I've been meaning to write this post for literally a week now! I'm just...really busy at this point. And likely to fall asleep the moment I get out of work.

I haven't talked much about my job on here because I think everyone around me is a little sick of the "Cammy doesn't like his job" carousel even though this one probably legitimately deserves the complaints. At my last two jobs, I was at fault, really—a lot of me being a baby for no reason, a lot of issues with customers and other employees that were on me, a lot of autism—and I regret complaining so much because I enjoyed both of them for what they were. In the case of my first supermarket job, which I've been trying to get back, people still get excited when they see me come in and ask me if I'm coming back! So many people have asked me how Wales was, both regulars and associates. That's a sign of a good job right there.

With this store, though, everything from

• Breaks (when I get them, if I get them, if I even get a choice to take them or not)
• My schedule (no consistent days off, no consistent shift times, don't know what next week's schedule is until the previous Friday)
• Employee discounts (got explicitly told we didn't get one, turns out, we do, but they don't want people using it, so they just tell people it doesn't exist and you have to go out of your way to set it up)
• Managers (some are alright, but I have had plenty of people talk to me like this is my first job and I don't understand how a store is run since I started)
• Store protocol (I got told my register would be used exclusively for beer, not groceries, with the word of both the hiring manager and the beer lead behind that, and the moment I attempted to use it, I got an earful from a customer and a third manager saying "actually that's not a rule, you have to take them anyway", so that was two people who lied to me or were also misinformed)
• My federal goddamn taxes (didn't get the necessary forms for dependents/withholding during onboarding, got lied to about when they go into effect by the store, got lied to about the paperwork being filed, had to go to associate support to get a straight answer, and had to spend another start of another shift filing it again)

has been an absolute flip-flopping fucking nightmare. Nothing is consistent whatsoever. Stuff I took as a given very much isn't here. Even the beer register pinpad has been broken for four months now, and they can't get anyone to fix it. I kinda don't know how this store stays functional. I've had customers, plural, come up to me and tell me how much their experiences working for the store or having family and friends work for the store suck as well. I know it's not just me this time, and this all started happening within my first week of working there, so I don't even think I factor into it. This is just how it happens here.

I was originally going to spend the rest of the year working on my IT certifications, but then I realized that I'd be more likely to find something in that field that'd hire me locally (locally meaning within a few towns of me), and I'd need a car for that. That's my story. I'm here saving up for a car and perhaps some more driving lessons so I can finally be mobile and go on fun vacations and bring Caby over here. This is car money and not much else.

Thankfully, no one bothers me over in beer most days, so I'm free to just take customers (who are frankly a good bit nicer than some of the managers), clean up a bit, and be on Discord the rest of the time. I've gotten pretty good at this customer service thing, so it all runs smoothly and no one ever has any complaints (aside from that one lady, but we made up the next time we saw each other, so I'm just gonna chalk it up to her being crazy and Puerto Rican). I'm looking at the rest of my year here, and I've accepted it. This is an opportunity for me. It's not a lot of money, but it is an opportunity to save up and make the things I want happen. I'm not squandering it.

Days go fast at this point, provided I'm not spending six hours at a time bagging people's groceries. Now that I'm not New and In Need of Training, people generally leave me alone. Before I know it, it'll be the end of the summer, it'll be getting cool out again, and I'll have been there three or four months. Then six. Then it'll be 2025 and I'll have a nice little nest egg of savings, and I can fly back to Wales for a month, get my car, get my driving lessons, and be free of it. I'm looking long term here. Right now, this is what it's like, but that's okay. I have a five year plan to blow this popsicle stand and get with my girlfriend finally and not have to deal with the living online, the shitty jobs, the no money—all of it will pass, and I will make this happen.

I mentioned Art Fight! I feel bad about not being in the right state to participate in the last two fights, despite promising Caby I would, so all my free time over the last week has gone towards drawing refs so I can actually take part this year. What motivated me outside of just purely making it up to Caby is that there's a large amount of not just mutuals and potential mutuals I've come across, but old-time and new-time inspirations of mine participating. I'm pretty sure I could actually carve out a little niche of friends and mutuals for myself here! I'm not gonna be able to get all the characters I want up on my profile drawn and before the start of the fight, but I can debut with three, I think, and then get the next two up at some point within the next week.

I've been hesitant to link my profile out and follow people until stuff is ready, but the good news is that I feel pretty fuckin' good about my art these days. It's a nice feeling that what I'm drawing now won't look dated in a year, like I'll have to redraw a ton of refs again come next July. Extra nice is that these refs double as illustrations for toyhou.se! I was aiming to have a fullbody on the toyhou.se profile of every character of mine, and the ref drawings are a perfect match for the aesthetic I want, once I color in the lineart. All this work is killing two birds with one stone, which is the kinda efficiency I really need as life gets crazy.

As a final note, I do technically have lofi.mari.somnol up on that domain, looking all lovely and all compatible with retro browsers as intended (seriously, this might be my favorite site I've ever built), but I haven't announced it anywhere because there's still a few missing pages, mostly in the writing section. I have a nice, tidy list of stuff to bugfix or missing words and misspellings to correct on nofi as well once lofi is sorted, and then I just need to draw a ton of Alexis and Setters, respectively. That might have to wait until August at this rate.

