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Author Archives: mariteaux
Happy Five Years: The 2024 Infrastructure Upgrade Plans
Normally at this time, I’d be bringing you the next installment of First Draft, but I just had no desire to work on it this past month despite having a wallop of an album to do it on–chalk that up to working 35 hours a week at retail, I suppose. Instead, given that it’s December and that means the Somnolescent retrospectives and prospectives start rolling off the line soon (five years of the group being officially reborn on the 20th!), I figured I’d ramble a bit about the group instead, and more specifically, updating things around here.
We fell off the site stuff a little over lockdowns, and when things opened back up, obviously, we were more concerned with going outside and getting on with life than updating our silly animal people pages. This has left some of them out-of-date, sometimes woefully so. I think we’re all feeling the desire for it again–dcb_v5 just launched in October, fwd_v2 has just launched–so let me tell you about my own plans to update Somnolescent’s web presence. There’s a lot.
First Draft: Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim
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 review looks back on the Pixies’ debut EP Come On Pilgrim, the infamous purple tape it came from, and the re-records of the leftover material scattered throughout the rest of their initial run, and whether or not the EP would’ve been better served as a full album.
First Draft: Failure’s Magnified
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 second edition examines the home demos that almost comprised Failure’s second album, 1994’s Magnified.
First Draft: Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
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 especially long-winded First Draft concerns the infinite permutations of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco’s 2002 art rock opus which streamed online officially for the first time 22 years ago today.
What Even is Somnolescent?
I’m standing around at work, tidying the shelves, and something pops into my head: no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of what Somnolescent actually is. We’ve been called a tilde, we’ve been described as a community of Windows 2000 users and MSN Messenger reverse engineers, a group of Furcadia friends, people have said we built toyhou.se, all sorts of wild shit. Those Somnolians, they get around!
Some of this was promulgated by me wanting to make Somnolescent sound spooky and cultlike, so I was intentionally vague describing it to people for the first year or two. We’re almost at five now, though, and whenever we’re mentioned online, folks still try to put us in a box–and they keep getting that box weirdly wrong. I didn’t think we were doing anything all that complicated, but apparently, Somnolescent perplexes people.
First Draft: …The Dandy Warhols Come Down
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 first review concerns the first attempt at the second Dandy Warhols album, 1997’s …The Dandy Warhols Come Down, as given to us by the band seven years later.
A Tale of Two Welsh Record Stores
If I didn’t tell you about it already, I was in Wales for three weeks last month into this month visiting Caby. It was genuinely life-changing, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, I’m still wishing I was back over there, and her and her family keep telling me how much they miss me too. Life is seriously much easier in person–and it’s a lot more fun when there’s adventure to be had! And what better adventure can you have than foreign record stores?
There’s two in Caby’s immediate area, and I hit up both to great success. It was a lot of fun digging through the bins, picking out CDs, telling stories, trying risks, and even having some encounters with some curious strangers! I even bought some Welsh-language music! While I continue to put off working on the much larger trip diary, let me laser-focus on the days I visited…
mariversary 4.0: Revisiting Nostalgiamining
To be honest, I didn’t think I’d have enough to talk about for a fourth Neocities retrospective post. I was only on that site for about ten months, for God’s sake. I covered the year afterwards, I covered all my old Supporter’s sites, and I talked about my very first site design in years past. What else could I possibly revisit?
Passion. There’s two essays I wrote back then that somehow, somewhere, continue to get found, circulate, and stir people up. They’ve taken on a life of their own separate from me. People I’ve never met somehow find these buried deep in the Somnolescent Archives and pass them around, sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing. I’ve yet to retell the story, so let’s return to nostalgiamining, forging the future, passion, Neocities, and why all this shit still matters to folks.
Four Becomes Five: My First Year in Art
I’ve been fooling with the idea of doing art since early 2021, but January 2022 was when I officially started. That’s when I drew some scrunkly Wyns for Caby and tried my best to sketch out a whole ton of the ideas I’ve had lying around for, I dunno, years at that point.
It’s taken a lot of nerves and a lot of personal growth to get here (plus practice), but I can pretty confidently say I’m getting somewhere with it now. For the big one year (give or take a month), I’m gonna show off five (or maybe more?) drawings from throughout 2022 and mix memories and art critique. Everyone gather in a circle now.
Into the Greater Somnolescent Multiverse
So quietly, I’ve been working on relaunching cammy.somnolescent.net. Working on that site before, there were lots of really good pages that I just didn’t think fit right where they were. This is one of those pages: a goofy, fun bit of group lore that makes a better blog post than it does a random page on one of my sites.
I’ve edited and rewritten parts of it, of course, but you can call this one from the archives. Quite literally. Go check out the new cammy.somnol, by the way! I’m just getting started with it and it’s starting to take shape as possibly the cutest site I’ve made so far.