Think like you haven't ever, try to remember the days
When we would talk 'til the light, before morning
Your summer neck is burned with salt and sand
I lost my fingers trying to find your old hands

In time, maybe
We'll discover we
Could've been closer to the core, yeah

In time, maybe
We'll discover we
Could've been closer, closer

It's funny, how perspective works. I've mentioned this before, but I've really sequestered myself these past few years. There's only so often you can watch things blow up in your face before you stop having the desire to talk to anyone outside the group. It left me with a surprising amount of social anxiety, frankly. I stopped having good chats and friends to balance out the sheer number of bad experiences I'd had in some unbelievably catty Discord full of grown men.

Part of the issue was expectations. It's hard not being mari, the big bad Flareon, when you've always been that to people, especially when that's grown out of my frustrations talking to people and positioning myself as this highly active and highly reactive social force. If you think that sounds silly, let me put it another way—it's hard to shake a bad first impression. People's first impressions of me were, for a long time, polarizing, and my first impressions of other people were similarly colored. It was still stressful, even when I'd talk to people I (thought I) was on good terms with. There's a reason "It's a violent way we have, even when we smile" is one of my favorite lyrics ever written, and one of the ones I had in my footer on mari_nc1. Interpersonally, with people I was close to and people I wasn't, that was the feeling.

Anyone who goes "well just stop doing that" is missing the point. It was something I had to grow out of, and even when I grew, the people around me didn't, necessarily. It was still the same old environment, the same Discords, that caused me to act out in the first place. You can't just expect an alcoholic to not drink even when they're still around alcohol all day, it's a fault in our brain wiring. My solution was to give up socializing completely, and that meant giving up on a lot of things that I loved. A lot of community, a lot I can contribute to projects outside the group, and living as a digital hermit. It was pretty miserable.

I'm starting to climb out of my shell again, which has been super nice. It's not perfect—I still have occasional moments of being basically convinced that folks quietly hate me, which was absolutely terrible early this week and thankfully has abated. I still have a hard time considering myself to have mental health issues, but I really can't think of any other way to describe it—it was effectively two days of me being stuck in this oppressively miserable imagined mental exile, which isn't ideal over Valentine's Day, I must say. Feeling much better now, thankfully!

As for where I've been! Been hanging out with the good folks at Aftersleep (site is currently down, but we're currently in #aftersleep on Rizon as a backup, and I think I'll be parked in that channel permanently now)—I missed talking site stuff with people. It was cool seeing yoshi join too, after what happened with him in the past. I'm just some fucking guy figuring this out. I genuinely don't harbor ill will towards people, and I'd hope they don't towards me. If we can be friends again and folks can avoid being fried out shitheads, that's the ideal.

I've also lined up a little contributor spot with Protoweb, which is a beyond-cool Web proxy that dishes out restored old 90s websites to retro browsers. When I get back to the US, I'm gonna be working on getting Gopher support finalized, both restoring period Gopherholes to browse and helping map out how their funky custom HTTP proxy should serve up Gopher data. I've really been enjoying peeking in their Discord once or twice a day and chatting between Caby drawing goff dogs and alien cats on the PC. Feeling free to not be stressed out all the time for once—highly enjoyable.

I'm also now on sheezy.art! I paid for early access so I could snag the name cammy on there, and even with a late upload and a small active userbase, my first drawing on there got a surprisingly nice reception! Honestly, same with DeviantART (where I'm active again—it's the place my drawings did best and it's where I find the most art I actually like) and FurAffinity; I gained watchers just from this one Cammy drawing. So I guess uploading art more regularly and seriously is also back on the menu!

Again, it was anxiety that kept me from pursuing it, but y'know what, spring is coming, the time is right, I miss having a presence, and I miss talking to new people. Let's do it.

I write this sitting in Caby's family lounge! I would stream tonight, but I've just gotten situated in Cardiff with all my logins and shower stuff and I've been recuperating. The world can wait a week.