Like I said though, that's soon. August hits and then we're not far off from fall 2024. I will hopefully have hifi sorted, now that I know what it'll look like, by the end of the year, and that's huge. I'm working on lots of things so someday soon I can relax and enjoy them instead. Things are shifting. The end of an era of my life and the start of a new one is in sight. I can feel it. I'm making this happen. Stay tuned.

And a small little update to finish out my back catalog of them—the library was having its annual used book and media sale over the weekend, and we went twice to check out what was up. You'd be surprised at the selection, at least at the start of the sale. The CDs and DVDs especially fun to pick through, and the DVDs in particular gave me intense wistfulness for the Cardiff CEX, because the selection and prices were really similar.

Among other things (including a copy of Buddha, the first blink-182 record, of all the ones I could've found, two Smash Mouth CDs, and a little curated boxset of episodes of Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, which I used to watch reuploaded YouTube copies of all the time as a kid), I now own a stack of fucking Redwall audiobooks in hard plastic cases. These come on 10-12 CDs apiece, and yes, all of them are in there. If they'll play, I have no idea. Probably. I'm mostly impressed I found so many of them. One of these isn't Redwall, it's another fantasy looking book from Brian Jacques, but it was half-price day, so I took it. Will let you know if it's any good.

All this came out to about $13, most of that for the audiobooks. CDs in particular were a dollar apiece. I have thought about this Onion video basically every day for a week now.

I don't normally talk about movies much at all, mostly because I don't watch a lot of movies. I find it hard to watch them by myself. When I'm around people, it's a social experience, so there's someone to discuss it with during and after. If it's just me though, and I have to park myself in a spot for at least 90 minutes, probably two hours, maybe longer, and not do anything else but pay attention, I just don't do that naturally. As a result, there's lots of times in my life where movies have come up and the person I'm talking to goes "what do you mean you've never seen that???"—Star Wars, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, any of the big 80s and 90s cultural staples, dead zone for me. I'll watch them someday when I don't have shit I'd rather be doing instead.

This is also the kinda post I normally make on Letters, but I've been the only one posting to it recently, and I don't want to make this into a really formal review of the movie anyway. I just saw it casually with my mom because I've been a Garfield fan since I was a small child, and we wanted to go out together because we're both constantly working and don't get a lot of time to do things together. We did mean to see it in May, but the theater had a big oopsie-poopsie fucky-wucky that meant the goddamn projector in the theater it was running in didn't turn on that day. We got free rescreening passes to use whenever we wanted and a refund and came back two weeks later.

This is an oooold Garf Caby drew. I wanted to include it because I dunno if she's ever posted it anywhere.

I dunno if I've ever talked about my love of Garfield online before! I owned many, many of the books as a kid, and I have the full run of Garfield and Friends on DVD that I've hung onto even after a lot of my other Garf merch has gone to the thrift shops. It's just a wonderfully, slightly surreal take on one of the most reliably reliable comic strips that has ever run in the history of anything, and it makes ya think the 80s babies had a point about their toy tie-in shows. I have a small Pooky beanie baby sitting on the CRT of the eMachines Box as I write this.

Garfield is just something universal, isn't it? I was reading an issue of LIFE I picked up from work about Garfield, and someone pointed out that you've got the toony sight gags and slapstick to appeal to the youngsters, but then Garfield's pure cynicism to appeal to the adults. It's easy to make fun of (I remember Bill Watterson shat himself in fury over it and especially U.S. Acres because of his high-minded auteur streak), and honestly, the deconstructed fanmade Garf media is a lot more interesting than the strip has been in a long time, but it's still nice whenever I see that orange bastard around.

The Garfield Movie is the story of how Garfield gets reunited in a very strange way with his stray father Vic, who's put up to the impossible task of stealing an entire milk truck to repay an insane Londoner cat named Jinx for leaving her behind during a milk heist years prior. Garfield and Odie are roped into it basically because Jinx likes to see people suffer, and given Garfield's surprising amount of familial trauma over being abandoned as a kitten, she figures the two will eat each other alive before they manage to work together. She also has two stray dogs following the three around to make sure they don't try to scamper off without completing their suicide mission. Along the way, Ving Rhames (who my mom thought was James Earl Jones), likely fresh off recording an Arby's commercial, assumes the role of a Buddhist bull with insider knowledge of the dairy farm they try to rob, agreeing to help if they free the love of his life from her pastoral imprisonment.

Now, Garfield movies are already notoriously a hard sell to the Critic class. Part of this comes down to the fact that Garfield just doesn't lend himself to large-scale stories like this. One thing I heard time and again in the reviews is that The Garfield Movie isn't authentic to the comic strip. Garfield doesn't act like Garfield, the tender moments don't line up with his dickheadedness, and the plot is way too action-y, somehow.

It makes you wonder if Critics realize—it's not much of a movie if the characters don't develop. Garfield spends literally half the movie sounding exactly like you'd expect him to, having no desire for the adventure, eating bonkers amounts on Jon's dime, snarking constantly, and being unshakably egotistical. I don't know what the fuck else Garfield is! If he was like that the entire movie, you'd go "wow, he sure is a rotten cat", and it wouldn't be any fun to watch. A comedy protagonist is nearly always unwilling, and Garfield is as unwilling as they come. This isn't him jumping at the opportunity to hop a train and break into a bottling facility. It's him being forced to do it under penalty of having his bones used as toothpicks. (Anyone complaining about the pacing of this movie as well is a goober. It probably should've even been a little shorter, if I'm honest.)

