Ah man, the days get away from me... I never like it when I look up and three or four days have passed. We've been in a time loop recently! A very nice one, granted, but with the family still in France (they're coming back tomorrow, all good), and us having to stick fairly close to the house for piggo breakfast and dinner and also because they get lonely, it's been hard to get out of the house and do stuff. We've been night owls, really! Been meaning to update the journal with stuff I've been drawing and also call my mom and all that, but I keep putting it off. Such is life with no schedule and no employment.

Thankfully, still got the better part of a month left on the trip, so nothing feels wasted, we have been very creative, and it's been nice doing more domesticore things with Caby, chores and chatting and going out for ice cream. We fixed the dryer the other day! Their dryer doesn't drain to the outside world like mine at home does, so we were experiencing weird pauses in the drying routine (and they normally air dry their clothes, so she wasn't sure what the issue was). Pulled up an owner's manual, found it was a full water tank, emptied it, and all was well. We're so smart and handy. (Then we burned some burger buns in the convection oven really badly, so. Well.)

We also baked! It's really funny. Caby sent me a compilation of Dylan Hollis historical baking shorts and prefaced it that she didn't expect me to watch the whole thing. I'm pretty sure I've seen more of them than she has now. This guy is great. He's the wittiest fruit in the bag, he makes weird and sometimes delicious-looking cakes and breads from the last century, and he's the only guy I've seen who can do an energetic, zingy personality in his shorts, and then pull off a calmer, more informative, but still highly entertaining personality in his longer videos.

I was looking through his shorts to find one Caby and I might wanna do, and the one for strawberry fluffies always intrigued me. It's an oddly really simple recipe. They're effectively cake cookies. Empty a box of strawberry cake mix and Cool Whip into a bowl, mix, form balls, roll in powdered sugar, bake. Little did I know that cake mix is as rare a beast as an unfinished bottle of rum in Trys' room in the UK, and Cool Whip doesn't exist here. Sainsbury's does sell the Betty Crocker stuff, thankfully, and we were able to thicken up some British cream as a substitute. (As for why I picked this instead of, like, a real cake or loaf, it was easy, and we've very rarely baked before. Start small.)

They were really good though! Like I said, they're effectively cake cookies, so you're getting the fluffiness of a cake from a pan or a loaf in cookie form. The color differences come from us experimenting with the baking time. The 13 minutes from the Dylan Hollis video gets you that ideal pinkness, but Caby thought they were still not done at first, so we did some for a few minutes longer and they got crunchier and slightly caramelized as a result. Still very good though. Highly worth the confusion I gave everyone in the group showing them the unbaked "batter" early on.

Since these went so well, Caby and I have been looking at other recipes we might be able to pull off from his repertoire. The peanut butter bread is apparently really good, and we both like peanut butter. Anything more in bread form is easier for us, since her family doesn't have a full-sized oven, only an air fryer and then a convection oven. (Both of these gave very similar results with the fluffies, so if you're wondering, yes, you can indeed air fry bake things. I'm sure I'm the last person on Earth to know though.) Also, her mom loved the idea of these, because the whole family likes simple and easy, and you get a lot of fluffies out of one box of cake mix. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more batches to be made.

Anywho, I will be posting more art on the journal, I promise. I also have an exciting announcement for a new place to see art from me soon, so stay tuned. Back to cleaning up the house before the folks get home!

Listen, when you visit a girl with a really nice screen tablet, you use that screen tablet. I have been stuck on art all month, but shortly after she went to bed one night (we're talking 5 in the morning), I doodled two Setters, and here they are finished!

I've been stuck exactly how I like to draw him—too big a snoot and hair more on the wavy side than the curly side, and he's basically just Cammy. I think they're pretty distinct now, still the same genre of guy, but again, distinct enough in flavor and design that I think both could be on Art Fight and no one would be confused.

Speaking of Art Fight! I do intend on participating next year, and I'd like to expand out my list of characters for that. Each ref I do very nicely pulls double duty: means I can get another toyhou.se bio up, and it means the character can go up on AF should I want that. Really, my true love for art hosting sites is still toyhou.se. It's not just a gallery, it's a big browseable directory of OCs that I can write bios for, and that means a lot more to me than just an art gallery.

