In October I shared that I was participating in Weird Web October. I mentioned in my last post that when it came up, it felt like the perfect time to be participating in something like this, but I was still on the fence about it until Mitch said he would try and participate in a small amount. He managed to participate on a handful of the days in October! I got my coworker Sha to participate as well, and she honestly knocked it out of the park, with some of her entries giving me a good laugh. As I’m writing this, I haven’t even looked at every single one of them (more on that in a little bit).

I think I went through a wave of emotions while participating in this challenge. At the beginning, my energy was high and I decided to dedicate some time every day, at the same time every day, to making something weird, but in very little time. The suggestion of an hour seemed fair enough—and fun enough, I should add. As the themes were all visible from the beginning of the challenge, I would think the day before about what kind of silly idea I might want to create. Weird Web October became a bit of a habit in the first week, and one that I could easily keep up.

I had some changes in my schedule and commitments just before the start of October that allowed me to have what felt like a generous amount of free time to spare. In that first week, though, I spent far too long on the theme of “Food” for day 5, in which I created a drag-and-drop interface to sort different types of food into bowls. I thought getting into the weeds with some JavaScript—even if a bunch of these creations involve some copy and paste—might be a good learning exercise, but instead I found myself staying up until midnight trying to perfect the experience. To that date, I had prided myself on making everything somewhat mobile-friendly (I’m definitely not blaming Chris for happening to look at most of my Weird Web entries on a mobile phone), and the “Food” entry wasn’t. I hadn’t planned that far ahead and definitely spent too much time getting the JavaScript to work, such that I was losing enjoyment in what I was doing.

I bounced back the next day since I had an idea for the theme of “Notifications”—an anxiety-inducing UI of the badge number on a Messages app icon increasing rapidly—but I also made a conscious promise to myself not to spend excessive amounts of time on what was supposed to be something fun. Sha also kindly, but slightly bluntly, pointed out that true early 2000s internet was not really mobile-friendly, which made me feel less shitty about the wackiness of my food-assorting webpage.

I had zero inspiration for “Science” on day 7, but since my friend Pauline was having a miniature meltdown about microplastics, she suggested something about microplastics as an idea. I was feeling demotivated by a lack of other ideas so I took that idea and merely copied most of my code from the Notifications page I created the day before, and made an alarming statement with a page that displays a six-digit number increasing in value to illustrate how many tonnes of microplastics are in the surface ocean.

In that first week, the amount of interactive and motion-based entries I had were fairly high. I don’t know what made me decide to make things interactive, but on day 1, having created spinning flowers for the theme of “Nature”, I felt like I was enjoying the animation and interactive factor. Having said that, though, my favourite from the first week might actually have to be my take on the theme “Lists”—which is not interactive at all—rather, a digital recreation with CSS of a photo of some Hey Geronimo concert/gig setlists.

My enthusiasm for creating interactive entries dwindled in the second week. I felt like I had far less inspiration, so I was creating very simple things like a calendar recreation for “Ritual”, a cheeky page of what “gif” meant 15 years ago for “GIFs”, and a list of historical events on 14 October for “History”. I spent a long time digging up files on an old hard drive while I was having a conversation with Sha, and that inspired my page for the theme of “Art” on day 10, which includes a whole bunch of nostalgic graphic design pieces I made in around 2009–2010. If you have been following my blog or my work since around that time, you’re gonna love what you see.

I chose to skip API because I had no inspiration or ideas for that one. Even after sussing out some of the other folks’ entries, I decided to give it a skip because I didn’t care enough. My favourite for the second week was actually what I did at the beginning of the week in day 8’s theme “Hashtags”. Hashtags haven’t always been around, especially pre-social media, but they sparked a memory of tag clouds that were common on blogs about 12–15 years ago. After wondering what I could possibly do a tag cloud of, I settled on the famous novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, which is one of my favourite books. It’s not a long read by any means, and there are dozens of PDFs of the book circulating around the internet (and have been for over a decade), so I figured I’d copy the text, dump it into a tag cloud generator, and style it as I saw fit. The tagline for that page was “How many times does the word ‘phony’ really appear in The Catcher in the Rye?” which I was completely nerding out over, and simultaneously laughing at. In school, I remember loads of teens complaining about how the protagonist Holden Caulfield was a whiny bore, repeatedly using the word “phony” throughout his story. But yeah, it was one of my favourite entries of the entire month; have a look for yourself.

