Essays

I've written an awful lot over the years, but I've never really collected it in one place until now. Most of it ended up buried in archives or in my files, but no longer! I have here linked every single blog post, opinion piece, and deep dive into some obscure bit of media or technology from all my years online that's still worth reading, and hopefully you find something you like skimming through.

(There's a lot more than this on Letters and also the archives of the Scratchpad, my personal blog from 2019 to 2022, but it's either stuff I don't necessarily vibe with anymore or it's just outright terrible.)

The Rediscovering

This one's big enough to get its own section.

This was a set of essays I did on the Scratchpad between mid-2020 and early 2022 giving my initial impressions on thirty 90s and 2000s rock records I had in my collection and never quite gave a fair listen. I found some surprising new favorites, some ones I hated, and each essay is given an appendix from more recent with my final thoughts on the album and the entry in question. Give 'em a skim through, you'll find a bunch you might recognize and a bunch you almost certainly do not.

Gaming and Tech Essays

Title	Date Published	Location
SomnolCCSO, and Reviving an Old, Dead Database Lookup Protocol	February 6, 2024	Letters From Somnolescent
CCSO was a people lookup protocol for the college kids in the late 80s, and with a whole six known servers in existence, Somnol brought a new one to life. And Cammy coded something! Let's talk about it all.
Title	Date Published	Location
2600 Pac-Man: Was it That Bad?	February 23, 2022	Letters From Somnolescent
It's still routinely considered one of the worst games of all time, but meet it on its own merits and 2600 Pac-Man is still mildly fun. Here's a deep exploration on the gameplay of the port.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Clever Feat of PNG Optimization	October 27, 2020	Letters From Somnolescent
The way PNGs are encoded makes it possible to save 20-60% of their overall size with zero loss in quality. How's that work? What magic do you need to make it happen? That's all in this essay.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Exaggerated Death of Optical	July 14, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
There's a certain misconception among tech geeks that optical media—CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays—are basically obsolete. I still think they have a place in any good collection of backups, and here's why.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Luddite in Me Screams	June 29, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
Lamenting e-waste, our world of planned obsolescence, and increasingly-frequent attempts to fix human problems with new technology.
Title	Date Published	Location
Tools, Toys, and You and I	May 9, 2020	Letters From Somnolescent
More rumination on how we rely on such fragile technology to power the modern world, and how computers should augment humans, not replace them.
Title	Date Published	Location
Why Gopher Will Fail	May 3, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
Part two of a post on the future of Gopher (a document-retrieval Internet protocol—effectively FTP on steroids), and why I think its community will let it down and it won't achieve its deserved success.
Title	Date Published	Location
Why Gopher Will Succeed	May 2, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
Part one of a post on the future of Gopher (see above), and why I think it still has a comfy place in the modern world.

Music Essays

Title	Date Published	Location
3-9-7-1-5: Exploring the Expanded Conet Project Boxset	April 1, 2024	Letters From Somnolescent
The favorite of conspiracy theorists and indie bands alike, numbers stations, strange, anonymous shortwave broadcasts consisting entirely of spoken numbers and strange noises, fall under my microscope. I paid £200 for the privilege!
Title	Date Published	Location
First Draft: Pixies' Come On Pilgrim	November 1, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
The fourth edition of First Draft, talking about the highly-productive sessions that led up to the Pixies debut EP...and the half of what was recorded that was left unreleased.
Title	Date Published	Location
First Draft: Failure's Magnified	October 1, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
The third edition of First Draft, revisiting Failure's second record Magnified from 1994 and comparing it to the home-recorded demo versions originally slated for release by their label and later released on Failure's Essentials compilation.
Title	Date Published	Location
First Draft: Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot	September 18, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
The second edition of First Draft, looking at Wilco's landmark indie rock classic 22 years after it first streamed online and comparing it to no less than six discs of in-progress cuts from the long, winding recording sessions.
Title	Date Published	Location
First Draft: ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down	July 1, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
The inaugural edition of First Draft, a look back at an album that was cut down or redone from its initial version to see what all the extra time in the oven did. This one concerns the Dandy Warhols' second record and its scrapped first attempt The Black Album.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Absurd Netherworld of Internet Archive Tape Transfers	June 24, 2021	Letters From Somnolescent
The Internet Archive hosts a lot more than just websites, like, say, transfers of amateurly-recorded cassettes! We explore obscure klezmer music, a 70s family having breakfast, and a mixtape of 90s hits made for a girl's friends. Aww.
Title	Date Published	Location
Experimenting With 5.1 Downmixes	March 8, 2021	mari's Scratchpad
I've long wondered about the differences between a stereo mix from a CD and a 5.1 surround downmix, and what even the point of surround mixes for music are. This post mulls on the topic with Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York as the focal point.
Title	Date Published	Location
Look What Your Money Bought	January 11, 2021	mari's Scratchpad
Defending Nickelback and riffing on the idea of authenticity as part of a band's image. Remember, it's okay to want success until you openly enjoy that success—then you suck.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Desperate, Bottomless Pit of Nirvana Fan Albums	September 16, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
There's been a trend on YouTube and places over the past few years of fake, post-Kurt's death Nirvana albums, and I find it rather miserable and creepy, not to mention historically absurd. Listen to another band, please.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Tragedy of MP3.com	January 15, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
The start of an obsession! My attempt to tell the story of the failed early indie music streaming site. There's several followups to this linked at the bottom of the essay—happy rabbit hole exploring!
Title	Date Published	Location
End it Someday: Looking Back on With the Lights Out	November 23, 2019	Letters From Somnolescent
15 years of a big ol' Nirvana boxset! Going through all four discs and talking about what it gets right and what it gets wrong. Motivated my own attempt at a Nirvana rarities boxset two years later.
Title	Date Published	Location
Brickwalled: The Sonic Arms Race of the Loudness War	January 13, 2017	Neocities
An old high school essay I wrote on the loudness war, an effort to make albums as distorted as possible that thankfully seems to have tapered off in the past few years. Needs a rewrite and images, but still charming.

