Hey, how’ve you been doing lately? ദ്ദി๑>•̀๑)
What a month, yo… it’s like I’ve been working for 8 weeks straight! I’ve been feeling increasingly inarticulate lately: all my writing juices have been getting industrially filtered onto some strange ideas, so excuse me if this post feels insane… I feel like dry water typing this, though my head might just be too full at the moment.
Regardless, I felt like delivering this blogpost was important, at least to get the ‘Year Appraisal’ out. It was going to come out on the previous update but the post was so scatterbrained I couldn’t revise it in time… not like this post is particularly organized either, hehe (⌒_⌒;)
Well, I’ve always been terrible at being timely anyways, but it’s something I’ve been working on: as a matter of fact, we released the ‘ghost equip’ artbook to the exact date of the album’s release 2 years ago, on January 18th.
ghost equip artbook • download
There’s not a whole lot of backstory to it: while trying to figure out the right idea for the album cover, me and t-sc went through a lot of experiments and iterations. I still liked a lot of them, so I figured “why not include all of them on a neat artbook?”.
I did all the layouts (if you have the .pdf, you should read it in the ‘Even Spreads’ display mode). I had never made an artbook before so it was a good learning experience. Also, I think it looks pretty cool. Some of our friends graciously did some art for it. It’s on the downloads page if ya need it.
Pôr do sol enferrujado na janela de um busão • listen
The other major thing that happened this month was that I worked on my friend Hasp’s first record, “Pôr do sol enferrujado na janela de um busão” (eng: ‘Rusted sunset on the window of a bus’). I did the album cover, of course, though I also worked on the mix/master and did some additional production on the songs. It was another big learning experience; I quite like how it came out. If you know portuguese, I’d consider you legally required to listen to it, but either way I’d recommend it to you.
So, zona.plankton news: there’s going to be a lot of stuff this year. I’m going to update the website at least once a month.
…
I saw the face you just did, man, but it’s true, it’s really true! I’m not sure what else I can promise without tumbling over myself. I don’t think I’ll be doing blogposts for every single update; I’m a bit worn out of seeing myself babble on and on. Still, I want to work a lot, as much as humanly possible (…well, while also having a day job). I’m young! I’m coming for you old idiots out there… kill the past, fight the future, etcetera. TIME TO GO TO WORK!!!
I just wanted to tell you, I’m giving it my all, even the all’s I didn’t know I had, all’s out of thin air, plenty of ow’s too; it’s “blood, sweat and tears” alright.
…
Yes, it’s stupid. I just wanted to say that… let you know.
…
Well, aren’t you lucky I’m not writing what you’re saying.
YEAR APPRAISAL
The past two years were actually quite weird. That was part of the reason why I didn’t do a new year’s post for 2023: didn’t know what to say, really. 2022’s post was consciously opaque on all of the year’s hardships, though it is also true that things have been harder than back then. Still, the message that I wanted to get across in that post hasn’t changed all that much.
I’m amused that 2024 went by that fast. It was fun. I saw King Krule live (my first show), and also Tortoise playing ‘TNT’ live! I went to a Yoshitaka Amano exhibition around the same time and ogled at Final Fantasy VI art; I got to work on ERROR’s latest album cocoroque; I’ve kept up with my on-going projects, day by day, a little closer; I started a secret music project, which is out there for anyone bothering to look; zona.plankton turned 2 years old in August! WOW!! I’ll do my utmost best to celebrate it more seriously this year. The comic I was working on, since the last post mentioning it, has derailed, crashed, burned, jackass-ed itself into hell and back. Since then I’ve been dilly-dallying with different ideas and adaptations, because the itch to do it is still as present as ever. I’ll just push through, I really will.