Been also thinking of making an art Tumblr. Think folks there would appreciate Setter muchly, and maybe other things I draw...

Hello chat! I have arrived in the UK. Or, more accurately, I arrived a week ago and have been too busy doing that thing called "living life" and "having fun" to update the journal. I'm sure you'll forgive me. That said! With there being so much having happened since I last updated, there will be a couple posts on the journal, some trip-related, some not, for you to enjoy.

If you're wondering, it's been lovely so far. It's incredible going from all the awkwardness of a text chat to stepping out of arrivals in Heathrow and suddenly there being zero inhibitions from me or Caby. Seriously, living online sucks, but it's nice to get that reminder that it is entirely the medium that tends to put me at odds with people (maturing also helps). I think you'd all like me more if you found me playing Point Blank in an NQ64 in Soho. (That post is for the group blog though!)

Let's start with something simple and timely. Caby and I went into Kellys yesterday! Kellys is a record store I have written about with adoration before, effectively blending the quality assurance and stock of a really good record store with the ragtag prices and organization of a flea market. Quite literally, it's one guy who owns the entire balcony in Cardiff Market and uses it for vintage records and clothing, and it is well worth the pilgrimage to grab some CDs and watch him just decide on a price on the spot.

The picture shows what Caby and I got in all. From top left:

• Warpaint's self-titled (which we were listening to earlier, absolutely gorgeous slow burner 2010s dream pop that gets better as the album goes on)
• Ben Folds Five's self-titled (which if I don't like, I can just pass onto dcb, though "Underground" is already a killer tune)
• Wilco's Being There (need to expand my Wilco knowledge—dcb, they also had Wilco (The Album) if you're curious)
• Counting Crows' Across a Wire (gotta dip back into my old-time love of the Crows, and this one came right after Recovering the Satellites came out)
• Cracker's Kerosene Hat (get off this! Get on with it!)
• My Vitriol's Finelines (which I picked up because I'm pretty sure it's the original UK mix of the album and not the US reissue mix with Between the Lines, though we don't have a working CD drive to check)
• Moby's 18 (or as Caby calls it, Happy Moby/Sad Moby)
• Feeder's The Singles (don't normally go for comps, but I love "High" and they didn't have any Feeder albums there and Feeder is Welsh and I always wanna pick up Welsh music while I'm here)

Caby also got a Specials best-of, because UK ska is very very different to American ska, an Elvis Costello best-of, which we were enjoying while I was writing this post, plus her own copy of OK Go's debut! It's so cool to see her expanding her music collection and getting braver about it. She has a really fun taste in music. What other girl will give you Flipnote music and Elton John's "I've Seen the Saucers" next to each other?

F's in chat for the eMachines Box's hard drive once again.

This was a sudden failure. The machine was really slow all of a sudden, which I thought might've been an errant background process, only for XP to tell me that the C: drive was not formatted! That's an error you don't want to see. I quickly booted into my Ubuntu (10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx if you prefer :lince:) rescue drive and thankfully was able to copy off basically everything I wanted to that I hadn't had backed up, which included my Bryce projects, game screenshots and some saves, and some other scattered files here and there. When I checked the SMART status of the drive, I got what you see up there.

This is now the second hard drive in the eMachines Box that's gone bad. Thankfully, I'm a lot more prepared for it this time. What I plan to do when I get back from Wales is to get an IDE-to-SATA adapter in there and just use a modern SSD. I'm going through drives at a rate of one every two years, which isn't great, and IDE drives are only getting harder and harder to find. I don't need a ton of space, I just want something reliable, and hey, speed increases aren't bad either. (Fun fact, I have never owned a computer with an SSD in it. That's right, I am Stone Age in 2025, but to be honest, I've yet to really notice or care. I probably will when I upgrade though. Let me have my naivete until then.)

Time to obsessively back up all my shards and vaults in case my daily driver is getting ready to go as well. I love computers.