Personal Retrospectives

Title	Date Published	Location
Further Down the Artsy Rabbit Hole	December 29, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
More about my time spent learning to draw, and more stuff I'm proud of from the year! This one's a lot more positive than the last, as my confidence grows...
Title	Date Published	Location
mariversary 4.0: Revisiting Nostalgiamining	April 1, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
Revisiting the initial essays that earned me much notoriety on Neocities, and their bizarre continued relevance. (Seriously, there's like seven different sites linking to them now, and yes, I still get emailed about them every few months.)
Title	Date Published	Location
My First Year in Art	February 3, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
January 2022 marks when I started drawing officially! I look back on the first year here and go over some drawings that I think make for good milestones.
Title	Date Published	Location
mariversary 3.0: The Platypus Years	April 1, 2021	Letters From Somnolescent
For the third anniversary of me joining Neocities, I explored my original site, in all its odd-but-pleasingly-colored glory.
Title	Date Published	Location
mariversary 2.0: I Actually Paid for This	April 1, 2020	Letters From Somnolescent
Two years after joining Neocities, I look back with amusement at all the many sites I made using my Supporter's plan. We also discuss if Kyle Drake is an asshole (he is) and if I'm always right (I am).
Title	Date Published	Location
mariversary: Thinking About Neocities	April 1, 2019	mari's Scratchpad
A sorta sappy little look at my time spent on Neocities, the site where I met the Somnolians and my future wife. Not bad for shitposting at children!
Title	Date Published	Location
The Day I Became a Nostalgiaminer	November 2018	Neocities
The inspiration behind, and the making of, my little fake 90s personal site minerteaux, which of course takes its name from the "nostalgiamining" term I came up with.

Web Essays

Title	Date Published	Location
What Even is Somnolescent?	August 25, 2023	Letters From Somnolescent
A ponder on the ways everyone seems to misinterpret Somnolescent as a collective, either who we are, what we're into, or what we're supposed to be—and everyone includes ourselves, yes.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Great Somnolescent Time Machine	April 20, 2022	Letters From Somnolescent
A bit on vintage website restoration! These are still largely my working methods and the things I do to patch sites for archives or just for my own usage in the event I have to grab them from the Wayback Machine.
Title	Date Published	Location
Fw: Fw: Fw: The Bizarroworld Time Capsule of 00fun	March 18, 2021	mari's Scratchpad
A strange 2000s website filled with "eCards" that only I seem to remember...and no, don't ask me why I remember it. Exploring it, exploring why it was made, and exploring why it should probably stay buried.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Death of HTTPS (on somnolescent.net)	February 2, 2021	Letters From Somnolescent
Sunsetting the "secure" version of our sites, and discussing the scare tactics around HTTPS, its usage, some people's desire to force it, and how difficult it can be to escape its grasp.
Title	Date Published	Location
The Death of the Hobbyist	December 18, 2020	mari's Scratchpad
It's sad how no one seems to make things just for fun anymore. I'm in full support of artists getting paid, sure, but when that's the point, what fun is there to be had?
Title	Date Published	Location
How the Feed Killed Creation	September 7, 2019	Letters From Somnolescent
My thoughts on how we've become slaves to walls of infinitely-scrolling content, and how it's killed exploration on the modern Internet.
Title	Date Published	Location
Neocities and a Lack of Passion	September 2018	Neocities
Easily my most contentious essay—encouraging users of the site to delete their accounts if they failed to make their sites fun and interesting to browse through.
Title	Date Published	Location
Nostalgiamining vs. Forging the Future	September 2018	Neocities
The lesser-known predecessor to the Passion essay, on how Neocities users like to copy the rainbow vomit part of Geocities as a substitute for a personality. Coined the term "nostalgiamining", which has somehow made its way to Urban Dictionary.