Site updates! This is where I let everyone know what's new here. Feel free to add the RSS feed to your favorite RSS reader to keep up-to-date on what I've got cooking.

[#] November 20, 2024

My site started to feel a little isolated, and I had to add Connor's new button anyway, so there are plenty more 88x31s at the bottom of every page now! Some of these are friends' sites, some are sites I like quite a bit, some are musicians and bands who I'm a big fan of, and in nya's case, it's long overdue for him using my button on his site. I'm sure there's lots more I could add, but we'll start with these, yeah? (Careful browsing these on retro machines, as a lot of them are not retro-optimized—some are, but not all!)

[#] November 13, 2024

Ack, I forgot about this changelog. I've been making improvements to the album reviews as always! From October, browsing by year and browsing by score are now much nicer, and there's a (still unimplemented on the front end) "Cammy's pick" function for my favorite record from a particular artist. From just last night, I have converted all reviews over to a ten-point scoring system because my old five-point one felt a little too limited and lacking nuance for as many reviews as I've got now. I have many, many mentions of Eh, Good, and Great scores in the reviews themselves to edit now, but that'll have to wait until I get back from jury duty.

More reviews coming every week! Now that I've finished mailing up all the Last Summer stuff, I can get back to relaxing and doing little stupid simple projects like these. I much prefer it. Winter vacation!

[#] August 29, 2024

My first Quake deathmatch level has finally been officially released! I've had this one sitting around in need of making the page for since I polished it up back in June. I still really like how this one came out, and I'm psyched to do more mapping for small little Somnol Quake skirmishes when I have the time, energy, and momentum. I've also updated my little art sampler with some of the highlights from this year's past Art Fight, given how much I challenged myself with it and how nice some of those drawings came out.

[#] August 22, 2024

Cammy reporting in after a long bit of silence! I've recently taken on a much more physically intensive (but much better paying) job, and I'm just not able to be as active creatively as I'd like to be. Most nights, I fall asleep before I'd like to, let alone get busy with something. As a result, I have deferred building hifi, which was meant to be the shiny modern version of this site located at mariteaux.somnolescent.net proper, until, I dunno, sometime in 2025. I'd like to take the holidays this year off to just save up money and play video games. I haven't done that in years.

nofi and hifi still work in newer browsers and two sites is already a lot of work, so I'm not too disappointed. At the moment, all links to mariteaux.somnolescent.net redirect to lofi. When hifi is eventually built, these will continue to work, as all three versions have the same link structure. I've also done a round of miscellaneous bugfixing across nofi, which it's needed basically all summer.

[#] July 19, 2024

Man, it's been over a month without a changelog update! Life is a blur and I'm still in the middle of the Art Fight-and-work grind. In fairness to my last update, I did get lofi mostly done within the week, it was just a few things keeping it from being content-complete (and now only Kevin and Theo remains). lofi definitely is turning out to be my favorite of the three sites, and perhaps period. If you're not following the album recommendations RSS feed, do that—I just hit 100 albums in the database and put out a call for requests and got a bunch of cool ones back! Beyond that, I'll be back to build hifi in August. Thanks for bearing with me.

[#] June 13, 2024

lofi is now in development. Since all the content has been assembled and finalized, since it's already an AutoSite project, and since it uses the layout and markup of the mari.somnol holding page (though much much upgraded, with Mac OS desktop-style navigation and actual widgets on the fake windows!), it's gonna be a really quick port. The hardest part is rewriting all the presentational <font> mess that nofi uses into orderly classes for each page. It'll still be done by the end of this week though, or next week at the latest. Then I just have to think of what I want hifi to look like.

[#] June 9, 2024

This won't affect how you guys see the site, but I've migrated nofi to AutoSite once more! If you don't know, AutoSite is a static site generator written by fellow Somnolian dcb, and I was probably the first to make serious use of it back in 2018 other than him. I intentionally didn't use it for cammy.somnol, and that knocked me out of the habit of using it, even when it made total sense to do so (like for this site!).

Anyway, I wanted to add all the 88x31s to the footers of these pages, but that's a lot of pages, and I realized I'd have to edit all of them any time I wanted to change the (admittedly minimal but still extant) page "wrapper" (head, header, footer, that stuff). So we use AutoSite once more! Now, sitewide changes are as easy as editing the template, regenerating, and then uploading the entire folder again. Weird to say AutoSite gets me nostalgic a bit, but honestly, it really did while I was migrating everything. Helps that it's summer outside, I think—all the best Somnolescent stuff happens in the summer.

[#] June 8, 2024

Classic Cammy surprise project—I've refactored both the game reviews and album reviews sections into three PHP files instead of one, an index, a browse page, and a read page. This was spurred on mostly by cleanliness and scale. I realized that, if I wind up with hundreds of album reviews (I will pass 100 by the end of the summer), just listing every single review the moment you hit my section is gonna brutalize retro browsers with hundreds of tables and possibly my database server with hundreds of rows returned at once. For me, personally, it was also getting harder to edit my own code because one file was pulling three distinct duties. All set now! It's clean as fuck. You will have to reset your RSS feeds if you were using them though, they're at different URLs now. I promise I won't move 'em again. At least the new URLs make a lot more sense and don't have that nasty PHP extension distracting you from the nice, clean XML.

