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Author Archives: mariteaux
Fretwork: Rating the marfGH Tiers with MATH
I’m known for doing multiple thousand word spews on albums on Letters as of late, so I’m here with something a little more digestible and like how I used to use the blog: weird fixations! I recently learned of a community tool that can actually score Guitar Hero and Rock Band songs based on difficulty, giving at least a repeatable, robotic second opinion to the very fallible world of difficulty scoring and tiering. I happen to be in the final stages of putting together a new marfGH, and got in touch with the dev to get raw Guitar Hero II game files supported within this tool. What’s the data, and how’s my tiering? Let’s dig in!
First Draft: Nirvana’s Nevermind
Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
Today’s First Draft concerns the studio sessions, rehearsals, and alternate mixes that went into one of the best-selling albums of all time, Nirvana’s 1991 smash hit Nevermind.
First Draft: Beck’s Guero
Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
This deep rabbit hole First Draft concerns the unfinished version of Beck’s 2005 apocalyptically poppy record Guero, which leaked out onto the Internet in early January that year and has been floating around ever since.
The Slightly Tacky Effervescence of Late 1990s Cable TV Ads
For my birthday last year, I dipped into a batch of network TV ads aired two days before I was born, on June 1, 1999, and picked out ten favorites to show you in particular. I really enjoyed it, and I only grow an extra number once a year, so let’s make it a tradition.
I have another batch of off-air commercial highlights from that day courtesy of OptimumPx, just as before, but whereas those were seen on WCBS-TV, a network station, these all aired over TNT, a cable channel. If you’re not from the US, you might not be appraised of the differences, but back in the 80s and 90s, cable and network TV were much different worlds. Network TV was over-the-air, antenna TV, free to view, and subject to much stricter regulation than cable TV, which as a result carried a reputation for being less…cerebral.
These ads definitely bear that out, though I think they’re still pretty warm and fuzzy. At the very least, they’re slightly less loud and technicolor than what we’ve got today–though some make it up with the dutch angles and shakycam. Have your seasick pills ready.
MCICR: The Color Crunching Algorithm Time Forgot
You know, when I wrote that initial post on PageMill, I wasn’t expecting to find a new rabbit hole to go down every time I explore the CD-ROM. It’s just happened that way! There’s so much included on it, so many weird, forgotten relics of the 90s, software you can’t find elsewhere, graphics from companies long gone, that I keep wanting to write about.
For today’s rabbit hole, I only ask you, my reader: are you a gambling sort? Today’s program involves just that, random chance, high stakes, and lawfare. I’m being more than slightly facetious. Sort of. Monte Carlo algorithms aren’t nearly as fun as Monte Carlo itself, but I do regularly downsample full-color PNGs to 256 colors for GIFs and things, and a program on the PageMill CD-ROM proved to be, if nothing else, an impressive and completely forgotten stab at doing just that. Let’s talk about why and look at some Somnolian art and photos along the way.
Exploring the Legacy of Image Club Graphics
Just over a week ago, I wrote a blogpost about Adobe PageMill. The kinda tool that could only ever have existed in the mid-to-late-90s, PageMill was a boxed CD-ROM Web page builder, and I find it neat. Being an Adobe product, you can imagine it came loaded up with some Adobe extras (install Acrobat, dammit!), but some of those extras have sent me down an additional rabbit hole. Specifically, it was a pack of Web-ready bullets, rules, headers, and backgrounds under the banner of Image Club Graphics–all stuff I love and stuff I could use in my various old Web pursuits.
My searches for more turned up precious little–until I knew what I was digging for. In the right spaces, you can still find their wares online, and I have some sampler discs from their lot to show you nonetheless. I hope you enjoy photos of cake, Smarties, businessmen, clocks, widgets for your Geocities site, and some jarringly quirky 90s handwriting and dingbat fonts.
(Fair warning that this is going to be a very image-heavy post and filled with the little-seen-on-Letters gallery block type. I know Letters is generally decently old browser friendly–this page may not be, or it may be slow. I’ve tried to optimize things where I can, but we’re gawking at shit today, so it comes with the territory.)
Milling a 90s Website With PageMill
I’ve built tons of websites over the past eight years, all by hand, clacking out HTML and CSS into Notepad++ or BBEdit and then assembling it with AutoSite, usually. Despite playing with WYSIWYG editors throughout my life, I’ve just never liked them. Eventually, I just get frustrated enough with their lack of control, wonky markup, and strange workflows that I start writing markup by hand again anyway.
Of course, we all mellow out with age, and I not only had a fun opportunity to build another little site recently, but a CD-ROM image of Adobe PageMill 3.0 lying around to build it with. I found it rather adorable and enjoyable. Let’s talk about the brief history of PageMill, what sucks about it, and what fucks about it.
Lucky Sevens: How Did People Get to somnolescent.net in 2025?
Happy new year to all the faithful Letters readers out there! As dcb said in his closing out the year post, groups like ours don’t usually stick around this long, but as we go into eight years of humbly posting obscure shit for your edification, the lights are on bright as ever here.
I thought I’d start up a new year’s tradition this year (which, turns out, I did back in 2021 but I guess gave up on) by giving you a peek behind the curtain. While somnolescent.net doesn’t track you (not just for privacy reasons, more because we like lightweight pages and clean HTML), I do have a lot of data courtesy of Google and Bing about where our pages get linked out online and what search terms bring people to what pages. While “Five Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives” and follow-up were meant to bring you what I think are some interesting draws to the site network, this one’s gonna be all about what actually draws people in.
Posted in 2025: Lucky Sevens, Retrospectives
Tagged Internet, Somnolescent, traffic reports
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Cammy vs. the PhotoCam III: This Has Gotten Stupid
The AOL PhotoCam has gone from “my curiosity” to “my nemesis” to “my fairweather obsession I somehow now own five of”. I know more about the PhotoCam than AOL did. I’ve seen the way these things break. I can tell when I got each of them by their specific damage. The search for a single working unit has been going on six years now, and I think we’ve found the end of it–because I now own two working units, one complete in the box.
If you know the story, I have more to update you on. If you don’t know the story, strap in! I’ve got a tale of temperamental retro tech, operator error, Redditor intrigue, and new perspectives on the futility of 30-year-old cameras and perhaps life itself. Yes, there will be photos. Hopefully, you find this a satisfying end to the saga.
Catching ‘Em All, and How to Do It
If you breathe, you know what Pokémon is. You’ve at least run into a Pikachu or perhaps even a Bulbasaur at some point in your life, and you might have a vague inkling that it’s a game about collecting creatures, with the goal being to, as both the song and the box says, Catch Them All.
The thing is, this is actually a lot fucking harder than you might think–so I set out to do it myself. In a copy of Pokémon Blue for the 3DS, after two-and-a-half years of on-and-off play, I now have a save with a full 151 possible Pokémon caught. I have screenshots of the journey.
What possesses a man to go to such obsessive lengths? What keeps people from doing the thing listed on the box? Why does Lt. Surge have such a fine ass? Join me, friends, and I will answer all your questions.