Hi, how’ve you been this past month? ( ・ω・)◞✺

Tomorrow is zona.plankton’s 3rd birthday! I didn’t delay the update to come out tomorrow because first of all, I love the monthly format, and actually, I uploaded the website for the first time today, July 31st – the drawing announcing it (& consequently, the official launch) came out on August 1st; so, today is also technically appropriate.

I’m a bit in my feelings, of course… I’m having a hard time writing this, because there’s so many things I want to say; it’s a little embarrassing, too. None of it would make sense to someone who isn’t me.

There are so many things in my life that I’m grateful about, but when I think about zona.plankton, I think about all the art that I’ve ever loved, and it’s so extraordinary… inevitably, anything I write regarding this will turn into a platitude, but you must understand what I mean; it rains down in the marrow of my bones.

Just being able to dedicate the free time I have into doing this makes me so happy it’s almost unimaginable. I’m working on so much cool stuff, I know that even if it doesn’t resonate with 99.9% of people, I’ll feel it and a small number of people will too, regardless of when, where, how, (maybe even if) it happens.

I mean, there are so many songs, drawings, movies, videos etc. that the people responsible for them have no clue that it means the world to me! I try to make it known when I can. One of my favorite songs was posted on SoundCloud almost 10 years ago and has less than 250 plays! It’s unbelievable!!!

Short Blurb on Making Your Own Website

I get messages every once in a while from really nice people who want to make their own website and are wondering how they can learn to do it, what resources to use etc.
First of all, thank you for all the polite and kind messages. I do my best to reply to them as thoroughly and attentively as I can. I haven’t put up a proper how-to page here yet because they tend to get obsolete (faster than I could realistically update them), and I’m not a good web developer by any respectable metric.

I still want to make a tutorial with some general pointers eventually, but in the meantime, I’d say there’s two distinct ways to go about it: either 1. you doodle some fun, random ideas first, and then figure out how to make them technically, or 2. you learn a bit of the syntax first and then get some ideas based on that. Realistically, you’ll do a mix of both (that’s how I started, anyway). I think nowadays, I tend to get the ideas first and then figure them out in practice.

If you want a specific recommendation, I really like the MDN Web Docs from Mozilla and I use them a ton. There’s a few structured articles for learning there (I’ve linked to a good one), and once you get further with those, it’s still great as a general dictionary for web development.

The most significant tip I can give you is that it’s really not that hard to learn the basics, even if you’re not a technical person. Everyone says this, but it’s true!
Have you browsed a culinary or news website in the past decade? They PAY people REAL MONEY to do websites that run like THAT. What makes you think you couldn’t do it?! I encourage anyone who’s interested in it to go for it.
Look at other websites for inspiration, write code that’s totally busted… get your ideas out!

I’d love to entertain and tell some stories regarding zona.plankton’s creation, but the truth is, it was so regular & uneventful (⌒_⌒;)

I had wanted to make a website for the longest time, but my first actual attempt was a simple prototype in June 2021 (a single HTML file with almost nothing in it) – the name zona.plankton had already been decided by then. I originally came up with it as the title of a zine that me and André never got to make, since we were both kids and never finished anything; then, it became the name of a compilation album, which I didn’t go further with either, again, because we were kids and never finished anything… You can tell I liked the name though.

By the time 2022 came, I had matured enough to be able to take something seriously, surely by consequence (and a crowning achievement) of the little mind tenure I had started back in December 2019 when I decided I actually wanted to learn how to draw, like, really learn. Back then I was just pounding water bottles all day, listening to Kraftwerk and drawing GARBAGE… it felt amazing.

So after a year of not doing or learning anything related to it, I picked the website back up around 3 months before it launched in 2022, and 95% of the work was done during that period. I already had the art & music independently from the site, so most of it was me preparing assets, refreshing HTML on the browser manually and getting pissed off at flexbox, which I’m confident ended up not being on a single element in that first version.

I’ve worked on it incrementally since, even though the update history looks spotty. By the end of this year, we’ll have more updates in 2025 than 2023 and 2024 combined, but I was definitely working on it during that time… I was just getting in my own head (it’s the first thing I mention on #006) and being punched a trillion times by life. It’s alright.

When I reminisce about the past, I just want to explode into a million bits… I knew this was going to be embarrassing (╯°益°)╯彡┻━┻

We’re just a little over halfway the year, so a lot will still happen in 2025. I’ve been really diligent about it. I was a bit bummed on the first two anniversaries of the website, since I felt like I wasn’t able to really celebrate & show what I was working on… while this time is not particularly different, I think there is something to it. What exactly, well, I don’t know yet… but we’ll see. It’s a hunch ｡*:☆(・ω・人・ω・)｡:゜☆｡

“It’s interesting how everything that I did is nothing, compared to what I’m ‘bout to come with”

Thank you so much, as always. I hope you have a beautiful August!

Signed, with love,
noo.dll__〆(￣ー￣ )
see ya!