We're into the final two weeks before this year's trip to Wales! We've already bought most everything I'm bringing, including the vintage digicam for good measure. (I drunk bought another AOL PhotoCam a couple days ago for cheap, though fully working with pictures showing it powered on and in-box, so that'll be arriving tomorrow as well. What can I say? Fourth time's the charm.) Now all that's left to do is wait.

If you're not following the RSS feeds for my album reviews and game reviews, go do that! I implemented a really simple tweak in PHP that will let me schedule stuff to go up, and I'm being very smart lately and writing a ton to go live automatically each week while I'm abroad. I suspect I'll write some more stuff while I'm on coaches and things, so ideally, this will be the start to a backlog I can feed very healthily while I'm in the mood and then not worry about when I'm not feeling it as much. I'm also revising how I do the "catalog reviews", where I cover an entire bunch of albums from a single artist. Since I feel having a bunch go up at once makes it more likely that people miss stuff, I'll probably evenly spread them out throughout the month alongside the normal reviews, on the same day or maybe something twice a week.

As a final point of housekeeping, scores with game reviews are no longer displayed or even fetched from the database. I never found a way I like to score games, and I'd rather just talk about what I find interesting about them rather than try to rate it, easier as that is for folks to glance over (and I really don't yearn for glanceover traffic anyway). I've got summaries and some cutesy extra text instead, which I'm much happier with.

Anyway, back to score hunting on Rock Band I go! I've got 55/58 gold stars for the first game's setlist and 11/18 for the AC/DC Live Track Pack. I doubt I'll be able to full game gold star RB1 and I'm not even trying with the AC/DC pack, but the fact that I've gotten so close makes me damn proud.

Folks, say hi to the retrocam you'll be seeing my upcoming Wales trip through. If you're a longtime Cammy fan, you'll probably remember my multiple run-ins with the AOL PhotoCam, and I was eager to not repeat those mistakes by buying an actual digicam from a reputable brand this time. I was a little hesitant to go Canon, only because I thought the sample images looked a little too good for the specifically hazy, shitty look I prefer from my retro digicams, but I've decided that usability matters to me more than aesthetics at the moment.

Anyway, this one works great! Very comfortably chunky in the hands. It takes four AA batteries, so I have no rechargeable packs to worry about, and transferring photos is as simple as sticking the CompactFlash card (the seller on eBay sent me it with a 128MB one inside) into a reader and dragging them off. It can shoot in three qualities, and three sizes, up to 1600x1200.

I'm not too terribly sure what kinda page I'll make for this trip—I didn't even finish the ones I was working on for the last trip, and truth be told, every year, I seem to have less interest in the "hey guys, look at what all I got up to!" grind. Projects are a different thing, but just my vacation photos? Whatever, they're fun. I'll let you have a peek soon. Here's a sample shot if you wanna know what kinda quality we're dealing with.

Above all else, I'm just happy I only have to take my 3DS this time. Carrying two DS consoles, one for games and one for pictures, into a foreign country is a bit clunky!

I keep forgetting to make this post, but it's only been a few days, no harm done. No, not the Justin Bieber song, though that certainly is on brand given that 2010s nostalgia is ripe in the group these days. A chance encounter at a thrift store! With sixteen burned copies of a student film from New York:

I don't normally go to thrift stores. I don't have anything against them, but they've always felt a little sad to me, a reminder of what extreme poverty looks like. Is what it is. After a really successful flea market outing about a month ago, though, my mom suggested we go browse the CD selection there, and I like adventuring.

These uncurated selections have definitely piqued my interest this year. At a record store, you largely know what you're getting, and you'll be paying for that guarantee, but at a flea market, thrift store, library sale, or any place not specifically built to sell you music, you could find anything. Lots of garbage of course—I found a copy of Cher's Believe in just about every bin I looked in at the flea market, and you bet there was plenty of gospel and karaoke CDs at the thrift store, but then there's not garbage! Then there's indie rock CDs, copies of Windows Me, sealed blank CD-Rs you pick up for a dollar entirely for the novelty of having a 1999 Verbatim blank you burn Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 for the PS1 onto! That's not even counting all the mix CDs, home movies, and strange locally-released albums I found in the shelves.

