A forgotten era [by Devon]

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Rambling about forgotten illustrators from turn of the millennium.

• Essays

How Do the Somnolians Organize Their Desktops?

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We at Somnolescent love old desktops. Not the fresh, factory Windows installs all the retrocomputing channels show off, but lived-in little portraits of someone else’s workspace from long, long ago. Whether it be DeviantART submissions showing off someone’s new, custom wallpaper or classic speedpaints with desktops and MSN Messenger windows incidentally in the background, we love seeing them and we post them in our Discords all the time.

The gradual move back to our chunky old PCs got us thinking about our own desktops and how they stack up to the workspaces of old, and honestly, to each other’s. As such, have a compilation of screenshots and a whole bunch of rambles about how we get around our machines and how we keep things organized (or not). Click the images for full-sized, lossless screenshots if you wanna peek at all our icons.

• Cult Activity

11/30 – The Bulb’s Last Stand (of 2020!)

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We’re getting real close to the end of 2020 here, lads, and suffice it to say, Somnolescent is going out with a bang. I mean, what don’t we have to show off? New sites, another story, things brewing for ages finally released, infrastructural improvements, blog posts! It’s a goddamn clearinghouse of material–that I will now recap for your pleasure.

• Recaps

Yerf, yerf, yerf

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I post once in a blue moon, but I finally have a new thing to talk about, so here I am! That thing is a little old art portal named Yerf.

• Essays

The Clever Feat of PNG Optimization

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I’ve become mildly obsessed with how compression algorithms of various stripes work over the past year. They really do make every bit of our modern computing existence work so smoothly, from gzipping packet data to speed up slow connections to storing vast archives of high quality music on flash drives the size of a ChapStick. Some simply rearrange the data in clever ways, and others take advantage of our weak eyes and ears to throw out 90% of what was once there–and we hardly notice.

Of the lot, the humble PNG is so ubiquitous, it might not even warrant mentioning. Every format has some magic up its sleeve, however, and in the case of PNG, the way they’re encoded usually makes it possible to shrink them after the fact to the tune of up to a few megabytes with no loss in quality. If you make sites, you might wanna take notes.

I recently decided to run a battery of tests to determine just how well PNG works, on what, and what optimizes the best. I’ll give you the rundown on how it works (in-depth but no math, no worries), and then I’ll give you some hard data and lovely charts to peek at, and finally, show you how to get smaller, lighter PNGs at home, no tricks, no catches.

• Essays

10/2 – The Ballad of the Comeback Kids

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This is a little more like it! With the weather cooling down (not here though, still 60s and 70s galore, guh), the Somnolians have been feeling vital again. borb and Caby are over their Art Fight fatigue, I’m back to writing after building that absurdly big Quake level (promise you’ll get to play it this year) and feeling damn good about it, and–what do you know? More Pennyverse! Much better recap than last month–let’s get into it.

• Recaps

Incomplete Eclipses and Muffled Screams

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I’m an artist who uses DeviantArt so I’m gonna tell you guys why you really shouldn’t force your site’s user-base to be beta testers.

• Essays

4/29 – Obsessive Little Moths

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You’d think after Site Month, the Somnolians would slow down, right? Not quite, we’re just getting started. More redesigns, blog posts, art! It all needs a recap!

• Recaps

A Year Under the Bulb: 2019 in Review

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And so, 1998+1 has come and gone. The first official year of Somnolescent. The first year out on our own, our own hosting, in our own group. People came, people left, projects were started, and love blossomed.

2019 was a year of change, of growth, and of optimistic unease. It was the start of us as Somnolians realizing what we had and what we didn’t need. It was the year of itemizing fears and coming to terms with realities. (You might say it sounds dramatic and pretentious, but so is life.)

Don’t worry, though. We got a lot done that people outside the group can enjoy too. If you missed anything, it’s more than likely here.

• Recaps

10/31 – Chunky Soup

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If you haven’t yet noticed, you’ve had 30 entire days to do so: it’s spooky month. This does not in any way call for a recap, but here we are nonetheless. Nowhere near as long as the last one, promise. Come! There’s Eevees!

• Recaps