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savannah’s book reviews: my syntax will never recover (the book of the new sun)
This is the craziest shit I have ever read. Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: Five More Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives
Never ask me to estimate things. I don’t know how much that would cost, I can’t wager how heavy it is, and I certainly can’t imagine distances. I don’t know why, but my sense of scale is the wonkiest thing on the planet.
Somnolescent is no different! One of our recent new casual friends who’s been sitting in on mine and Savannah’s streams remarked that somnolescent.net is like a gigantic maze, and I really hadn’t thought about it because I’ve been working on it for seven years now and have zero perspective on it. Even though it’s as organized as it can possibly be, there’s still so much to see that I can’t imagine how it looks to anyone who isn’t me. Must be intimidating.
I did a roundup of neat things I found on archives back in May 2023, when I really started to push on turning it into a Web museum of restored, vintage sites and pure Somnolescent history, but one post of five things (technically ten things) only scratches the surface, and I’ve added a lot to it since then. Given it’s warm, fuzzy, rememberberries season, I bring to you another batch of neat shit we all worked on that you should go and check out.
Cammy vs. the PhotoCam III: This Has Gotten Stupid
The AOL PhotoCam has gone from “my curiosity” to “my nemesis” to “my fairweather obsession I somehow now own five of”. I know more about the PhotoCam than AOL did. I’ve seen the way these things break. I can tell when I got each of them by their specific damage. The search for a single working unit has been going on six years now, and I think we’ve found the end of it–because I now own two working units, one complete in the box.
If you know the story, I have more to update you on. If you don’t know the story, strap in! I’ve got a tale of temperamental retro tech, operator error, Redditor intrigue, and new perspectives on the futility of 30-year-old cameras and perhaps life itself. Yes, there will be photos. Hopefully, you find this a satisfying end to the saga.
The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge
So back in November, I grabbed 1.78TB of media from the Internet Archive’s mp3.com Rescue Barge, and their Wayback Machine both, in pursuit of creating the most thoroughly complete archive I can muster of MP3.com’s music. The Rescue Barge is … Continue reading
Catching ‘Em All, and How to Do It
If you breathe, you know what Pokémon is. You’ve at least run into a Pikachu or perhaps even a Bulbasaur at some point in your life, and you might have a vague inkling that it’s a game about collecting creatures, with the goal being to, as both the song and the box says, Catch Them All.
The thing is, this is actually a lot fucking harder than you might think–so I set out to do it myself. In a copy of Pokémon Blue for the 3DS, after two-and-a-half years of on-and-off play, I now have a save with a full 151 possible Pokémon caught. I have screenshots of the journey.
What possesses a man to go to such obsessive lengths? What keeps people from doing the thing listed on the box? Why does Lt. Surge have such a fine ass? Join me, friends, and I will answer all your questions.
London, Through the Eyes of the PowerShot A20
A slightly belated hello from Wales, Letters readers! I’ve actually been in the country for a week and a half now, but I’ve been too busy working on art and story stuff with Caby to put up this post like I wanted. I’ll be here until late August, and the rest of the family is in France right now, so we’re vibing with the guinea pigs.
Since I fly in through Heathrow every time I visit, Caby and I start our visits with a couple days in London, zipping around on the Tube and buying way too much fast food. We’ve been getting more adventurous the more often we do it, and this time, I had a new toy to capture the experience with: a Canon PowerShot A20 circa 2001. This $500 MSRP rebadged Canon IXUS 300 beauty shoots in a max of 1600×1200 and takes CompactFlash cards for additional storage, of which I have a 128MB one in there. Gorgeous.
What does London look like through the lens of the A20? Let’s find out.
I don’t know what to mine / I’ll mine this anyway
It’s not especially uncommon for someone who’s played Minecraft for a while to get caught up in thinking about the past. The new updates are a different game from our first versions, many of the servers we played on in … Continue reading
beta readers: the terror and joy of being known
Hello from a cheap hotel room in Winnipeg! I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve been working on Desertbound, my debut novel (coming 2026?). Consider this a bit of a sequel to that post. Continue reading
Five Things I Learned from “Hacking Windows XP”
We had our annual local library sale earlier this month! If you’re curious what all I got (it was an especially good haul for weird alternative CDs), you can go read the journal post I wrote on cammy.somnol about it. One of the books everyone, including myself, was most interested in though was a book called Hacking Windows XP, written by Steve Sinchak, the maintainer of tweaks.com to this day, and published by Wiley in their ExtremeTech range. (Wiley, if you don’t know, are the folks that publish those For Dummies books that were the main way I got into retrocomputing as a very small child. I had another of their ExtremeTech books on building an arcade cabinet as well.) What’s especially fun about my copy is the CompUSA price tag on the front that says it was marked down to half off in December of 2004. History!
I’m a long-time XP power user. I had my own XP computer from about when I was 7. I used it every day at school. I now have an XP box on my floor to my left as I write this! (I mostly use it to chat on Aftersleep.) I like to think I know a lot about it, so I was curious how much this book could teach me. Indeed, a lot of especially the early part of the book is about stuff like customizing the Start Menu, changing system icons, and dinking with msconfig. Useful information, but stuff I’ve already got filed away in the brain box and mostly don’t bother with.
That said, I didn’t walk away completely unenlightened! Here’s a handful of stuff from this book that even a grizzled, old-school, daily XP user walked away having learned–either from it just somehow getting by me or because it’s properly nerdy. Also, there’s a CD. I’ll unseal it and we’ll get to that after the main course.
savannah’s book reviews: the long way to a small, angry planet
Hey! I’m packing for a trip to Winnipeg (not a frozen shithole currently, but it is on fire) but I’ve got some time, and by that I mean I’d rather write a book review than pack. I read The Long … Continue reading