I am rather glad we stayed in London a day less this time. It's a lovely city, but it sure is noisy. And big. And we had a few snags navigating back to Cardiff. We had to contend with line maintenance—the Piccadilly Line that normally services Heathrow was partially closed, leading to us using the District and Elizabeth lines to avoid resorting to the buses—and missing our coach and having to buy tickets for another. We arrived in Cardiff on a cold, late night, crampy and a bit nausesous, immediately had chippy, and all pain was healed.

That said, we did do a little bit of adventuring in London! We made our way out to Soho and visited Sister Ray, one of those fabled London record stores, and one we looked very out of place in. Honestly, the store was pretty unremarkable, great selection, prices pretty typical for a used record store, but Soho is kinda the artsy part of London, and two big teenagers in sweats and hoodies is not their typical clientele, let's say.

I did pick up a disc I've been after, My Bloody Valentine's EP's 1988-1991, some old favorites, the first Pretenders record and the CD single for Eels' Novocaine for the Soul (I tried Beautiful Freak as a whole and found it to be a pretty unlistenably maudlin record, but that song is killer), and one I really want to try again, the Breeders' Last Splash. I do love me some Breeders, but I have never quite gotten into this, their biggest, record like I have their others. (They're not the only band I can say that about—I still have to give Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf another go.)

Aiming to write some tomorrow! For now, I'll just keep chatting on Aftersleep and watching Caby clean the piggo cage. (The piggos don't like me yet. Moonie was alright with me though, she's my favorite.)

It really feels like I don't write on here as often as I used to, but apparently, I wrote seven entries in January. So I guess there's still stuff going up all the time? News to me.

I've spent the past two days packing and getting last-minute technical stuff situated for my departure tomorrow, making sure server stuff is automated and accessible halfway across the world, loading some more games and music on my 3DS, that sorta stuff. I'm gonna use the next month like I used the last semester of college: I want to spend it wandering whenever I want, eating, sleeping, hanging out with Caby, and writing stories (and doodling now!). I want to reconnect with that creative urge that I've been stifling because I have Something Else to work on first. I'd like to indulge myself more.

Her parents have been nothing but supportive—apparently without Caby even being involved, they were looking into the best way to get me moved over there, and they've (again without her prompting) offered to take me in while her and I look for a place. I'm in a really privileged position to be able to do this, honestly, on both sides of the Atlantic. I want to enjoy it, and I have an idea I've been really excited for for a long time to work on while I'm there.

Funnily enough, I've not felt this free of anxiety in a while now. I really think it was hearing that MiloHax literally celebrated the one year of me departing their server. Something clicked in me when I learned about that on stream—I felt for a long time like I was cast off and forgotten unfairly, but now I have proof of how much I affected, that I am the most important person in that server's history. Seriously, imagine a whole-ass server of hundreds of people celebrating the departure of a single one, complete with announcements and server icon changes. lol. lmao, even.

I really think their well dried up. All the big Deluxe projects dropped when I was still there, one of which has my sticky hands all over it, and they're not talented enough to figure out the real crazy shit with those games, like model replacement (which is about the only thing we still can't do with GH2). They literally made new Neocities accounts with reuploads of the sites I made for them, plus censored versions of my callouts (you can see these links for the uncensored ones, there is no protecting the guilty). I'm so awful! But all my contributions to Deluxe are probably still in those mods, and they'll still reuse the sites I made for them.

I won. I won! I went and made an album and drew a ton of shit and wrote a book and hung out with my GF in person and they can't even make new sites. I won.

I was poking around at my chart testing disc again last night. Shit is still so awesome, I'd forgotten how great everything I did on that game was. Great charts, great songs (with a ton more still left to do), and some nice new features to boot. Internet drama isn't the only reason I put marfGH on hold; I want to be better at drawing first as well, especially being able to draw my Flareon boy marf, so I can retexture all the menus. Still, goddamn, what a cool bunch of charts.