As far as how he develops as a character, that's where all the interesting stuff happens. It's interesting to see a character so bigheaded, so terminally self-absorbed, so large and in charge suddenly faced with this inconvenient wrinkle in his life, a father figure to dig up years of bad feelings, one he initially fights, then warms to, and then has to contemplate again when the typical mid-kids movie "everything goes to shit" scene happens. It's not deep, cerebral shit, it's Garfield, I get it—but if this cat isn't on the verge of tears sometimes, how can emotional investment on any level occur? If he's not having little revelations, how can a movie move forwards? That never comes up in the reviews. It's just "this isn't Garfield". Okay, then what does a Garf movie look like?

Let me address some of the other bugaboos surrounding the movie:

• Yes, Chris Pratt voices Garfield. I would've liked to see someone else too (rest in peace, Lorenzo Music), but he did a fine job. Maybe I'm just not familiar with him enough to have it take me out of the movie, but it matched Garfield fine enough. Amusing to see people pine for Bill Murray's Garfield, given how negatively the live-action movies were received back in the 2000s.
• There's a weirdly large amount of product placement. You'll see iPhones and Olive Garden boxes. It is probably excessive, but it's meant to be a modern-day Garfield, so I didn't find it particularly offensive. I thought the brick plot device around drone food delivery was cute. It's the kind of thing that'd ruin a headier movie, but given Garfield is already a huge brand, what's a little more really affecting?
• Someone hilariously complained about Garf referring to himself as "G-Money" early on. He's an old cat! He's supposed to be out of touch. That fits perfectly. He's not hip and cool with the kids, he's just trying to be.
• Visually, I thought it was cute. Garfield has looked weird for almost thirty years now, and the movie does a good bit to bring him back from Area 51. It's not jaw-droppingly beautiful, but it's also not direct-to-DVD slop. Animated movies haven't been eye candy since Zootopia anyway. Blame Illumination, The Garfield Movie is just made to the spec of the times.

As far as my own thoughts on the movie go though? It's cute. I liked it. It's not heady, and it's not fine art, and it doesn't need to be. It wasn't particularly funny, if I'm honest, but it was a satisfying movie to watch, and I really did enjoy the softer moments as Garfield has to eat his assumptions about Vic and about his life time and time again. It's what you want out of a Garfield arc. Odie, frankly, stole the entire show. I think his design is the cutest of the lot, and being Garfield's traditional whipping boy, he always ends up with either the last laugh or seeing coming whatever brick wall Garfield is about to walk into. I appreciate him more and more as I get older.

It really does remind me a bit of a 90 minute Garfield and Friends episode. Those regularly had to drag Garf out of the house on some bizarre adventure, oftentimes involving stray animals or fantastical settings, and the pacing of the movie wasn't too dissimilar to the pacing of those cartoons, just on a longer scale. The wibbly-wobbly fourth wall also felt very Garfield and Friends-esque, if anyone remembers, say, the episode where Garfield makes his own show starring a cat because he doesn't appreciate the representation they have on TV. I actually had to check if Mark Evanier or any of the original writers of the show were on board for the movie—the answer's no, but if you liked the cartoon, this movie isn't too far off from that, just longer.

My only real complaint (other than the lack of truly funny moments) is that the ending is kind of bonkers. The end result is that Vic moves in with Garfield and they throw wild house parties featuring all the other characters, sans Jinx obviously, which is just about the most kid-playing-with-his-toys way they could've possibly written that ending. Vic, I get, since he's family (I figure him preferring to stay outside and come and go is a little more in character for him, but he gets a nice BarcaLounger to match Garf's), but the stray dogs, Vic's old crew (I think?), Otto and Ethel, who are literal barn animals—I just can't imagine Jon letting all these creatures into his house. Maybe a backyard barbecue scene would've been more appropriate if they really had to end off with what felt like five minutes of everyone being happy slappy friends 'til the end.

That aside though, it was nice. I liked some of the nods to other Garf media and trivia throughout (Binky-Os, or Garf's lock screen passcode being his birthday). If you're a lifelong Garfield fan, I think you should see it. You'll either consider it a disgusting use of the IP from all the product placement, or you'll appreciate it as a short and touching little thing about family. That's what's so powerful about it. I don't know how to end off movie reviews.

I turned 25 recently! It was nice. I got to enjoy a game with the Somnolians (more on that in a moment), I had cake with cannoli filling, I got some music autobiographies I'd picked out and my mom paid for (I'm hard to buy gifts for and we were in the bookstore, so we figured that'd be the easier arrangement), and Caby and Savannah drew me some stuff!

Click both for full size! Check out the texture and halftoning on Savannah's! And the Setter PC wallpaper in the Cammy one! That's my real one for the eMachines Box!

Gosh, they're both lovely. Caby wasn't sure what to draw me, and I requested a badger boy because I miss when she'd draw him all the time, and because her and I have been playing our Minecraft modpack Pinede and sharing screenshots of our progress on Murad in the server, Savannah surprised me with a studious desert Maldwyn! I really gotta draw that boy more, but he's absolutely a better fit for the University than guild work, I can say that much.