Still, the amount of things that I didn’t get to do was just obscene. I want this year to be more consistent. It seems out of the question that I could do my website and projects without all these time-consuming external factors, recurring interruptions poking their heads – ‘tis life – but I won’t dare nag about it. The fact that I can even do it at all is a miracle. So the only logical way forward seem to be, well, “push forward”. I’ve already been working hard, but I can improve so much more…
Whenever artists I like are silent for a longer-than-usual period of time I feel a real, twisting pain in my heart, like wringing cloth. I’ll go back and admire everything again, listen, watch, read, but the feeling is there, it doesn’t leave. Of course, I don’t feel it when looking at older artists, because you’re aware of the finality of it: we’re not getting more Redon than what we already have.
I think the feeling might be excitement? It’s genuinely a bit hard to tell – it does hurt – but, despite everything, I want this feeling to exist. I want to feel it for myself somehow. What’s the point of this part? Well, I don’t know, I got a bit carried away…
Akira Toriyama passed away earlier in the year and I’m still thinking about it. It is not an exaggeration to say that I see his art daily. Even if I didn’t seek them out, there are murals painted with them on streets near my house, next to the liquor stores, barbershops, churches… I guess, what amuses me the most these days is the optimism and fun that beams so immensely out of every single illustration. I feel it in my heart a lot, and I can’t help but think again and again, oh, just how much I love drawing. A year isn’t enough for how much love I feel…
***
I’m writing this part in 2025, as this happened quite recently and I would feel strange for not mentioning it, but David Lynch passed away just a few weeks ago.
I don’t have anything clever to say – I loved Eraserhead as a teenager, Twin Peaks was monumental, Mullholand Drive, The Elephant Man, his paintings and songs, the sounds and sculptures, all of it, unforgettable… when ‘The Art Life’ came out, I watched it with my dad and at some point in the middle he said something like “what the hell is with this guy?”. While intentionally vague with interviews, his advice was always crystal clear and a huge foundation on how I think about things. I do want to kill myself when I forget an idea, I do love strong habits…
Me and my friends watched the Weather Reports religiously when he started doing them again.
Before watching the Number of the Day videos, we’d each secretely pick a number, and the days where I guessed right had the most special feeling, like it really did something to my luck… The consistent pronunciations, cadence, phrases – “beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine, all along the way”. Whenever LA is at its sunniest, it’s always raining non-stop where I live, but I believed it anyway.
There’s things that I’ve been doing for thousands of consecutive days at this point, in large part because of those videos.
It felt weird watching them again once he passed, but ultimately I’m happy. A day isn’t enough for how much love I feel, never mind a year… I think it just goes on.
Most of the time I can’t honestly tell who’s reading these posts, looking at the art, listening to the music, all that stuff. It is usually mesmerizingly abstract little numbers up until someone sends me a message, comment, question… I teeter off into self-indulgence a lot with these, but I always try to keep in mind that there might be someone reading. When proof-reading lately, I’ve been asking myself “does this suck because I suck or because the text sucks?“. If it’s the text, I’ll do my best to fix it and you deal with the rest on your own, pal.
Still, I don’t know what you want to read. I’m sure in your own life, you have your own sappiness over life and New Year’s, one that already annoys you plenty, so this melancholy-soaked, structureless, idiotic post might have just RUINED your day, and now you’re about ready to kick a dog, steal candy from a baby, or – heaven forbid – KICK and SHOOT a baby dog, to which I say, HOLD THE FORT!!
I do my best to avoid sounding formulaic when writing the end of posts, because every time I am actually hoping you’re having a nice day, just in slightly different ways. Obviously, most of my days are quite average, bit bland; a big chunk of them are straight up bad and depressing. You have to fight for a good day to happen, and I’m so damn lazy…
The thing about bad days is that they don’t really stick; I forget them so easily! Good ones, on the other hand, are always in the back of my mind. I sound overly positive here not because life is a breeze and nothing ever goes wrong, but because I love having a fucking stupid dumbass website, and every time I’m writing for a post, I’m like “oh yeah, I have a website!”.
Nevertheless, I have yet to say “thank you” in a more direct way than I did on 2022’s new year’s post. This is about as good of a closer as I could ever do:
Thank you for your weightless kindness again. I am hoping for a beautiful 2025. So far, so good.
Signed, with love,
noo.dll__〆(￣ー￣ )
see ya!