Essays | mari@macintosh.garden
I've written an awful lot in longform over the years, but I've never really collected it in one place until now. Most of it ended up buried in blog archives or in my files, but no longer! I have here linked every single essay I still like from 2018 to present day, and when I write more, I'll keep this updated.
(There's a lot more than this on Letters and also the archives of the Scratchpad, my personal blog from 2019 to 2022, but it's either stuff I don't necessarily vibe with anymore or it's just outright terrible. Also, I'm undecided if I should do local mirrors of this stuff or not—on one hand, mirrors are good and I can edit these some, on the other, feels like it defeats the purpose of having the separate blogs for them. Lemme know.)
The Rediscovering
This one's big enough to get its own section.
This was a set of essays I did on the Scratchpad between mid-2020 and early 2022 giving my initial impressions on thirty 90s and 2000s rock records I had in my collection and never quite gave a fair listen. I found some surprising new favorites, some ones I hated, and each essay is given an appendix from the past couple weeks (as of writing this) with my feelings on the album and the entry in question now. Give 'em a skim through, you'll find a bunch you might recognize and a bunch you almost certainly do not.
Gaming and Tech Essays
| Title | Date Published | Location |
|---|---|---|
| SomnolCCSO, and Reviving an Old, Dead Database Lookup Protocol | February 6, 2024 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| CCSO was a people lookup protocol for the college kids in the late 80s, and with a whole six known servers in existence, Somnol brought a new one to life. And Cammy coded something! Let's talk about it all. | ||
| 2600 Pac-Man: Was it That Bad? | February 23, 2022 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| It's still routinely considered one of the worst games of all time, but meet it on its own merits and 2600 Pac-Man is still mildly fun. Here's a deep exploration on the gameplay of the port. | ||
| The Clever Feat of PNG Optimization | October 27, 2020 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The way PNGs are encoded makes it possible to save 20-60% of their overall size with zero loss in quality. How's that work? What magic do you need to make it happen? That's all in this essay. | ||
| The Exaggerated Death of Optical | July 14, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| There's a certain misconception among tech geeks that optical media—CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays—are basically obsolete. I still think they have a place in any good collection of backups, and here's why. | ||
| The Luddite in Me Screams | June 29, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| Lamenting e-waste, our world of planned obsolescence, and increasingly-frequent attempts to fix human problems with new technology. | ||
| Tools, Toys, and You and I | May 9, 2020 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| More rumination on how we rely on such fragile technology to power the modern world, and how computers should augment humans, not replace them. | ||
| Why Gopher Will Fail | May 3, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| Part two of a post on the future of Gopher (a document-retrieval internet protocol—effectively FTP on steroids), and why I think its community will let it down and it won't achieve its deserved success. | ||
| Why Gopher Will Succeed | May 2, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| Part one of a post on the future of Gopher (see above), and why I think it still has a comfy place in the modern world. | ||
Music Essays
| Title | Date Published | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 3-9-7-1-5: Exploring the Expanded Conet Project Boxset | April 1, 2024 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The favorite of conspiracy theorists and indie bands alike, numbers stations, strange, anonymous shortwave broadcasts consisting entirely of spoken numbers and strange noises, fall under my microscope. I paid £200 for the privilege! | ||
| First Draft: Pixies' Come On Pilgrim | November 1, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The fourth edition of First Draft, talking about the highly-productive sessions that led up to the Pixies debut EP...and the half of what was recorded that was left unreleased. | ||
| First Draft: Failure's Magnified | October 1, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The third edition of First Draft, revisiting Failure's second record Magnified from 1994 and comparing it to the home-recorded demo versions originally slated for release by their label and later released on the Essentials compilation. | ||
| First Draft: Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | September 18, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The second edition of First Draft, looking at Wilco's landmark indie rock classic 22 years after it first streamed online and comparing it to no less than six discs of in-progress cuts from the long, winding recording sessions. | ||
| First Draft: ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down | July 1, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The inaugural edition of First Draft, a look back at an album that was cut down or redone from its initial version to see what all the extra time in the oven did. This one concerns the Dandy Warhols' second record and its scrapped first attempt The Black Album. | ||
| The Absurd Netherworld of Internet Archive Tape Transfers | June 24, 2021 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| The Internet Archive hosts a lot more than just websites, like, say, transfers of amateurly-recorded cassettes! We explore obscure klezmer music, a 70s family having breakfast, and a mixtape of 90s hits made for a girl's friends. Aww. | ||
| Experimenting With 5.1 Downmixes | March 8, 2021 | mari's Scratchpad |
