This past week, and really the month as a whole, has been odd. Frankly, I was wondering if any of this making-stuff-and-posting-it-online business was still worth it. To be clear, it's been a mixture of things—the 25 year itch (I'll be 25 in June), folks in Somnolescent being busy or stressed out with life on their own, alternating indecision and disinterest in my art and writing, my own struggle at finding a job—but the last straw, and where this affects the Internet, a place I'd really like to go to have fun in all honesty, was seeing the way the groomer Discord server leaks got discussed.

If you don't know, this month, a site called spy.pet popped up selling access to the logs of publicly-accessible Discord servers. Some of them were, really, a thinly-veiled child grooming operation using cute memes and anime boys as a way to gain access to and prey on teenagers, getting them to take photos of themselves and all that, I don't need to go on. The spy.pet guy joined the Kiwi Farms to post his discoveries publicly, and folks closer to home than I would've liked had...difficulty with the news.

Predators are an upsetting enough topic, but when I saw people in servers I'm in desire violent revenge on that guy for shining a light on the shit currently being done to teenage boys, boys just like I was—insecure, from dysfunctional homes, figuring they were just so precocious for their age—I was alienated. If you don't know, and I'm about to put this very not delicately, so be warned: I was a grooming victim. From age 14, I had an older woman encourage me to write snuff for her, violent, painful snuff. She withheld her affection for me until I gave her something to shlick to. She preyed on the stuff that I was into. We roleplayed both, and then she handed all the logs over to another underage person to humiliate me publicly with. She wanted me to move to Canada someday, pretending to be a deeply sick person with about every condition under the sun so I'd feel bad and take care of her forever.

I don't let any of this affect me these days, but that's where I'm coming from. It's a topic very close to home, and seeing people unbelievably fold the kinds of abuse I took under the umbrella of "queer servers"—phenomenal, just the community I want to be associated with, as someone who's learned not-so-quietly over the past year that he might just like dudes as much as chicks. That's all this is, being queer! And not pedophilia or anything.

You can think that's retarded, you can tell me I'm projecting, you can tell me to stop paying attention to the news, but it was everywhere I went. Sheezy had a discussion, boomer shooter Discords I was in had discussions about it, I think it might've even gotten posted in Protoweb? Naturally, folks were worried their own messages had been posted publicly, but the more concerning, and frankly more telling, reactions of fury and upset let me know that I was sharing very different air than I was when I first joined Discord. That's the Internet I share with people? That's who tell me they "worry" about me poisoning their social well? People not upset that kids were being targeted, but that someone decided to show everyone what was happening to them. That's the bad guy.

The classic tale of people seeing two different movies strikes again. I kept my mouth shut through all of this. All it'd do is get me banned and more people cursing the meanie old mariteaux once again anyway for having a heart about the fucking kids and not wanting them to get preyed on or anything. It all fed into a feeling of "maybe I should just leave". "I don't fit in, shit is different now, this isn't my Internet, I'll figure out something else." That's not the only reason I felt that, like I said. I've been more and more aware that the folks on Discord and IRC, even servers about retro tech and old video games, really stuff you'd expect adults to be into more than kids, never get older, but I do. I'm lucky to have Somnolescent, a tight-knit group of people my age who share my interests and I love talking to, because goddamn, that shit is hard to come by out there.

Of course, I'm not leaving. I got blackpilled for a bit, but I'm coming to my senses. I have good chats with people, especially on small Web forums these days, and I'm contributing more and more to Protoweb—it's been really nice to have an outlet for my specific skills and interest in early Internet development. (I wrote a NoSQL CSV database and search thing in PHP for my bleem.com restoration! That didn't even get a journal post, sadly, but you can read a little about the process in the writeup I did on the Protoblog.) Most folks are alright. Quirky, but alright.

And hey, let's continue rolling with the good news, since I got the exorcism out of the way. I meant to announce this on here when I was officially at 160 (maybe I'll focus on it more in another post), but I'm now 18lbs lighter than when I started trying to lose weight in January! I was never super heavy, but I was a couple into overweight territory, and after a Christmas season of a lot of chocolate and booze, I was curious how much I could truly lose, since I'd never really given my diet much thought. It really became apparent today, after an interview I had (which I'll hear about how I did tomorrow, hopefully it's good news since I think I did well)— all of my nicer clothes are a size too big now, and I have to do my belt one notch tighter to fit my work pants as comfortably as they did at Staples. That's wild to think about.

Finally, creatively! I've got a plan for cammy.somnol now; not too drastic as far as changes in the content go, but I have in my head an idea for a new, much fancier front page graphic featuring Cammy as opposed to Setter, plus everyone else's sonas. (Setter will be moving to lofi.mari.somnol, as part of the three-pronged "support all browsers" approach I want to take for that, so no worries, the puppy will not be without mascot work!) I've also decided on a new page banner style, something a lot tidier and a lot less work than the fullbodies I've been doing since the site started. (I gotta get back into drawing, it was something I wasn't much in the mood for lately. Is a shame—another thing I've come a long way on and rather enjoy.)

