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Tag Archives: Somnolescent
Lucky Sevens: またあした！
Oh… 2025!! Yeah, 2025, right?! What do you mean there’s more after this?! It was certainly a strange year for me. Marks when I turned 20 years old (Oh God, I’m gonna be 21 in 3 weeks and 1 day?!) … Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: How Did People Get to somnolescent.net in 2025?
Happy new year to all the faithful Letters readers out there! As dcb said in his closing out the year post, groups like ours don’t usually stick around this long, but as we go into eight years of humbly posting obscure shit for your edification, the lights are on bright as ever here.
I thought I’d start up a new year’s tradition this year (which, turns out, I did back in 2021 but I guess gave up on) by giving you a peek behind the curtain. While somnolescent.net doesn’t track you (not just for privacy reasons, more because we like lightweight pages and clean HTML), I do have a lot of data courtesy of Google and Bing about where our pages get linked out online and what search terms bring people to what pages. While “Five Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives” and follow-up were meant to bring you what I think are some interesting draws to the site network, this one’s gonna be all about what actually draws people in.
Posted in 2025: Lucky Sevens, Retrospectives
Tagged Internet, Somnolescent, traffic reports
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Lucky Sevens: Who Knows Where the Time Goes
Once again, as quickly as it arrived, another year heads off into the great unknown… 2025 was an interesting one, to say the least. With my birthday on the 29th, I have now passed the halfway point of my 20s, … Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: Closing Out 1998+7
If there’s anything 2025 has made clear for me, it’s how extremely fortunate I am to have the friends that I do. And seven years running! Do you know how insane that is? Doom (2016) was two years old in … Continue reading
Lucky Sevens: Five More Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives
Never ask me to estimate things. I don’t know how much that would cost, I can’t wager how heavy it is, and I certainly can’t imagine distances. I don’t know why, but my sense of scale is the wonkiest thing on the planet.
Somnolescent is no different! One of our recent new casual friends who’s been sitting in on mine and Savannah’s streams remarked that somnolescent.net is like a gigantic maze, and I really hadn’t thought about it because I’ve been working on it for seven years now and have zero perspective on it. Even though it’s as organized as it can possibly be, there’s still so much to see that I can’t imagine how it looks to anyone who isn’t me. Must be intimidating.
I did a roundup of neat things I found on archives back in May 2023, when I really started to push on turning it into a Web museum of restored, vintage sites and pure Somnolescent history, but one post of five things (technically ten things) only scratches the surface, and I’ve added a lot to it since then. Given it’s warm, fuzzy, rememberberries season, I bring to you another batch of neat shit we all worked on that you should go and check out.
Posted in 2025: Lucky Sevens, Retrospectives
Tagged Nucleus, Somnolescent, web design, WordPress
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The New HTTP Order
Happy new year to all our faithful blog readers! January is always the time for reflection and looking forward to the future, and while I do the personal talk on my personal site, I want to discuss the future of you connecting to this here site network here today. I’ve beaten this drum before, but I’m about ready to puncture a hole in it today, because I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be a drum to beat in the next few years.
I am seeing the death of the HTTP-only connection coming in the next year or two, and I am pissed. I will have to force HTTPS on somnolescent.net, something I have resisted at every turn so far, if we want to remain accessible to the wider Web. Think this is hyperbole? Here’s a nice throwback to ring in 2025—have a steaming hot marf rant to keep you warm in these winter months.
Merry Christmas!
Caby here to wish the other folks at Somnolescent (and anyone else who might see this) a very Merry Christmas! I hope today has been and continues to be good to you, and I wish you deepest thanks for how much more wonderful you’ve made my year. I’ll have something longer out sometime later this month but Cammy encouraged me to create a blogpost to show off this year’s festive group pic,,,
Oh, you want to see the picture? Of course, here you go! Continue reading
A Site Update Tracker (and Making somnolescent.net Slightly Less Obscure)
One of the things the group and I realized over the past year is that it can be a little difficult keeping up with everything we get up to. I used to write monthly (and eventually seasonal) recaps here on Letters about everything that was going on, but I eventually stopped those out of fatigue and a lack of things to write about. That didn’t mean that things stopped happening across the site network, though–it just meant the main way to let people know what was going on around here dissipated, and I imagine a lot of cool stuff has gone unnoticed as a result.
No longer. Right on the homepage of our top-level site, you can now check to see all of the recent site updates across our site network. Better yet? There’s a feed for your reader, if you’re into that sorta thing. And if you wanna talk about any of this stuff, there’s a place for that too now! Let me fill you in one last time…
How to Host a Site Network for All Your Friends
So about a week ago, I got a very nice email from a Somnolescent reader named Cyrano. I don’t normally post reader mail–for starters, I don’t get enough of it to make mailbag posts a thing–but this time, I got a mailer daemon every time I tried to reply. There’s nothing personal in it, so I’m gonna take the risk and post things on the blog. Hopefully you see this, Cyrano, and you don’t think I simply ignored you. Your reply address isn’t working is all.
Somnolescent has a pretty unique setup as far as little amateur indie Web stuff goes. Everyone on somnolescent.net has their own account where only they can access their subdomains’ files, and potentially the files of domains outside somnolescent.net. Because I know Somnolescent attracts people who are in little online art collectives and Web groups and sometimes would like to know how to start their own site like ours, I’ve elected to lightly edit the book I wrote for Cyrano and post it here to Letters instead. Hopefully, someone finds the information useful.
Join the Somnolescent IRC!
Long, long ago, in a timeline that seems completely absurd now, Somnolescent was merely an IRC room on Foonetic hosting four lonely people who didn’t like each other much. That was 2014. I still have the logs. (Please don’t ask to see them.)
Over time, lurkers and friends outside the group have asked us where they can chat with us, and the choice has either been to say “sorry, we don’t have a place you can chat with us”, or to start up a Discord we’ll wind up hating and shuttering in a few months. The answer always lay in IRC, of course, given that’s where Somnol started–but it never occurred to us. Except for that time in 2020 when it occurred to us.
Now that we’ve gotten the fuzzies for it again, we’ve once again established an official IRC room (on Rizon, given that Foonetic is sadly defunct). Join #somnolescent at irc.rizon.net, 6697 for secure connections and 6667 for insecure connections (among other ports). If that’s gibberish to you, you can click this Kiwi IRC link to join the server in your browser, no setup required. Hope to see you there!