The third week was rough and I feel like I hit a point of burnout at this time. Not because of Weird Web October, but other unrelated concerns that came up. It no longer became a priority and some of the themes didn’t get my creative juices going. I was a bit sad that something I initially found fun was no longer fun. I was also pondering what a successful month might look like, realising that there was no great loss if I didn’t end up creating something that I didn’t even have the drive for in the first place.

For day 15’s “Audio” theme, I thought music must certainly be present, because that would give me a horrible excuse to autoplay some poor quality .midi file on a crappy site. Ah, to go back to 2003…! After beginning my mission and locating a midi file that actually inspired me big time, I realised that it’s not possible to play midi files in modern browsers anymore, and although someone had made a JavaScript solution, they’d apparently stuck some gnarly bitcoin-mining shit in there. Yikes. I ended up converting my midi to an mp3 file, and, behold… Octopus’ Garden. I located the free vectors quite easily to create a rudimentary under-the-sea scene, and turns out Emojipedia has a bunch of open source emoji including an animated damn octopus. There was no way I was not putting that in. I was ecstatic at the result here.

My participation in the rest of the third week was minimal and I kinda gave up on the themes I had no inspiration for, like “Social” and “Dimensions”. I played around with some basic shadows in CSS for Dimensions, and then had an idea for “Data” that was spreadsheet-related, but Daniel came up with the incredible idea of putting the word “data” on a page, such that it was too big or didn’t fit, and call it “big data”. The simplicity and amusement of this idea led us to discuss a similarly simple idea for the next day’s theme “Capitalism”, and their idea gave me another one of my own that was similarly simple.

Unfortunately, due to some events affecting my mental health, Weird Web October went further down my priority list. I wouldn’t say I necessarily admitted defeat. I didn’t have the energy or motivation to attempt a lot of the last week of the month, even though I had ideas for some of the themes. I had a clever idea (in my opinion) for “Bugs” where I was going to recreate common bugs in CSS that can cause a website to appear broken. I didn’t get to do that, though.

I thought about attempting some of them after the actual day the theme was for, but given that the core of the challenge is really to do stuff daily, I felt less interested in trying. To be completely honest, some of the themes in the last week of the month were uninspiring to me. I felt like giving “Interactive” a solid pass, given that a handful of my creations were interactive already. “Generative” just kept steering me towards AI, or to this superhero name generator I made about six years ago (amusingly enough, I got “Lesspooper” as my superhero name just then 🙄). Also, I love emoji as it is, so “Emoji” felt like one of those themes where you feel like you already live and breathe the thing, so it’s not really a challenge, if that makes sense.

It’s here where I think it’s useful to notice the patterns that emerged over the month. I feel like there was initially a little bit of a focus on interactive pieces, animation, and movement, then given the time-consuming aspect, that changed into more things that were re-used from existing pages on the internet, or basic information-only single webpages, then into simple typographic pieces that made some kind of statement.

Looking back, I think it is honestly kind of remarkable that there was a sense of community that built up around this project that was started by Jay. The integration with Octothorp.es (created by Nikolas and Nim)—a nifty hashtag/webring directory kinda thing—was pretty sweet, and I loved seeing other people’s entries. I thought I was participating in something that perhaps only folks in the XOXO community would participate in, but I like that it spread a little and that all my friends—indie creators on the internet and those who are not—took an interest in what I was doing. I left all my concerns at the door and even posted a few of my favourite entries on LinkedIn because it was “professional adjacent”. 😂 I think I may have even inspired some people to create things just by way of sharing what I was doing.

It’s sort of obvious by what I’ve already mentioned, but you can tell a fair bit about me as a person from the way I approached some of these themes. Like what sort of music I might be interested in, my history online, and maybe even my sense of humour. I think I could say the same for other people who participated. You’re not inspired by just the theme, but by other things that you might have experienced or that you enjoy.

The whole month was mostly pretty fun. I do genuinely love a select few of the creations I made, while others feel less important and just the result of trying something based on a theme or idea. I really enjoyed seeing what other people came up with and how they interpreted the themes. What I like most about my participation and my experience is how much I really stuck to making stuff for fun and for amusement. This is the kind of stuff that often has some kind of discomfort or uncertainty behind how other people will perceive these things. But sharing them with some of my closest mates was great, and I love that I often didn’t have to explain myself beyond “hey, I’m doing this thing for fun”.

From here, personal concerns aside, I may need to take a bit of a break from making stuff, at least before I do something new. I have been thinking about what creative projects I can do in a more tangible, less “online” kind of way. Truly sucks when you’ve grown up on the internet, make a living because of the internet, and are still fairly “on the internet”. But there are always creative things to do in the world out there. Especially when you can make it weird.