Oh yeah, and I've been working on a Quake map! It's a little thing for deathmatch I started last year before I went to Wales the first time, but finished it over this oddball period where I didn't want to do much else. I'll save the full details for a post I'm gonna write tomorrow. For now, have a crunchy screenshot:

So yeah, kind of a heavy post, but I'm coming out of the other end. Good timing too; Caby just finished the last of her schoolwork last night, so I'll be hanging out with my girl more! (After she gets in a nice nap, of course. Lots of twelve hours days and not a lot to talk about other than schoolwork, rough times...)

I haven't been posting many journal entries lately! That's partially because I've been a little bit wayward, certainly bouncing between projects waiting for something to stick me, and maybe double-thinking basically everything I do creatively. (Those jobs were a bust, by the way. One never got back to me, and the other rejected me not through a rejection email, but through an update on a helpdesk ticket for a broken form on their website. I then got an automated email later that same day asking me to complete registration anyway, again, using the broken form. It's a fucking comedy.)

That'll probably sound like a lot of Anxiety and Self-Doubt, but it's really not. I'm not despairing, I'm pondering. I think the trip really flipped around a lot of my priorities, and now I'm wondering what I want to do, why I want to do it, and what I wanted to do, past tense, as I go back to being an Internet gremlin updating my websites and doodling between shifts at Whataburger. (I've never been to a Whataburger, but it's a funny name.)

It's probably best to go over each field in its own blog post (and some of this, I've discussed previously anyway), so let's start smaller. My album reviews. Back on Neocities, I did two paragraph album reviews of either stuff I liked or stuff people said I should cover. I started doing these again last year, and it's been a lot of fun. They take no time at all, and I get to talk about music I like. That part hasn't changed.

One of the albums I picked up in Wales was the self-titled debut of Remy Zero, a little band best known for doing the theme to Smallville on their way out. This was one of the first CDs I dug into getting home, and I found it to be a neat-sounding, definitely warped and a bit unpredictable, but not particularly memorably written alt rock record. I'll quote myself, since I don't think I'll be posting that review as it is:

This Alabama quintet produced the kind of album that Internet music fans seem to fawn over, rock music as sound exploration, a set of ten mood pieces that prompted Radiohead to bring them along on tour, but they're still a pop band at heart. By writing a 90s rock record without hooks, they don't please casual listeners, and the capital-D Discerning Music Listeners find this style old hat anyway. Another one through the cracks.
[...]
Remy should've leaned more on the vocals, really: the best songs on here, "Descent" and especially "Twister", are powered by the same deeply aching vocals as "Save Me" that'd fit them snug on a thousand teenagers' wallowing playlists. If you give this album a few listens, though, you start to grow warm to the ether-tornado-through-a-dusty-attic sound Remy Zero craft through their harmonies and acoustic guitar misery on tracks like "Gold Star Speaker" and "Shadowcasting". It's a cool album if you like eerie mope music—just don't expect to remember most of the songs by name.

I wrote the review, gave it a Good, and called it an evening.

And then I listened to it some more, and it grew on me, like a lot. There were days where I had it on repeat. I now have lyrics from it as my public Discord bio, and I might still rebrand the journal after the title of "Chloroform Days", because goddamn, does that describe my life these days. It's still not a perfect album, mostly suffering from a really slow ending, but yeah—it was never bad, just not immediate. And you might say "well that's great, Cammy, it grew on you", but that's the thing. It moved up from a Good to a Great—and I give fuckin' everything a Great.

That got me wondering what the point of even rating the record is when most things wind up a 4/5. Of course, I know why, it's to mark the album when it's not a 4/5, to praise the stuff I adore and to put lower the stuff I thought was lacking. I don't consider it grade inflation very much because I'm not elevating the stuff I find mediocre; I genuinely do really like every record I've given a Great. I suppose part of it is selection bias. I listen for pleasure, and I mostly cover albums I listen to. Of course they're all gonna skew upwards. If I was being asked to review more Bjork and Wolf Parade albums, they likely wouldn't clear the bar.

But then that got me wondering if you can truly give an album a negative review for being fine, but just not doing it for you, and if that's really the album's fault or the fault of the artist. I'm a big believer in John Peel's philosophy of "if a record gets made, it's because someone felt it needed to be made", and unless a record is truly disgusting or truly a gigantic misjudgment, someone's gonna find that record appealing. Then again, who decides what's disgusting or a gigantic misjudgment? Is it the band? The band is too personally attached. Is it the fans? They like it. Is it critics? They listen to 500 albums a year and get jaded from it.

Of course, everyone knows that an album review is pure opinion and that there's no objective metric you can use to measure albums, and in that sense, I wonder if my album reviews are more like curations, what you might like if you like this and so on. Thing is, I'm a weird listener who crosses all these boundaries, and I like a lot of things that don't really seem to cross over with each other when we're talking other people's tastes. Does that impact it? Can someone use my recommendations effectively if, in my head, two very different things go together, and they're not likely to like both of those things? (I'm leaning towards yes on that question, because it's my taste, and there's always more people like me than I figure. Still something I wonder about.)