[#] June 6, 2024

RSS feeds! There's now RSS feeds for the changelog, the album reviews, and the game reviews. No more needing to remember to check back to my humble little site to see if I've posted anything—give them to your favorite Discord utility bot or feed reader and let me announce them to you! I had RSS feeds for the game reviews back on cammy_v1, but I had to update that manually. This happens completely automatically thanks to PHP being so cool.

If you want some album reviews to read before I get back to them proper, try these two recently-excavated ones for Local H's As Good as Dead and Faith No More's Angel Dust, both circa August 2018 from Neocities. Been a while! Internally, to make the RSS feeds work, I now have at least approximate dates for every review I've ever written. Given how bad my records have been over the past six years, I'm impressed I got that much. Very glad to have the Somnol Discord server!

[#] May 28, 2024

nofi is feature-complete. Every page is here. This is not a drill. Guitar Hero II modding tutorials, brought over. Rediscoverings, accounted for. Remasters from when I was a teenager added to the music page? It's all here. All it needs are a bunch of Alexis and nofi will be complete and I will have a full site on this domain I'm happy with again after many, many years away.

[#] May 27, 2024

The art highlights and album pages are up! I said I probably wouldn't do an art section, but it was simple to put together and it felt sad to leave out all that hard work on my main site. I'm feeling motivated, so I'm gonna try to get nofi content complete by tomorrow. Shortlist of what's left: Rediscovering ports (easy, just tedious) and bringing over all the modding pages (see former). I also started to add summaries of the Rediscoverings to the normal album review pool, to buff up the amount of albums I've covered in that format. The vast majority of those still need to be written, but that's a stretch goal, so we'll leave it for now. Anyway, soon! Hopefully super soon!

[#] May 22, 2024

Check out the new illustrations! Alexis have started to appear on nofi. By my estimation, 6-8 will be needed in all, and we have two already, one on the index and one on the contact page. I've got a really fun style I'm doing them in, where I line each one three times to get a squigglevision wobble going on, and I think it really helps to make a big visual impact on otherwise rather simple HTML pages. I had this idea probably last year and it's really fun seeing it in action finally. I'll be keeping it up for lofi and hifi as well. Other things are being transferred over and added, but nothing's finished just yet.

[#] May 18, 2024

It's been a crazy past week for the new site! Game reviews are transferred to a database and scripted (PS2 reviews have even been brought back from cammy_v1! They never made it to the Macintosh Garden site, sadly), essay page is scripted, this changelog is PHP-powered now as well, Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure has gotten its first ever public airing after having written it over a year ago, tons. It's even valid HTML 3.2!

Once I migrate the modding pages, the Rediscoverings, and write the music page, all the content will be solidly in place. All of it. Then I just need to draw a ton of Alexis and nofi.mari.somnol will be officially, 100%, completely done! That happened seriously quicker than I was expecting, and then it's onto lofi and eventually making the full hifi site! I'm super excited, and super pleased to have a home base portfolio site again. Read more about it on the journal on cammy.somnol if you're interested!

[#] May 10, 2024

Today marks the official sunsetting of mari@macintosh.garden. I'm now putting effort into moving everything back to mari.somnol and doing the design and assets for it. This is for a few reasons, but mostly, Macintosh Garden was just never meant to be permanent in the first place. I'll be adding banners to the top of every page marking them as frozen. The pages will remain so the links stay working, but nothing new will be added.

And in proper site development news, meet the new PHP page for my album reviews! Knowing I'll have nofi, lofi, and the normal mari subdomain to maintain, I've been looking to reduce the amount of static HTML pages on each. At 1:30AM last night, I stuffed all my reviews into a MySQL table and wrote up this PHP script to access it all. I'm super super pleased with it, works on everything from Mosaic onwards, and this offers numerous benefits over the old way to do it, including additional methods of sorting through reviews (by rating, by year, viewing and linking to individual albums) and being able to generate an RSS feed from new reviews. Will keep working on this, still more to be done, but now's a good place to stop and relax for the evening.

[#] March 18, 2024

Happy six months without an update, lurkers! I just got back from Wales, and I do have some stuff for you to see. Firstly, check the art gallery as always, that's now up to date and there's some stuff there I haven't posted elsewhere. But! Six new album reviews, most of which were written on various planes and buses while I had nothing but music to occupy me: Ash's 1977, The Cardigans' Gran Turismo, John Gold's these are color days, Pine Marten's Beautiful Stakes and Powerpoles, Sebadoh's Harmacy, and Wrong Way Driver's Nonplussed, all from between 1997 and 2011 or so. Some of these I've been meaning to write for ages now, and some are long-standing favorites of mine, so it's nice to get 'em out there finally. I bought 25 new CDs while I was away, so I'm gonna try to listen through and get them all reviewed at some point this year. Keep an eye on this space!