Gifts aside though, I really wanted to spend some time playing something with the group for my birthday, and I figured it'd be good to finally test MXDM1, the Quake dm_lostvillage remake I started last year and finished this Spring. If you remember the post I did on building this level back in April, I mentioned I hadn't tested it yet and had no idea how it played. I figured it'd be fun, given lostvillage was fun, but Quake is a different game, y'know? Plus, it just needed beta testing anyway, with all the decoration and some of the additions to the layout I did. Who knows if I fucked something up somewhere.

Anyway, I spent a few hours learning how to set up a QuakeWorld server and configuring EZQuake for dead simple "download this and type this command and you're in" play (since Somnol isn't exactly made up of boomer shooter deathmatch aficionados), dropped it in the chat, and here's some screenshots:

It was a lot of fun! We went three rounds, all of which I captured for posterity on demos. I did surprisingly poorly and my software-rendered, hyperaccurate QuakeWorld client running on the eMachines Box got a nice solid 25-30fps throughout, but I was just happy to hang out and fire at people. Caby, Savannah, dcb, and Connor all got in on it, and Savannah and Connor basically dominated. Amusingly too, because the server package I was using announces your server to a master server, we actually got some random QuakeWorld people dropping in right at the tail end of our session, so we went for another twenty minutes with some slightly more experienced players in the mix.

I did find some things to fix in the level, and I got some further feedback in a deathmatch Discord server I'm in from one of the regulars. The big thing was that the level was too dark. I used very little minlight, no fill lights, and set the _bouncescale to 0.5, and paired with the _bouncecolorscale setting in ericw-tools, which multiplies the lightmap with the colors in the textures for some gentle extra colored lighting and results in somewhat dimmer lighting thanks to Quake's overall dark palette, it was a little hard to see when you have your game brightness set to minimum. I preserved that in the screenshots for posterity, that's fixed now. I also heard from that Discord guy that my 3D trim was likely to prevent people from bhopping through the level, and I've since decided this is a feature and not a bug. Playing with bhoppers sucks ass.

Beyond that, it was mostly fixing and tweaking the lifts, preventing some stucks, and adding more item pickups on the ground. This wasn't so much a thing to fix, but I learned nQuakesv's FFA mode has powerups (Quad, Pent, probably biosuit) turned off by default for some reason (or maybe I accidentally disabled them and didn't notice?), and it was only through ten minutes of digging through commands after playing that I found the way to put them back on. That kinda sucked—I had a fun slime area with a Pent and some other powerups scattered about that just went unused during the session and tarnished some of the map's luster. Ah well, we know better for next time.

And yes, next time! Now that the infrastructure is all set up, over time, I'd like to build up a small rotation of custom Quake maps for a SomnolQuake server. There's something extremely gratifying about building the game world that you and your friends play on, and Quake is excellent whether you're playing with ten people or two. It's all about what the map supports—and I could probably have a good 1v1 map cranked out in a week or two. Small projects always please me greatly. Really, more games with the group in general would be nice. I've been trying to consciously set aside time to spend time with people again and do things, because it's easy to let them grow distant over the Internet otherwise. Gotta get out there and make good memories!

I'll also likely be porting MXDM1 to Deathmatch Classic. I haven't played on Mr. Maxwell's servers in a hot minute, but he's said he'll run any maps I make for him, and this is as good of one as any. Given how similar the games are, I doubt it'll be a big job.

Expect this one for download on mari.somnol soon!

Gah, journal stuff gets away from me. I have a big pileup of stuff to write about, and then I go off and play Gran Turismo 2 or live life instead. No worries, you'll be seeing more in the coming days. Here's a quick one before I get to bed, I got work in the morning:

After six long months of sitting on my floor, I have finally gone back to Staples and assembled all twenty physical copies of Last Summer! You might remember when I showed off the test copy on the journal in January, and thankfully, about half of them look better than that one, so I'd say it was a smashing success. I had extras of the back cover and booklets printed because I knew a few would come out wonky (and they did) and I could substitute in the extras done at the end when I knew what I was doing for some of the worst ones done at the beginning before I knew what I was doing.

I'm damn pleased for something I did entirely by hand. Took me about three-and-a-half hours in total, and only four customers mistook me for a Staples employee in the process! (I debated breaking into my "helping Print" speak the next time someone asked just for a laugh, but then no one else asked.) Now it's just a matter of mastering the CDs and getting things mailed out. They will be numbered, by the way—which one will you get???

This has also definitely given me some things to watch out for and take into consideration next time I want to do a run of CDs in jewel cases for any purpose—for example, stapled booklets are bullshit and you should not do them. A folded insert will look terrific and work far better.

I'm in one of those dry spells with the journal right now where I'm not particularly into updating it. I should get back into it; lots has been going on. I guess it's the pileup that makes it overwhelming. Let's do a roundup quick with the last two hours of the month.

nofi

nofi is complete! I just need to draw a bunch more Alexis for it and it'll be finished. As of right now, though, all the pages are in place and they work great on Netscape 3.0. Your favorite retro browser will love it too. Perhaps I can convince Oliver to let it and cammy.somnol on Protoweb as passthrough sites in the future.

On the topic of art, I'm a bit out of it with that as well. I keep seeing a much sketchier, pointier, proportionally strange, and maybe edgier version of my art style in my head. I really should experiment and branch out. I've done my time with making sure everything is nice and neat and cute. I have the confidence for more range now--plus when I get back to marfGH and GH modding in general, I'd like to be able to reillustrate all the menus, and something weirder is basically required for that game.