So that goes back to the original question: if I just like most things I cover, does that render my scores meaningless? Most review sites and reviewers have given quite a few albums I really like very middling or negative scores, and is that disconnect between those scores and my routine Greats because of differences in purpose in covering the record, or is it because I'm a fan and not a critic? Can you give a negative review to an album you like? If I give Remy Zero a Good because it's so diffuse, does that betray my true feelings of really liking the record even though that might be a more accurate measurement of the album's objective merits?

I don't think it's fair to say that being a reviewer means being negative. I think it means being discerning—and I'm certainly that. I mull over aesthetic decisions and if an album has the songs or not, but I don't poke at records because I'm thinking of what they're not, I talk about them because I'm thinking of what they are. Going back to it, what Remy Zero is is a tidy slab of moaning, ghostly alt-rock that leans more on sonics than songwriting. It's not immediate, and I can see someone being underwhelmed at first or feeling it has no longevity. You do have to listen a few times for it to start really catching you.

It caught me, and it'd be cool to have turned other people onto it as well. I just have no idea if my recommendations will be useful because so much of what I cover turns into "it's really good if you're the right kind of listener". You can say that about a lot of records. I suppose that's why I've been calling them "recommendations" and not "reviews", because that's one thing I do know—I like them. (And yeah, for someone's hobbyist music writing, that's all that matters, I know—indulge me in thinking on it anyway.)

If that wasn't the longest pause on journal entries yet, it's probably close. I'm so out of practice with these! For a bit, it was because I genuinely didn't feel like updating it, and now I have a bit of a pileup of stuff to cover, so let's not let that put me off further. I'll split them up into sections. Let's go!

Protoweb!

I've already posted this literally everywhere, but my first Protoweb restoration has been accepted! I restored imax.com, circa 1998. It was in incredibly good shape for a Wayback grab, and it was fun recreating what images were lost and learning how server-side imagemaps work for backwards compatibility. Read the full story over on the ProtoBlog, and look out, because I've already got my next site lined up.

At a crossroads with cammy.somnol

Part of the reason I stopped with the journal entries for a bit is because I've suddenly grown a little dissatisfied visually with it and with the site in general. It's not the aesthetic necessarily (love the cuteness and the textures), and it's not even that the art is approaching two years old now in some cases. It's just that I draw Setter differently than I used to, and that makes any new pages with him not match the old ones unless I intentionally stick with some of my old, wonky ways of drawing, say, his ears, or the dot eyes.

That leads me to ponder that, if I do redraw everything, if I should stick with Setter or replace him with Cammy as was the original idea (I just couldn't draw him yet, and now he's got a design I love drawing). Aesthetically, do I want everything to stay hand-drawn, or do I mix in some Bryce 3D primitives and lattices for the islands? Do I stick with fullbodies, or do I go with proper bordered banners a la Netscape's old site (or Districts)?

I'm still feeling out what I want to do, but I probably will redraw everything and finally get everyone else's sona on here like I've been meaning to. Back when I started illustrating cammy.somnol, everyone was very drawn out in full, head to toe, no real stylization, no effects on anything, and I dunno, I might be in the mood to do something a little different. Plus, the posing fullbodies as decoration was roughly what I had in mind for mari.somnol, now that that is coming more into focus for me, so giving cammy.somnol something unique might be in order.

Various server shenanigans (ZNC, vhosts in Apache)

Whatever I decide to do with cammy.somnol, I've started to expand out what I use my little beta testing home server for. Apache can actually support running many servers on one instance through what are called virtual hosts. I've been meaning to set up more of these for a few months now, because it's actually really fucking useful for site debugging in ways that editing local files isn't. For one thing, you can experiment with .htaccess settings or anything without disturbing your live setup, but you can also run link checkers and spiders across your site to find broken links, which came in super handy when I was working on imax.com for Protoweb.

I also put together a cute little index for easily linking people to all the sites that I'm currently working on. Not everything has been uploaded yet (because I haven't started those projects, generally), but my next Protoweb project is up there, ready to be worked on, plus cammy.somnol as before.

As a bonus, now that I'm spending a lot of time in IRC, I figured it'd be a good time to finally set up a bouncer! Bouncers let you share one IRC login across multiple clients and keep track of chat history, even when you're not connected to it. Basically, it makes IRC feel a little more like a modern group chat app, but in the ways you'd want and none of the ones you wouldn't. I'm quite pleased with the setup; now, I can close MegaIRC when I'm playing a game or off to bed and not miss anything that happened while I was offline, and no one can tell I'm not there. Win-win!

Whoops Cammy might be working two jobs soon

I'm leaving details of this a little vague until stuff starts landing, but it just so happened that I've applied for two jobs, one in real life and one remote, that are both interested in hiring me. I've never worked two jobs, and both of them alone pay better than Staples, so hey! Infinite money cheat??? (I'll see how I like both jobs and the workload of having two jobs once I've got them. It sure would be cool to be making so much money though. I'll finance that car and those certifications I swear I will focus more on in a bit in no time, with money left over for stupid shit and computer upgrades, maybe! My daily driver is turning ten this year, I should eventually look into a properly new PC...)

