Author Archives: mariteaux

About mariteaux

Somnolescent's webmaster with way too much to write about and a stack of CDs he'll never finish.

End it Someday: Looking Back on With the Lights Out

Posted on November 23, 2019 by mariteaux

It’s been 25 years, 7 months, and 19 days since the death of Kurt Cobain. You might remember him as the singer and guitarist for Nirvana, who later ended up trying pellet-flavored Pez in his greenhouse. He’s pretty much been canonized as the last great rockstar, and eh—I don’t care. I love Nirvana, but I don’t care.

It’s also been 15 years since a little three-CD-one-DVD Nirvana treasure trove of B-sides, live tapes, and rehearsals came into the world. With the Lights Out was the first official look into the home demos and leftovers that went into producing Nirvana’s three proper records. It’s a fascinating little document with a lot of history—and a lot of flaws.

Join me as I ramble about my history with the boxset, its highs, its lows, and where I think it sits in the Greater Nirvana Canon as a Sacred Text or something. Continue reading →

Posted in Show-and-Tell | Tagged | 2 Comments

How the Goldfish Man Changed My Life

Posted on November 2, 2019 by mariteaux

My stepmom had a bookshelf CD collection when I was little. Young spergs have active imaginations, and I was no exception; album art was everything to me at 5. I probably spent more time staring at the cracked out, surrealist album covers and being confused, fascinated, and terrified than I did listening to anything at that age. (Redman’s Malpractice, whose blobbily-proportioned cover guy is still unsettling to look at, is a prime example of the weirdness I found in there.)

Of course, I knew just enough about CDs to know what they were for, and just enough about our family’s Athlon-based Windows XP machine to be able to listen to the odd album or two. Somewhere down the line, Counting Crows’ This Desert Life fell into my lap. It was bound to catch my attention; it had a man with a fishbowl for a head on the cover, how could it not? What wasn’t bound to happen was how important the album would become to me; in fact, it’s the first album I ever truly loved.

That album turns 20 today, and I’m feeling sentimental. No one else is looking back on it, so I’m going to. Continue reading →

Posted in Retrospectives | Tagged | Leave a comment

How the Feed Killed Creation

Posted on September 7, 2019 by mariteaux

Let’s start with a premise. We have a creator. She’s a writer, maybe, or maybe a visual artist. Maybe dabbles in animation. She’s got big ideas and the drive to see them to fruition. Might even be months into a grand project right now. Yet, she’ll post her stuff online or in a Discord server, and no one gives a shit.

The internet’s built on user-generated content, stuff ordinary people (people like you, perhaps!) create. And yet, with all these sites for it, where’s the support? Let’s talk about the feed and how it’s killed independent content. Continue reading →

Posted in Essays | Tagged | Leave a comment

Cammy vs. the PhotoCam

Posted on July 13, 2019 by mariteaux

I’ve long liked early digital cameras. There’s a really specific era of 95-98 or so where digital cameras were, by some measures, atrocious, and by others, absolutely fantastic. Their bad CCDs, chunky design, and inconsistent featureset makes them fascinating and … Continue reading →

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Somnoville

Posted on July 4, 2019 by mariteaux

I can remember the last time I had a proper Minecraft server with a group of friends. It was in 2012 or so, when a close friend of mine bought me the game and invited me onto his little public … Continue reading →

Posted in Group Posts | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Web is a Shitty App Platform

Posted on May 9, 2019 by mariteaux

I’m a big believer in implementing as little as possible to get the task at hand done. I’m as minimalist as it gets. Proprietary, open source—ultimately doesn’t matter to me so long as it gets the job done as simply as it can.

So why in fuck’s name did we give everything away to the web? Continue reading →

Posted in Essays | Tagged , | 7 Comments

How a Fusion Drive Ate Our Gopher

Posted on April 30, 2019 by mariteaux

The story of how I lost everything because I trusted the marketing. Continue reading →

Posted in Happenings | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Introducing the Somnolescent Blog

Posted on April 25, 2019 by mariteaux

One long-winded night ago, I had the idea of adding a group blog to the site. Maintaining our subsites is fun, but not all of the Somnolians are at that level yet, or have the time to. Plus, it’s a little tedious to do it by hand. Continue reading →

Posted in Projects | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments