The Number of the Bulb: Cammy’s Greatest Hits

It’s almost midnight here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still say it: happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers. I had a quick check of what I’d posted on my cammy.somnol journal this time last year, and evidently, I wasn’t a happy camper, but this year, I’m feeling significantly more content. Actually, this might be the most comfortable and pleased I’ve ever been during the holiday season. 2018 and 2022 were ruined by, ahem, suboptimal family situations, 2019, I was in Ohio getting shoved into closet doors, and 2020 and 2021 were stressful for the reasons it was stressful for everyone, but 2024? This year is ending quite nicely.

As I get older, I realize that I’ve largely left behind a pretty angsty, negative legacy as mariteaux, full of “people aren’t doing [x] correctly” and “[x] sucks” and “I’m working on this deficit in my personality”—at some point, a boy’s gotta be a little happier, and I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. I’m gonna ramble about all the things that have gone well for me and all I accomplished this year and am proud of, while it’s late and I’m feeling good and full of alcohol.

SomnolCCSO

Starting from the beginning of this year, I spent a lot of time working on SomnolCCSO. CCSO is a late 80s Internet person lookup database format that by and large went away by the early 90s. (To wit: even as I write this, there are less than ten functional CCSO servers still left in the wild.) A few years back, I had the very fun idea of using a CCSO database linked to our Gopher server to store information about our characters, something that you can quickly punch a world or species query into and see all of our cats or all of our Pinede characters at a distance.

dcb having done the initial work to get something like that going, I spent a couple weeks in January and February spinning up SomnolCCSO, a Python 3 server for delivering plain text people search entries to any clients that would take them. It works great, it’s been running for almost a year now without complaint, it’s easy to update thanks to the database being a JSON file, and it works with all ph clients that I’ve been able to get my hands on, including the canonical ph client, Netscape, Lynx, and a couple others. (You can read all about the juicy details of SomnolCCSO in the “SomnolCCSO and Reviving an Old, Dead Database Lookup Protocol” post from February.)

A Cammy project idea from years prior come to life is sweet enough, but more than that, this was the program that officially got me thinking like a programmer. I remember toying with, well, toys like Just BASIC and Phrogram as a kid, never making much of note but in love with the idea of telling the computer what to do, and Python is kinda one of those ideal beginner languages with a lot of room to grow in it. Pituophis, the Gopher server that dcb spun up for us years ago, is also written in Python, so I knew it was plenty resilient–I just never felt I personally could do much with it until I wrote the majority of SomnolCCSO’s functionality, logging, and error-checking over a few weeks. It’s a very powerful feeling, being able to write your own servers and software, even if it’s just a little antiquated thing like a CCSO server.

Little less antiquated, though…

PHP, databases, and the mari.somnol relaunch

Even if I grew a little disillusioned with working on Protoweb over the summer, it did give me my first taste of writing PHP, and the first taste is always the sweetest. PHP is the world’s premier server-side scripting language, and everything from WordPress to MediaWiki is written in it. We’ve had the ability to run PHP scripts since I bought Somnol hosting in late 2018, and have been for mostly blog stuff until now, but I’d never felt I could actually write any of it myself until I had to write some CSV database stuff for a Protoweb restoration.

Believe me–you don’t get just how strange and crazy it is seeing a small chunk of HTML you wrote get turned into tables and pages of browsable data, none of which actually exist as HTML documents in your files, until you’ve written a bit of PHP yourself. I was so supremely used to maintaining dozens of static, individual HTML pages, slogging through manually updating them one at a time any time I wanted to fix something small with them all, that seeing the server generate a page for me based on one script and a few HTTP GET variables took me into the 21st century. I was hooked. I wanted to make use of this arcane magic for my own sites.

I’m still working on my album review section to this day. The frontend is all written in PHP, using some of the newest PHP features to securely parameterize and retrieve data from a MySQL database, the thing that stores all my actual album reviews. Put it in plain English: I write the page once, and the server slots all the names, review, and score stuff into it for me, as you try to read it. It is wild being able to edit one script and fix bugs in all of my album reviews at once, or introduce new features, or add new reviews simply by punching a new row into a database.

Even if some longtime PHP guru could conceivably look down on my work, I’ve yet to care. It does it better than I ever imagined, I’m not making any big security errors, and it’s completely reinvigorated my love for making websites, because it’s infinitely less work to keep maintained. With what PHP freed up in me, I can now split mariteaux.somnolescent.net, previously dormant and being prototyped offsite, into three different sites, so you can browse the same site on Netscape 3.0, RetroZilla, or your fancy-ass modern phone, fully responsive. (The latter has yet to be built, but lofi is my favorite site I’ve ever built, so I don’t mind one bit.)