Jesus Christ, that's a rabbit hole I don't wish to go down again. cammy.somnol now officially supports Internet Explorer 3 and up and Netscape 4 and up. And Mosaic for the most part, though it doesn't like my images.

I seem to get caught up in these occasional 24 hour tech projects, like the 24 hour flu, y'know? It's entirely emotional, it's not rational, and realistically, there's no reason for this one—well, there might be. Also it's a fun story to tell.

We have it really really good as Web developers in the 21st century. We have advanced CSS modules to enable us to easily put together layouts from scratch, and all the relevant CSS frameworks have grid and flex systems to make it as easy as putting a few classes in. This was not the luxury Web designers in the late 90s got to enjoy. They had to deal with two browsers from two temperamental browser developers that each supported a completely different version of the Web, and they were called Internet Explorer and they were called Netscape.

Microsoft has always been easy to put down as the evildoer, bulldozing the competition with their stagnant Web browser included with loads of software and bloating the nice and efficient Windows desktop shell with Active Desktop. This is all true. People also still have a lot of piss and vinegar for Microsoft today, which helps reinforce the idea that Internet Explorer was the bad browser and Netscape was the good one, but—I much prefer dealing with Internet Explorer if I can help it. It feels much zippier and less buggy when you actually compare the two, and here's the big thing, the CSS support is light years better.

Netscape was just as culpable as Microsoft in the "I'm only going to support my technologies" arms race, and the big one that haunts me as a Web developer is JavaScript Style Sheets. In case you're not aware, JavaScript originated with Netscape—and aside from it being used to do things it shouldn't, it's pretty good for what it is. Netscape wanted everyone to use JavaScript; they had plans for a server-side JavaScript (sit down, React users), and with the desire to have stylesheets for people's larger and larger websites looming on the horizon, they figured they could turn their scripting language into a styling language as well.

It didn't work, but it continues to be relevant to those designing retro Web pages because Netscape inexplicably hacked its CSS support around translating to JSSS. If you use CSS at all, and you're targeting Netscape at all, you will have to learn to deal with its hideously bad, incredibly limited, unbelievably buggy implementation of JIT translated CSS. To give you an idea, there's a phenomenal website I've been combing over for the past day or so called RichInStyle.com, which is devoted to turn-of-the-millennium CSS information, bugs, and best practices. They count several hundred bugs for Netscape 4's CSS implementation—some parts of the site list it around 230, other parts 500.

I've known for a long time now that cammy.somnol, basic as though the layout is, ate shit on Netscape 4, but I wasn't too interested in figuring out why...until it crawled up my ass and I started playing with it. Here's some bugs I've personally encountered:

• The most egregious one involves line-height. Specifying a line-height on a container that features images causes those images to overlap the text, sort of like a float gone wrong. Not setting a specific line-height. Specifying line-height at all.
• margin: auto does nothing. auto equals 0 to Netscape 4. (This one is actually common to both IE3 and IE4 as well. You all disgust me.)
• You can center-align a table, but only if that table doesn't contain images. If there's images in the table, it will ignore centering, even if you use a <center>.
• Tables are actually just permafucked on Netscape. Any CSS you have that applies to a container will be unset after a table in that container closes. In plain English: if you set a text color and font on your body, and then have a table, the text color and font will be unset after the table closes.
• Netscape will replace some images with others and generally cause chaos with your layout if those images have inline CSS on them.
• !important causes Netscape to ignore CSS declarations set as such. (This is actually quite useful for making it ignore certain buggy declarations.)

The thing about JSSS is that, because only Netscape 4 supports it, I can write a JSSS file and use it to fix Netscape-specific rendering bugs without resorting to CSS hacks. Why would I want to do this? Originally, I didn't much care, but I got to thinking about how I'd eventually like to have cammy.somnol linked more around the still-growing retro Web community a bit more, and I know folks on Windows 3.x and 9x and other OSes alike sometimes have no choice but to use Netscape. Even if they do have choice (RetroZilla supports Windows 95 and NT4 and is lovely to develop for), it doesn't mean they're taking advantage of that choice.

So, literally 24 hours ago as of writing this, I got to seeing how much better I could make cammy.somnol work on Netscape without completely rewriting every page. I could've gotten things pretty close looking and fairly consistent across all browsers had I just resorted to presentational HTML, but that's not my style and I like clean markup too much. (I wound up using some anyway, I'll get back to that.) That journey expanded out to Internet Explorer 3, 4, and Mosaic 3.0 fairly quickly; I knew it mostly worked in IE5 and worked perfect in IE6 already, but I didn't have anything I could test the older versions on to hand and had to spend the morning setting up PCem with networking support.