| I've long wondered about the differences between a stereo mix from a CD and a 5.1 surround downmix, and what even the point of surround mixes for music are. This post mulls on the topic with Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York as the focal point. | ||
| Look What Your Money Bought | January 11, 2021 | mari's Scratchpad |
| Defending Nickelback and riffing on the idea of authenticity as part of a band's image. Remember, it's okay to want success until you openly enjoy that success—then you suck. | ||
| The Desperate, Bottomless Pit of Nirvana Fan Albums | September 16, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| There's been a trend on YouTube and places over the past few years of fake, post-Kurt's death Nirvana albums, and I find it rather miserable and creepy, not to mention historically absurd. Listen to another band, please. | ||
| The Tragedy of MP3.com | January 15, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| The start of an obsession! My attempt to tell the story of the failed early indie music streaming site. There's several followups to this linked at the bottom of the essay—happy rabbit hole exploring! | ||
| End it Someday: Looking Back on With the Lights Out | November 23, 2019 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| 15 years of a big ol' Nirvana boxset! Going through all four discs and talking about what it gets right and what it gets wrong. Motivated my own attempt at a Nirvana rarities boxset two years later. | ||
| Brickwalled: The Sonic Arms Race of the Loudness War | January 13, 2017 | Neocities |
| An old high school essay I wrote on the loudness war, an effort to make albums as distorted as possible that thankfully seems to have tapered off in the past few years. Needs a rewrite and images, but still charming. | ||
Personal Retrospectives
| Title | Date Published | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Further Down the Artsy Rabbit Hole | December 29, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| More about my time spent learning to draw, and more stuff I'm proud of from the year! This one's a lot more positive than the last, as my confidence grows... | ||
| mariversary 4.0: Revisiting Nostalgiamining | April 1, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| Revisiting the initial essays that earned me much notoriety on Neocities, and their bizarre continued relevance. (Seriously, there's like seven different sites linking to them now, and yes, I still get emailed about them every few months.) | ||
| My First Year in Art | February 3, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| January 2022 marks when I started drawing officially! I look back on the first year here and go over some drawings that I think make for good milestones. | ||
| mariversary 3.0: The Platypus Years | April 1, 2021 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| For the third anniversary of me joining Neocities, I explored my original site, in all its odd-but-pleasingly-colored glory. | ||
| mariversary 2.0: I Actually Paid for This | April 1, 2020 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| Two years after joining Neocities, I look back with amusement at all the many sites I made using my Supporter's plan. We also discuss if Kyle Drake is an asshole and if I'm always right (I am). | ||
| mariversary: Thinking About Neocities | April 1, 2019 | mari's Scratchpad |
| A sorta sappy little look at my time spent on Neocities, the site where I met the Somnolians and my future wife. Not bad for shitposting at kids! | ||
| The Day I Became a Nostalgiaminer | November 2018 | Neocities |
| The inspiration behind, and the making of, my little fake 90s personal site minerteaux, which of course takes its name from the "nostalgiamining" term I came up with. | ||
Web Essays
| Title | Date Published | Location |
|---|---|---|
| What Even is Somnolescent? | August 25, 2023 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| A ponder on the ways everyone seems to misinterpret Somnolescent as a collective, either who we are, what we're into, or what we're supposed to be—and everyone includes ourselves, yes. | ||
| The Great Somnolescent Time Machine | April 20, 2022 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| A bit on vintage website restoration! These are still largely my working methods and the things I do to patch sites for archives or just for my own usage in the event I have to grab them from the Wayback Machine. | ||
| Fw: Fw: Fw: The Bizarroworld Time Capsule of 00fun | March 18, 2021 | mari's Scratchpad |
| A strange 2000s website filled with "eCards" that only I seem to remember...and no, don't ask me why I remember it. Exploring it, exploring why it was made, and exploring why it should probably stay buried. | ||
| The Death of HTTPS (on somnolescent.net) | February 2, 2021 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| Sunsetting the "secure" version of our sites, and discussing the scare tactics around HTTPS, its usage, some people's desire to force it, and how difficult it can be to escape its grasp. | ||
| The Death of the Hobbyist | December 18, 2020 | mari's Scratchpad |
| It's sad how no one seems to make things just for fun anymore. I'm in full support of artists getting paid, sure, but when that's the point, what fun is there to be had? | ||
| How the Feed Killed Creation | September 7, 2019 | Letters From Somnolescent |
| My thoughts on how we've become slaves to walls of infinitely-scrolling content, and how it's killed exploration on the modern internet. | ||
| Neocities and a Lack of Passion | September 2018 | Neocities |
| Easily my most contentious essay—encouraging users of the site to delete their accounts if they failed to make their sites fun and interesting to browse through. | ||
| Nostalgiamining vs. Forging the Future | September 2018 | Neocities |
| The lesser-known predecessor to the "passion essay", on how Neocities users like to copy the rainbow vomit part of Geocities as a substitute for a personality. Coined the term "nostalgiamining", which has somehow made its way to Urban Dictionary. | ||