Never ask me to estimate things. I don’t know how much that would cost, I can’t wager how heavy it is, and I certainly can’t imagine distances. I don’t know why, but my sense of scale is the wonkiest thing on the planet.
Somnolescent is no different! One of our recent new casual friends who’s been sitting in on mine and Savannah’s streams remarked that somnolescent.net is like a gigantic maze, and I really hadn’t thought about it because I’ve been working on it for seven years now and have zero perspective on it. Even though it’s as organized as it can possibly be, there’s still so much to see that I can’t imagine how it looks to anyone who isn’t me. Must be intimidating.
I did a roundup of neat things I found on archives back in May 2023, when I really started to push on turning it into a Web museum of restored, vintage sites and pure Somnolescent history, but one post of five things (technically ten things) only scratches the surface, and I’ve added a lot to it since then. Given it’s warm, fuzzy, rememberberries season, I bring to you another batch of neat shit we all worked on that you should go and check out.
#1: Letters From Somnolescent (/web/blog_v1/), 2019
Being a recovering contrarian, for a long time, I had reservations about anything popular and successful. WordPress is, by far, the most used blogging platform, and DreamHost really pushes integration with it, even offering managed WordPress installs for a fee. Naturally, this meant I didn’t want anything to do with it. (I’d like to think these days, my occasional dips into things like HTMLy for the journal on cammy.somnolescent.net are more out of curiosity and a need for a different workflow than an active desire to be different.)
Originally, Letters From Somnolescent ran on Nucleus! Nucleus is an ancient PHP and MySQL blogging package much like WordPress, only completely different. Nucleus’ original developers skedaddled in the mid-2010s, leaving development to be picked up by some Japanese folks who really liked it. For Somnolescent, I set it up on this here subdomain in 2019 when I got the itch to give the whole group somewhere to post things that didn’t require dealing with their websites. Nucleus was picked for the ability to have child accounts with the ability to submit posts, but not nuke everything. (Remember, Hyperlink had happened less than a year prior. If you know that means, be sure to renew your AARP membership, grandpa.)
Nucleus shat itself hardcore in December 2019. With no configuration changes, people suddenly stopped being able to log in, and I had just gotten tired of dealing with Nucleus’ wonky editor and the fear that running such janky, ancient software would leave us vulnerable to Little Bobby Tables that I said fuck it, migrated all that year’s posts to a WordPress install, converted the theme to a WordPress theme, and relaunched it a day later. WordPress has been with us ever since, and y’know what, I quite like it.
That said, the original Nucleus version of Letters, despite surviving in my backups (I did monthly, now seasonal, scrapes of the entire site network from the backend to protect us from ourselves), was never accessible again after it died in December. somnol_v2 was meant to match it, so if I had one on archives, I really had to have the other, doubly so now that Letters uses a completely different theme than it did back then.
Earlier this year, I briefly reinstalled Nucleus on an unlisted subdomain, rendering it all to static HTML using wget and throwing the copy up on archives for all to enjoy its…charm(?) once again. The process was messy, the jank and ancient PHP bubbling back up out of the vents to burn my throat, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. If you want to read the gory details of how I did it, that got a cammy.somnol journal entry back in August 2024.
Honorable mention: The original version of my Scratchpad, attached to mari_v2. This went up at the same time as blog_v1 for similar reasons. The Scratchpad was originally its own thing on archives, but that felt wrong to separate it from the context it existed in, so it eventually got homed to mari_v3 (which it was contemporary with), and I rendered the OG version of the Scratchpad for mari_v2 to match. WordPress sites are a lot easier to make static than Nucleus ones, thankfully. Check out that also extremely jank custom theme! I was on fire back then.
#2: Caby’s DeviantART (/web/caby_v3/art/), mid-2020
No, not Caby’s actual DeviantART. That site hasn’t been worth using for years! (I stuck with it longer than most and got rewarded with AI-generated vaginas on my front page for my troubles. I stopped using it shortly thereafter.) No, this was a site gallery! Back then, she thought it’d be fun to use DeviantART’s actual 2000 markup and structure for a monthly art roundup thing, but as you can imagine, it was pretty awfully put together and it made working on it difficult. (This version is still on caby_v2, if you’re curious.)
The version on caby_v3 is actually a cleaned up version I made to make it easier for her to update! I did a lot of work to slim down the mess of tables, improving the navigation, struggling with bizarre image margin quirks in the process, and converting it to an AutoSite template so she could just plop drawings and descriptions into an AutoSite page and get out a new gallery as desired. Caby wound up not sticking with it (and neither did I, we’re older and busier, no shade here), trying a WordPress-based gallery for caby_v4 and then giving up on the concept of site art galleries altogether, but archives preserves all that hard work the both of us did, so I wouldn’t call it a waste.