So here's a summary of what all I did:

• I sorted out the buggy declarations and got Netscape much happier with my stylesheet fairly quickly. That said, the page still can't be horizontally centered, but I figure if you're stuck with Netscape or early IE, you're probably viewing at 800x600 like I designed the site for anyway.
• Most of what I did in JSSS became CSS hacks when I started targeting IE3 and 4, but there's still a good bit of it embedded in every page. This gets ignored by every other browser and lets me target Netscape specifically.
• I fell back to using presentational HTML for centering individual images, page headers, and footers. I also use it to set border to 0 on images that act as links, because old browsers like to generate boxes around those and it's ugly with my transparent images. This all necessitated changing the doctype of the entire site from HTML4 Strict to HTML4 Transitional, though it's still fairly clean either way.
• Each page now has a fallback background, text, and link color specified in the <body> opening tag, in case the user agent has no CSS support whatsoever. This is, funnily enough, how I initially learned to write HTML when I was a little kid fooling around in Notepad back in the 2000s. <body bgcolor="green"> my beloved.
• I had to do much digging into CSS hacks, plus manually specifying my font choice and color on every single paragraph to make sure the tables didn't eat my styling. This and the above two bullets led to a lot more redundancy than I would've liked, but no big deal, really, things are still fairly efficient.
• I outright disabled all image rendering on the journal for Netscape 4 because of the bonkers "images bouncing around" bug. I'd reload the page and find the Setter journal drawing replaced with a screenshot of Sheezy, and after not being able to find a fix to my liking, I just disabled it outright. I may revisit that bug in the future, but for now, use a better browser.

As a result, Netscape 4 finally works mostly well on cammy.somnol (ignoring the journal), IE3 is near-perfect aside from floated images not working, IE4 is perfect, and Mosaic is almost perfect, rendering my GIFs as black-and-transparent for some reason I can't seem to understand. All of them have some trouble with the journal, either due to lack of PNG support, Netscape's image bug, Mosaic's tendency to crash when it has to get off its lazy ass and render a bigger page, or my lazy ass' tendency to not render thumbnail versions of embedded images, causing load times and images breaking out of their containers. RetroZilla and more recent were already perfect and remain completely unaffected.

I've learned so many nightmarish bugs, hacks, and workarounds over the past evening, trying to target one browser but not another, working around the lack of horizontal centering in basically every browser I was working with, and constantly checking this not-altogether-accurate-somehow W3 specification submission on JSSS for reference. That said, she's working nicely! cammy.somnol will now work in your favorite retro browser, I didn't have to change how I write these pages too much to make it happen, and eventually when I start floating this thing around more, hopefully someone in the retrocomputing scene will appreciate all that hard work. (mari.somnol will avoid this pitfall because I'm going to be writing a no-CSS version from the get go. You can't deal with bad CSS implementations if you don't use CSS, black man taps head GIF.)

Wait, I had a bunch of other stuff to work on? Like, other sites, pages, a trip diary, drawings, IT certifications? Ah geez dude.

I'm back in the US now. It's 6AM local time as I write this—or 10AM in Wales time. I'm still operating four hours ahead of myself. I fell asleep at 10PM accidentally the past two nights.

Of all the days I'd have to fly to Ireland for a connecting flight, of course it'd be St. Patrick's Day. I didn't intend for that, nor did I even remember the day existed (due to my allergy of sixth- and seventh-generation Americans who still consider themselves Irish). That was fun! Dublin is the only airport in Europe that has something called US preclearance, where you go through the bag scan and "interview" (like a question and a webcam photo) with a border agent before you actually fly off to the US. As a result, when I touched down in New Jersey, all I had to do was grab my bag and get in my mom's car. It was pretty easy breezy.

Less easy breezy has just been being back. I'm alright—in some ways relieved, because I'm not crammed into Caby's bedroom without my setup and all my stuff, but in most other ways, really feeling being gone. Last time was so intense and emotionally overwhelming that I think her and I both felt we could breathe afterwards, which masked the isolating feeling. This time was so much more comfortable and natural that that's all that's noticeable, feeling being gone. All the 2AM giggle fits over awful memes and impressions of Phil Thomas Katt. Meeting her after school and walking into town together to eat and window shop. All the long chats with her family, late trips into the village for booze and snacks and mouthwash and whatever else. That's all stopped for the moment.

I'm mostly glad it happened though. We were much less clingy this time, more like close friends, which meant the lovey snuggly stuff happened so much more naturally. That bodes well. I've been more confident in myself, realizing my needs and limits and and what I need more, which means it's easier to defuse messy situations and just keep myself at ease. That bodes well. I can read Caby better and navigate her stresses better too. That bodes well! Her folks love me to the point of her dad offering to pay for me to fly out next time, in case money was what was keeping me from coming back so soon. That bodes well.

The goal now is to be able to prop up a place together. To do that, I'm gonna need more skilled work. I've decided I think I'd be most interested to do something with networking, so I'm gonna start doing research into that field and into certifications to get something that pays nicer and is less customer-facing than retail. If I play my cards right, I might be able to get into the UK via a work visa, which is better than the marriage visa because you can actually work while you're still being naturalized. Then comes just finding something there, getting a place with Caby, and managing the move. It'll take a lot of money and planning, but we're the people who can pull it off.

