2016~Ongoing · Website
Always Your Pal, Melon! is an online studio and playground, a maze-like website full of experimental ideas, personal journals, micro-projects, tools, and virtual worlds. It's an ongoing project started in 2016 that has received 20 million unique visits as of 2026. It explores the mythology, joy, and haunting loss felt by a generation who grew up on the web and now feel it has been stolen by corporate greed.
This project was a Webby Award finalist in 2023 and a Lovie finalist in 2026, it received a write-up in the New Museum's Rhizome branch, it's been featured in multiple publications such as It's That Nice and Polygon, and it received a Rhizome Microgrant in 2023.
Webweekly interview with Badgermein skimask
"I don't think I could pinpoint when it began! It's made of ideas that go back as far as I can remember; however, the oldest currently active site (melonking.net) started in 2016 and the forum started in 2021. Both of those years were quite traumatic times for me; I needed a space I could retreat to and call home; so in that sense, it is exactly what I needed it to be."
Naive Yearly series essay (mythopoetic web)
The first upload to my homepage (melonking.net) in 2016 was a story about a goat who trades his ears for an iPad, but recovers them again when he realises that the iPad can be broken in two, and remade into cyborg ears that fuse the best of what he had lost and what he had gained.
The story itself is a reference to a local myth about Lough Hyne, a tidal lake in West Cork, Ireland. After my parents split up in 2006, my dad bought a house near this lake, and we would sometimes canoe to an island on it for picnics. At the island's far shore and surrounded by a wall of brambles were the ruins of a small castle that had overgrown into a mound of ivy. It was an abandoned place, though supposedly the mythological home of a King who had donkey’s ears.
It’s a myth that appears in various forms across Europe. It goes: Each year the King would summon a local boy to cut his hair - and then kill the boy when he discovered the King’s secret (that he had donkey ears). This continued until one year, as the latest boy lay dying on the ground, he whispered the secret to the grass. The grass then whispered it to the trees, and the trees to the birds, and pretty soon everyone knew.
Wonders Of Web Weaving podcast with James
I had a lecturer who did web stuff, and all his sites were plain white: perfect semantic markup, perfect accessibility at every point. We had this rote class where we’d build websites and he’d judge every detail: did you get the semantics right, is there some obscure accessibility problem here.
When I found Neocities, it was a rebellion against that. I wanted to make a website that broke every rule I’d been taught in college: overly compressed images, impossible to read, difficult to navigate, everything unclear. That was the initial “why does it look the way it looks” point.
I thought it’d be a weekend project. It was a joke - more a parody of a 90s website than a homage.
That changed when I went to California and visited Disneyland. I’m not a Disney person, so I didn’t expect to like it, but I was curious. I spent two days walking around, mesmerised by their ability to construct an alternate reality and to morph your mood, even if you didn’t want to be morphed.
When I came back, it changed my perspective on what a site could be. I wanted to see if I could make the Disneyland of the web: a site that could do that mood transition and world-altering stuff that Disneyland does.