I have some more fingers in some more pies at the moment, stuff outside Somnol. I'm feeling more social than ever, honestly. Think 2024 is going to be a killer fucking year. Hopefully will update this while I'm over there, given that there will be no later trip diary as said.

Whoops, I fell asleep before I could write that post last night. Here's the fun stuff!

So, I've said this many times now: whenever something creative I made becomes massive out of date, be it sites or stories, I have a hard time looking at it. The Somnolescent Gopher server absolutely, 100%, fit this criteria. The last time it was seriously updated was 2021, back when borb and mon were both still in the group. That's legitimately ancient. There were talks of making a GitHub repo and us collaboratively updating it, but that fell through and I've come to realize I literally do not take on projects anymore without first thinking of everyone else around me, which isn't great.

So I've been rebuilding it myself. Direct link for clients that support Gopher, proxy link. Have a looksee:

Click for full size. Ahem.

Firstly, menus (which is what you'd call pages in Gopherspace) are a lot more graphical now. Back in 2021, I was really on this "pure Gopher" kick where I thought menus shouldn't have informational selectors (which aren't a canonical Gopher itemtype, so some bad Gopher clients that don't understand them just discard them), so our menus were very plain to look at and browse through. I recently saw some grabs of the original 2018 Somnol Gopher (courtesy of The Potato), and our menus used to look so fucking swag with the ASCII art and the decorative dividers, it was nuts. I brought all that shit back, with fallback text files so those using said less robust clients can still understand what's going on.

Secondly, alongside updating what was already there, we're adding new menus to show off everyone's work in various mediums. The big thing has been a Gopher art gallery with some personally-selected highlights over the past few years, but I'd like to do the same on a new menu called the Grand Playlist featuring both my music and Connor's. Old-school file formats are still being taken into consideration here: there's small versions of each of the art pieces in GIF or JPG, and I'm gonna have 128kbps MP3s and 8-bit WAV files for the Grand Playlist for computers that can do MP3 playback and ones that can't, respectively. Lots more on the way, really loving how it's coming out and having an up-to-date Gopher server again.

Finally! I've saved the most exciting bit (to me) for last: Somnolescent now has a CCSO server, at gopher://gopher.somnolescent.net:105/2/.

CCSO is an absolutely ancient database lookup format first developed in the late 80s at the University of Illinois for their Computing and Communications Services Office. You can store anything in a CCSO server, but it was mostly used for looking up your professors and other staff through a command-line interface. There's less than ten known CCSO servers still in operation, most of them for colleges who probably don't remember they even have them, and some of those using LDAP-to-CCSO translation layers, not even proper CCSO servers.

Somnolescent is now running its own CCSO server. I had this idea back in 2020, 2021 or so to not only use it to list us, as is obvious, but also be a full database of every single character we've got (and we have a few!). dcb wrote a Python script for it back then, but I didn't like how it worked and I wasn't bright enough to realize I could just rewrite and add onto it either.

Anyway, that's all been deployed now. I've been working on the server code for the better part of a week now (here's the repo if you wanna see it, feel free to shoot bug reports), and you can search by name, universe, species, character creator, and affiliation for people's friend groups, guilds in Pinede, Somnolians, etc. I'm still adding people to the database, but SomnolCCSO is available through our Gopher server to anyone who has a CCSO-capable client, no authentication needed. Netscape 4 works quite well. The above screenshot was taken with the most recent version of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, you can use Lynx or telnet if you've got those lying around, and I've even gotten this old neat freeware Windows 3.1 Ph client working with our server, after some additional command scrubbing:

This is such a highly specialized, hipster, niche nerdy toy that I expect no one but me to fool around with, but I am beyond delighted for Somnol to have it. One of the last ten still in existence, and my knowledge, the only new one that's been deployed in the past five years. I really think there's a lot of life still left in CCSO, at least as much as there is in Gopher; Tildes and clubs could use them for member lookups, as an example. Just needs more client support, really. Ideally, when dcb gets a permanent home for Gopherlens, he'll add CCSO support through that so you can do CCSO lookups through the web instead of needing an extra program for it.

