mari's Scratchpad

Some Pinède, Some Fantasies for March

• Posted by mariteaux on February 27th, 2021 filed in Updates
• 2 Comments »

Snow’s lovely. For the first night or so. By the time the plows come through, kicking up chunks and clouds of dirt and rocks and replacing it with a fine layer of rock salt, and by the time half of it’s melted off into a wet, slushy, runny pile, it’s just a fucking mess.

Depression’s much the same way. Reality and people’s absurdly romanticized concept of it do not line up. I’ve known total assholes who have tried their best to seem like moody, misunderstood misfits who like to angst out by windows in empty rooms (in between rounds of Tetris), and in reality, they’re just the most boring, forgettable fucking people you’ve ever seen. The reality is that you sleep like shit, you sit around a lot, and you miss your friends.

I suppose it’s only fitting that “February” has the same number of letters as “hangover”, because they’ve largely been synonymous this year. Now, I’m under no impression that 2020 didn’t also start in sleep mode (and 2019 started in “non-system disk or disk error” mode outright)–but yeah, I think I went a little insane on top of it.

But you, faithful reader (whoever outside of Somnol is reading this, anyway), didn’t come to hear about how I got a case of the vapors! Caby helped me remember that half the reason I started the Scratchpad is so that I’d be able to peek back at it when I’m 30 and get a real good handle on what I’d been up to, so let’s talk about some plans and some (admittedly smaller) updates.

Blog/site updates

So first: “On Rewrites” on the group blog if you haven’t seen it. It came out…okay. I don’t know why I have such trouble with them, but it gets the point across. My apologies to dcb, who was left hanging waiting for a response to that comment. That’s a really good way of looking at it. Starting is always the hardest part. I know that well.

I also fished out a couple more screenshots for that Abandoned Quake Maps page. I somehow didn’t think to look in my own hell in Somnolescent, but yep, few lurking in there! No Quake mapping this year. I’ve already made that explicit. Not ruled out in the future, but nothing this year. Not after that gigantic mess I made. Have some lovely screenshots of maps that no longer exist instead.

Beware the fluffy bunnies

I can’t say if this is a thing that’ll ever get properly “published” (likely at some point, maybe alongside the official site), but I’m redoing the Pinède bible so hopefully it’s easier for me to edit, easier for the lads to read, and something Caby can add onto. Have a sample of the new, frameless layout, plus part of a page I just wrote for it:

Rediscovering that album thing I used to do

Remember how I started doing Rediscoverings again and then totally fucking stopped again? Yeah, I had zero desire to listen to new music. That’s come back though recently (in fact, probably due for another Monthly Mixtape to make up for the dearth in musical content), so onwards it goes.

In case you’re curious, we are exactly halfway done with the Rediscovering pile (which is now a small block of upright jewel cases on my desk to keep the discs safer, but that’s not as catchy). Out of 30, five of which were not in the original stack, we’re through 15. If you’ve been keeping up with the math (which I haven’t), I just keep finding CDs I haven’t touched around my room, so the pile fails to shrink, necessarily.

I’ve got the next one queued up for tonight for its first listen, so hopefully, we can start making some progress again. I’ve got “My God is the Sun” stuck in my head now, so hoping it’s a good one. (Yeah, that’s the one we’re doing.)

More GH2 customs

At the moment, I have three customs and two half-finished custom discs listed on the ol’ Trello. For the custom’s, one’s fairly simple once I get the audio mix of it sorted (alas, Audacity didn’t quite have the effects I needed), two are major label customs (yes, with stems! From bands you might’ve heard of, Wolfmother and America), and…

…There’s potentially a fourth. I was in touch with an artist I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog now (no, not Midwestern Dirt, although I’m hoping to snag some of the stems to their next album before they get tossed this time) who’s on board with giving me the multitracks for one of his best tunes. If all goes to plan, it’ll actually be my first lead/rhythm custom, as opposed to the guitar/bass customs I normally do. It has a great riff.

As far as the two discs go, one’s marfGH, which needs to be audited and all the audio remixed (I cook them way too hot to get them audible over the sound effects, hoping to get it sounding cleaner using the game to boost the audio instead), and the other’s a much easier effort that involves porting all the 360-exclusive stuff (36 songs in total!) back to the PS2 version. All the charts and audio for that one are already prepared, I just need to write the script to get the game to load all the songs.

Hopefully by the summer, MARF-00001 will be available at your convenience.

Other things…?

All I can say is that Seamounts and Stardew have not left my mind, but the former needs more work before I can say anything more about it, and the latter is probably best served to be announced in a recap.

By the way, no recap tomorrow. I know, almost had a year streak there! (Last time I missed a month was in January 2020.) That’s alright though. Somnolians don’t sit in one place for too long.