rather draw big things and be disappointed when they aren't taken how I want them to than not draw for others or outright half-ass an attack and sabotage what could be. It's the way I live life. I want to aim high and succeed some of the time instead of aiming low and succeeding none of the time. None of what I do, none of my plans, none of the trips overseas, none of my aims for my work and my skills and who I want to be as a person, would be possible if I were mousy about it. If that means getting hurt or looking ridiculous sometimes, I'm okay with it.

The other drawover I did, and definitely one of my favorites of the whole year. I really oughta do more of my backgrounds in level editors.

I will definitely aim to be less maladaptive with it next year, though. The good news about the Art Fight refs I was doing is that they double as toyhou.se profile fullbody fodder, meaning each one I get up on one site, I can bring back (or bring for the first time) to my toyhou.se! That's the one I really care about still, and the artsy profile I'm the most proud of, so in working on that, I'm also preparing for next year's event. I'm aiming to have a better and more easily discoverable batch of characters for people to draw, and I'd like to start exploring a bit beyond the circles of artists I recognize and maybe make some more friends at my art level (and age—Goldie is at least twice my age, which probably didn't help). Beyond that, I'll start brainstorming some ways to reduce the amount of work I've gotta do, style things where I can maybe bake shading into the lineart and skip a step or two. Plus I'll be a year older and better practiced, so I might just outright be faster anyway. The goal though is to not have it eat up all of my free time so I can still get in races in Gran Turismo 2 and not feel like I'm losing precious drawing time doing so.

My first Art Fight really was a fight sometimes, but I'm also happy folks drew for me and liked what they did from me, and that I grew as much as I did as an artist. It helped me remember why I started drawing in the first place, to illustrate my sites and stories and get the ideas for characters and designs out of my head and into yours. Gotta keep ahold of that. Anything that isn't fun, I won't be repeating. Anything that is fun, or furthers that goal, you can expect me back at it next July.

I'll have my plans for August up in a subsequent post, this one's gone on long enough. Be on the lookout for all my attacks this year on my various art sites!

I gotta fuckin' write something, this Art Fight stuff is a grind. Conveniently for the journal, to give us two whole posts this month, I have something to ramble about! Let's talk album reviews, because I recently hit a really special milestone with them: 100 entire albums in the database!

To review or not to review

When I was putting together the brand new mari.somnol on Macintosh Garden, bringing back my album reviews (and game reviews from cammy_v1—we'll do more of those next year, promise) seemed like a really natural fit for the big smorgasbord approach I wanted to take with it. One of the things I started doing pretty early into my Neocities career was album reviews, these little two paragraph sorta-advertisements (or PSAs, depending on the review) for whatever albums I liked and had been listening to at the time. I took requests a few times, I really enjoyed writing them, I covered some then-recent albums even, but for whatever reason, I left them on Neocities when we moved to our own hosting. 36 in total were written that first year. All but two of these has been returned to the database, as I hated how they came out for a while and now I like them again.

They never truly left, though. When I was working on mari_v2, I cloned my Neocities site and hid it in the files as the place you get sent to if you encounter a 403 Forbidden on my site (I was super into hiding stuff around my sites at the time, page comments, secret extra content, that sorta deal). A couple more reviews were written for old time's sake. On various versions of the Somnolescent Gopher, the album reviews again came with, occasionally getting little rewrites and one or two more being added to the mixture. It was still never something I really advertised though, more sort of a throwback when I was feeling fuzzy for Neocities.

Then came mari@macintosh.garden, and I wanted to bring the reviews back proper. Of course, at the time, I was still using entirely static HTML, so each artist got their own page I had to manually maintain and update for layout changes. I'm an idiot and I enjoy pain, so I dutifully did this, but it tempered my desires to write a ton more. 16 more were written between June 2023 and March 2024, when I came back from the Wales trip, a good chunk of those being written in transit on planes and coaches.

And then my learning PHP for Protoweb blew the doors off the whole thing. Suddenly, I didn't have to maintain dozens of different artist pages. I could just have the one read.php script and have it pull reviews from a database exactly as requested. I got the idea to integrate rewritten and updated versions of the Rediscovering entries into the mix (since that was how I covered albums between 2020 and 2022). Suddenly, I was flush with entries. Suddenly, I could write one a day, just add it as a new row in the database and upload the cover art. Suddenly, I could see reviews on their own, sort by year, sort by rating, see it on nofi, see it on lofi, and soon this year see it on hifi. Suddenly, an RSS feed of entries was realistic.

