Tag: Somnolescent
The cult we call home.
December 1, 2023
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 This has left some of them out-of-date, sometimes woefully so.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.
November 16, 2023
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.
August 25, 2023
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.
July 25, 2023
If you or a loved one have fallen victim to Somnolescent, call the toll-free number on your screen now. Our trained purr-fessionals are standing by. (844) 509-1003 Available until the end of August.
May 6, 2023
 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.
December 30, 2022
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?
December 26, 2022
Alternatively: two years in
December 20, 2022
A quick happy birthday to Somnolescent before the day’s out here on the east coast…
December 18, 2022
Four years in, five folks under the bulb. Actually, I’ve been around for longer, haven’t I? What’s up with that?
December 5, 2022
So quietly, I’ve been working on relaunching cammy.somnolescent.net. Working on that site before, there were lots of really good pages that I just didn’t think fit right where they were. This is one of those pages: a goofy, fun bit of group lore that makes a better blog post than it does a random page on one of my sites.
I’ve edited and rewritten parts of it, of course, but you can call this one from the archives. Quite literally. Go check out the new cammy.somnol, by the way! I’m just getting started with it and it’s starting to take shape as possibly the cutest site I’ve made so far.
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