Author: bulb
February 19, 2024
 Long, long ago, in a timeline that seems completely absurd now, Somnolescent was merely an IRC room on Foonetic hosting four lonely people who didn’t like each other much. That was 2014. I still have the logs. (Please don’t ask to see them.)
Over time, lurkers and friends outside the group have asked us where they can chat with us, and the choice has either been to say “sorry, we don’t have a place you can chat with us”, or to start up a Discord we’ll wind up hating and shuttering in a few months. The answer always lay in IRC, of course, given that’s where Somnol started–but it never occurred to us. Except for that time in 2020 when it occurred to us.
Now that we’ve gotten the fuzzies for it again, we’ve once again established an official IRC room (on Rizon, given that Foonetic is sadly defunct). Join #somnolescent at irc.rizon.net, 6697 for secure connections and 6667 for insecure connections (among other ports). If that’s gibberish to you, you can click this Kiwi IRC link to join the server in your browser, no setup required. Hope to see you there!
November 16, 2023
I debate making posts like this. Letters is normally a place where we as Somnolians come to share what we’re into or what we’re up to, but it’s also the only spot I truly have for making announcements about group matters. I feel supremely silly every time someone leaves the group, given how private we are and how Somnolescent is nothing without each person that’s a part of it. That’s why I often don’t make mention of when people go. That said, I’ve seen people try to attack us in parting, so I’m defending my group.
Devon, matfloor, has been removed from Somnolescent. We’ve seen her become increasingly unhinged and flat out out of pocket racist over the past few months. This came to a very violent head this afternoon. We hope she gets healthier and comes to her senses, but as of today, she is no longer associated with the group. Her sites will remain up on archives and her posts on Letters, as is customary.
October 17, 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!
May 6, 2023
 If you were to ask me my favorite part of the Somnolescent site network, archives would be it. archives started back in 2020 as cold storage for file hoards, but more and more, it’s become my obsession to use it as a living museum of all the websites that the Somnolians have built over the past six years or so. We’ve had so many cool ideas for pages, so many memories around our sites, so many neat looks and layouts for them, that I feel personally responsible to keep it all intact. I want it all as browsable, speedy and functional as the day we unveiled them.
archives has been eating tremendously well this year. All of Caby and dcb’s sites from the Neocities days are finally present on there, patched, restored, and usually fully functional. I just finished restoring dcb_v2, a BeOS-styled site that used an embedded Gopher proxy to display Gopher menus in lieu of pages, last month. Now that’s fully functional again, using locally-stored copies of the proxy’s output back when our Gopher looked like that. I’m supremely proud of it–and just happy to have it to click around again!
Only counting full sites (not components of sites or subsites), we’re up to 54 of them. That’s a lot of sites! And I built half of them, probably! There’s so much on archives, you might not know where to start, and that’s what I wanna spotlight. Here’s five cool, nostalgic (if you’re of a certain age and web background) sights from Somnolescent’s past you can go visit on archives right now, just as if it were still live on our sites today.
December 20, 2022
A quick happy birthday to Somnolescent before the day’s out here on the east coast…
September 20, 2022
We’re a festive sort here at Somnolescent. We love our Halloweens and Christmases and even our Easters (it’s the cute bunny, but enough about my girlfriend). Holidays are great! It sets the mood for the whole month, it breaks up the monotony.
We devoted the entirety of August 2019 to Pennyverse, and it got me thinking about giving that devotion to the rest of our worlds and building up a Somnolescent calendar for the whole year. Always something to celebrate around here!
July 15, 2022
We like to redesign our sites from time to time, and earlier this year, the top-level domain got its turn. The previous design came in the spring of 2020 and featured a rotating crop of big, toony banners at the top of each page that would show up either year-round or seasonally.
While we gave up on that site design, we’re still very fond of the banners. Obviously, they’re no longer featured on the top-level site. That’s a lot of art and a lot of work going to waste! While we’d like to reuse them in another design, for now, this post will have to do.
Being a longtime reader of the Video Game Critic, I decided to take a page out of his book (or off his site, maybe?) and not just write up a bit on my thoughts on each banner, but get the people who made them to tell their stories about each one.
April 4, 2022
What’s this? What’s going on? Why the sudden change? Is Somnolescent falling apart? I bet it is–look, people’s sites are disappearing! Something big is happening. We said it wouldn’t last four months, and hey, three years isn’t too far off–
Grab some wood there, bub. The blog is not going anywhere, nor is the group. This is the final recap in its current form. There’s a very good reason for it, and I think the new arrangement will make my friends in the group, as well as myself (having to write all this…), happier as a result. It’s a good recap though! Lots good happening. Let’s revisit the last three months one last time.
April 3, 2022
Today, the new somnolescent.net launches! It’s taken us a couple months, but we all love it here. Far livelier, far cuter, far better matching how we truly are as a group, and far simpler to boot.
With it comes a new manifesto, something I felt everyone should be able to weigh in on rather than the one I wrote in a few evenings back in 2018. While we elected to go with a simpler about page for the moment, I still think the new manifesto deserves a place in the spotlight alongside it. I’ll be looking for a place to link it on the site itself, no worries.
December 25, 2021
 I couldn’t write a traditional year recap for this year because it just hasn’t been a traditional year for Somnolescent. I can’t lay out four seasons of what we all did together–too much has changed, my mind’s elsewhere, I’m ready to do something different and simpler, right now and next year.
Here’s what we’re doing instead: I’ve gone back through the old recaps, picked one thing per person I liked, and I’ll ramble about it some. Art highlights follow, as always, then I’ll talk about what exactly has changed and what the gameplan for Somnolescent in 2022 is. Less to write, less for you to read.
Oh, and Caby drew my favorite thing in the world for the occasion. Let’s review!
Older posts |
