Hi, how have you been this past month?! く⁠コ⁠:⁠彡

I’m never complimenting the weather again. It’s so dry. I’m pounding bottle after bottle of water and I still feel like my skin is going to pulverize…! I’m sick too – my voice is, without exaggeration, completely gone; my coughs, so frequent, they’ve settled into a sort of consistent motorik rhythm… I honestly can’t remember the last time I got sick twice in a year, but 2025 is a box of surprises.

Speaking of box of surprises, I have a friend that has, for the past 10 years, incidentally mentioned in conversations, quote, “I know how to say ‘box of surprises’ in French”, to which we reply “what is it?”, and he answers “caixin de suplé”.

Now, this might be gullible on my part, but I have never even ONCE doubted this little factoid – so imagine my shock when I look it up after writing the last paragraph, only to find out it’s actually “boîte à surprises”… which sucks! People laud French as this ‘sexy’, ‘romantic’ language, but things like ‘sexy’ and ‘romantic’ have never factored in my life. I just respect their front rounded vowels, is all.

After confronting him about this, all my friend replied was “you believe in the internet?” — he then later added, “that’s AI”.

…well, I want to believe. “caixin de suplé” it is.

Like I had previously mentioned in the last post, the interview I did with chipy (cheapycore.com’s creator) came out earlier this month. You can read it here.

It was fun! I feel very honored for even being asked questions like that in the first place. Usually it’s just me rambling on and on here, for no apparent reason – but now you get to read it all on someone else’s page… well, I recommend some good art books and artists, so at least gleam the interview for that!!
Take the opportunity to check out chipy’s website too. There’s a lot of charming stuff over there… I love their music d(´• ω •`)b

Something I actually forgot to mention in the last post was the book reader – adding new features to the website and mentioning them an update late has become something of a tradition here. It was on the changelog, but nonetheless…
This book reader will prove to be super useful later down the line. t-sc helped me (once again) to make a modular folder system with astro, so now, all we have to do is throw pictures in a folder, change a few parameters and it’s more or less done. We’ve done some small quality-of-life improvements for it on this update.

Right now, you can check out the ghost equip artbook online, but there will be more stuff added soon (for real this time!).

There’s also the playlist page that I’ve never officially acknowledged, because… I forgot about it. It updates automatically with every blogpost, and if you play the songs from there instead of the regular button on the blog, you get to go through all the tracks like, well, a playlist – previous and next buttons included. You can access it normally by clicking on the “now playing” header that’s on the sidebar.

That’s all for zona.plankton news, I think～

I know I haven’t recommended anything directly in quite a while, so let’s get back in the groove… here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about:

Hermeto Pascoal • listen to “Alexandre, Marcelo e Pablo”

Rest in peace!! In my opinion, he was not only the greatest Brazilian musician, but the greatest musician from anywhere in the universe. He truly lived through music… his records, so densely packed with love that it surpassed every trite, superfluous connotation that carelessly throwing words like “love” around could have. Always the real deal.

I can’t recommend his work enough (I even did it already on blogpost #007), though I’d say, if you’ve never heard his music before, start with “Zabumbê-bum-á” (my personal favorite), “Lagoa da Canoa, Município de Arapiraca” (so many classics here), “Festa Dos Deuses” (perfect for Spring), or, ah… just pick a random one!!! They’re truthfully all incredible.
This is the music that has framed every single sound of my life from the point I listened to it onwards. Só não toca quem não quer! ✿

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek - Bird, Lake, Objects • listen

It’s a beautiful, delicate record. As a teenager, I used to love just sitting in bed or next to a window, and letting it play from start to finish; it was like immersing myself in a world of sea foam.
Funnily enough, their other full-length collaboration is named Schaum, which is “foam” in German (very satisfying phonemically, which is not something I can say about ‘boîte’), though that record always lent itself more to the alien tropics side than this one.
I love the resonant tone that plays at the end of “Waltz (a lonely crowd)”, like a whalesong… Another favorite of mine is “Stripped to RM” (RM being, I think, a reference to ring modulation). It unfurls so subtly, you only ever notice it happening once the song starts fading back into nothing. “Undercurrent” is an incredibly sentimental opener. The vibraphone feels like a teacup at the edge of a table!… Every timbre is tastefully arranged here. It’s been keeping me company while under the weather.