I can even keep RSS feeds updated, completely automatically, of everything I get up to. Somnolescent now has an RSS feed for site updates. Subscribe and get notified when anyone on the site network adds to their site! That’s killer. You know it and I know it. Technology.

The art grind and Art Fight

The past two years, I’ve been commemorating my starting to learn to draw with blog posts with some of my favorite pieces from the year and some art goals for the next. Last year, I set out for the following:

If 2022 was the year of learning to draw at all and 2023 was the year of learning to draw confidently, I want 2024 to be the year of learning to draw a variety of things. I want to give ferals another go–that means I’ll be able to draw proper animal-y animals, Pokémon, Neopets, all those wonderful fantasy creature OC ideas I’ve been meaning to get down on paper for many many years now. I want to shore up my mustelids; mustelids are my favorite animals, otters and martens and polecats and, of course, badgers, and being able to draw them comfortably means being able to draw effectively half of my character lineup.

Smashing success right there! I’ve since drawn two Eeveelutions, one for a piece for Caby I never quite got done and one for Art Fight for dcb, an Azumarill for Art Fight, a Bori, so a Neopet (also for dcb, not for Art Fight), and I’ve drawn fennecs, African wild dogs, servals, skunks, goats, pine martens, and plenty more badgers for others and myself. I even did some more drawovers and mixed media stuff and painted a rather wonky, but personally charming landscape piece for some CD cover art.

I branched out big time this year, and all that practice has made me forget that I’m just three years into knowing how to draw. That’s basically no time at all! I definitely could do with pulling back, but when you go that hard, you land somewhere you like, no matter what, and I really have. I look back at even drawings from last year and find myself noticing all the wonky bits about them that I wouldn’t do now, eyes being too far apart and hands and ears not being quite proportional. I don’t mind it, of course, because I had to draw those to get here, but I do feel I’ve improved by leaps and bounds, and I love what I draw now! I never thought I’d be able to draw anything, and yet here we are.

I also tackled the biggest challenge so far–Art Fight! Art Fight is a massively-online art trading game that gets played every July, and I’ve been promising Caby I’ll join in (and failing at that) since 2022. This year, I was determined to get up some better refs for my characters and start attacking others. I surprised myself! I did ten full-color, shaded fullbody pieces for the event, while working five days a week. Now I know better, and I’m not gonna pretend like I didn’t get my ass kicked and some of my hopes dashed while I was at it, but for my end, I did great. Big thing was being able to finally make good on one of my promises to Caby, and I very much did that this year.

The lightest, thinnest Cammy since high school

Onto more real life things! I lost over 30lbs this year. I distinctly remember a post-Christmas scene where I could finish a whole chocolate bar in one go and thinking “hang on, I used to have more restraint than this”. Fuck Dry January, I took January off from snacking and drinking altogether, only having my normal meals and water, and that became six months of no junk food and no flavored drinks, not even milk.

By the end of it, I went from overweight to right smack in the middle of healthy range for my height.

Weight loss felt like happy marriages to me, this thing people chase and yet never seem to actually manage, but I not only did it–I’ve kept the weight off despite going back to snacking and drinking. I can only guess I really packed on a lot of weight from being sedentary over lockdowns, but being under 150lbs, the closest I’ve been to my weight in high school since then, and watching my work pants feel ridiculously loose on me and my old jackets fit me again is awesome.

You too can be thinner. Ignore anything about how well you’re eating, it’s all calories. (Eat a good diet too, though, dork. Nutrient deficiencies are nothing to fuck with.) Find your basal metabolic rate (the amount of calories you burn a day just by existing) and shoot for 500-600 a day lower than that. I managed it by only eating twice a day, which never left me feeling hungry, because hunger is when your body expects to eat, not when you actually need to eat. Very few people need three square meals. I dropped two pounds a week doing it at my fastest.

I’m probably gonna do it again this January because it just felt supremely satisfying to watch myself get lighter and lighter, less and less squishy and slovenly. If I can get under 140lbs, I’ll laugh my ass off. I never thought it possible, but I did it.

