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Tag Archives: Somnolescent
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.
happy five years: a seat at the table
Hey! This year went by insultingly fast. I’m going to ramble about 2023, entering your mid-20s, collaboration, and goals. Continue reading
Happy Five Years: The 2024 Infrastructure Upgrade Plans
Normally at this time, I’d be bringing you the next installment of First Draft, but I just had no desire to work on it this past month despite having a wallop of an album to do it on–chalk that up to working 35 hours a week at retail, I suppose. Instead, given that it’s December and that means the Somnolescent retrospectives and prospectives start rolling off the line soon (five years of the group being officially reborn on the 20th!), I figured I’d ramble a bit about the group instead, and more specifically, updating things around here.
We fell off the site stuff a little over lockdowns, and when things opened back up, obviously, we were more concerned with going outside and getting on with life than updating our silly animal people pages. This has left some of them out-of-date, sometimes woefully so. I think we’re all feeling the desire for it again–dcb_v5 just launched in October, fwd_v2 has just launched–so let me tell you about my own plans to update Somnolescent’s web presence. There’s a lot.
matfloor is No Longer With Somnolescent
I debate making posts like this. Letters is normally a place where we as Somnolians come to share what we’re into or what we’re up to, but it’s also the only spot I truly have for making announcements about group matters. I feel supremely silly every time someone leaves the group, given how private we are and how Somnolescent is nothing without each person that’s a part of it. That’s why I often don’t make mention of when people go. That said, I’ve seen people try to attack us in parting, so I’m defending my group.
Devon, matfloor, has been removed from Somnolescent. We’ve seen her become increasingly unhinged and flat out out of pocket racist over the past few months. This came to a very violent head this afternoon. We hope she gets healthier and comes to her senses, but as of today, she is no longer associated with the group. Her sites will remain up on archives and her posts on Letters, as is customary.
What Even is Somnolescent?
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.
Somnolescent Abuse Hotline
Available until the end of August Continue reading
Five Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives
If you were to ask me my favorite part of the Somnolescent site network, archives would be it. archives started back in 2020 as cold storage for file hoards, but more and more, it’s become my obsession to use it as a living museum of all the websites that the Somnolians have built over the past six years or so. We’ve had so many cool ideas for pages, so many memories around our sites, so many neat looks and layouts for them, that I feel personally responsible to keep it all intact. I want it all as browsable, speedy and functional as the day we unveiled them.
archives has been eating tremendously well this year. All of Caby and dcb’s sites from the Neocities days are finally present on there, patched, restored, and usually fully functional. I just finished restoring dcb_v2, a BeOS-styled site that used an embedded Gopher proxy to display Gopher menus in lieu of pages, last month. Now that’s fully functional again, using locally-stored copies of the proxy’s output back when our Gopher looked like that. I’m supremely proud of it–and just happy to have it to click around again!
Only counting full sites (not components of sites or subsites), we’re up to 54 of them. That’s a lot of sites! And I built half of them, probably! There’s so much on archives, you might not know where to start, and that’s what I wanna spotlight. Here’s five cool, nostalgic (if you’re of a certain age and web background) sights from Somnolescent’s past you can go visit on archives right now, just as if it were still live on our sites today.