CHANGELOG |

Site updates! This is where I let everyone know what's new here. Feel free to add the RSS feed to your favorite RSS reader to keep up-to-date on what I've got cooking.

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[#] May 27, 2024: The art highlights and album pages are up! I said I probably wouldn't do an art section, but it was simple to put together and it felt sad to leave out all that hard work on my main site. I'm feeling motivated, so I'm gonna try to get nofi content complete by tomorrow. Shortlist of what's left: Rediscovering ports (easy, just tedious) and bringing over all the modding pages (see former). I also started to add summaries of the Rediscoverings to the normal album review pool, to buff up the amount of albums I've covered in that format. The vast majority of those still need to be written, but that's a stretch goal, so we'll leave it for now. Anyway, soon! Hopefully super soon!
[#] May 22, 2024: Check out the new illustrations! Alexis have started to appear on nofi. By my estimation, 6-8 will be needed in all, and we have two already, one on the index and one on the contact page. I've got a really fun style I'm doing them in, where I line each one three times to get a squigglevision wobble going on, and I think it really helps to make a big visual impact on otherwise rather simple HTML pages. I had this idea probably last year and it's really fun seeing it in action finally. I'll be keeping it up for lofi and hifi as well. Other things are being transferred over and added, but nothing's finished just yet.
[#] May 18, 2024: It's been a crazy past week for the new site! Game reviews are transferred to a database and scripted (PS2 reviews have even been brought back from cammy_v1! They never made it to the Macintosh Garden site, sadly), essay page is scripted, this changelog is PHP-powered now as well, Kevin and Theo's Multiverse Misadventure has gotten its first ever public airing after having written it over a year ago, tons. It's even valid HTML 3.2!; Once I migrate the modding pages, the Rediscoverings, and write the music page, all the content will be solidly in place. All of it. Then I just need to draw a ton of Alexis and nofi.mari.somnol will be officially, 100%, completely done! That happened seriously quicker than I was expecting, and then it's onto lofi and eventually making the full hifi site! I'm super excited, and super pleased to have a home base portfolio site again. Read more about it on the journal on cammy.somnol if you're interested!
[#] May 10, 2024: Today marks the official sunsetting of mari@macintosh.garden. I'm now putting effort into moving everything back to mari.somnol and doing the design and assets for it. This is for a few reasons, but mostly, Macintosh Garden was just never meant to be permanent in the first place. I'll be adding banners to the top of every page marking them as frozen. The pages will remain so the links stay working, but nothing new will be added.; And in proper site development news, meet the new PHP page for my album reviews! Knowing I'll have nofi, lofi, and the normal mari subdomain to maintain, I've been looking to reduce the amount of static HTML pages on each. At 1:30AM last night, I stuffed all my reviews into a MySQL table and wrote up this PHP script to access it all. I'm super super pleased with it, works on everything from Mosaic onwards, and this offers numerous benefits over the old way to do it, including additional methods of sorting through reviews (by rating, by year, viewing and linking to individual albums) and being able to generate an RSS feed from new reviews. Will keep working on this, still more to be done, but now's a good place to stop and relax for the evening.
[#] March 18, 2024: Happy six months without an update, lurkers! I just got back from Wales, and I do have some stuff for you to see. Firstly, check the art gallery as always, that's now up to date and there's some stuff there I haven't posted elsewhere. But! Six new album reviews, most of which were written on various planes and buses while I had nothing but music to occupy me: Ash's 1977, The Cardigans' Gran Turismo, John Gold's these are color days, Pine Marten's Beautiful Stakes and Powerpoles, Sebadoh's Harmacy, and Wrong Way Driver's Nonplussed, all from between 1997 and 2011 or so. Some of these I've been meaning to write for ages now, and some are long-standing favorites of mine, so it's nice to get 'em out there finally. I bought 25 new CDs while I was away, so I'm gonna try to listen through and get them all reviewed at some point this year. Keep an eye on this space!