And then we have Baby. We naturally took our time going through the bins in the back of the store, cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs (where stray PC games like to hang out, but nothing all that great this time), and tons of used monitors and TVs, all of which I'd much prefer to deal with over a shitty smart TV you buy new. (Can you believe our cheapo Onn Roku TV requires you to enable the composite inputs in the settings before you can use them? What the fuck?) I found a box of circa 2005 HP slimline jewel cases that I thought were unused, and not realizing I had a ton at home already, I picked up the whole box.

Before we'd even paid, though, my mom and I looked closer. There were discs in these cases! Each DVD-R looked exactly the same, a screenshot from some kinda independent film with some text reading "Baby" on them. They were dated 2008, by "Muse Productions". (Better than Passion Project Studios, I suppose!) Now her and I were immensely curious. What was on these? A really low-budget indie film? Porn? They came with the box of jewel cases, which was $6, so we were gonna find out one way or another.

As it turns out, it's a student film! It's about nine minutes long, probably multiple people's final, and absolutely reeks of late 2000s Final Cut Pro goodness, even down to the DVD authoring. Ithaca College in New York is thanked in the credits, and there seems to be a decent-ish cast to it. It's not all that interesting of a short film, but it is pretty competently mixed, edited, and structured, so I hope whoever was involved with it got a nice grade. (We didn't want to stalk the names we found too hard, but of the two girls who got top billing, we found one has been working as a head of production VFX artist at the same place basically since graduating in 2008, so that's a happy ending.)

If you're curious, I have uploaded Baby to The marf Collection on YouTube. Like I said, it's not really that interesting—some light commentary on quick hookups that aren't all that appealing the next morning. I suppose we'll see if anyone involved awkwardly finds it in a few years and asks me to take it down. I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed about, though. Certainly a lot better than the result of my attempt at a film degree.

That does leave me with one final question, though: what were sixteen copies of Baby doing in my thrift store 150 miles away from the college they're attached to? It's one thing if, say, twenty copies were made and then given out to production staff and professors, I totally get that. These are untouched though, and not only that, in the cases, they were aligned perfectly upright, meaning they were placed very intentionally and then never touched again. Were these intended to be given out and then they just didn't get around to it before graduation? Did one of the girls or production people bring them back home to here in town and then they just went to the thrift store? If you're curious, the DVD-Rs varied in brand, which tells me they were using the college's media to burn onto, and as I said, the HP box branding was copyright 2005, which means they went into these jewel cases at the time and just have not been unearthed since then.

I'll keep a copy for myself and then, as I need cases, recycle the rest or something. What a bizarre and fun find.

Brief moment before we begin: Go check out hifi's game review section! I just spent an evening capturing a ton of screenshots from real hardware for a bunch of games, both ones I've streamed and ones I haven't, and I'll be posting new ones on Fridays for the next few weeks until the pool runs out. Use the RSS feed to your advantage, and stick around for more to come.

So as I alluded to in the post from the other day, there's one other idea I've had for the cammy.somnol refresh that I've started working on. If you check the footer as of writing this, you'll see that the link designated "Elsewhere" is marked as an unimplemented link. That's because, up until now, I've not been quite sure how to use it.

It's pretty typical when you have a personal site to link to other people's sites. This was what I did all the way back on Neocities, linking to the sites of my friends and acquaintances and, funnily enough, a couple people who dislike me now. (Lempamo, babe, call me, let's catch up.) That was originally the idea for the /elsewhere/ directory, having a big long imagemap of the Somnolians peeking out of various stone portals, each of which would take you to their sites. Naturally, I never implemented this.

I mentioned in that post that I was pondering Arkm-style choose-your-own-adventure site navigation for cammy.somnol, but ultimately decided against it. I still think the idea is cool as fuck (much like Mario), and I didn't want to abandon it completely, so I decided to apply it to the still-vacant /elsewhere/ and turn it, indeed, into an exploration into elsewhere: you can use it to browse the rest of the site, you can explore other Somnolescent sites with it, or you could visit the various creative worlds of Somnolescent with it.