This has all led to a golden age of quick and dirty music rambles. Not only am I psyched to have some more 2018 Cammy stuff knocking around my site (I'm still really gooey and precious about my old work, given how little of it I even have anymore), but I've started considering the possibility of eventually covering not just my entire music library of over 400 albums, but taking more requests, exploring more music, and having this gigantic, sprawling encyclopedia of music according to me around. Because it's such a simple concept, I've not really talked about my perspective with it, but I feel that's in order now that I've reached a hundred of the damn things.

What I'm actually rating here

Maybe it's easier to say what I'm not rating, firstly. I don't rate albums by how novel or important they are. You're not listening for historical significance, you're listening because it brings you satisfaction, usually pleasure, but also catharsis or intrigue, or maybe multiple of those. I also don't rate albums by how big and experimental a statement they are. Bands are great vehicles to masturbate in, but eventually, someone's gonna peek in your car, and I'm not rewarding someone driving with one hand.

Here's roughly the questions I'm trying to answer with each review:

1. How much did I like this album? (natch)
2. How well did the band succeed at making the album they were trying to make?
3. How much will fans of the style get out of this album?

I feel like people who are passionate about music use the word "bad" way too liberally. There are those who will say with no hint of irony that something not conforming to someone's concept of musical and lyrical quality doesn't make it bad, but will not extend that same courtesy to bands they hate. This is just a given, given that it's all someone's opinion anyway, but I do think that people still far too often judge music based on how cool it makes them look listening to it.

I'm a big believer in the John Peel philosophy of "if it didn't speak to somebody, it wouldn't have gotten made". It's probably funnier to just completely trash a record, but I only do that if it viscerally displeases me, and very rarely does a record actually do that. Otherwise, I only give it a middling score, because most albums have musical importance to someone, that someone just isn't me.

More honest music fans can recognize skill and quality work in even the most uncool, square, commercial places. People like to separate music out in these two worlds of "the underground" and "the surface", but culture hasn't worked like that in some time, if ever. Your childhood favorite indie musician recording in his parents' basement can get featured in a Lexus ad. The most experimental and weird bands were getting big label bucks in the 90s and 2000s to go and be "the next Nirvana", a hilarious notion applied to everyone from The Vines to Helmet to fucking King Missile. The 90s in general gave a lot of weird local favorites a quick spot of sunlight, and a lot of those bands went and peed on a major label's leg in the immediate aftermath. It was funny, and they aren't gonna miss the money anyway.

This is also why I don't call them "reviews" with the reviews themselves, even though that's what they are. I prefer the term "recommendations", because, although it's a bigger word, my goal is to focus on the albums that will appeal to someone who shares my particular tastes. Whether those tastes are too narrow to be useful or too wide-reaching to be useful (which has caused me grief in the past), that's up to you to decide. If I can turn anyone onto anything I like, I'm pleased.

How I write the reviews

Have you ever read a review from Pitchfork, and you forget it's supposed to be about the music and not how many other bands the author knows? Have you ever read a review on Sputnikmusic and the author literally goes track by track to tell you how much they like each song and why? I have. Too many times.

I keep my reviews to two paragraphs. The length of those paragraphs can differ, but nevertheless, I consider brevity a virtue and attention span a premium. Of course there's many, many things I can say about an album that I can't fit into two paragraphs, but the goal is to turn people onto stuff, not to write an essay. To that end, I try to keep comparisons to other bands to a minimum (that's lazy writing), and I try to be descriptive with what the album actually sounds like to listen to. I want someone to be able to get the gist of a record entirely from my written description, to appeal to a new listener through that description, while also having my opinion be apparent and entertaining, ideally.

If that sounds like a tall order—it can be. I'll sometimes have to sit with a review for a bit and play with it to make sure I like what I'm saying, and sometimes I spot things I could've worded better. I try to avoid editing reviews after I've done them, but it does happen and I'm not apologetic when I do.