Ironically, while we've lengthened our timeframe for all this happening (thanks to there not being the desperation of being together Or Else anymore), it feels so much more within reach. No doubt a lot of the stress had to do with lockdowns; hard to feel confident in your ability to immigrate when you don't even know when you'll be able to see your girl in person for the first time. I thought it'd never happen. It's now happened twice, with the full support of our parents. I feel like I can do anything, really, and I think Caby's feeling a lot more confident too.

So yeah, I'm missing Wales, but I made it home safe, her and I are on better terms than ever, and we have a much stronger plan going forwards. I'm gonna work on my side of the Atlantic to secure our financial future. By 2030, I'll be in the right country with the girl I love permanently.

I'm gonna go play Red Faction, I think. Check mari@macintosh.garden for some new Cammy content if you're so inclined, and stay tuned for reviews on all the CDs I bought and a deep dive into the Conet boxset on the group blog!

I have my flight out of here scheduled for this Sunday, the 17th. With any luck, by next week, I will be back in the US, comfy and with all my new CDs to finally listen to.

On another note, I've been hitting the art stuff seriously hard this trip. I might try to finally update the mari@macintosh.garden art gallery, seeing as it was last updated in November of last year. Here's a drawing I did just yesterday and one I doodled this morning, neither of which have been posted anywhere just yet, so you guys get first dibs for sticking with a sporadically-updated journal.

Prince! I've struggled a lot to figure out how to draw his funky crazy one-sided hair style, and it wasn't until Caby doodled a simpler version of it that the shape became apparent to me. This was done for her Please Draw a Cat gallery on Neocities, and spoilers, I wound up being one of two (and then three when Savannah drew one) people to do an anthro cat instead of a feral one. It still counts, I'd say. I adore this fruity bastard, very pleased with how solidly he came out. I gave it the airbrushy color style because soft suits soft.

And now a Cammy! This one is for my toyhou.se profile, which I wanted to take private starting January 1st of this year, but wound up not for lack of an updated profile image. I've had this one in my head for a few months now, Cammy getting haunted by some of my long-neglected OCs, and today was the day it happened to fall out. This was fun! I don't do dynamic poses enough...or props, or expressions, or magical things. This is like four generations of OCs I've fixated on in one picture, Cammy, Felix, Colton, and Prince from left to right. Can't wait to line and color it.

Well, I was supposed to be back home yesterday. I am not. I am still in Cardiff.

Let's talk about how this all happened.

1. My flight was to depart at 10:45. I was not aware of the rule that check-in closes an hour to departure. For extra hilarity, thanks to a rule with my carrier in the US, my phone's international calling and roaming is disabled by the 5th. "I'll be home soon, it's all good," I think. I'll get back to that.
2. Caby and I make it to Heathrow departures at 9:50. The check-in fails. I am confused and the ticket slip tells me to seek the assistance desk.
3. I go to the assistance desk and they proceed to tell me that I was in the wheelchair queue and I need to move. I did not obtain assistance there.
4. Asking another member of staff, I learn of the hour-before-departure rule. He asks me if I booked through British Airways or through a third party. Because I booked through Expedia, he says British Airways can't provide any assistance and he tells me to contact Expedia. (Caby's dad, himself a regular flyer, tells me that they weren't very nice about it, in retrospect—sometimes they just hurry you through anyway.)
5. I find Expedia's US customer support number, though because I have no roaming and Caby doesn't have international minutes, we can't call it. I soon locate their UK number, where the automated prompts are all in an American accent anyway.
6. The kindly Indian gentleman representative I eventually get ahold of tries his best to get British Airways to get me on another flight and fails. I'll have to buy another plane ticket. I accept this, and he tells me of two same-day flights out of Heathrow to Newark, the airport I was returning to. One is a 24 hour connecting flight to Lisbon. The other is a direct flight for $2600.
7. Without any way of properly contacting my mom (all I have is her number, again, US-based) and without email on my phone, I use Caby's email to explain the situation and to tell her to please do not make the long drive to Newark, because I won't be there.
8. We get breakfast at Black Sheep Coffee in the airport (very tasty by the way, much recommended) to calm the nerves of missing the flight and regroup. I'm already set on going back to Cardiff for another week; I figured if I rushed back a day or two later, it would disrupt my mom's work schedule, be more expensive, and introduce more room for error. Caby, who I'm soothing through a mini meltdown, eventually agrees, and both her parents and my mom agree that slow-rolling it and waiting for the best price on my mom's next day off would be ideal.
9. We go back on a coach for another three hour trip and eat chippy when we get home. Caby sleeps for ten hours. I spend half the night playing Gran Turismo 2.

In case you're curious, you can stay up to six months in the UK either without a visa (if you're from a country that doesn't need one, like the US) or on a standard visitor's visa (if you're from a country that does need one). The concern isn't staying long enough to arouse the authorities, but just making sure I can land in a way where everyone is on the same page, ready, and isn't breaking the bank.