After months of searching

I finally have a job and training days lined up! I went back to selling beer and wine because it was easy, and this one paid better than the previous supermarket. I just had my first beers of the year too (Wales trip notwithstanding)—I stocked up on some I wanted to try yesterday while I was in doing some online learning and getting my RAMP certification redone. I passed it in 40 minutes, natch.

By the third one or so, applying for jobs and doing the interview circuit becomes a lot less nerve-wracking. You know what to expect. A bad start seriously set me up for failure at Staples, and I was eager not to repeat it here. Plus, I've just gotten a lot better at talking to strangers and about myself thanks to all the traveling. Hopefully, I keep this one a little longer than six months, use it to finance some certs, some CDs, and another trip to Wales in 2025. Mostly I miss the momentum. Money appearing in your bank account makes a man feel mighty accomplished.

The big loss

Six months of seeing how much weight I could lose is finally over! I was never huge or anything, but ten pounds overweight towards the start of this year, and after finding myself devouring an entire chocolate bar in one go over Christmas, I figured that wasn't healthy. Weight loss is a lot like marriage to me, in that I didn't think either was particularly possible in real life. Not that I thought they were impossible—just that I didn't know anyone who'd pulled off either one. Still, I was curious how much I could lose, so I cut out all snacks and drinks other than water, and when it got warm enough, I started walking more regularly. You know Dry January? Same concept. Call it Junkless January.

Six months later, I end off the experiment at 155lbs. I started at 180, so call it 25lbs lost. I'm endlessly pleased. I dropped an entire clothing size, basically. My work clothes and shorts are both so much bigger on me now. The shirts I used to squish into, much less so now. Looking back, I'm not surprised I got that big. The aforementioned way I'd devour candy, the way I'd pair alcohol with chips, the way I'd have chips, candy, and booze in the same night—like yeah, you'll gain a little like that.

The good news is that you don't really have to quit anything, just take it slower. Only have one unhealthy thing a day and don't make it the entire bag of chips, and it's pretty easy not to gain it all back. In the past week, I've had milkshakes, cookies, and beer, and I haven't gained anything, so I think the next six months of maintaining this weight will be pretty simple stuff. If I do get above 165 or so again, I'll just start cutting back again—and I might do Junkless January every year as a respite from all the Christmas sweets.

Turning 25 and shifting priorities

Earlier this year, I posted a journal entry about people's reaction to the spy.pet stuff and how alienated I felt from the reactions of the Internet at large. I thought it was about that, but as that fades from memory and yet some of those feelings of detachment still linger, I'm beginning to think I just don't care about making things for other people to see anymore.

Well into my 20s, I joined Discords and forums partially with the intent of finding community and a place to chat, but admittedly, also partially to get people to gawk at my stuff. It used to be, way way long ago now, that I wanted the attention and the validation, being a teenager starved of that stuff by Brianna mostly, and even when I stopped needing that and started growing into myself as a person, it just became habit—and also that it's nice to hear other people like your stuff.

I'm starting to see people I know who are getting older like me and still clinging to this thing of "Internet people need to love me", wanting to have a known name, wanting to be popular, wanting to make money on their stuff despite having literally no actual wares of value to anybody. It just looks weird and desperate as you get older, and it's totally turned me off doing that. Having people appreciate my stuff is still nice, obviously, but they do that anyway, even though I'm a nobody. I get the nice emails, I get the compliments, and my tutorials for GH2 are still being linked out by MiloHax, even though marf bad.

I just want to make things for me, and if people find it and like it, that's great. If not, why should I chase them down? Why should I concern myself with seeking that out when I can just make stuff I find cool and people will come to me over the many many years I and Somnolescent will be around? I'll still have a bit of a public presence just because I like being social, but I'm there because I want to be there for what's going on, not because I need anyone to pay attention to me specifically.

Part of this is also that working on nofi has reminded me that I've done a lot. I think it's super cool to be up to so much, but I also don't need to build Rome every year. Again, it used to be insecurity, that I had to show just how much I'm capable of, but I think I've shown that now. Why can't I take things slower? Now that I've traveled and now that I've been with Caby in person, I want more of that. I want to shore up my real life, keep the five year plan to Wales moving, take more day trips, work a job, stop worrying so much about creating a lot of pretty good things and more about making a few really fucking good things my heart is super into instead. And I have some ideas. I sure do.

Anyway, so I'm turning 25 soon. I should draw a Cammy for the occasion. He's a good dweeb.

Lots more work on nofi.mari.somnol has occurred since my last blog post! We're getting fairly close to having everything moved over from the old site—only the modding section really remains. Even better is that, with the stories and, in a bit, music sections implemented, this is actually not just more fully featured than mari@macintosh.garden was, it's actually everything I wanted on mari.somnol implemented. Like, that's it. I was pondering some kind of Web design gallery, showing off some of my favorite website designs I've done and acknowledging all these skills I've acquired in the past six years of being a webmaster, but that can be added later. Art would be nice to have on the site, but I'll leave that for when I can decide how I want to build that section. I just need the Alexi drawings after that (thinking little chibis would be best with the limited viewport space) and it's complete. Not basically—complete. Cammy has a portfolio site again, and one-third of the move is done.