Click for full size!

And look! Caby finished that Setter wallpaper I commissioned her for! Look how well it matches XP Media Center Edition! He's such a ditz and I adore him and I adore how this came out. Thanku Cabyyyyyy~

If you're not keeping up on my streams (shame on you! Sundays at 7PM EST, they're lots of fun), you might be wondering what's been going on with me as of late. There's kind of a lot, as to be expected when Cammy doesn't write any journal entries for two weeks, but really, I needed that time off to go indulge and explore some things. As such, I'll be doing daily entries until we're all caught up. Let's get the real life stuff out of the way first, and we'll talk about the fun stuff tomorrow.

So I am no longer employed by Staples. I was a tech there for just over six months, and I resigned. I did not get fired! This one was on sadder terms, and really, given the gigantic internal shitshow that company is undergoing right now (I can confirm from where I stood that a lot of what gets posted to r/staples is very much real), I both wasn't surprised and wasn't too hestitant to jump ship.

Long story short, I seem to get into it with a customer at least once a week—not even because I say anything at this point, because they just seem to read me as an asshole and get uppity about it. Now that Caby's been with me, she notes I have a very flat affect a lot of the time and I put things very straight, which to some, uh, challenged customers, reads as being an asshole. That's just part of being autistic. Folks take you weird. (I'm sure there's people who have seen me online who will imagine I was out here making fun of customers to their faces and saying edgy shit—I would've been gone a long time ago if that was the case. I know better when my employment is on the line.)

Staples prides itself on its customer service (because it has literally nothing else to offer people besides free Amazon returns), and I was already on my last warning for some shit that happened back in, what, September now? So with all the complaints (my GM estimated it to be about five a month), HR was looking for a reason to terminate me, and I wasn't about to give it to them and lose my ability to use my GM as a reference in the future (which he straight up offered, provided I resign). Plus, hour cuts—not just for associates, even corporate got reshuffled due to being so overbudget that the execs couldn't get their bonuses for 2023—already had me down to three days a week. Is $180 a week worth fighting that battle for? I didn't think so.

Of course, if you're an avid journal reader, you'll know it took me a while to really feel comfortable at that job. Staples held me to a much higher standard than my last job did, which taught me a lot, but was a lot more stressful as well. I'm already odd socially, and I left my last job due to being targeted and lied to, and it felt in a lot of ways like that was continuing but worse here (and I've since learned some things that corroborate my fears, but I'm well over it by now). Keep in mind, for all the complaints, my ESP numbers were consistently really good. I got a lady to buy an extra $240 worth of toner on top of a printer by offering to take $30 off the printer. I got some nice market baskets while I was there. It just took me a long, long time to get over those feelings of being out of place, and it was maybe too little too late in the end.

So yeah, I tried my best, I performed as best as I could, and it lasted about six months. I'm still happy with that, though. I didn't think I'd make it out of my 90 day probationary period. My GM stressed to me on the way out that I shouldn't doubt my technical ability, because I could fix PCs with a deeper grasp on their weird issues better than most, I could explain stuff supremely well to customers, and I was really good at getting extra shit on top of the sale. Corporate wants a very specific associate, and the weird and easily stressed kid who can dig through log files to find exactly why someone's PC isn't booting is not that. Sad, but it's just a retail job at the end of the day. I'll be replaced and I will find something better.

In the meantime, I'm going back to Wales. I always figured I'd go every time I cycled out of a job, and flights are bonkers cheap this time of year (I got this one for $620 round trip) and Caby and folks were okay with it, so back off to the UK I go! I won't be doing a gigantic trip diary this time, probably just a gallery of sketches and photos. Something a bit more collage-y and easier on me. I'll be gone February 8 to March 7. So hey, we'll be spending Valentine's Day together—makes up for being apart for our anniversary this year.