I've already let my bank know I'm here another week—another reason I wanted to go back to Cardiff, because I couldn't do that at the Travelodge on my phone without my passwords (I have since gotten Bitwarden on my phone)—so I won't be cut off from my funds while I'm still here. I've also established alternate forms of contact with my mom that don't require texting, and I'll probably get WhatsApp as well since Caby's family uses that and that means I'll get to join their family group chat. I'd say we handled it pretty well, all things considered.

What a fucking bizarre situation, though. We'd emotionally prepared ourselves for me to leave, saying our goodbyes to everyone all through this past Wednesday and Thursday, only for me to pop right back up in the coach park like nothing happened. I'm so grateful and thankful her parents are cool with it and agreed that was the best course of action, because the alternative would be a week in a hotel, and that shit is expensive. It helps that they've been all over the world and know how difficult flying can be. My mom was also cool with it, so long as I'm not blowing all my funds (I'm not, only some)—I do miss her, though, and she misses me.

I was supposed to be home today, in my bed or at my desk playing Red Faction or one of my other phenomenal CEX finds on the eMachines Box, listening to one of the now-25 CDs on my big stereo, recovering from the trip. That hasn't happened yet, but I'm okay. I'm accounted for, I have enough money to make it as long as I need, and Caby has ever-so-kindly offered to cover the plane back with all her savings. There's still stuff I can do here while I'm here, castles to visit and trains to get on, so I can vibe.

It's not ideal, and we're still occasionally laughing exasperatedly at the past two days, but we're alright. And hey—lot worse places to be stranded than with your girlfriend.

Before we begin, NEW CABY SITE. NOT A DRILL. PLEASE GO VISIT IT. OLD FLASH GAME VIBES ARE EVERYWHERE. IT'S ADORABLE AND IT'S FUN.

Paired with that, she wrote a journal last night while I was out getting snacks from Lidl with Trys, and she's been chewing on a lot of the same thoughts that I have about leaving. It's a phenomenally bittersweet thing, more so than last time. It's become so natural, this trip has been so relaxed, so domestic, and yet I am so much more aware of myself and what I'm capable of on my own as well, so I'm no longer in the big rush to move here. There's a CabyCammy, but there's just as much a Caby and a Cammy again, if you know what I mean. Let me give you a bit of context.

Last time was much pressure. Lockdowns caused us both to become very clingy and hyperaware of one another, offline and on. We were bad at communicating, yet constantly worried about the other person. Understandably so! We hadn't visited friends long-distance before, let alone a partner. We never had to come right out and tell another person how we were feeling. I had a bad habit of wanting things from her I'd never ask for. That stuff takes a toll on you, and it separated us. Not to the point of us separating, but y'know, emotional distance, being protected. Being both incredibly reliant on the relationship and very scared of things going horribly wrong constantly.

It was a bumbling fucking mess, but the good news is that we're both problem solvers and absurdly dedicated. There was never a "let's break up" moment, we knew that wasn't the solution. Regardless of how much frustration we caused each other, we'd have long talks and figure out what we needed together, from each other and from ourselves, and ironically, what we found was we needed to become separate people again in order to be a stronger couple.

Consider the timeline. 2018 was a stressful year for her and I both, with school that we were not ready for starting, Neocities getting us some of the most white-hot infamy we'd ever been under, and suddenly having better friends to open up to for the first time. That's a lot going on emotionally. 2019 still had the new car smell, and 2020 and 2021 were spent stuck indoors and effectively hallucinating being a couple because we had no idea when we'd ever see each other for real. You pick up a lot of bad habits, and I already had a lot of pre-existing bad habits because of Brianna suicidebaiting me as a teenager. Being 14 and wondering if your new friend would be alive next week is a recipe for being a clingy person, to put it nicely.

To give you an example, there was a very conscious thought I had back then, specifically after Rocks the 360 came out, to drop literally everything that wasn't drawing so I wasn't off spending months on projects she felt left out of. She's in school now (and doing not just better than she did the first time, but also better than most kids in her class, frankly) and has her own little personal worlds and of course her following to tend to, lots more to occupy her time, so it's not necessary to keep her company 24/7 anymore. Quite the opposite! She's been nothing but encouraging towards me rediscovering my own personal hobbies with modding and level design and going out and being involved in projects.

I still felt I needed that permission to be myself again though, and reassurance it wasn't going to cause more grief. Since I've gotten it, we've frankly never been better together. I can go out on walks like I want to. I can look at castles and talk about Quake maps and mapping for Garry's Mod like I've really wanted to. I can weave in time together and time spent separately, recharging our batteries so we can be cuddly in the evening naturally, organically, without it being an expectation. We're far less in a rush to make things happen, because we trust each other to be there when the time is right. We're relearning how to be a couple, the right way this time.