How I pick albums

My selections are a little bit random right now. I have the stuff I'm really into, and of course it's easiest to write about albums I either know really well or are embedded in at the moment. I still try to shy away from really popular albums unless my opinion significantly differs from popular opinion on them, but as my focus changes from mere curations from my music library to covering everything I possibly can, it's inevitable that I'll be talking more about Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Aphex Twin, bands and artists people have actually heard of, and possibly agreeing with consensus.

I get the urge to do these deep dives into an artist's catalog sometimes, just because covering everything a band's made is satisfying to me in completeness. One of those two Neocities-era reviews that haven't been added to the database yet is R.E.M.'s debut EP Chronic Town, and that's because I'm actually holding it for when I cover R.E.M.'s music as a whole. Those take a bunch of time to do, and they're probably a bit repetitive to read, but I think it's definitely worth it.

The albums I'm covering right now err very much on the side of constant Great scores because I don't keep a lot of albums I don't like around (why would I). It probably makes it seem like I really like every album, but then I add some more Rediscoverings and the piles for Eh and Good fill up, and I'm happier with the balance. When I'm eventually covering more new finds than stuff in my library, I expect the scores to fall a little more unpredictably as well. Either way, I like music! It's not often something truly repulses me. I think I can still be critical of an album while still liking it—in fact, I think the people most aware of a work's flaws are its biggest supporters.

Where I'm going next with it

Speaking of Pink Floyd and Aphex Twin! I've recently been soliciting suggestions from people on Aftersleep, Worlio, in Discords, and of course here at home for albums to cover next in celebration of the big 100. Helps to break up the monotony for me and for you when it's not all just albums I know I love, yeah? I've got a nice, varied selection here, everything from Australian indie pop courtesy of Savannah to Elvis Costello courtesy of Caby to some Elliott Smith thanks to Davathan in Protoweb and a, uh, whole bunch of electronic shit I've never heard of thanks to bonkmaykr on Worlio (no idea where to start with any of that, but much appreciated!).

I've got plenty of interesting albums to talk about from my own playlists as well, though. There's a record from a guy named Josh Joplin that I was big into circa early 2020 on the list called Useful Music, and he's got this training in real classic American Songbook folk, and the album mixes in power pop and some really hilariously dated early 2000s adult alternative production (vaguely hip-hop-y drum loops!), it's a real fun one. I've been meaning to cover Music For Films, Brian Eno's second foray into ambient, all consisting of music cues intended for movies. There's some MP3.com bands still kicking around my Pandora! I've not even finished talking about all the classic Cammy bands like Failure, Silversun Pickups, Pixies, the Breeders, certainly Nirvana—no loss at all for what to cover.

The hardest part sometimes is just listening and then writing the thing. When I'm not inundated with Art Fight stuff between shifts at work, I'll hopefully get on it more consistently again. Less than two weeks left!

(Oh, and review #100 was One Part Lullaby by the Folk Implosion, before I forget.)

Well, we're eleven days into July and I still haven't updated the journal yet this month! Literally all of my free time has been spent lately either writing album reviews (follow the RSS feed, I've got a run of one of day going!), working, and most importantly, participating in Art Fight! I've gotten four attacks done in eight days. One attack every two goddamn days. Here's some highlights:

It's been good, really! It's nice to get some more dynamic, character-driven art done, given how much of my time with art is spent working on site assets and sona drawings. These? It's fun coming up with a doofy idea for something based on their personality, experimenting with shading and textures and poses, and just putting a lot of thought into things. I don't want to take the easy way out and just draw someone's lad standing there and smiling, I want it to feel unique to each one! Thankfully, I'm pretty happy with both my own showing so far and the reaction I've gotten (including that Maldwyn ref getting spotlit on Sheezy, hot damn)—but we're not halfway through yet and I still got a lot more I wanna draw. Here's my profile if you wanna attack me or just peek in on what I'm up to. Hint hint.

I wouldn't say I'm overworked or anything (feeling pretty accomplished, really!), but I am definitely aiming to take it easier next year. I was drafting out a post for the end of the year Letters retrospectives at the register yesterday, based on a bunch of thoughts I've been having about the group and reflections on how the last six years have gone. We're a pretty unique group, and there's a lot about it and how we've attracted and repelled people that I haven't thought much about, let alone talked about. Expect that in December. I gotta get back to drawing my idols and hoping I can make mutuals out of a few of them.