# Recap #16: The Bulb's Last Stand (of 2020!)
## November 30, 2020
### From gopher.somnolescent.net, the Gopherhole of the weird lightbulb people
We're getting real close to the end of 2020 here, lads, and suffice it to
say, Somnolescent is going out with a bang. I mean, what *don't* we have to
show off? New sites, another story, things brewing for ages finally released,
infrastructural improvements, blog posts! It's a goddamn *clearinghouse* of
material--that I will now recap for your pleasure.

---

## One more Pennyverse story...
> "Mmhhh, Cat..." I moaned half-awake and congested--wait, congested? I was
> contagious! A filthy vector for the plague I was trying to stave off!
> "Cat! Cat, you can't be in here!" I yelped, digging back into the bedding
> in some attempt to protect her. "I-I'm sick!"
> 
> Yet, she only gave a bemused chuckle. "Seb, it's alright," she tried to
> reassure me. "I got my flu jab and everything."
> 
> "B-but what if that's not what I have? What if I have a novel disease they
> haven't yet quantified the effects of?"
> 
> "I'll live through the sniffles, promise." She fidgeted with the container
> a little, fingers up against the notch on the lid. "Of course, if you want
> me to leave, I can..."
> 
> "No, no! That's alright. Thanks for--coming to check on me. ...W-what's in
> the container?"

I wanted to get one last Pennyverse story done for the year now that I have
some momentum behind me. Even if I didn't get the Halloween Special proper
done, I still wanted to bring you all what would've been the aftermath of
that just because I thought it would turn out cute. And it did! It's called
"A Fuzzy, Stuffy Stupor", and it's about a sickly Seb and a Cat who learns
just *why* Seb got lost outside. I hesitate to call them lovers in the
traditional sense, but...they care a lot about one another.

I think with these most recent stories, I'm finally hitting on that tone for
Pennyverse I'd wanted for so long, goofy and charming even when it's weird,
strange, and a little spooky. Think the lads agree too, given the reaction
these have been getting. I have some serious plans for the whole writing
thing for next year, but I'll wait a bit for those.

Oh, and all stories are now available to read once more on the Somnolescent
Gopher server! Delightfully nostalgic; if you've been with us for a while
now, you remember that "Darkpenny" initially came out over on the Gopherhole.
Nice to return it to where it once sat.

## "Arrogant Erratum" is out!
Not to dominate this recap (but I'm going to, because I got a ton done this
month), but if you were looking forward to playing my *Quake* levels,
they're out now! I got in my week or so of rebuilding, polishing, and
bugfixing, and I'm super happy with the result. These *do* require a source
port, but any will work. Install it as a mod, as it comes with a new start
map. Feel free to watch my little rambly highlights reel of outtakes and
scrapped bits for more.

## New and improved sites!
We have a new site on our network, and a few much-improved ones! Some sites
that have been pretty hard up for updates since their launch have finally
gotten some love, and in one case, the site actually hopped domains. Pretty
busy. Let's get to that.

### We promise there's no ghost doors
Archives, hoards, and collections have always been a bit messy around here.
For one thing, there's no consistent way to access the materials in them, and
they bloat our site backups since they tend to deal in media, and thus,
contain a ton of big files.

Enter The Somnolescent Archives. This is a simple, no frills index of sites
put on ice and large collections of files to browse and download from at your
own convenience. I'm slowly moving both stuff from my own site and stuff from
the lads' sites over too, so keep an eye out.

### It's official: she's Caby now, lads
In case you were wondering if it's "Capy" or "Caby", wonder no longer--it's
Caby now, officially. Accompanying the change in sona name is a change in
subdomain (caby.somnolescent.net), a new 88x31 in case you like those, and a
new button on the Somnolescent home page to replace the sketchbook-style one
that stopped matching months ago. (My girl's been busy too <w<)

There was some worry about how much of a pain in the ass it would be to
update all our links, but no worries--all links to capy.somnolescent.net will
continue to work and redirect silently in the background thanks to some
really clean .htaccess trickery. If you're shooting her an email, it's
officially caby@somnolescent.net now, but capy@somnolescent.net has been
repurposed as a forwarder, so no worries about that either.

### Making it even easier to trick out your Windows 2000 PC
w2krepo also got some pretty significant cleanup and updates this month.
Aside from adding a bunch to the collection and rearranging some of it,
w2krepo now has item descriptions for nearly everything up for download! This
should make it significantly easier to parse some of the strange file names
and find what you're looking for. (These changes have naturally been
mirrored to the Gopher version.)

I really would like to vouch for w2krepo's usefulness for your old hardware;
it's in such a simple, efficient package that, even on a base XP install with
just Internet Explorer 6, I was able to get a much better Firefox and
RetroZilla on there so I could do some proper browsing. Do give it a look if
you're in the retrocomputing space, and perhaps contribute some of your own
rare software if you feel inclined! We'll keep it safe for you.

### More reading material for Misery Inspires
And one more from the "Cammy has too many projects" pile: Misery Inspires,
my long-neglected Silversun Pickups fansite, finally has the last piece it's
needed since I came up with it in 2016: the interviews! I had a ton saved
from back then, and this month, I went back through years of old-school MP3
blogs looking for links and sources (and to correct formatting and things--
2016 Cammy did a whole lot more editorializing...), and it's out now!

## Man, art portals sound fun
If my post on PNG optimization got its own section in the last recap, Caby's
recent post on Yerf sure can too! Yerf's one of those old-school furry art
sites, a bit more of a curated approach than the (frequently landfill,
dumpy, terrible) art sites you have around now. (Plus, it's all SFW and
relatively absent any fetish art, which is good if you're like me and don't
think with your cock.) Caby was enamored with it for a bit and went on a
bit of a spree digging up artists and seeing where they are now, and the
results are fascinating. Do read it; when she blogs, the results are always
worth the wait...

I don't know about you, but I am very ready to shut off at this point. I'm
actually still not quite done for the year; I have a tiny bit left to go on
a new website for AutoSite (which I wanted to do again as a little way to
show my appreciation and partially to help it go gold before the end of the
year), but I unfortunately wasn't able to get it done in time for this
recap. It'll absolutely be done by the big year recap though, so I guess
it'll wait for then.

Aside from that though? I'm going back to playing video games. Remember when
I used to play those?

Right, this is the group recap. My bad.