PHP continues to be a curious mistress that treats me well for the most part. I spent today cleaning up the internals of the music recommendations page, better integrating PHP into the HTML (no more echo spam!) and adding logic to add the artist and album name to the title and page heading, depending on what you're looking at. I'm really happy with the language still. Basically everything I want to do with it, there's a really clean way to do it, even if that thing happens to be slightly esoteric. Great example: two-dimensional arrays (which are arrays inside arrays, if you're not a programmer—but if you aren't, you don't know what an array is anyway, so just hold tight). I figured, if I wanted to access the data in the inner array, I'd need to split it out into a separate array first and do my logic on that. Nope! You just add on a second key to the array variable address, like so:

$rows[0]["year"]

This accesses the year key inside the first array that's in the $rows array, which in my case, is the data being returned from the database. So in practice, that gives you the release year of the first album in the search results. It's that easy.

The only time I really get confused with PHP is when tables get involved. Browsers get really weird if you don't close your tables correctly. I had a bug early on where the table for the last artist in the list of artists and albums (currently, that's Wrong Way Driver, a side project of one of my favorite bands Pine Marten) was missing, but only in Netscape 4. Turns out, it was in the page source; Netscape was just not rendering it because it wasn't closed correctly. Yesterday, I had an issue with the game reviews page (no link yet because it's not working yet) where there was no table under the Game Boy Advance heading, and then the GBA table was appearing under the PlayStation heading, and everything else was moved down a console as well. After an hour of thlamming my penith in the car door, I discovered—yep, another table unclosed. (I had messed up my logic for building the tables programmatically. Happens.) I don't know why or how not closing a table right can make it appear somewhere else on the page, but thankfully, it's solved.

There's still a whole world of other stuff I'd like to do with PHP even after all this is done as well. The ACNES compatibility list page is currently being manually updated as I also update a Works database alongside it, and it probably takes me an extra ten minutes that I could absolutely automate. Export out a CSV, and then when you view that page, it reads the CSV and turns it into a page. I could take that CSV and put it into a MySQL database when I'm done and let you search games, or view games by their year (if I put that data in) or their working status. I'd like to finally get sleeby.art built at some point too! I have experience with all the base components, making database queries, displaying data, making thumbnails with ImageMagick—I'd just need to put it together with a login system. Like, I already own the domain, and Caby's been wanting this for years now. Years! I'll be at this coding thing for a while.

But yeah, I keep telling folks in Somnol how big of a relief it'll be to have a main site again. It's now been about three years since I last had mari.somnol in a usable state. For some of that time, it redirected to archives. For the rest, it's been parked. I don't like to make myself ever anything more than another member of Somnol generally, but mari.somnol kinda is and always has been the subdomain the entire site gravitates around, thanks to it being my group. It's weird not having that center there. It's weird not having a home base to catalog all my work at. cammy.somnol is adorable and I'd like to give that the care it deserves as well (and finally get Cammy on cammy.somnol), but it's not mari.somnol. It's not the site that's been here since the beginning.

Having it again, and seeing it come together again, and seeing it come together more powerful and using all these new technologies I learned just for this? Seeing how much less work I'll have to do to maintain it in the future because of all the database work I'm doing now? It really has reinvigorated my love of site building. I've been making websites since I was 6 years old. From the age I was old enough to comprehend what a computer was, the coolest thing in the world to me was having a website—and now I'm enjoying working on them again. Once it's all in place, I can go back to my writing and music and art full-time, with the ideal platform for it all right on my own domain. I can't think of much that'd make me happier.

So as I move further into getting nofi.mari.somnol filled out, I realize that I've been putting off a story section. Stories used to be a huge part of the mari.somnol stew, but it's been so long since I've written anything now that bringing stuff that old back feels a bit unflattering. I was still growing as a person and also just plain gaining confidence in my work. When you're scared of failing, you don't do things to the greatest extent you could have. You don't sing loud, you don't draw dynamic poses, you don't write eccentric, animated characters. I've had to learn that—and now I have! But I'm happy to leave the old stuff on archives. Like the mtlx EP for my music, I really oughta get some properly new writing that shows off what I'm capable of.

That leads me to a little thing you might remember if you're a longtime journal reader—Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure. For as long as Pennyverse has been around, it's funny that the first thing that got truly published from it was a post-main plot story after Kevin's left the trio. True to that post, I did rewrite the story and it did come out a hell of a lot better, and Caby is a machine as always, so she came up with about two dozen illustrations in four different art styles, across digital and traditional. Despite some bumps in the road with the printed hardcover copy (which is in a weird mix of American and British spellings due to oversight) and the promotional poster (which got printed at the wrong size and fucked with by one of Caby's tutors, the period was not optional, thank you), it all came out killer. We were super proud of it.

And then it just kinda sat next to us, unfortunately. I always had plans to make a Web version, but Caby never sent over the images. We wanted to refine the printing and do an on-demand thing for family, friends, and Internet folks who'd like to own some physical Caby art, but those plans never materialized.

So, this year, I'm making it official. I grabbed everything from her art files when I was over there in February and I've now got it up as the first story you see on nofi.mari.somnol. For those who remember reading stories on my old sites with the color-coded dialogue, that's all back. The images will be small on modern displays, but it's super comfortable at 800x600. This is basically as good as reading one of my stories on a website gets:

So, since none of you got to read it a year ago, if you want some new Cammy writing and a ton of unreleased Caby art, go check it out! I'm absolutely gonna be working with Caby, now that we're both fresh from having read all this again and being proud of it, to get an on-demand printing going of it in case you'd like to throw her some extra money for all the hard work. And, of course, lofi and hifi mari.somnol will have higher-quality art assets, custom fonts (I will bring Los Altos back as my dialogue font, don't you worry), and maybe even a printer-specific stylesheet because those sound fun. Lots of options!