[#] September 30, 2023: I've been hard at work working on cammy.somnol, drawing stuff, writing for the blog, and at least for those last two, I have updates here: my art gallery and essays page now have all the drawings I've done in the last two months and links to everything I've written in the last two months, respectively. First time the art's been posted publicly too! I've been debating making a new FurAffinity, potentially, but for now, it's all still here exclusively.
[#] September 6, 2023: Long time no see! I have dug up from my archives the entire run of the Rediscovering, a set of thirty essays on a bunch of albums I bought and never listened to. I've been working on porting these to basic HTML for a month or two now, five at a time, going back through them, reading them again for the first time in a while, and giving my commentary on thoughts looking back at them in a much different headspace. If you caught them the first time, read them again, they hold up. If you didn't, they're a treat, I think—pleasantly surprised with how they hold up.
[#] August 18, 2023: The new Midwestern Dirt album Twilight at a Burning Hill is out today! It's fantastic, you should listen to it and buy a copy. I've been listening to it for months already for free and I still did. Here's my full review of it, and that page also now features catalog reviews for 2020's Sayonara and 2017's Amendments. Back to Web stuff full throttle tomorrow, after I take a trip to my job to buy another ethernet cable.
[#] August 15, 2023: Man, life's been weird lately. I'm happy to have the modding and level design section done and updated, even if I apparently linked it on this front page ages ago and thus some people probably went in there already, 404s and all. All good! This really leaves two sections, my music and my stories, and this site will have everything I want on it. Past that point, it's all just design work and migrating back to mari.somnol.
[#] August 1, 2023: Quick little update—changing around the sorting of the music recommendations page and readding the four low-bit reviews I did! These were a lot of fun, I think they added some nice flavor to my reviews page and I'd like to do more (and get back to listening to netlabel stuff in general), but it felt odd sorting all these various artists together and it made the page extra long. Now I've got them split into the bigwigs that had a record deal and the weirdos who just put stuff out for fun on the internet. Like me.
[#] July 29, 2023: Hi, sorry for the lack of updates! There's been a bunch of things going on in the background that I haven't gotten around to finishing, despite me working on this site most days of the week. I have one of them for you now: the first set of catalog recommendations, these for Beck. Catalog recommendations are just a bunch of reviews posted at once exploring a specific artist's discography. This isn't all the Beck albums I'd like to get to, but four of these are brand new and one is rewritten. That's plenty for right now. (I also separately did Earlimart's Treble and Tremble and Autolux's Transit Transit earlier in the month, I just didn't post them to this changelog.)
[#] July 12, 2023: Preparing more sections of the site! For now, have the Setter ref I finished up last night and a review of Marcy Playground's debut. I'm on a roll with the album reviews, they're super quick and easy and fun. More to come.
[#] July 12, 2023: I have gotten my art gallery up! This didn't take too long. I already had the images sorted and text written from when I built the mari.somnol version for funsies, and that's been sitting up on mari.somnol unlisted for long enough that it's rather outdated. I just updated it with everything I've drawn since and ported it to this site's layout. Glad to have it up! Still fun to see my art through nearly a year and a half of constant attempts and improvement. I think I'm in a really good spot with it now, and it's only getting better. Expect this one to update as I draw more, of course.
[#] July 8, 2023: A contact page appears! Yeah, easy shit, doing it between some other, bigger projects I've been working on. I also got two more album recommendations up for ya, Wilco's Summerteeth and Marcy Playground's Shapeshifter, both from 1999, only one of which is as remembered and respected as it should be, sadly.
[#] June 30, 2023: I have ported over almost all of my album recommendations, save for the ones I either don't like and need to rewrite or the low-bit ones, which I'm still feeling out how I want sorted in the listing, how I want to link to the original releases (support the artists), all that. I've also overhauled the way you browse them. They're now sorted by artist, and each artist gets their own page as opposed to the reviews being per-album, which made things a lot harder to look through. I anticipate doing more catalog recommendations for artists I've already done reviews of, so this will just make things a lot easier and cut down on the amount of pages you'll have to browse between.

NOFI | LOFI | HIFI