Art Recaps: September 2023

At present, six different people in Somnolescent draw—that’s a lot of art! Though we stopped doing the full-blown recaps last year, I thought it would be fun to turn the art highlights section from those recaps into their own recurring monthly post. This, of course, means going up halfway into the month, because I get up to too much and sometimes deadlines slip. We’re not a corporation here, just a cult.

The deal was simple: I asked each of the Somnolians to submit the one drawing they did during the month that they’re most proud of or have the most to say about along with anywhere from a paragraph to a small essay about it. We’ve got a nice grab bag of everything for the start of autumn. Click the images for full-size!

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First Draft: Failure’s Magnified

Failure's Magnified

Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.

This second edition examines the home demos that almost comprised Failure’s second album, 1994’s Magnified.

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tech bro (derogatory)

This week I attended a work conference. The coffee was too hot and the cookies were stale (still ate ‘em), but the real stand-outs were the speakers. Continue reading

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So I’ll make my clothing myself

Second hand clothing market is cesspool. Searching for decent clothes I like and are of good, natural materials in Normal price is a very… masochistic nowadays. So I decided to torture myself more and make most of my new wardrobe myself.

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man i love eating takeout on the floor

Nothing screams “I’m out” like being 19 in January eating takeout in an empty living room in a shitty apartment. I should sell all my belongings.

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First Draft: Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

All eight CDs of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot boxset

Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.

This especially long-winded First Draft concerns the infinite permutations of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco’s 2002 art rock opus which streamed online officially for the first time 22 years ago today.

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YouTube Layout Timelapse Redux

Today’s menu, remaking the YouTube Layout Timelapse video. I felt the original was a bit incomplete and the process of which I took the screenshots was very ghetto, so I dedicated this afternoon to writing a quick script in Python and sent it running. Continue reading

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Fully licensed campus printer

Getting your printer set up for wireless printing is relatively simple on a home network. Most printers can connect to your Wi-Fi network and make themselves discoverable, and we’ve seen units be all in one, neat little packages for about a decade. It’ll be ad-hoc (Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth) or infrastructure, usually, and current operating systems are pretty good about finding them. Save for the occasional clogged spooler problems on Windows—I just reinstall the printer when this happens—it isn’t too bad.

But what if you’re trying to print from your printer as just one of thousands of users on a campus network? Continue reading

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What Even is Somnolescent?

I’m standing around at work, tidying the shelves, and something pops into my head: no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of what Somnolescent actually is. We’ve been called a tilde, we’ve been described as a community of Windows 2000 users and MSN Messenger reverse engineers, a group of Furcadia friends, people have said we built toyhou.se, all sorts of wild shit. Those Somnolians, they get around!

Some of this was promulgated by me wanting to make Somnolescent sound spooky and cultlike, so I was intentionally vague describing it to people for the first year or two. We’re almost at five now, though, and whenever we’re mentioned online, folks still try to put us in a box–and they keep getting that box weirdly wrong. I didn’t think we were doing anything all that complicated, but apparently, Somnolescent perplexes people.

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trip photos: toronto!

Hey! I mentioned in my Art Fight post I was in Toronto at the time of posting. Wanna see some photos? Continue reading

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