-
Somnolians
-
Categories
-
Archives
- March 2026 (1)
- February 2026 (2)
- January 2026 (4)
- December 2025 (4)
- October 2025 (1)
- September 2025 (1)
- August 2025 (1)
- July 2025 (2)
- June 2025 (4)
- April 2025 (1)
- February 2025 (1)
- January 2025 (4)
- December 2024 (2)
- November 2024 (1)
- September 2024 (2)
- August 2024 (1)
- July 2024 (1)
- June 2024 (1)
- April 2024 (1)
- February 2024 (4)
- December 2023 (7)
- November 2023 (3)
- October 2023 (3)
- September 2023 (6)
- August 2023 (6)
- July 2023 (1)
- June 2023 (1)
- May 2023 (1)
- April 2023 (1)
- February 2023 (2)
- December 2022 (5)
- November 2022 (4)
- October 2022 (2)
- September 2022 (4)
- August 2022 (5)
- July 2022 (1)
- June 2022 (2)
- May 2022 (2)
- April 2022 (6)
- March 2022 (1)
- February 2022 (1)
- December 2021 (4)
- November 2021 (1)
- October 2021 (1)
- July 2021 (1)
- June 2021 (4)
- May 2021 (1)
- April 2021 (3)
- February 2021 (2)
- January 2021 (3)
- December 2020 (3)
- November 2020 (2)
- October 2020 (3)
- September 2020 (2)
- August 2020 (3)
- July 2020 (3)
- June 2020 (1)
- May 2020 (4)
- April 2020 (6)
- February 2020 (1)
- January 2020 (4)
- December 2019 (9)
- November 2019 (3)
- October 2019 (2)
- September 2019 (4)
- August 2019 (1)
- July 2019 (3)
- June 2019 (1)
- May 2019 (3)
- April 2019 (5)
- March 2019 (1)
-
Meta
MCICR: The Color Crunching Algorithm Time Forgot
You know, when I wrote that initial post on PageMill, I wasn’t expecting to find a new rabbit hole to go down every time I explore the CD-ROM. It’s just happened that way! There’s so much included on it, so many weird, forgotten relics of the 90s, software you can’t find elsewhere, graphics from companies long gone, that I keep wanting to write about.
For today’s rabbit hole, I only ask you, my reader: are you a gambling sort? Today’s program involves just that, random chance, high stakes, and lawfare. I’m being more than slightly facetious. Sort of. Monte Carlo algorithms aren’t nearly as fun as Monte Carlo itself, but I do regularly downsample full-color PNGs to 256 colors for GIFs and things, and a program on the PageMill CD-ROM proved to be, if nothing else, an impressive and completely forgotten stab at doing just that. Let’s talk about why and look at some Somnolian art and photos along the way.
Exploring the Legacy of Image Club Graphics
Just over a week ago, I wrote a blogpost about Adobe PageMill. The kinda tool that could only ever have existed in the mid-to-late-90s, PageMill was a boxed CD-ROM Web page builder, and I find it neat. Being an Adobe product, you can imagine it came loaded up with some Adobe extras (install Acrobat, dammit!), but some of those extras have sent me down an additional rabbit hole. Specifically, it was a pack of Web-ready bullets, rules, headers, and backgrounds under the banner of Image Club Graphics–all stuff I love and stuff I could use in my various old Web pursuits.
My searches for more turned up precious little–until I knew what I was digging for. In the right spaces, you can still find their wares online, and I have some sampler discs from their lot to show you nonetheless. I hope you enjoy photos of cake, Smarties, businessmen, clocks, widgets for your Geocities site, and some jarringly quirky 90s handwriting and dingbat fonts.
(Fair warning that this is going to be a very image-heavy post and filled with the little-seen-on-Letters gallery block type. I know Letters is generally decently old browser friendly–this page may not be, or it may be slow. I’ve tried to optimize things where I can, but we’re gawking at shit today, so it comes with the territory.)
Milling a 90s Website With PageMill
I’ve built tons of websites over the past eight years, all by hand, clacking out HTML and CSS into Notepad++ or BBEdit and then assembling it with AutoSite, usually. Despite playing with WYSIWYG editors throughout my life, I’ve just never liked them. Eventually, I just get frustrated enough with their lack of control, wonky markup, and strange workflows that I start writing markup by hand again anyway.
Of course, we all mellow out with age, and I not only had a fun opportunity to build another little site recently, but a CD-ROM image of Adobe PageMill 3.0 lying around to build it with. I found it rather adorable and enjoyable. Let’s talk about the brief history of PageMill, what sucks about it, and what fucks about it.
One Month Out
It’s been a month and a half since I graduated college, and just about a month since I last wrote on the blog. It’s been, well, January. Regardless, I feel it’s worthwhile recapping what I’ve been up to this month. … Continue reading
Posted in Happenings
Leave a comment
lucky sevens: escape to pinède
What a year, eh? I’m going to fall back on my favourite strategy of ignoring real life for a while and talk about my current fixation. On Christmas, Cammy put out marfGH: Volume 1 (yes, I’m plugging here, too!). Just … Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: またあした！
Oh… 2025!! Yeah, 2025, right?! What do you mean there’s more after this?! It was certainly a strange year for me. Marks when I turned 20 years old (Oh God, I’m gonna be 21 in 3 weeks and 1 day?!) … Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: How Did People Get to somnolescent.net in 2025?
Happy new year to all the faithful Letters readers out there! As dcb said in his closing out the year post, groups like ours don’t usually stick around this long, but as we go into eight years of humbly posting obscure shit for your edification, the lights are on bright as ever here.
I thought I’d start up a new year’s tradition this year (which, turns out, I did back in 2021 but I guess gave up on) by giving you a peek behind the curtain. While somnolescent.net doesn’t track you (not just for privacy reasons, more because we like lightweight pages and clean HTML), I do have a lot of data courtesy of Google and Bing about where our pages get linked out online and what search terms bring people to what pages. While “Five Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives” and follow-up were meant to bring you what I think are some interesting draws to the site network, this one’s gonna be all about what actually draws people in.
Posted in 2025: Lucky Sevens, Retrospectives
Tagged Internet, Somnolescent, traffic reports
Leave a comment
Lucky Sevens: Who Knows Where the Time Goes
Once again, as quickly as it arrived, another year heads off into the great unknown… 2025 was an interesting one, to say the least. With my birthday on the 29th, I have now passed the halfway point of my 20s, … Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: Closing Out 1998+7
If there’s anything 2025 has made clear for me, it’s how extremely fortunate I am to have the friends that I do. And seven years running! Do you know how insane that is? Doom (2016) was two years old in … Continue reading
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