If this is sounding a little familiar to the longtime Somnolescent viewers, you might be remembering something I built in 2019 called "Colton's Adventure". "Colton's Adventure" was meant to be a CYOA-style way to explore Pennyverse's Apricot Bay, the two paths terminating in short stories I wrote. I don't mention "Colton's Adventure" much anymore because I really don't like how it came out. I just think it's mean-spirited and weird in spots, I don't much like the stories it went with, and I sat with it too long. There wasn't a sense of jubilation in the group when I finished it. In fact, it kinda went quietly. Not great.

It wasn't the format that was the problem, though. It just needed something better to come along and take advantage of it.

That brings us back to Elsewhere. When I built "Colton's Adventure", it was done entirely in static HTML, figured out by hand with flow maps on paper. Charming for sure, but clunky, and no doubt in the six years since then, I could come up with a better way to structure a CYOA section, yes?

Indeed. In twenty minutes at 4:30 in the morning after a night spent drinking (I sleep weird when alcohol is involved), I implemented a simple little PHP-and-JSON thing that completely trumps my old setup. Yes, it came that quickly.

JSON, if you don't know, is a plain text data format meant to be written by humans and read by computers. It consists of a long list of nested objects, arrays, and name-value pairs that, when put together, structure whatever you need the data for. In my case, I needed a list of objects, each one representing what would've been an HTML document under the old setup. From there, name-value pairs represent where you are, the description of the scene, and the scene ID, concluding with a list of scene IDs you can visit next.

"1": {
    "world": "island",
    "location": "Cammy's front yard",
    "bodytext": "<p>You stand in the yard in front of the large cluster of stone buildings that makes up Cammy's house in the sky. A marble fountain with many little jets of water spewing out in a circle stands between you and the house, though what water feeds it, you're not sure. A garden shed free stands to your left, and around the taller silo attached to the house to your right is a set of stairs descending into the ground.</p>\n<p>Cammy is probably inside the house, up to something or other. By the same token, though, there's plenty to see outside as well. Where do you go next?</p>",
    "directions": [
        {
            "destination": 4,
            "text": "Enter the house."
        },
        {
            "destination": 0,
            "text": "Approach the garden shed."
        },
        {
            "destination": 0,
            "text": "Take the staircase down into the earth."
        },
        {
            "destination": 2,
            "text": "Look around at the other islands and floating ephemera around you."
        },
        {
            "destination": 9999,
            "text": "<i>(What exactly is this?)</i>"
        }
    ]
}

PHP has a json_decode function for exactly this. Given a valid JSON file, it'll break objects into a list of associative arrays that you can manipulate from there. In twenty minutes, I had a decoder that would take a scene ID, print out various bits listed under its heading, and list out various other scenes to progress to next. Another hour to pretty it up, and I had the programmatic equivalent of "Colton's Adventure". If I want to add more scenes, all I have to do is add them to the JSON and link them up by ID to the existing ones. The PHP end of things takes an HTTP GET variable for the current scene, fetches it from the JSON, and parses it out.

I'm routinely impressed with how easy and fun PHP is to work with, I really am.

Now, the grind is writing out all those scenes! I've got plans for roughly four paths, more depending on how much the Somnolians want to help: a Cammy path, where you explore my house in the clouds and it takes you to various pages across mari.somnol and cammy.somnol, a Somnolian path, where you can visit their sites through Elsewhere, a Pennyverse path, where you can interact with the citizens of Apricot Bay, and a Pinede path, taking you a bit around probably Caerpinwyd (way too big a world to let you roam it freely, that could be a CYOA game all on its own). There's potential to visit other Somnolian worlds, but I'd need Caby and Savannah's help with those, and they can be added at a later date. My focus is on something shippable right now.

I'm convinced "Motorcycle" by Remy Zero was written for folks slightly under the influence. "Too much wine has crossed my mind" indeed.

So my website focus over the past year or so has been returning mari.somnol to prominence, and on all accounts, we're there. It's not even basically, all the important stuff is in place, plus a ton of the non-important stuff. Everything I wanted, the three flavors for any browser, the theme switcher on hifi, PHP album/game reviews, stories for all three sites that can be built from a central document, they're here. Aside from a few drawings and more content, mari.somnol is complete.

