Two new sites, bios and refs, stories, a little raccoon out on a giant adventure, and I’ve started playing Cookie Clicker again. This one’s gonna be so massive, I’ve had to split it into sections, so get cozy in the nearest armchair. It’s time for a recap.
New Sites
Somnolescent’s newest member, mon (ya might know him as paperbagthing if you’re of a certain lineage), has finally gotten his site up! Music and guinea pigs (that makes two of them now…) abound from the deer boy. On the other end of the spectrum (:3c), one of Somnolescent’s older members, borb, is back on the site thing over on her subdomain. Content coming soon, I hear.
Unlike me, Caby, or dcb, mon and borb didn’t actually know HTML or CSS going into making their sites, so they’ve had to learn as they go along, hence the slowness. But all good, they’ve been vigilant, and we’re gonna hopefully be seeing more from them in the future.
Colton’s Adventure
Back in June, I wanted to try my hand at a quest hidden in my site, a text adventure of sorts starring my little sad raccoon guy Colton. It’s finally out. This is ~13,662 words of Pennyverse goodness (for the record, I currently have 13,333 words currently on toyhou.se, so over doubled my count there), letting you explore the outskirts of the Valley Cascadia surrounding the town or meet some of the weirdos in town themselves. Both paths terminate in new stories from me.
Getting this done was an absolute battle of nerves and weariness throughout; it’s the single most writing I’ve ever done in a single go. All in all, though, I think it came out nicely. Because of its length and the amount of work it took, I’ve elected to not hide it after all. Please go poke at it, it’d make me a happy Cammy.
The Results of Pennyverse Month
Oh, and if you clicked on that link to Colton’s bio up there? You might’ve noticed a massively overhauled toyhou.se profile, and that’s just one of the many things we got up to during the first annual Pennyverse Month, where we dedicated the entire month of August to writing stories, improving the world on toyhou.se, drawing, and just getting a load of ideas out there. We did so much that I basically have to list everything to get it all in.
- As said, we’ve rewritten all the bios for all the Pennyverse lads. I came up with a more detailed bio template that actually focuses on the important stuff about a character, and everyone seemed to like it a lot, so we went with it. Aside from the trio, who were more collaborative between Caby and I, everyone wrote the bios for their own characters (so borb did Arthur, Caby did Catherine, Diesel, Giulio, and Madeleine, and I did Colton, Gonzo, the Guardian, Riley, and then the trio.)
- Caby did refs for every last character, and you can see the whole lot over in the new DeviantArt group. Their personality shots are also featured on their bios.
- Of course, I didn’t let the opportunity go to waste without a bit of writing, and ended up doing two one-shots, one of Madeleine getting the fuzzies over Colton singing and playing guitar, and the other of Kevin hopping the multiverse and meeting some of my old Calelira characters. I also finished two proper plot stories for the two endings of Colton’s Adventure: Orchard Peak, which terminates the forest path, and Sebastian vs. the Guardian, which terminates the town path.
- Caby also did some writing, a story about how absolutely vile Diesel is. Betcha didn’t know she could write, did you?
Otherwhere
Of course, I can’t just stop at one project, and after reading too much Teenage Victory Songs (come back, soyrev!), I thought it’d be fun to start a songblog of my own. I also wanted to try out Dreamhost’s WordPress integration and not have to build yet another site from scratch. Thus, Otherwhere, where I’m trying to write a bit about every Failure song ever released.
A new entry comes out every Friday. The order’s randomized between their six or so albums, so I’m getting a nice blend of old and new Failure to talk about, and hopefully you’re finding some stuff to listen to.
AutoSite XL
In news I’m rather excited about, dotcomboom’s taken the time to retool the already incredibly useful AutoSite into a lightweight site management app with a GUI and a nice tree view and a built-in editor. If you have a static site and need a templating engine for keeping your pages consistent, AutoSite’s rock solid, and now that there’s a proper desktop version, I’ll probably go back to using it for my next site redesign.
Site Optimizations
I’ve been playing with and tuning up the site for funsies here and there. I’m still very very new to how .htaccess works and I’m likely to break more than I fix, but Dreamhost lets you use them, so I’ve been playing with them for various caching and redirection things. I’m also likely to start enforcing either HTTP or HTTPS per subdomain for logging purposes. (Case in point, somnolescent.net now forces HTTPS. An experiment for now, and if Google really does favor HTTPS sites, I think that’s a fair tradeoff for losing Netscape support, which can’t handle my chrome-plated HTML anyway.)
By the way, did you know we keep logs? IPs, user agent strings, referrers, the works. This means nothing for 95% of you, but for the 5% of people with certain…inclinations, we see you~ (That means you can stop obsessively archiving stuff now, Jimmy.)
Also, did you know the blog has had RSS this entire time and I completely forgot to link it in the custom theme? I’m smart. Here you go, use your favorite Discord bot or reader to know when we’ve updated.
Oh, and I wrote a humans.txt, because dead memes are fun.
Anniversary!
The one year anniversary of me inviting Caby and dcb into the group just passed, by the way. I consider August 31, 2018 to be the day Somnolescent started to change from the kinda miserable, nothingy “friend” group it was before to a proper group, something to be proud of being a part of, honestly. There was a hell of a lot of nerves at the start, and a bunch of awful people had to leave before it wasn’t a shitshow, but at this point we’re as solid and stable as we’ve ever been. And that? Is a good feeling.
Infinitely glad you two are still with us. Hoping you’re still Somnolians long into the future.
And on…
Mmm, what else? I wrote some stuff for TCRF, if you’re into Guitar Hero. Oh, and I finally edited that SimCity stream supercut like I wanted to, still a classic. And I saw Silversun Pickups in concert! I Don’t Know How But They Found Me opened for them, and even if the sound at the show was dogshit, they took me by total surprise when they played Beck’s “Debra” and Dallas, their singer, absolutely killed it. Plus they just kicked ass anyway. And the Pickups played “Common Reactor”, so I was pleased.
But enough waffle. Where to from here? Well, obviously we’re not keeping up this level of busyness into September. School’s starting for some of our members, I’m exhausted, and real life stuff keeps tugging at my shirt. Pennyverse is going quiet, at least for me, until October and then December, when I have special things planned for it. Likely, we’re all just gonna play vidya and fuck around for a bit. A well-deserved break, I’d say.
