I only came across the concept of zines the past year, while in lockdown. That coupled with the growing nostalgia for "the old web" gave me the idea to create a

I only came across the concept of zines the past year, while in lockdown. That coupled with the growing nostalgia for "the old web" gave me the idea to create a Neocities account for "creative idea brain dumping". The intent is for it to hold the creative work (e.g., photography, fiction, or just plain web/coding experiments) that I have not deemed good enough for my usual self-promotion channels (like DeviantArt and FB for my photography, GitHub for coding). I've never experienced zines but I feel like this captures their spirit; publications that can't get any more amateur if they tried. Alas, I got caught up in the project planning tendencies I've acquired from work. I got to design homepages for two projects/e-zines but that's pretty much all I've finished. Nested in my project directories are markdown files of stories in various stages of completion, a portfolio of digital paintings that have lost stylistic cohesion, CSS and JS files for half-baked "cool ideas". In my Trello boards are concepts and character backstories though, right now, there's only one card in-progress and null finished. But I'm not disappointed with it! I definitely learned a lot in this ultra-unfinished project. It gave me the impetus to finally learn CSS and JS properly (as opposed to copy-pasting SO snippets to meet deadlines). And I bought a Wacom tablet and learned digital painting which is a really cool hobby to wait lockdowns out. It is exhausting trying to do everything as a one-man team but the act of brainstorming itself is creativity-refreshing. I'd still like a finished work to point to but, with all I've already done, I have found internal satisfaction.