The X-Files

I first started watching The X-Files a few months ago. I didn’t know much about the show beforehand (you could summarize my exposure to it with the Simpsons spoof episode and the theme song) but I’ve been having a good time. I’m on season 4 right now; what I’ve been noticing is that the highs have gradually gotten higher, the mids and lows gradually duller. It really hammers home the importance of writing…

Most episodes go like this: someone dies under strange circumstances. Because of this, the local authorities call for federal help, often specifically soliciting Agents Mulder & Scully (for their extensive experience with strange circumstances).
Scully does some medical autopsies and discovers dubious scientific and/or forensic leads, to which Mulder immediately makes a leap of faith into the paranormal… “they had a case like this in the 50s” and such. Scully disagrees with him, as she’s much more grounded. Maybe throw in a little smarmy quip between the two attractive agents – well, no time for that, as more people die!!
By this point, both Mulder’s & Scully’s modus operandi seem to be vaguely validated as they follow through on their own little logic/feeling conundrum and narrow down the danger’s source.
In the third act, all hell breaks loose – someone could die right now, you see – and they need to act with urgency (and a clearer sense of what’s going on). The episode ends as the threat is neutralized, somehow, and they experience one final contact with the paranormal… but there’s still some plausible deniability to leave you wondering.

(You can throw in some secret government interference every few episodes, as a treat.)

I like the format, but what you do with it is the important part! Vince Gilligan’s “Pusher” is a great episode. It’s a novel (and much soapier) X-Files angle on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure”. My favorite one so far is “Die Hand Die Verletzt”, which starts out as a pretty cheeky satanic panic story, though it takes on an earnest, disturbing tone halfway through. It’s probably the best balance of horror and humor in the show… I love the locations on that episode as well. As far as straight up humor goes, well the Darin Morgan episodes are just great: “Humbug”, “War of the Coprophages”, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”… They’re all highlights. The dynamic between Mulder and Scully is at its peak on these. “Blood” is also a solid episode (and it’s basically denpa).

If you’re at all interested, the first few episodes should be a good way to gauge if the show will hook you or not – it’s pretty solid television… I’d say give it a shot.

I’m writing this little epilogue on the 29th. Everything before this part came relatively early in the month, compared to the previous updates. I’m still a little sick, but much better now – I summoned every strength I had, real or placebo… I could be in the throes of disease, the eye of the storm; for all I care, I think my attitude is doing something here.

I can afford to doubt myself at almost every moment, and I do, though—I have to admit—living like failure is an absolute uncontested certainty, seems to have a strange, incorporeal side effect… I think to myself, “the more you fail, the likelier it is that you’re gonna win”. It’s not good logic. Can you imagine if I tossed all my cash into the lottery out of a conviction like this? Nonetheless, I really believe it, and am sort of living by it.

I’ve been working like a salaryman lately. I just head straight to work after waking up, leave and then (really) work on projects until it’s time to go to bed. I feel like this is what I was training my whole life to do.
This has some repercussions, of course, like having intermittent naps at my office job – but I just drag my chair under my desk and sleep there… a perfect foil. They won’t even remember I was there in the first place!… except they do, and I get frequently dragged out by my co-workers. The special insight you get from working in IT is that people usually leave earlier than you, and that your job is basically Dr. Mario. It’s always an uphill battle, isn’t it?

The thing I didn’t factor in when deciding to make monthly posts for all of 2025 is that these posts would eventually morph into little snapshots of how my life is going… for the most part, I expected to just recommend some random thing, tell you that “I’m still working on cool stuff behind the scenes! Just wait!”, and keep at it – I’m glad this is the direction things went in instead. This is a truly odd year… It might be a bit boring now, but with enough time it will make for an interesting archive.

I’ve really been trying my absolute hardest… I just wanted to bookend this post by telling you that I’m having the time of my life.

Have a beautiful day! This October’s going to be dynamite - everything will blow up!!

Also, everyone wish a nice recovery for my friend Gabriel ~

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