Outside of the technicals, a lot of this has literally never been seen elsewhere. Even if you’ve been through Caby’s old DeviantART galleries and FurAffinity profile, most of this will still be new to you. You’ll also find lots of unfinished and experimental drawings, brush tests, shitposts, and whatever the doodly flighty brain of a Caby that got squashed out with college and our fixation on finishing things came up with. It’s really fun to see the exact moment Neopets fever hit the group, or when Districts or Pennyverse was first being developed, or when the anime bug started to creep into her art for the first time. archives is such a phenomenal time capsule, I love it to death.
Honorable mention: the Badger Appreciation Gallery (really the Cammy Appreciation Gallery) from caby_v1. I still adore all these. I can’t describe to you how crazy it is to have a girl who had never met you in person and only seen a few random dumb photos of you manage to capture you so accurately in an animal person (yes, even the shitposts). Her Cammys really did inspire me to get comfier in myself, the things I saw in him that she actually saw in me, and every one is still very special to me as a result. She’s got a gift, lads. Funnily enough, these days, Caby draws a lot of badgers for school (not Cammys, though that would be really funny), so a badger gallery updated for 2026 would have to be, like, a whole fucking subsite.
#3: Welcome to dotcomboom (/web/dcb_iweb/), unreleased, but circa mid-2020
archives is a funny old place because some of what appears on it actually never got deployed, or never functioned correctly when it was deployed. dcb has always pretty restlessly reworked his sites, experimented with meme frameworks, or toyed with WYSIWYG HTML editors, and this little experiment with iWeb fits right in with those.
If you don’t remember iWeb, you probably don’t remember iLife, the software suite it used to come in, either. In the 2000s, Apple had these two paid bundles of software, iLife and iWork, one a lifestyle/creativity/media sorting package and one an office suite. iLife used to be super exciting. You got iPhoto (which just became the Photos app on iOS and Mac), iTunes (also superceded, now by the Music app, because everything needs to be boring), iMovie, GarageBand, iDVD (full DVD authoring software!), and of course iWeb (you build websites with it!!!). Oh, I loved it, as a squeaky Mac fanboy who’d yet to fall from Tim Apple’s graces. Now computers are no fun and everything is just spicy autocomplete, but I promise, there was a time when fucking around with Photo Booth and using iMovie to give those videos goofy titles and music was the funnest thing on the planet.
This one’s actually been quietly up on archives for quite some time, but it needed more love before I linked it out. I do a lot of find-and-replace patching of links and removal of unnecessary elements (say, RSS feeds for static WordPress sites, since they’re obviously static) when I move stuff to archives, and occasionally I break stuff that way. While iWeb sites are highly nostalgic, they’re also, well, WYSIWYG editor sites, which means they have a ton of extra styling, markup, bloat, and JavaScript than they need to, and the sole reason for dcb_iweb to exist, the photo gallery, didn’t work for something I broke somewhere.
Again, this is where my obsessive backups come in handy, because I was able to pull a copy from dcb’s period site and start over. Now the galleries of his fun nature photos not only work, they’re all animated. You’ll have to supply the music yourself; try my ripped iLife Sound Effects and Jingles hoard for something appropriate, also courtesy of archives.
Honorable mention: dcb_nc0. Not a ton to see, except that this is a very early version of dcb’s Neocities site that never made it onto Neocities. He had it in his files, gave those files to me, and it was tiny, so I put it up on archives. There’s lots of little unlisted things on archives like this that never got released, or are there for the group’s amusement. If you want to see what he actually left Neocities with, that’d be dcb_nc9 (or dcb_nc2, for what these earliest versions of his Neocities site took shape into).
#4: Lince’s Links (/web/lince/), mid-2021
There’s a theory that things like eating disorders can come out of a need for control in a stressful environment where you have none. I wanna say Somnol went through something similar to that at the outset of lockdowns, with all the myriad site redesigns and weird fads that blew through the group then, one of which was the concept of digital gardening. Digital gardening is meant to be the antithesis of the nice, polished, edited blog. It’s a garden. Stuff’s growing, pages are small and half-finished and linked together in a big web. Paired with our at-the-time very strong old Web larp (as opposed to our current mild-to-moderate old Web larp), it was exciting and refreshing to change what we could when we were stuck wasting our lives inside. So, dcb, Devon, and I (in that order) broke ground on our very own digital gardens.
That said, I can’t say Devon or I really understood the concept. We mostly made little static HTML “more personal” sites in devon.somnol and cammy.somnol. devon.somnol got abandoned basically after one update, and cammy.somnol felt wrong to me, something I’ll get into later. dcb’s worked a lot better and stuck to the actual concept, filled up with quick scraps of useful console commands, lists of interesting links elsewhere, self-recorded radio airchecks, and experiments making fractals or drawing or Bryce 3D, effectively a digital notebook mess of various flights of fancy and interests dcb has or had at the time at least. Even though Lince’s Links was retired in 2022, it still makes for interesting browsing a few years later.
