#Gonna cry and complain as I make my messy sketches into beautiful art ✨

[musogato]

What is going on with your website, Distant Horizon? I see it hasn't been updated in a few years. I found it recently and was really intrigued by it. Do you think you will ever start updating it again? Maybe because of new avatar content from Avatar Studios? If not id still like to know more about it and what happened/ how you made it. :)

Hi there! Yeah, My old beloved fansite Distant Horizon is more-or-less on permanent hiatus. (Although now that I'm looking at it, I realize I didn't announce that anywhere?? Oops.)

But yeah! I had a lot of fun working on the various pages, especially the easter egg/omg dude! page, the annual pumpkin carving contest, all the character sprites, and the seasonal layouts. Especially when the show was originally airing and there was so much fun energy in the fandom. But it eventually became too much work for me and my interest in ATLA and website maintenance in general just declined over the years. (I know I should update it with the Avatar Studios news but... I don't want to 😭)

I do still love atla though and I'm curious to see what Netflix and Avatar Studios will be doing with the series. But I'm also observing from a distance. I'm not sure if I'll ever update my site again, but we'll see. It feels kind of unnecessary with the other fast-updating atla news sites and the very comprehensive fandom wiki. And tbh just the thought of doing website stuff is exhausting to me. I'm out of the game and aren't interested in getting back in.

But when ATLA first aired in 2005, I loved that first two-part episode so much that I made my fansite in one week. Back then it was just the layout and pages with character bios and lists of the creatures and items and whatever official info and art I could find from promo sites and Nick.com. God I used to take screenshots of the show by pausing my vcr and taking a photo of the tv. 😂 But it was a lot of fun seeing the Avatar world expand with every new episode and rushing to add that new info to the site. And DH continued to expand with the forum, the wallpapers and fanart that fans sent in, the tcg scans and calligraphy translations, all the other info pages, and info/official art from the international Nickelodeon sites. Fandom was really collaborative and even though the shipwars were terrible, everything else was really nice.

There were a lot of other atla fansites too, small and big, and that community was probably my favorite aspect of the fandom. So many people set up their own sites and dedicated it to the latest atla news or their favorite characters, or their fanart, layout graphics or sprite adoptables, or snarky takes on badly written fanfics, and etc. A lot of it is completely gone now, which is... really sad to me, and is why I still keep Distant Horizon up even though I'm pretty much done with it. I don't like seeing fandom stuff disappear as if it never existed.

Anyway this got really long, sorry! 😅 But to answer your last question, I was just a nerd who learned how to code html on Neopets, loved it, and wanted to make a website for my own art and stuff. If I didn't know how to do something, like make a mysql database to make my wallpapers & tcg gallery searchable by characters, I looked it up and learned how to code it. (I make that sound easy but know it involved a lot tears.) I made a couple of fansites before DH, so by then I knew what I was doing and what kind of site I wanted to make. Although that still didn't prepare me for just how big it got. At one point my webhost had to contact me because of how much traffic the site was getting, and they couldn't understand why so many people were visiting if there wasn't pirated content or p*rn involved 😂

But experienced or not, if there's something you want to do, then do it. It may be difficult and involve a lot of crying or complaining, but if it's something you want, keep going for it. 👍