Letters from Somnolescent

 

September 18, 2023

First Draft: Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

mariteaux

All eight CDs of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot boxset

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.


September 13, 2023

YouTube Layout Timelapse Redux

jake

Today’s menu, remaking the YouTube Layout Timelapse video. I felt the original was a bit incomplete and the process of which I took the screenshots was very ghetto, so I dedicated this afternoon to writing a quick script in Python and sent it running.


September 11, 2023

Fully licensed campus printer

dotcomboom

Getting your printer set up for wireless printing is relatively simple on a home network. Most printers can connect to your Wi-Fi network and make themselves discoverable, and we’ve seen units be all in one, neat little packages for about a decade. It’ll be ad-hoc (Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth) or infrastructure, usually, and current operating systems are pretty good about finding them. Save for the occasional clogged spooler problems on Windows—I just reinstall the printer when this happens—it isn’t too bad.

But what if you’re trying to print from your printer as just one of thousands of users on a campus network?

Tags: technology,

August 25, 2023

What Even is Somnolescent?

mariteaux

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.

Tags: Somnolescent,

August 9, 2023

Update Rollup for dcb services

dotcomboom

I’m going to keep this post a bit short- I have drafts (and a lab report,,,) in the works, and the nature of this post is partly catch up. I’m gonna cover sites, sites again, and site generator generatoring. So here’s a few updates from my neck of the woods.


August 6, 2023

art fight 2023 (first blood)

fiveducks

Hey! Been a while. Been a weird year.

I participated in Art Fight for the first time last month. Call it part of my “being less of a hermit” arc. Which is funny because I dropped Twitter and barely pay any attention to any other social media. (I did say less of a hermit.)

But enough about the downfall of the modern internet, I’m here to talk about Art Fight. Which also wound up having drama, funnily enough, though I didn’t pay much attention.

Tags: art, art fight,

August 5, 2023

Mac and Cheese disaster

dotcomboom

So I saw a video of a guy making some real bomb mac and cheese really easily by cooking the noodles, leaving some of the pasta water in it after draining and adding cheese shredder shredded cheese to the mix. It looked really really good and I wanted to try it, so I took some […]

Tags: food,

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