The Story
TL;DR — I painted a banana with watercolors and then, with no coding experience, I built an app for my banana using ChatGPT and natural language. Then I used ChatGPT again to build this random website so I could tell you about it—and show you.
Click the green Enter the Portal button at the top of this page then tap/click on the banana. Each tap on the banana reveals a new animation. Best on desktop. Impossible a few years ago.
One night last year I got bored and painted a banana with watercolor at my kitchen table. I also peeled a sticker off a real banana and stuck it on the painting.
Then I cut the banana out of the watercolor paper, snapped a picture, and taped it on my refrigerator where it has lived ever since.
Last week I was going through old photos on my phone and came across the banana. I thought, “I really love that banana.” So I went over to Staples and printed the picture to see what it would look like on paper. When it came out of the printer, I thought, "Wow, I think I might love this banana more than anything in the world."
So I went to the dollar store across the street and bought a picture frame for $5 and put the freshly printed banana into the frame. It looked so cool I drove around to all the dollar stores in Guelph, looking for more of the same frames—I came up with 10 more.
I went back to Staples, printed 10 more bananas, and put them into the frames.
So for no particular reason, I now have a box of bananas sitting in my living room that I love more than anything.
Over the weekend I was staring at the box of bananas and I wondered, "What else could I do with that banana?"
Meanwhile, I had recently heard about a coding platform called Replit that I was curious about trying—the idea being that anyone who doesn’t have a programming background (me) can use natural language to build software.
So I created a free Replit account, opened a new window with ChatGPT, and started tinkering.
I hadn’t planned to build anything—just poke around. But then something weird happened.
Something…magical.
I fell into a banana portal.
Time faded and suddenly there was bananas everywhere.
Hundreds of bananas—spinning, jittering, melting, wobbling, leaping through the air.
Bananas that undulate, oscillate, pulsate and squish with sine-based scaling.
Hours of conversation about trick logic, event triggers, bounce physics, elastic collisions, friction damping, gravity and lateral drift simulation.
My god!
Some bananas even became hero jumpers with boosted super-arc acrobatic energy that have a 3% chance per frame of launching across the screen based on their cooldown state.
I entered the banana portal with a vague idea in my head and about six hours later I reemerged with a strange app.
It was a small idea that might have stayed trapped in my head forever—too technically impractical to express without years of specialized skills. But in less than half a day, it became real using nothing more than plain English—the same words I’m using right now to tell you this story.
This first experiment with Replit was built with exactly the same impulse as my watercolor banana.
And now the bananas are starting to escape into the REAL WORLD! You might spot one in a café, a bookstore, maybe even hanging in your friend’s living room. The portal is open—who knows what could happen next.
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UPDATE 8/10 New 'banana tree' animation added to the portal. Banana leaves with a slight breeze.
Technical page coming soon with animation descriptions.