Oh, and uh, new stories. I have a couple ideas for 'em, I just have to get to writing. And then illustrating, because it's hard to convince Internet people to stare at plain text.

Hello, journal people! I haven't really been updating this because there's kinda been a dearth of coherent Cammy updates. I can say I'm definitely doing better than my low point last month. No buts! Definitely feeling a lot better. It just hasn't resulted in a ton of stuff rolling off the line that I feel the urge to talk about.

Now, though, I have some. I return to my kingdom of webshit to discuss the thing that has reinvigorated my interest in making websites, and that's PHP. I fuckin' love PHP.

PHP was always one of those things I'd say I'd eventually get to learning, but I just never had a reason to actually go through with it. I was happy with my static HTML pages and using AutoSite if I needed any kind of automation. But then Protoweb came into the picture, and after seeing a Web page get put together in front of me, from HTML I wrote as a template and data from another file stuffed into it, I was suddenly awash with ideas for my own usage. Of course, Dreamhost Shared gives us the latest-and-greatest on both PHP and MySQL, which is basically all you need to write any sort of Web app.

PHP has been a lot of fun to work with. Stuff comes together with it really quickly. You can mix it with HTML in any form you'd like or need, PHP-in-HTML or HTML-in-PHP. It's got all the things you'd need to read from files, databases, and URLs built-in. Dreamhost installs the ImageMagick PHP extension for you, so you're covered for literally any kind of image manipulation, all done on the server. My favorite bit is undoubtedly the fact that everything is done on the server. JavaScript is a pain in the ass because old versions of it are supremely limited, and new versions obviously don't work on my target browsers most of the time. PHP? Functions introduced in the current version of it, 8.2 as I write this, work the same on Vivaldi and fuckin Netscape 3.0.

For a couple days, I was working on an art gallery. I wanted to be able to drop images into a folder and have them formatted nicely on a page on my site. That worked! I even got it generating thumbnails for me. I quickly realized that I was gonna need to rely on a database of some kind to have anything fancier and more involved, though, and I wasn't sure how well that all would scale if you were someone like Caby with tons of art to throw at the script. Instead, I'm gonna put the knowledge I gained from that into working on a RetroZilla-targeted Somnolescent art portal we can all post to. Caby's been wanting us to have our own Yerf for a couple years now, and dreams should really come true at least some of the time.

Today, I took the plunge into MySQL queries, building them, passing them along parameterized to a database server, and getting back usable information. I put all my old album reviews into a database table, and from just one script, I can list them out and read my reviews, in identical form to how they were as static HTML. Just as fast too. It's actually frankly more featureful than the static reviews were, because I can retrieve one review, an entire artist, an entire year, or every single album I've given a certain rating to. I can generate an RSS feed of new reviews. I still have to code in the easier way to add new reviews, since at the moment I'd have to poke them into the table on the backend to have them appear, but words cannot describe how excited I was seeing it all come together.

I've realized the import PHP could have on my rather insane goal to have three different mari.somnols for three different groups of browsers. Instead of having three different changelog pages I'd have to maintain individually, I just have my changelog in a CSV and then three PHP scripts. Update the CSV, and magically, the changes appear on all three sites. I did the same thing for my essay list. This isn't theoretical, I've implemented all this! I'm sure none of it's impressive to anyone who's worked on dynamic sites for a while now, but y'know, it's impressive to me. I'm used to maintaining static HTML pages, and now, I'm writing frontend and backend stuff. It's making perfect sense. It's coming together so quick! Admittedly, I forget semicolons about as often as I forgot to change all my tabs to spaces when I was working with Python, but having a reason, good reason, to flex my coding muscles has gotten me totally reinvigorated to work on my sites, especially since I find myself in a slight lull with art.

I'm gonna be sunsetting mari@macintosh.garden over the coming days. All the pages will remain there, but my new path forwards with mari.somnol has effectively necessitated my return. It was never meant to be permanent anyway, and some of the stuff I still have to add to mari@macintosh.garden, like my stories with Caby's illustrations, will probably fill up the remaining 20MB or so of my 100MB disk quota there. I think it's just time to come back home, and it's been a long time coming.

As I said, mari.somnol will be available in three flavors, nofi.mari.somnol, lofi.mari.somnol, and the normal "hifi" mari.somnol. nofi is aimed at ancient 90s browsers who can't reliably handle CSS; they get a zero-layout HTML 3.2 experience that's zippy and looks great at 800x600. lofi is aimed at slightly newer browsers (RetroZilla is my target, thereabouts) who work well with HTML4 Strict, probably two-column like mari_v3, but still no multimedia or client-side scripting outside of just linking to MP3s, and hifi will be where I go nuts, make it super modern, responsive, CSS grid, with a theme switcher to let you view the site in the garb of any website I've ever built. Each will have a different one of my sonas as the mascot to give each one an extra sprinkle of uniqueness, Alexi on nofi, Setter on lofi, and Cammy and mari on hifi. nofi is already partially built, as linked above. The other two will be completed sequentially once all nofi content is in place.

