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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
The Majestic Serenity of Late 1990s Network TV Ads
You know, in the past, I never liked to let people know about my birthday, but this year, I’ve had a change of heart. Yesterday, I turned 26! Pretty sweet. Was a pretty damn good day, I streamed, got some money, Caby and Savannah drew me some really adorable drawings, I got a buzz going, kino. Despite my newfound eagerness in letting people know, that alone wouldn’t be Letters worthy, but I have something special to mark the occasion: retro commercials.
I’m subscribed to a channel on YouTube called OptimumPx. He’s one of those VHS digitization archive channels that uploads commercial breaks and stuff. I don’t catch every single video, but they’re comfy when I’m in the mood. I like his in particular because of the variety (80s up through the 2020s) and because he’s not egotistical enough to watermark his videos like he himself made the commercials or something. You know who you are.
About two months ago, he uploaded a commercial break that aired on CBS during a showing of JAG, which was a 90s legal procedural that I’d never heard of until right now. Turns out, it spawned NCIS, so if you know what that is (and if you’re American, you probably do), there you go. What makes this upload special though is that it aired two days before I was born, on June 1, 1999. That makes this block of ads also freshly 26 years old!
So come with me. Let’s check out what prime time network ads were like 26 years ago.
savannah’s book reviews: get me out of rf kuang hell
I think I mentioned in my last post I’ve been reading loads recently. The Somnolians end up suffering through me liveblogging reactions to books I read, particularly those I don’t like (which has been a grand total of two). And Letters is due for a post. Continue reading
Somnolescent Record Club #2: Cage the Elephant’s Thank You Happy Birthday
It’s been about a month since I dug deep into my musical memory banks, so let’s do another edition of that Record Club thing, yeah? To be honest, I’m not used to being this personal when I talk about music. Music has always been the perfect distance from me emotionally, close enough to relate to and enrapture me, but separate enough that I don’t have to share myself much when I share it with others. The idea of regaling the Internet with stories of me as a teenager lost in fantasy thinking of Pokemon OCs while listening to Silversun Pickups and Pixies records is both very fun and kinda embarrassing.
The other good thing about this series is that, because it’s effectively a very casual ramble about how I listen to music and the things I think about when I listen, it doesn’t take long at all to write. That’s good when you got three days to finish and publish it before the month’s out. :blobokhand:
Today’s record brings me right back to middle school, shortly before the world hit me for the first time. It’s a record I still enjoy quite a lot, the noisy, punky, gouged-and-warped pseudo-90s sampler tape that makes up Cage the Elephant’s second album Thank You Happy Birthday. It’s got a 7″ with it!
Somnolescent Record Club #1: Autolux’s Demos (2001-2002)
I’ve written a lot about music. Like a lot. A lot a lot. Usually, when I talk about music, it’s with this air of formality, either giving my opinion or digging into the details and investigating—I’m autistic, this is what I do.
I do listen to music for fun sometimes, though. I put on songs because they’ve been stuck in my head all day. I have characters and ideas I associate with albums and songs and specific times of my life. Sometimes, even—I will throw on a record.
I’d like to start up a monthly all-vinyl blog ramble series called the Somnolescent Record Club. For once, we’re gonna believe all the myths, get into the groove (quite literally), enjoy the tactility of the big art and the wax platters, and I’ll talk about my listening setup and all the things that run through my head when I put on an album. Today’s record is the vinyl-exclusive gold-colored Demos (2001-2002) from the mighty Autolux, whose debut album these demos were for I lived in in high school.
Hopefully, this runs more casual than you might be used to from me—that’s my aim.
writing about writing
Hey! Two posts from me within a month of each other? Unheard of. Suppose I’ve got a writing itch and I’m all out of Gold Bond. Continue reading
ChromeOS To Go: Thoughts on ChromeOS Flex
You might have used a Chromebook, Google’s funky, moderately dystopian cloud-centered take on the netbook formula. If you owned one, you likely needed a lightweight, cheap little laptop (with pretty solid battery life) for school, light office work or entertainment. As most of these things are done reasonably enough in a plain old web browser, pitching a lightweight operating system specifically for that purpose isn’t too farfetched.
As the Gentoo-based operating system that runs the Chromebook, ChromeOS, is quite lightweight, it should be able to run well on anything that could run Chrome. It shouldn’t be too bad for an older computer, either: although aging, even a sufficiently specced 15 year old machine – 2010 as of writing – can totally run Chrome just fine.
There’s also a whole niche of Chromebook-inspired Windows laptops that came out in the mid-2010s, immediately stifled by stiff storage requirements and an operating system not designed for them. Out of the box, they’re effectively ewaste. But they have modern guts! They’re rocking UEFI, some Celeron with a generic Intel case badge, and typically fanless, with some amount of power efficiency! This makes them an excellent candidate for the ChromeOS experience.
I’ve used ChromeOS Flex on and off on secondary machines of mine, and I think it is pretty neat! I think it fits these cases pretty well, especially for users who aren’t as technologically savvy and just want to extend the life of their computer hardware. I’ll discuss this a little more later, but I think it’s worth some history first – because despite the somewhat recent arrival of ChromeOS Flex in 2022, this is not the the operating system’s first rodeo on non-Google licensed hardware.