That brings me back to this site, cammy.somnol. cammy.somnol has always kind of had a rough go of things. If you don't know, it was born out of the digital garden thing that dcb and Devon got into back in 2021 or so. Devon's not even in Somnol anymore, lince.somnol was retired, and this too didn't really work for me. It felt kinda larp-y, where I had this retro-ish 90s furry sorta site with my art and my stories and any fixations I felt were a little too personal for mari.somnol, and then that was explicitly music, mod work, and stuff that I thought the Internet at large would like. In short, I was kinda embarrassed by the whole thing, the flavor was wonky, there wasn't a clear split between the sites, and each felt like they represented only half of me.

cammy.somnol was reborn in late 2022 then when I came up with a new way to lay it out. mari.somnol would be my portfolio-ish site. Anything I make, regardless of who it's for, would go on there. cammy.somnol would instead be an interests site and more devoted to who I am day to day. This worked really nicely, and still does! Issue being, 2022 was when I was still trying to find my footing as an artist. I couldn't draw Cammy, the badger namesake of the site (and of course my sona), so I settled for Setter instead. Setter is a secondary sona who was meant to fit into a world of domesticated animals that Caby's had in mind for a long time (same as Bunny for her), and because of the lack of snout, he was naturally a lot easier to draw.

Fast forward to 2025, and I now draw Cammy way more than I do Setter, and in fact I'm not sure how I like to draw Setter at the moment. Setter is now the mascot of lofi, so I don't feel bad replacing him here, and really, all the cammy.somnol art was done at a time when I had far less of a clue what I wanted aesthetically and what I was doing technically. It needs a refresh.

But truth be told, I've been pondering over the past month how extensive that refresh should be. I wasn't sure if I was gonna even keep the aboveground/underground sorting, or the island aesthetic. I thought maybe I'd go for a choose-your-own-adventure site structure, you go find the content! (Hold that thought.) It was all very up in the air, but I decided to hold off on saying much out loud or putting anything into action until it became a little clearer in my head.

Then I remembered more recently that a big inspiration for cammy.somnol in the first place is the still-wonderful still-in-action platypuscomix.net (which has apparently started redirection to platypuscomix.com when I wasn't looking, hmm). It was the long days of browsing pages on Garfield and Friends and the U.S. Acres comic strip (I was a Jim Davis kid, alright) or obscure as fuck cable networks or scary logos (I am also severely autistic, but you knew that) as early as 6 or 7 years old that still stick out in my mind. Back then and now, I decided I wanted cammy.somnol to be my own little small tribute to that, less on the cultural mirror front but no less on the personal fixation front. Why should the end result change all that much? The mission statement is still the same.

To talk a little more about Platypus Comix (because really, when the hell else will I be able to?), to this day, all content pages are built in FrontPage Express. FPX is a truly vintage 90s WYSIWYG page builder program that Microsoft regularly included with Internet Explorer starter kits and suchlike. I imagine this was to compete with Netscape Composer, the equivalent truly vintage 90s WYSIWYG page builder attached to Navigator. I've used FrontPage Express, and while it's got a nice, pleasant WordPad-like interface, I hate the markup it produces. For that matter, I hate Composer's markup. I don't care about the markup of other sites, not even our friend Peter Paltridge's, but my own? Again, I'm a sperg, and I care immensely. cammy_v1 was built with Composer, and I hated it.

All that said, I think the plain text and images aesthetic of Platypus Comix is still beyond reproach, and I'm very glad I didn't decide to change it.