Speaking of that, I did do something for it, but it's not ready to go live yet. I'll give more details in a few days, but it's a site dedicated to CabyCammy and all the projects her and I get up to together. I took a break from working on it this past week to indulge, as I said, but I will be getting back to that along with all the other web stuff I'd like to do this year. Stay tuned for more regular blog posts! I'm getting back into the swing of things.

Stream tonight has been rescheduled for next week. My cold had gotten significantly worse—it's a bunch better today, but I still sound pretty stuffed up and I didn't want to be hacking up a lung constantly and chancing screwing up my voice by having to talk for two-plus hours straight. Consider it another week for folks to know I'll be going live soon.

I'm still chopping away at some private projects, but I decided to poke at a smaller one this evening: upgraded my Nirvana boxset! Back in 2021, back when the Scratchpad was still a thing and I could document my progress there, I put together a Nirvana demos and rarities boxset called Nirvana: Sound of Dentage that I felt was of better quality than the With the Lights Out set we got officially. Writing about that boxset was one of the first things I did on the group blog in 2019 (twenty years of WTLO this year—guess I should advertise that post around some in November), so it only felt fair to assemble my own thing after doing so much armchair quarterbacking with the official one.

I'm still pretty damn proud of Sound of Dentage, but since I've gotten my hands on a few more discs that could've improved the original set had I had them back in 2021—better sources, more songs, all that. I've gone ahead and added them to the Internet Archive, though it'll take until tomorrow for all the derives to be made and all the new stuff to be properly accessible. Knowing that site, some of the old files will still float around anyway, and the new ones probably won't be available through the torrents. Such is life.

If you like Nirvana and you didn't hear about me putting this one together back in the day, feel free to give it a listen! I suppose I should advertise the boxset around some too, given how much of my time it took up and how much I still like it and still occasionally listen to it myself. I'll have more from me to show off with the world soon.

Well, with four different people at work sick recently and my sister also having fallen ill, I guess it shouldn't come as any surprise I caught something too. Not too bad, thankfully—I have to keep clearing my throat, but as long as I do that, that doesn't hurt too much, and I feel fine otherwise. I was rather proud of myself for not having gotten sick the entirety of 2023, despite working two different retail establishments, being in four different airports several times and in close proximity to people on three plane rides. I figured that meant I'd be sick starting 2024, but again, thankfully, stuff's been manageable.

And lots to work on! Stuff sorta piled up around the time I got a bit of the holiday depression leading up to Christmas, one of which was a new cammy.somnol page! Since I'm playing Animal Crossing on the GameCube now, and since that game has a fully functional NES emulator built to run any game, not just the twenty or so that the game shipped with, I figured I'd try to test the entire US-released NES library on it, well over 600 titles in all. I'm through with the A's right now, moving onto the B's.

I haven't logged into my town since the 23rd, so I'm expecting a lot of weeds when I get back. I will start testing again tomorrow, though, and this page will update over time with my new findings.

Beyond that, keeping busy—got Last Summer submitted to RouteNote so you can hopefully eventually stream it on Spotify and Apple Music and wherever else you get your music streams, got the art for Last Summer printed and ready to be assembled into jewel cases to mail off (and one of those twenty copies can be yours soon!), working on an anniversary gift for Caby, and I've been toying with writing again. Gonna try to burn through my big backlog of ideas and stuff and keep the cool shit coming for you guys, whoever out there is reading. I much appreciate the interest.

Little minor update—I've gone through all my old streams and given them new thumbnails. Check it out:

I've also gone through and standardized the descriptions, so they have proper lists of games, intro songs if present, and a link back to mari.somnol (gotta always be linking places, right?). It's a weird feeling, going back through these old streams and seeing all the names of people who popped in and I don't talk to anymore. Definitely some good times had on those streams, though; I'd like to go back to some of my greatest hits (the Boohbah stream comes to mind, which was much funnier than I remember it being) and do little edited highlights reels for those who didn't catch 'em or did and wanna reminisce. I'm optimistic these new streams will make some memorable moments as well.