[#] September 30, 2023

I've been hard at work working on cammy.somnol, drawing stuff, writing for the blog, and at least for those last two, I have updates here: my art gallery and essays page now have all the drawings I've done in the last two months and links to everything I've written in the last two months, respectively. First time the art's been posted publicly too! I've been debating making a new FurAffinity, potentially, but for now, it's all still here exclusively.

[#] September 6, 2023

Long time no see! I have dug up from my archives the entire run of the Rediscovering, a set of thirty essays on a bunch of albums I bought and never listened to. I've been working on porting these to basic HTML for a month or two now, five at a time, going back through them, reading them again for the first time in a while, and giving my commentary on thoughts looking back at them in a much different headspace. If you caught them the first time, read them again, they hold up. If you didn't, they're a treat, I think—pleasantly surprised with how they hold up.

[#] August 18, 2023

The new Midwestern Dirt album Twilight at a Burning Hill is out today! It's fantastic, you should listen to it and buy a copy. I've been listening to it for months already for free and I still did. Here's my full review of it, and that page also now features catalog reviews for 2020's Sayonara and 2017's Amendments. Back to web stuff full throttle tomorrow, after I take a trip to my job to buy another ethernet cable.

[#] August 15, 2023

Man, life's been weird lately. I'm happy to have the modding and level design section done and updated, even if I apparently linked it on this front page ages ago and thus some people probably went in there already, 404s and all. All good! This really leaves two sections, my music and my stories, and this site will have everything I want on it. Past that point, it's all just design work and migrating back to mari.somnol.

[#] August 1, 2023

Quick little update—changing around the sorting of the music recommendations page and readding the four low-bit reviews I did! These were a lot of fun, I think they added some nice flavor to my reviews page and I'd like to do more (and get back to listening to netlabel stuff in general), but it felt odd sorting all these various artists together and it made the page extra long. Now I've got them split into the bigwigs that had a record deal and the weirdos who just put stuff out for fun on the internet. Like me.

[#] July 29, 2023

Hi, sorry for the lack of updates! There's been a bunch of things going on in the background that I haven't gotten around to finishing, despite me working on this site most days of the week. I have one of them for you now: the first set of catalog recommendations, these for Beck. Catalog recommendations are just a bunch of reviews posted at once exploring a specific artist's discography. This isn't all the Beck albums I'd like to get to, but four of these are brand new and one is rewritten. That's plenty for right now. (I also separately did Earlimart's Treble and Tremble and Autolux's Transit Transit earlier in the month, I just didn't post them to this changelog.)

[#] July 12, 2023

Preparing more sections of the site! For now, have the Setter ref I finished up last night and a review of Marcy Playground's debut. I'm on a roll with the album reviews, they're super quick and easy and fun. More to come.

[#] July 9, 2023

I have gotten my art gallery up! This didn't take too long. I already had the images sorted and text written from when I built the mari.somnol version for funsies, and that's been sitting up on mari.somnol unlisted for long enough that it's rather outdated. I just updated it with everything I've drawn since and ported it to this site's layout. Glad to have it up! Still fun to see my art through nearly a year and a half of constant attempts and improvement. I think I'm in a really good spot with it now, and it's only getting better. Expect this one to update as I draw more, of course.

[#] July 8, 2023

A contact page appears! Yeah, easy shit, doing it between some other, bigger projects I've been working on. I also got two more album recommendations up for ya, Wilco's Summerteeth and Marcy Playground's Shapeshifter, both from 1999, only one of which is as remembered and respected as it should be, sadly.

[#] June 30, 2023

I have ported over almost all of my album recommendations, save for the ones I either don't like and need to rewrite or the low-bit ones, which I'm still feeling out how I want sorted in the listing, how I want to link to the original releases (support the artists), all that. I've also overhauled the way you browse them. They're now sorted by artist, and each artist gets their own page as opposed to the reviews being per-album, which made things a lot harder to look through. I anticipate doing more catalog recommendations for artists I've already done reviews of, so this will just make things a lot easier and cut down on the amount of pages you'll have to browse between.

[#] June 29, 2023

Working on majorly overhauling the album recommendation sorting, but if you want a new review from me, here's one I did for Starflyer 59's Gold. Nostalgic album for me, nice to revisit. Definitely think I prefer Starflyer's later work, but that's probably just novelty. Silver and Gold are still quality heavy rock records.

[#] June 27, 2023

I have finally assembled a listing of the essays I've written over the years that I still like. Seriously, I neglected to do that for almost five years now, and it's made finding a huge chunk of the stuff I've written over the years impossible. Very preliminary, but good for right now.

[#] June 24, 2023

My old PS1 reviews have returned! These have all been edited to be even tinier and more concise, and on an occasion or two, rewritten to better reflect my current feelings on the games. I forgot how much I enjoyed this format, I'll absolutely be writing some new ones when the mood strikes.

[#] June 20, 2023

Got a bunch of my old album reviews posted for some stuff to look at, finally, plus a rough sitemap of other stuff you can expect to see in the future. The reviews have all been edited for length, clarity, and to be less edgy than when I wrote them as a teenager. There's also a new one, for Superdrag's Regretfully Yours, which is an album I like very very much.