by bulb

We skipped January as, frankly, we were all a little hungover. What can I say, things start slow sometimes. Nevertheless, we’ve got enough happenings for February’s, plus whispers of plans for spring. Come! Off into the recap we go!

The Somnolescent Filebase

I’m no stranger to losing stuff. I’ve been skimping on the backups for a long time; not even all of my Neocities sites survive because I just didn’t keep copies of everything.

One of the first projects of the year was the launch of the Somnolescent filebase, a backup node for Somnolescent’s internal use. A Raspberry Pi and a hard drive is more than enough juice to keep our projects safe, and so far, it’s worked wonderfully.

Of course, time will tell if our projects stay safe, but alongside some brand new dual-layer DVD-Rs (and maybe Blu-Rays at some point, who knows, sounds fancy), I’m hoping so. At the very least, I’ve been getting some peace of mind out of it. You can read about our setup in this post I wrote about it.

Long Live the Valve Developer Union

This one might not be an official Somnolescent happening, but it’s what I’ve been working on lately and it’s on our hosting now, so I’ll list it anyway. My first web project, the long-suffering Valve Developer Union, returns…sorta.

The story of VDU is a long and complex one, but it starts in September 2017, about seven months before I’d meet dotcomboom and 11 before I’d meet Caby. The idea was simple: write about level design for Half-Life and suchlike and archive the many fan tools for it. Many months of arguing, degeneracy, burnout, and hubris later, and it met its fate before its first birthday.

In total, about 40 weeks of content were written. The site was never officially shut down, just left dormant, and it was in a sorry, semi-functional state for a long time in the hands of my webmaster, who had frankly tried to wash his hands of it ages ago. I don’t plan on adding more to it, but with a better site than it’s ever had, I’m satisfied with all that’s happened.

W2krepo Relocated

In a similar vein to VDU, just with far less annoying rambling, dotcomboom’s W2krepo has been providing a nice little haven for rescued software and things that’ll run on Windows 2000. I figured the thing was big enough to be on its own subdomain and not buried on his main site, and he agreed when I poked him about it. Thus, it’s been relocated. He even got old links redirecting to the new site thanks to a clever little .htaccess.

Some other, larger Somnolian projects are already on subdomains (like Tesserae), and a few new ones slated to get their own sometime soon. Very excited to not be the only one using them.

Eric’s 32-bit Patio

Remember how I said I copied dotcomboom’s microblog when I started mari’s Scratchpad? Turns out, he thought it was an excellent idea and asked for a WordPress install of his own. He then proceeded to write about Ashens’ theme song and install the Twenty Ten theme, which is great because it looks ancient. It reminds me of Cosmic Panda and Google+. Remember when those were supposed to be the death of YouTube? Innocent times.

Anyway, if you’ve got an RSS reader on board, be sure to keep up on his happenings. He’s posting a lot of music and pictures of sunsets these days, not to mention the slow, satisfying inch towards AutoSite going gold.

Blog Highlights

Ironically, it’s been the blog that’s been the most active part of the network as of late. Here’s what you might’ve missed:

• Five Reasons I’ve Stopped Reading Your Story by mariteaux (January 3): “None of these are the sign of a bad writer, just bad writing. Without fundamentals, you can’t get much further with all the cool moody stuff people jump to. It’s as simple as that.”
• The mtlx Chronicle by dotcomboom (January 21): “Here, I was lost. It’s how you just know something exists, but you can’t find any mention of it past a couple archived pages of a music distributor that went under years ago. Common first-world problem, I’m sure.”
• Good Influences – My 1-year Anniversary Blog Post by mon (January 22): “The group’s encouraged me to get in touch with my creative side, shaped me into the person I am today, and allowed me to nerd out about crap I couldn’t nerd out about anywhere else.”
• Somnolescent Radio: Winter 2020 by everyone! (January 23): “Sometime towards the end of 2019, I got the idea to solicit a song from everyone in the group and compile them into something of a playlist for you to pick through. I asked each Somnolian to write a little bit about the song they picked to go along with their choice.”

Beware of Illegal Somnolescents!

Recently, sites have begun to pop up copying the structure of our site, attempting to use the glow of Our Dear Bulb for their own, and in some cases, even copying the wording from our manifesto. They claim to be creative collectives, but there is nothing creative about them. This matter is no walk in the park, no zone to be charted.

Accept no alternative! Poor quality Somnolescent knockoffs reduce your browsing pleasure and leave you feeling empty, unsatisfied, and perhaps a little insulted. Check whether your cult robes carry a genuine label hologram.

And with that out of the way, I’d like to say: keep an eye on us in the near future. We have many redesigns and content to enjoy coming your way. 2020 remains our year.