Speaking of! I have settled on 7PM EST on Sundays for streams. The most recent run of them have been a hell of a lot more comfortable than the old streams were, more casual, less stressful, less focused on being a good streamer when it's really only my friends watching anyway. That said, if you want to drop in and say hi and chat a bit, we'd love to see you there. Here's the direct link to the next one coming up on the 14th. (Obviously, if you're reading this past the 14th, that'll be a direct link to the stream VOD instead.) We're about a third of the way through the first Sly Cooper, and it's been nice playing something familar and doing it on real hardware this time too.

By the way, yes, my CDs were retrieved and redelivered. You can expect a review of Isn't Anything to drop in the Somnol zine in the spring (and on my site eventually after that).

I've been playing too much Unreal Tournament

Caby finally shipped over the games I bought in Wales! It was a lot of fun sitting and installing them to the eMachines Box from disc, punching in the CD keys, the whole ritual. It's not convenient, but neither is the eMachines Box. It's fun! I'm very happy that the eMachines Box actually offers a much better gaming experience than I initially pegged it for—just so long as those games are five years older than the box itself. As Caby said once though, that's not really a negative since it's all retrogaming anyway.

So alongside 100%ing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for a third time (fourth if you include the PS1 version!), I've found a new favorite mental shutoff game, Unreal Tournament 99. Not one of the ones I bought, admittedly, but I downloaded an ISO on a whim and now I'm absolutely sold. The eMachines Box runs it great, the movement and guns are phenomenal, and the bot AI is damn good. I've actually found myself admiring and being humbled at all the built-in maps. Looking at them, it's clear to me how limited my ideas on how to build functional, beautiful levels really have been. I've been taking a lot of screenshots—Caby suggested I put them all in a room in my paste server on Discord for inspiration next time I make a level, and I really should take her up on it.

(If you're curious, my favorite level by far is DM-Agony, and my favorite gun alternates between the Shock Rifle and the Flak Cannon. So satisfying.)

And listening to a lot of old favorites (and fighting the post office for them)

As happens around Christmas, I found myself with a few gift cards in hand. I elected to start buying up some of the records I used to enjoy the most back when I was a teenager, but still never owned a copy of. Usually, these were torrented back in the days of Kickass, listened to over and over, and then lost and never rebought for one reason or another. Here's a small list:

• The Black Keys' Magic Potion: Old, old favorite of mine. This was one of the first Black Keys records I ever owned, possibly the first if that wasn't Brothers. Unfortunately, my copy developed some nasty, stuttering audio glitching possibly from the manufacturing of the discs not being the best, so I had to chuck my original copy. It's taken me four years, but I've got this one back in the collection, freshly unsealed, and it still fucking rules. They make such big sounds for being two guys, and Dan's guitar parts are surprisingly intricate at times. My essential pick for the moment, probably "Modern Times".
• Pixies' Bossanova: Only missing Trompe now. It's not uniformly strong like Doolittle is, but it's got its own weird, distant, creepy atmosphere and some real bangers, so that makes up for the occasional weak track. I still fucking love "Is She Weird".
• Blur's self-titled: God, I forgot how great this record was. I love the sounds, I love the varied songwriting, I love how it's a forerunner to Gorillaz' as a whole. I like the back end of it a lot more than I did back then too, and "Strange News From Another Star" is super underrated. My copy is a US one, so it came with a surprise extra hidden track, "Dancehall"! Which I fell asleep to last night. It might be noisy and woozy, but you can nod off to it as well, if you're insane like me.
• Josh Joplin's Useful Music: This one defined late 2019 into 2020 for me just as much as, say, Earlimart's Hymn and Her, but buying it slipped my radar for a long time because I refused to spend any money during lockdowns. Now I got it! There's some really goofy genre exercises on here, but Josh Joplin is a super strong pop songwriter, and songs like "Matter" and "Here I Am" are so early-2000s sounding, they're just awesome. Still really like this one.
• Superdrag's Regretfully Yours: The newest (to me) of the lot, this one's mostly notable for the fact that the Discogs seller included an extra CD in the package! This was a total surprise to me: it's apparently an early-2000s post-rock record called Finally We Are No One from an Icelandic group, Mum. I've yet to listen to that one, but I really should. I discovered so much cool shit in my teen years just from listening to absolutely everything, as I've been discovering looking through my Discogs wantlist, and I feel like I should dive back into doing that.