My favorite job so far

Keeping active is important too, and while I’d intended to stay at home and focus on my IT certifications so I can start working into a job that’d get me a UK work visa this year, a boy’s gotta make money, so that meant continuing to work retail. Following this year’s Wales trip (which I’ll get back to in a moment), I was having a hell of a time finding work, either from other places around town or from the former grocery store I worked at (and Staples is falling apart lmao). It only ended up being through aggressively pursuing people that I fell into another grocery store beer job, this time for a place ten minutes from my house.

That job sucked, but it paved the way for where I’m working now, and a place I’ll have been with for four months in less than two weeks. I’m now working a proper beer distributor! In Pennsylvania, places are partitioned by what kinds of alcohol and how much of it they can sell to people, with bars (and technically grocery stores and gas stations and the like with eatery areas) only able to sell malt beverages and wine in limited quantities, liquor stores being state-run, and beer distributors being able to sell bulk amounts of malt beverages in any amount, but only malt beverages (and alcohol-reduced wine, and ready-to-drink cocktails of whiskey and vodka, but not actual whiskey and vodka–look, Pennsylvania’s weird).

I managed to fall into this beer distributor job literally a week after quitting my last grocery store job, and it was again through aggressively pursuing people. My mom spotted a listing on Indeed, it was gone, I emailed them, they said to send my resume, they loved my resume, and within a week, I was training there. This job not only pays a couple dollars more an hour than any of my previous, it’s full-time, I’m fully insured with good health and dental insurance, I get holiday pay (yeah, I got paid for today! And we were closed!), and I get a free case of one of our brands of beer or cider every month.

The atmosphere is the most relaxed I’ve ever worked in, and sure, it’s not perfect, it’s still retail–but this place singlehandedly paid off my student loans. If I can stick with it for a year, I should have a real nice nest egg saved up, plus a nice car. That’s not bad at all coming from the worst grocery store in our area.

Another Wales trip!

But about that Wales trip! I was basically prodded into resigning from Staples, and that meant scheduling another trip to Wales right away while I didn’t have a job. I know I came back from the first trip in 2023 with a really deep sense of longing, and it felt good to go back so soon. (Caby’s parents would’ve probably appreciated more warning, but life comes at you fast. Wha-pow.) Plus, the flight traffic in February is pretty comfortable–you don’t wanna be flying peak hours in December or June, and neither do I.

This trip was even better than the first one. I was surprised and a little sad to learn that Caby kinda regretted the trips because of some of the hard nights and things we had to figure our way through, but I didn’t and don’t care about any of that. I was set on this being my future while I was there. Walking every day all over, all the comfy lunches together, buying tons of cheap DVDs at CEX and gathering her parents boxsets of Spaced and The IT Crowd and watching them over rum and cokes (or late night pasta, which is still hugely tasty, I must say), it was so good, dudes. I can still remember falling asleep on her bed right next to her as she drew Flipnotes on the DSi XL I modded for her an hour prior. That’s true love right there.

Even if the day-to-day isn’t nearly as exciting as that, the fact that I get to be there every day, from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, with my best friend, this girl who thinks like me and understands me and I can talk to forever and ever, is more than enough to make me sure on that being the next step in my life. We have our ideas planned out for how–just about building the money and the work history to get a UK company to sponsor me over–but for now, I have the memories, the photos I took, and the promise of another visit next autumn to keep me going. (I’ll do up a trip diary at some point, I have one half-finished and then life got crazy.)

The end of the very long last summer

I’ve been feeling this year like I really should relax a little more, now that I’ve got this full-time job and life’s draining a lot more out of me than it used to. There was one specific order of business I had to finish up first though, and that was getting my handmade Last Summer CDs assembled and mailed out to friends.

In December of last year, I put out my first new music since college, the Last Summer EP under the name mtlx, and in all the celebrating, I wanted to make a physical release of it happen. I knew I didn’t want to spend the $200 to get 50 copies of it professionally made, and I happened to work at Staples at the time, and casually feeling up all their paper made me realize that 80lb gloss is a near-exact approximation of CD booklet paper, so I decided to get some templates off the Internet and put together my own run of twenty CD-Rs, complete with back covers and glossy, eight-page booklets.

Of course, knowing me, I had to go even more nuts than that. I’ve been saving all the gory details for a postmortem for my personal journal (which I can only post when Canada Post decides to stop fucking around and deliver Savannah and Connor’s packages), but here’s a brief summary.