This is the solution to making one site work on all browsers. I'm pretty sure I am the only person crazy enough to put this together. If you know of anyone else, do let me know so I can make immediate friends with them.

I haven't been this excited to work on Web stuff in a while. I'm in the class of programmer that enjoys it, but needs a particularly good reason to write code, and a whole slew of reasons have fallen into my lap as of late. I'll keep you updated! Well, ideally. I always have the best intentions.

Ah, it feels good to be busy again. I said I'd do this journal post two days ago, but then I got working on starting up the ACNES compatibility list project again, I'm streaming again tonight, I've been chatting with people and actually enjoying it again (protip, mute and hide all the channels you're not interested in in any public Discord you're a part of and your life will instantly feel less cluttered) and I've been going on walks again. Every period of being antisocial comes with a burst of being social afterwards. Swings and roundabouts.

Nevertheless, we have a Quake map to discuss! I've been itching to do some Quake mapping for a long time now. I used to be very active at it back when the place to be was Terrafusion instead of the Quake Mapping Discord (no, I am not in that), but life took me other places and I was still recovering from being a little shitflinger who got shit flung back at him. Honestly, it feels silly to even let it continue to be a topic of discussion. Looking at the names on the Quaddicted submissions now, I don't even recognize most of them. Everyone's moved on, I'm an adult now, I'm sure I could shoot the shit with the people who had issues with me now if we did cross paths and there'd be no problem, and most importantly, I don't get into fights anymore and I suck less at mapping.

I don't recall if I talked about this back when I started working on it (no mention of it on the journal from around then, so I suppose not), but back in Spring 2023, a month or two before the first Wales trip, I was playing a lot of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and found myself drawn to what I've since learned is still a fairly popular custom map in that game's cult following, dm_lostvillage. It's a simple and fun two-level layout with some center hallways, but it's pretty apparent the person who built it wasn't much of a level designer. The texture work is one step above hideous, there's a lot of line-of-sight issues (I'm not sure it was even vis'ed), it doesn't make much sense as a place—but it's fun. The layout is good.

I wanted to take that layout and rebuild it in Quake as an idbase deathmatch level, making it make at least a little more sense as a place and also tailoring it to a game with a more fluid feel to combat. As much as I like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, the Source engine was starting to tip heavily towards realism, the gunplay wasn't as fast and furious, and the thin catwalks and chunky, undetailed building facades that were the bread and butter of hardcore clan level design for Quake and GoldSrc were no longer cutting it visually. It's probably why the game has only had cult success despite my enjoyment of it—people who like fast and fluid gunplay a la arena shooters have no use for its limited sprint and weapon cooldown, and it's very classicist and limited as far as its modes go (basically entirely deathmatch, no CTF, no control points, no last man standing, no vehicles, etc).

I got roughly 30% into the level before the first trip to Wales knocked me out of it, and despite all the castles we visited on both trips inspiringly me great to map for Quake as soon as I got home, I just never returned to it. (In all honesty, I had to refactor one of the center hallways to make the layout work, and that was just, like, so much effort. That's why I dropped it for so long. When I got over it, it took about a half hour.) I guess during this recent bit of moping, going back to what I was doing as an angsty teenager felt comforting, so I finished it up in about a week. Have some screenshots at long last:

While I kept true to the overall layout, I did make a few changes in connecting some areas to others where they originally weren't, and I expanded out the dinky little combine metal hallway in the far east of the map into an additional little sewer bit with a lift. One thing I'm always hungry for in my levels is making them feel like believable places, places that sprawl beyond where you're actually able to go. I did that a little bit with this level, decorative doors, a slipgate area, catwalks high above the playable level area, and I think it looks terrific. idbase also feels like putting together Lego after a fashion—layering wall textures separated by chunky metal supports that occasionally act as key light sources, it all just makes sense to me.

As far as lighting goes, this is very ericw, all bounce, automatic skylights, basically no fill lights, colored lights to separate various areas (warmer in rooms, colder in the hallways, and pale blue from the sky, and red to mark special areas). Fog is so huge for atmosphere in both drawings and levels; a slight bit in the distance makes any level feel instantly colder (or stickier!). Especially with the software simulation in Ironwail cranked, I think it's gorgeous. Dimension of the Past is a perennial inspiration for me as far as base stuff goes, and I don't think I've fully mastered that episode's design language, but I think this is closer than I've ever gotten.

With regards to how it plays? I don't know yet. I gotta set up a little QuakeWorld server and get some tests going. It's nice having access to both seasoned deathmatch players and Somnolians who don't play these games as much as I do, because it means I can see how people from all skill levels handle it. I'll probably do a couple rounds with both, some with me playing and some with me just watching to see how it pans out. As an aside, while I didn't intend for this to be a singleplayer level, once I sent NewHouse the level to run around in, he immediately wanted to do a singleplayer remix of it. He's apparently very close to being done with it, and I asked him to not send me any screenshots so I could see what he did with my work blind.

Glad everyone's liked how it looks! I can only hope it plays nice as well—and either way, it's just nice to still have it, and really have it better than ever, with my level design abilities. Many games I'd like to map for in the future, some more complex, some less. (And I will return to the Source engine someday. Parts of it are a disaster, but it's a disaster that feels uniquely like home.)