I did buy two more, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, but they didn't turn up in the mail! I received tracking for both of them, and calling the post office with the numbers revealed they got delivered to a very similar address about ten minutes away, where our stuff has been blackholed in the past. They said they'd try to retrieve the packages, but I don't find that very likely. I'll probably wind up just getting my money back from the post office and going and buying them again. My manager suggested having them shipped to the store this time (apparently he does that), and I am highly tempted, yes.

Taking better care of myself

On a more serious note, I have been finding myself on more of a reflective, kinda depressive note lately. There's been plenty of times over the past few months where I've felt lonely, where I've been sad about how I'm still largely living online, and how I don't really indulge in a lot of solitary pursuits anymore. Everything I've done creatively, I've always tried to involve other people in, which is great, but it doesn't leave me with many places to go if stuff happens between friends and I'm just not in the mood to work on stuff with them.

I think I need to appreciate what I have more. I have good friends, a lot going for me creatively, and I'm comfortable. A lot of folks would kill to have what I do. It is hard, going back to dating online after finally not eating alone for a solid three weeks, but that's just how things are right now, and there's much worse fates in the world. I definitely should remember how to enjoy myself on my own more. It's not that I don't, because for example, I love my art regardless of how other people see it, but just that I should really do it more. I don't fully remember how to—or maybe I do it so much, I've just have internalized it and now need a reminder of what that looks like. Either way, I gotta think of myself more, I really do. Indulge more. Draw more Prince, probably.

I've officially typed so much this evening that the corner of my desk has irritated my wrist. Enjoy, everyone! Here's to lots of good shit going on in 2024!

Happy new year, journal folks! Have been getting over the emotional holiday hangover, but I'm pretty close to full speed now. I've had a bunch of things to update the journal about, so to avoid spamming it with a bunch of smaller updates, I'm gonna split it into two bigger updates, one with projects and one with my leisurely pursuits:

mari.somnol is officially parked

I've had plans for mari.somnol for well over a year now (this journal just happens to be from eight months ago instead), so I figured it'd be a good time to make it official by deleting everything on that domain and parking it. Not a lot to say that that page doesn't explain to you, why I'm doing it, what's taking so long, what to expect from mari_v4, but I think the Cammy came out really adorable. Gonna get some site backups going now, methinks.

toyhou.se will be going (temporarily) private soon

I mentioned it in passing at the end of the two-year anniversary of Cammy art post on Letters, but I will be taking all the lads on my toyhou.se private and slowly rebuilding their profiles and drawing them again. I really want my toyhou.se to be something I'm proud of—I love the site, I love all the functionality, I pay for Premium—but at the moment, everything on there is so ancient that I can't be. I actually avoid looking at it.

For specifics, I'd like to draw matching icons for all my lads, update the profiles, get some nice profile art going, and get all the random lad ideas and designs I've had cooking finally posted so people can look at 'em. I'll get this (long-term) project going in a few days, I wanna draw another Cammy for it.

mtlx artwork test completed!

I finally have test prints of all the Last Summer artwork! I had the booklet done before Christmas, but I needed to resize and reprint the back cover/spine art since it came out too big. Now it's all done and I can do the proper print order and get everything assembled! I have a local video if you'd like to see the prototype in motion (H264, 10.8MB), or you can just enjoy these photos:

You'll be able to purchase some of these real soon from my Bandcamp, if you'd like some Cammy music in hardcover. You'll get exclusive demos with your purchase!