1. I got prints of all the booklet pages, double-sided, plus the back inserts for the jewel cases in December.
2. In July, long after I stopped working there, I came back and used the print center’s stuff to chop everything up, staple things together, and assemble twenty jewel cases. This took me four hours.
3. I decided I wanted to draw people’s OCs and personalize the copies going to the Somnolians. That took another couple of weeks to draw everything, get it printed on nice colored cardstock, trimmed out, and put into the cases.
4. I realized that shipping was gonna be nutso expensive and I wasn’t keen on doing it twice, so my end of the year mixtape (which I also got mailed out and you can expect a separate post on my journal about whenever everyone gets theirs) got included in everyone’s envelopes. That was another piece of art I had to make and print out and cut out and get assembled in the jewel cases.
5. CD-Rs got burned. I definitely burned through at least a dozen, some of which were test burns and got discarded.
6. Finally, I had to get everything assembled in boxes and bubble mailers and pay for the shipping. $97.60 on its own, according to the receipt I still have on my desk.

I spent well over $200 in the making of the Last Summer CD-Rs, and aside from the delays with Canada Post, I consider it all entirely worth it. The reactions I’ve gotten from dcb, from Caby, from some of the folks outside the group who got theirs–everyone says I did a spectacular job, and every time I listen to Last Summer again, I’m reminded of what it’s all for. I’m really pleased with the album, and I wanted nice artwork to go with it, and I wanted to give everyone in the group a little personalized gift this year, something to remind them I am real and can send them drawings of animal people in the mail. (I will eventually start selling the CD-Rs on my Bandcamp as well, mostly to get them out in the world and to clear up space at Somnolescent HQ.)

What I got

And really, that’s a good jumping off point into life in general. I have around me the best group of friends I could ever ask for now, people who get the way I think, people who appreciate everything I do, and people who I love talking to. These are people I am not only excited to get packages from, but to send to, now that I can do them exactly as I want to do them. I want to visit them next year. I’m a couple grand off from having a nice, reliable car to take the trips to Canada or Minnesota or Virginia or wherever else I want to in. By spring 2025, I’ll be able to see these folks standing next to me, and that’s huge.

In every other time in Somnolescent’s existence, someone didn’t fit. Something you really should keep in mind is that, when someone claims someone is keeping them down and they finally get free of that influence, if they still suck, they were probably keeping themselves down more than anything. We had borb, someone who we devoted so much of our time, advice, energy, encouragement, and attention to, only to have her try to tell other people how we were a literal cult that “consumes” people. (Naturally, she has spent roughly $3500 in the past two years on PNG adoptables and never draws anymore.) Devon was someone we so wanted to fit, so encouraged to be better and to take care of herself, and in the end, she just could not stop being unhinged, miserable, racist, and misogynistic at complete random. (She is currently apparently in debt and still buying fabrics and magazines, still malding about other people being uncool poseurs under a new name, happily ever after of course.)

These are the kinds of people I tried to make friends out of. They will never tell you the time I accompanied them to the water park and eased their body dysmorphia just by being a good friend and having a good time with them, or all the times I drew their characters, or helped them for hours to build websites they didn’t even want to build in the first place, yet lied over and over and said they totally did prommy–but I did all those things anyway. I get a bad rap around these parts because I am a stuffy, humorless sperg. I’ll talk about that all more some other time, but I’m keenly aware of the enemies I’ve made just by being me, and sometimes it’s amusing and sometimes it’s frustrating, doubly so given I turned 25 this year and am way too old for shit like that.

This iteration of Somnolescent has it all right. We all have the same kind of sense of humor. We like to encourage each other as much as we like to just play old favorite games and zone out. No one feels out of place, no one harbors any kind of resentment, no one has to be awkwardly coaxed into doing the stuff they said they love doing and yet never do. We can have a laugh and we can share sad or personal stuff, and no one feels uncomfortable at any of it. These folks are well and truly some of the closest friends I’ve ever had.

And I do wanna give a shoutout to some non-group folks and former group folks who were good to us, all things considered. Jake, Friday, nyanezt, mon, anyone who’s emailed me with kind regards about my sites, anyone who’s shouted out AutoSite as something they’ve gotten a lot of use out of, anyone who’s submitted a cat to Caby’s cat gallery, linked Somnolescent on their own site, any of that–love you, you’re great, and I’m glad you’re out there and looking at my dumb little group of sites from me and my friends. We should talk more. mariteaux@somnolescent.net is always open to everyone.

And anyone who has ever been against us and is currently down bad–which is all of them–hopefully you feel the Bulb’s warmth again and you come back to the light. We love you.

Happy Thanksgiving!