Writing

I just never know when to shut up, unfortunately. It's a curse, but at least it's one that's given people a lot to read! This is my attempt to collect seven sprawling years and counting of blog posts, stories, opinion pieces, manuals, documentation, and other things I made by typing words into Notepad++ and various versions of Word and Works. Hopefully something catches your interest!

Stories

Let's start with the fun stuff! This is all the fiction I've seen fit to bring back right now—there used to be a lot more of it, but it's a bit old and weird and I don't want that to be your first impression of my work. For now, there's some longer stories (some of which have been illustrated by my super talented girlfriend!) and cherry-picked flash fiction from the past six years or so.

I admittedly need to write a lot more, because my characters are miserably neglected, but I've been busy elsewhere. Hopefully, with this site settled now, I can turn my attention back to them.

Game and album recommendations

Reviews for things! I like to listen to a lot of music, and I like discussing it. I occasionally do the same for retro games. These sections have been upgraded from previous versions of my sites by way of PHP, so you can browse by, say, game publisher, or album rating now, as opposed to strictly by artist and by platform. I'll have more ways to take advantage of my newfound server-side freedom in the future.

I have a ton more of both games and albums that I'd like to cover, and the formats are short and sweet enough that I can do 'em in ten minutes or write them on a coach or a plane if I'm sufficiently motivated. Keep checking back! More will be added in time!

Essays

A section for some of my longer writing! Some of these are deep dives into books, how something works, or albums (the Rediscovering series of album reviews that used to live on the Scratchpad now reside in here). Others are just rants I wrote one night. You'll find my oldest works from back on Neocities all the way up to my newest essays on Letters From Somnolescent and elsewhere here.

Technical writing

And finally, I've written a fair bit of technical documentation and wiki stuff over the years. Here's a small list:

(Note: if you're on a vintage browser, these outgoing links either won't work or the sites won't load very well! Careful out there.)

Tesserae (tesserae.somnolescent.net): Tesserae is my currently-inactive attempt at writing a Web design help site. I find a lot of them are either rigid reference guides like MDN (correct but a bit daunting for newcomers) or are SEO-manipulating slop that might as well be AI-generated (w3schools, Geeksforgeeks, etc). Tesserae focuses on concepts—discussing the things you'd want to put on a page in-depth (like tables, HTML5 audio and video, doctypes, OpenGraph tags) and the theory behind how best to build a website (semantic HTML, HTML and CSS validation, and so on).; Tesserae is deeply neglected, and as I've gotten more involved with building sites, the scope of what I'd like to cover has increased. I'd also like to add a mascot to it. It will probably begin to show signs of life again when my own websites are built and settled.
Valve Developer Union (valvedev.info): The first true Web project Cammy ever took on! The Valve Developer Union was a site for archiving various useful modding tools pertaining to the Quake, GoldSrc, and Source engines, plus guides on how to make use of those tools. I wrote nearly everything featured on-site and edited everything else, while the technology end of things was handled by a guy named Jax. Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at working with others as a teenager, and Discord is combustible at the best of times, so it fell within a year to infighting and my increasing burnout from not pacing myself with the writing end of things (I was writing three guides a day at my fastest!). Still, I am proud of what we got accomplished.; VDU was started in September 2017 and became frozen in time in August 2018. The current site is built and maintained by me and features everything that was written for the site in that year. I don't plan on adding anything new to it, nor updating the tool mirrors.
AutoSite manuals (autosite.somnolescent.net and autosite_legacy on archives): I've been a longtime proponent of AutoSite, which is a site templating engine by dcb. It was meant to be an easy-to-use way to manage a site full of nearly-identical pages by separating the page text out from the layout templates, so you could make changes to one file as opposed to dozens. (If you've ever used server-side includes in Apache, imagine that, but all the includes are done by a program on your computer and you just upload the static HTML to your Web host.); Back when AutoSite was a Python 3 script (back when we all still used Neocities), I wrote a manual for it, and when AutoSite was rewritten in C#, I wrote a brand new one for that intead. Both manuals are included with AutoSite and AutoSite Legacy as sample AutoSite projects.
TCRF: I've done my share of writing for The Cutting Room Floor, which is a wiki for cut content in video games. At this point, all my work involves datamining various Harmonix rhythm games, plus documenting their development. Some pages I wrote: