Four Becomes Five: Find the ones that get you

caby

As the year draws to a close once more, it’s the perfect time to get all retrospective about it. How the last year has gone, what I’ve enjoyed, what I’ve not enjoyed, and just how things have changed, hopefully for the better. I’m currently laying in bed with a wicked case of acid reflux thanks to far too much Christmas food, so what better time to ramble?

• Retrospectives

four becomes five: reflections

devon

Alternatively: two years in

• Retrospectives

four becomes five: what a year, huh?

fiveducks

Four years in, five folks under the bulb. Actually, I’ve been around for longer, haven’t I? What’s up with that?

• Retrospectives

surprise caby blog post

caby

I’m sat right now at my laptop, in my bedroom, with the window open. It’s about 11pm, it’s a little cold, and I can smell the last few embers of a barbecue my neighbours had earlier this evening. And I’m feeling… normal. It feels like early-mid September, it makes me think of the upcoming spooky season, makes me think about heading into college in the crisper, cooler air, makes me think of Christmas and New Years. I feel normal.

• Retrospectives

Revisiting the Official MP3.com Guide to MP3s

mariteaux

I don’t think it’s a stretch to call myself an MP3.com historian at this point. From my initial essay two-and-a-half years ago, to digging deep into how the service worked, to previewing some of the music that MP3.com were promoting their service with, I’m part of that small group who have been trying to keep the memory of one of the most forward-thinking dot-com startups alive after it was all but forgotten post-closure in 2004.

I was effectively honor-bound to pick up the last copy of The Official MP3.com Guide to MP3s from Amazon after all that work, and I was not disappointed for my $6.29! We’ve got late 90s MP3 hype, forgotten MP3 and MP3.com competitors, and even some screenshots of the backend of MP3.com, far away from where any web spider could’ve gone. It’s a trip.

• Retrospectives

Exploring somnol.net’s Old Banners

bulb

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.

• Retrospectives

2600 Pac-Man: Was it That Bad?

mariteaux

I’ve recently been really enjoying RetroAchievements. It’s a site where you can unlock Xbox Live-like achievements for older games, provided you’re using a hacked emulator logged into the site. It’s a novel concept, and it’s a nice excuse to dig back into some of my favorite Atari games and try “mastering” (getting all the achievements in) them.

When I covered Racing the Beam on this blog back in 2020, I mentioned one of the games covered in that book being Atari’s Pac-Man. It’s a great tale of disappointment, one of Atari’s programmers given a mere 4K of ROM to produce the flagship game of the 1981 Christmas season. The results were not pretty, and along with E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, became the poster children of the glut of low-quality games being produced at the time and later symbolized the “game burial” in the Sunnyvale desert where Atari famously dumped their excess stock.

Game reviews of VCS Pac-Man often don’t dissect it any further than “it’s ugly and plays like crap and you already knew that”. But how does it play like crap? What are the little details that make it such a below-average port? Is it playable on its own merits, despite how alien it is to the arcade version? That’s what I’m here to discuss. You might want to wear ear protection.

• Retrospectives

Look to the future now,,,

caby

Rambles and emotions from a cabybaba on New Year’s Eve

• Retrospectives

How to Reconcile Your Friends at the End of the World

mariteaux

I often think of Somnolescent as an island, but we’re a rather interconnected bunch. We span the United States through Eastern Europe, and so, what goes on in a big chunk of the world is likely to affect at least one of us. Given the past two years, it goes without saying that Somnolescent didn’t make it out unscathed, though better than most, thankfully.

Though the world’s in a weird, precarious, unstable spot right now, given the 20th marked three years of Somnolescent (I wasn’t able to get this done in time, but I started it in time at least…), I figured I would write about a bit of an epiphany I had, and something of a silver lining while everyone heals: how social stress can cause good friendships to sour, and how pushing forward with that in mind can help mitigate the damage.

• Retrospectives

mariversary 3.0: The Platypus Years

mariteaux

Well, it’s been a tradition for me, every April 1st here at Somnolescent, to look back at something Neocities-related. I don’t quite think I’ll be carrying it along after this year, but there’s still one major bit of Neocities ephemera I’ve carried with me, something I unwittingly preserved unlike every other of its kind: my very first site design.

Given that I spent last year discussing my various Supporter’s sites, it’s only fair the main one gets its due too. And given that the other two mariversary posts both focused a bit on me and a bit on the community, I think looking back at just what I was up to will prove more positive, or at the very least, rouse the peanut gallery less.

• Retrospectives