I am starting to realize it's okay to like things outside her, even to fantasize outside of her as well. I like boys as much as I like girls (maybe the year spent talking to a crossdressing Filipino guy should've clued me in). There's things I like to draw that are squarely for me, hobbies I have that are solely my own, and I don't feel like I'm neglecting anything to indulge in those things anymore. I have projects waiting for me when I get back. I've realized how much I miss my mom, how much I have to see in the US still, and how much more I want to be before I have to take the gargantuan leap towards being independent in a foreign country. The UK might look superficially similar to the US, but then you're surrounded by voices that don't sound like yours, phone numbers that are formatted weird, so many roundabouts, cars we don't have, chippies instead of sandwich places, Costas instead of Starbucks, and of course in Wales, an entirely different language, and you realize "fuck, I really am in another country".

I don't want to do that yet. I love the UK, I love Wales, and everything here has been very, very nice—but the culture shock would kill me if I tried that now.

Of course, it's still sad it's ending. This time really has been phenomenal. I'm gonna miss the good chats with her family, wandering around at night and during the day, picking up Caby at university so we could walk into Cardiff Central for snacks and plushies and CDs and DVDs and PC games, having someone sleeping in the same bed as me. I'm gonna miss the day trips and the laughs about "dark thunder" and Mr. Brain's Pork Faggots on supermarket trips and heading into Americandy because they're the only place around here that has imported Takis and TGI Fridays Potato Skins chips. Cardiff is such a wonderful city, and if you can visit it someday, you so should.

The good news is, though, I miss home just as much. I feel far less like I need to be here to be happy in life. There will be another time, and we will go nuts next time too.

One week until I'm back in the US. This would be the headlining piece in most other journal entries, but for now, just enjoy what I received in the mail last night. Expanded, limited edition reissue Conet Project boxset, all five discs, all mint condition, all extras included. I way overpaid to make sure I could get it, because it is unfathomably hard to find, and ordering it here meant I could avoid eating the international shipping costs. I feel like I own a piece of military intelligence now, but the good news is that customs apparently doesn't ask much anymore unless you're bringing expensive liquor, electronics, weaponry, or furniture back into the country. Least, that's my hope.

So a weird thing's happened! I'm drawing stuff and people like it:

"Okay, well, maybe that's just how active I've been with the community on Sheezy. Let's check FurAffinity."

Well, alrighty then! I didn't post anything of them to this journal (or my long-neglected static HTML art gallery on mari@macintosh.garden, which I'll update when I get back), but I drew both Cammy and Colton in separate drawings, and both of them have done remarkably well basically everywhere I post art (save Weasyl, but no one uses Weasyl except the fatfurs). I don't post this to brag (mostly), I post this out of bewilderment, if I'm honest.

I got used to being easily ignorable earlier in my art journey, and really, understandably so—no idea of eyes, expressions, 3D space, texture, style in any capacity. Still, it did put me off posting my work publicly, knowing it'd get somewhere south of no reaction at all. Now that I've improved and I'm actually making an effort to post art again though? I'm getting a reaction! From people I've never even met! It's genuinely been really encouraging. I feel like there's a lot there to build on.

I'll be sure to give you guys more art soon. If you're wondering, I post now to DeviantART (newly returned, since it hasn't disintegrated further and I find more art I like on there than anywhere else), Weasyl, FurAffinity, and the recently-relaunched Sheezy. Sheezy is limiting signups to donors at the moment, but if you had an account on the original site, your account and art will be there waiting for you. I donated to get in, and I've been very happy with the site functionality and the community (even if a lot of them aren't like me, to put it bluntly).

This does all leave the potential for Cammy to start posting his art even more places—Newgrounds might like what they see, maybe? Perhaps Twitter? (Iffy on that last one, but at least Caby would retweet my stuff.) It's funny—I feel like I'm uniquely the only techie person who gets along better with the artsy crowd. Perhaps it's because they spend less of their time trying to be Correct on the Internet.

So it turns out, when you let Cammy loose in a foreign country with his Staples money, he buys a shitton of CDs with it. Have a nice look at what I'll have to get through customs in two weeks:

There's nineteen in that stack. A few were grabbed from Sister Ray in London (which was honestly pretty unremarkable, though the CD selection was nice), a few more from Spillers once more, and the rest (probably half the stack) were grabbed from the absolutely legendary Kelly's in Cardiff Market.

I don't think my old post "A Tale of Two Welsh Record Stores" accurately describes the wonder that is Kelly's. Other record stores have distributors; Kelly's stock is literally whatever people sell him. He apparently owns his entire top half of the balcony in Cardiff Market. My man doesn't even use a scanner with barcodes to check you out, he adds up all the price stickers on the albums on paper and then tosses a price at you. The CDs are all at impulse buy prices, practically. My haul today, consisting of the seven records from Bush, Matchbox Twenty, Brendan Benson, Better Than Ezra, and Remy Zero, came out to £19.

Seven CDs for 20 quid, lots of it stuff I literally never expected to see in a record store over here. Kelly's is officially my favorite place to visit in Cardiff, bar none.

Anyway! Gonna rip all these probably on Sunday and get them uploaded to the home server. Tomorrow, we visit Castle Raglan, stream, and drink cream liqueur on stream. I have another journal entry going up tomorrow; I'm officially in backlog territory with these now. Good times though! Much on my mind, much to say.