So now, I've decided on what all I'm gonna do. cammy.somnol will be getting a visual refresh. Not gonna play with the formula, the site will be structured the same, I'm just gonna start updating the visuals. I learned a lot, trying to illustrate all those pages, and I'm ready to give it a second go in a more sustainable way. Here's my aims:

• Setter's going to get replaced with Cammy. This was the intention even back then.
• I need simple. Back in 2022, I was so green to art that whatever came out came out. A Setter could not be a chibi Setter or a detailed, highly anthro Setter, it was just Setter. I also probably felt I had to put all my available skills on screen back then, and now I have enough art lying around that it's okay if a Cammy in a site graphic has dot eyes and stubby limbs. If anything, the simplicity works a lot better for that.
• To the end of simple, I'm also dropping the visual gimmicks. I'd do lettering by hand for the banners because I wanted the edges of the letters to have the same texture as the lines of the drawing, and I just fucking can't do that anymore. Good lining practice, but really not worth it.
• I'm also going to be getting rid of the MS Paint GIF dither. While I still think it's kind of a fun look, it definitely noises the shit out of everything (doubly not great for stuff like backgrounds that text sits on), and because Paint doesn't support transparency, there's a whole process of running it through Paint and then making an alpha mask out of the original to make the dithered version transparent as well. I have to repeat this process every time I want to update the banner. I need to start making this stuff easier on myself. If I want some grain or a specific palette, I have a Python palettizer script I can use that'll respect transparency just fine.
• I'm dropping Netscape >6.0 support. I used to grapple with JavaScript Style Sheets (yes those were a thing) and CSS hacks to get pages to look right in pre-Gecko Netscape alongside everything else, but it was never worth it, and 4.x still chokes on the journal anyway for all my effort. cammy.somnol should be built clean, because that's what I prefer. nofi supports 3.x and 4.x just fine, and there's far better period browsers to use if you want that (IE and Opera come to mind—but really, just use RetroZilla).

There is one other big idea I've had for cammy.somnol, but I'll write that one up tomorrow. It's 1:30 in the morning, the moon is high in the sky right outside my window, and my eyes are starting to hurt.

Library sale started up yesterday! You might remember last year's post about it where I picked up a bunch of music and Redwall audiobooks, and we went again today. I love library sales and flea markets and the less-traveled end of music hunting, because you never know what you'll find and you'll usually pay a lot less. True, I may stumble into five copies of Cher's Believe, but then you'll find a copy of Editors' The Back Room for $1 and it becomes the best album you've heard all year! Not to mention the weird bootleg mix CDs (today's was Barbara Streisand in an Imation CD-R case) or the bonkers low-quality local releases, you find everything. I do love a good CD shop, I really do, but they're much pickier about what they accept and they know what they have for pricing.

I'm very fortunate to have such good options around me for CD hunting, and the library delivered this year! If you can't read from the picture, I picked up a (probably missing the dust cover but I don't mind, it suits) copy of Mossflower, because fantasy animal autism, William Gibson's Count Zero (no, I didn't buy it because of the Harmonix band Count Zero, that'd be silly, but I am also actually curious about his stuff since he's one of the few authors I recognize), out of shot, but iWoz, Steve Wozniak's autobiography, this funky book on registry hacks and customizations for XP with a still-sealed CD in the back and a December 2004 CompUSA price tag, and ten CDs, all a dollar apiece:

• John Frusciante's debut, Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, in a nice cardboard sleeve
• The Doors' L.A. Woman, because I've been accepting my love of oldies more and more
• The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse, on the gen X oldies front
• The Verve's Urban Hymns, which had me humming "Bitter Sweet Symphony" all day
• Throwing Muses' In a Doghouse, a two-disc set of all their formerly import-only early material
• The Reverend Horton Heat's Smoke 'em if You Got 'em (!!!!)
• They Might Be Giants' Flood (time to see what all the hubbub is about!)
• Return of the Rentals, because fuzz bass and throwback sci-fi are peanut butter and jelly
• Is It...Man or Astro-Man?, who I've been curious about ever since I loved the Jimmy Neutron theme as a kid
• The Juliana Hatfield Three's Become What You Are, because her work on that Lemonheads record was lovely and I'd hear "My Sister" on Lithium Deep Cuts at work decently often

Oh, and all of this was $13.50. And yes, I check the discs are in there and clean, and they were. I also saw plenty of other cult 90s favorites on display—Morphine, Spacemen 3—on what planet should I be allowed to buy the Rev, the Rentals, and Man or Astro-Man? at a library? Apparently this one, and I'm thrilled.