I do still like the idea of a digital garden, but the ideal is difficult to define and even harder to maintain. You read reflections on the topic, padded to the back teeth with flowery language, seemingly setting up to distinguish the wiki as the peak of digital gardening, only to say that personal wiki software like Obsidian and TiddlyWiki actually limit you, decrying them as “cookie-cutter solutions” despite offering the exact idea of a digital garden, but in a way someone might actually wanna build with, and you start to get the sense that there is no true expression of that ultimate freedom to people. Even if you did build one, a website of 400 half-finished pages suddenly seems a lot less appealing in practice than it did in your head. dcb did give it a good shot though, and I always enjoy being reminded of it.
Honorable mention: The original version of cammy.somnol, cammy_v1. Like I said, I didn’t like what I built for a long time. Even ignoring the lockdown depressive streak, I felt like I was splitting my sites, mari.somnol and cammy.somnol, between what I felt comfortable with people seeing attached to the mariteaux name, like my mod work, and that which was too personal, like my stories. Paired with the aforementioned old Web larp, it just didn’t suit me. Eventually, I reconceived mari.somnol as my nicely trimmed portfolio site and cammy.somnol for my real-life adventures and obscure interests, and that stuck. At this point, though, it was still a lot of Netscape Composer old Web OG furry larp. I don’t hate it as much as I used to, and there’s still some fun reads in there, most of which has either been transferred to mari.somnol or will be returning to cammy.somnol at some point hopefully soon.
#5: somnolescent (/web/somnol_nc/), November 2018
Returning to Somnolescent’s earliest days! (I went and put on a Hum song that I was listening to a lot back then just to put myself in the right mood for writing this bit. It’s a little glimmer of warm love in a dark, fried, tired, miserable instrumental. How fitting.) We didn’t even have our own hosting yet! We were all still on Neocities then. I was so good at attracting conflict in those days that Caby especially became paranoid at the next way people were gonna start fucking with us (I was only paranoid of ways people would fuck with her, in truth). Discovering that somnolescent.neocities.org had been recently registered by someone else spooked us both…
…Until it turned out Neo had just grabbed it for us. She thought the same thing we did and grabbed it before anyone else could. In commemoration of our group slowly forming into something very real and heavy indeed, we quickly put together this little page, Cheren’s design with my overdramatic writing that’s that wonderful mixture of kinda embarrassing and also “I kinda still like that” that my flowery stuff ends up being to me and Caby’s super neat and ominous glowing-eye headshots (look! snake dcb is a bomb, because dotcomboom).
I recognize that there’s probably a lot of people reading this right now who don’t know who Cheren and Neo (the cat and dog underneath me, Caby, and dcb) even are. They’re such blips in the timeline to the point where I don’t even mention them on the History of Somnolescent page; they left that little of an impression. Long story short, they were this K-popper couple we met on Neocities who wrapped us up in their, uh, nonsense. I don’t know how much he-said she-said you really want to listen to here, but as quickly as they came in November, they were gone by February. It sucked, it hurt, it was very messy and very personal, and we had to learn that lesson a couple times before it stuck. Do not befriend crazy. The Geek Social Fallacies are fallacies for a reason. (Last we knew, they were drawing Pikmin pornography on Mastodon or something. It was pretty funny.)
If you’re curious, the actual Neocities account this was posted to no longer seems to be active. I don’t know if it got closed on its own or if it was under my Supporter’s banner; all those sites finally got shut down thanks to Kyle Drake realizing he fucked up after I emailed him earlier this year, to no reply like always. Like districts.neocities.org, I’d kinda like to have it again just for the sentimentality. Unfortunately, Kyle is a deadbeat with five kids from three baby mamas, one of which is me.
I’m gonna make you pay child support, Kyle. You can’t hide in your little sailor hat forever.
Honorable mention: /web/somnol_nc/kachow/. Neo wrote this for some reason. It’s just always been attached to the backup of the site, even though it’s not linked anywhere. Now it is! Burger Mountain is a real place, by the way. It’s actually called the Caerphilly Mountain Snack Bar (oh yeah, Neo was also Welsh–what are the chances that I had two strange Welsh women over the Internet into me at the same time?), and it really is up a gigantic fucking hill, hence the name. It was sort of the promised land for Somnolescent for a long time, and now I’ve been there! I ate a Mountain Monster! In halves, which amused Caby’s family endlessly, but it’s a bigass sandwich! There’s two meals there. I’ve been to diners my whole life, I know how this works. Fuck you.
