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Meta
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
savannah’s book reviews: my syntax will never recover (the book of the new sun)
This is the craziest shit I have ever read. 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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Cammy vs. the PhotoCam III: This Has Gotten Stupid
The AOL PhotoCam has gone from “my curiosity” to “my nemesis” to “my fairweather obsession I somehow now own five of”. I know more about the PhotoCam than AOL did. I’ve seen the way these things break. I can tell when I got each of them by their specific damage. The search for a single working unit has been going on six years now, and I think we’ve found the end of it–because I now own two working units, one complete in the box.
If you know the story, I have more to update you on. If you don’t know the story, strap in! I’ve got a tale of temperamental retro tech, operator error, Redditor intrigue, and new perspectives on the futility of 30-year-old cameras and perhaps life itself. Yes, there will be photos. Hopefully, you find this a satisfying end to the saga.
The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge
So back in November, I grabbed 1.78TB of media from the Internet Archive’s mp3.com Rescue Barge, and their Wayback Machine both, in pursuit of creating the most thoroughly complete archive I can muster of MP3.com’s music. The Rescue Barge is … Continue reading
Catching ‘Em All, and How to Do It
If you breathe, you know what Pokémon is. You’ve at least run into a Pikachu or perhaps even a Bulbasaur at some point in your life, and you might have a vague inkling that it’s a game about collecting creatures, with the goal being to, as both the song and the box says, Catch Them All.
The thing is, this is actually a lot fucking harder than you might think–so I set out to do it myself. In a copy of Pokémon Blue for the 3DS, after two-and-a-half years of on-and-off play, I now have a save with a full 151 possible Pokémon caught. I have screenshots of the journey.
What possesses a man to go to such obsessive lengths? What keeps people from doing the thing listed on the box? Why does Lt. Surge have such a fine ass? Join me, friends, and I will answer all your questions.
London, Through the Eyes of the PowerShot A20
A slightly belated hello from Wales, Letters readers! I’ve actually been in the country for a week and a half now, but I’ve been too busy working on art and story stuff with Caby to put up this post like I wanted. I’ll be here until late August, and the rest of the family is in France right now, so we’re vibing with the guinea pigs.
Since I fly in through Heathrow every time I visit, Caby and I start our visits with a couple days in London, zipping around on the Tube and buying way too much fast food. We’ve been getting more adventurous the more often we do it, and this time, I had a new toy to capture the experience with: a Canon PowerShot A20 circa 2001. This $500 MSRP rebadged Canon IXUS 300 beauty shoots in a max of 1600×1200 and takes CompactFlash cards for additional storage, of which I have a 128MB one in there. Gorgeous.
What does London look like through the lens of the A20? Let’s find out.