Reflections on Weird Web October 2025

This year, I participated in Weird Web October again. For some reason, I was under the impression that it might not necessarily happen every year, but turns out it was back for a second year. If it weren’t for the interest of some of my friends who wanted to participate in it this year after actually finding out about it from me last year, then I might have completely forgotten about it, or not felt too motivated to participate. I reflected on the experience last year and was looking forward to writing this post. Stay tuned until the end for my favourites out of the ones I completed. 💕

Having a couple more friends participate in WWO this time made it more fun. I was thrilled that a conversation with Bill many months ago encouraged him to make a note of WWO and that he enjoyed participating in it this time round. In particular, Sha (who participated last year), Chris, and I maintained dialogue about WWO throughout the month about what we were working on and sharing ideas about future prompts. At times, we weren’t necessarily doing the day’s prompt on the day, but might have been catching up on it the day after, or working ahead due to other commitments. I used to intensely gatekeep all my ideas when it came to digital creations and the things I wanted to make, for fear it would get stolen or copied. In my time of peak internet fame, people took code for my layouts without credit, someone registered a domain name I wanted because I mentioned it in a blog post and they loved how it sounded, and someone copied my blog posts about my personal life word-for-word but changed all my friends’ names. In the latter two cases, I received an apology. But we’re all adults here, and things aren’t quite like what they were several decades ago. Theft of ideas is mostly credited, and you can pretty much trust your friends to support your ideas or ask how they can get involved (if you are open to it), and not palm off an idea as their own.

Overall, I am happy with how I did throughout the month, and I completed more days than I did last year, when life threw some curveballs and I had no choice but to stop working on WWO. I completed 27 out of 31 days, compared to 17 last year. Also note that many of the screenshots in this post were taken in dark mode, and that the actual websites might look a little bit different when you visit them, depending on your operating system settings or whether I’ve deliberately made the experience use dark colours. 🌛

General thoughts on WWO 2025 itself

I wish I had more time to poke around at other people’s creations via Octothorpes. There is always time now, but it would have been fun to peruse other sites during the month itself. Because I didn’t have a deep look, I have no idea if I coincidentally ended up having the same idea as other folks.

I liked that some of the prompts could be interpreted different ways, although this made me a bit desperate to think of something “different from everyone else”. Some such examples were Scramble (3rd)—scrambling letters/numbers or scrambling food, Filters (4th)—image effects or censorship, Doubles (14th)—duplicates or pairs or copies or repeating, Hidden (20th)—invisible or hiding, Spell (27th)—spelling words or magic-related, and Tables (28th)—tabular data or furniture.

I felt like the last 7–10 prompts for both 2024 and 2025 (even though I didn’t do a whole chunk in 2024) were a little less inspiring than the others, or felt kind of limiting and boring. I happened to think outside the box for some of these.

Not necessarily completing entries on the given day

Although I looked ahead at the prompt list, it felt like too much mental work to ideate or plan anything further than the next day. I mention this because Sha and Chris seemed to have ideas a few days ahead, and I wonder what the situation was for other people participating. Last year, I really cared about working on each entry on the day it was for. Although I have been trying to shake it for years, I have tried to forego perfectionism in favour of consistency of output and commitment to the cause, and this time I decided to be flexible. There is also the case of being in the southern hemisphere and GMT+11 that made me feel slightly okay with working on something the next day. (Apologies U.S.A., but you are a huge country with a large percentage of the world’s population, and this time I get to use it in my favour. Even though it doesn’t really matter. 😂) Conversely, I sometimes did the following day’s entry, especially when I knew I wanted to do something simple. Two such examples were Blink (9th—a recreation of a blinking “open 24 hours” sign) and Upside-down (13th—photos of me and my friends that would switch to one with a silly expression and upside-down on hover).

It was tricky to get the balance right on how much time to spend on each entry. An hour a day seems fine enough, but in reality I think that some of us internet folks are either bad at estimation, or we just go down a rabbit hole of enjoying what we are working on or fleshing out an idea that brings even more ideas, and then the time gets away from us. I screwed myself as early as day 3, when for “Scramble” I wanted to do an interactive cooking thing where you could scramble some eggs, but also wanted to go as far as using different images for dropping eggs or putting in too many ingredients. Even though I directly copied code from something I completed in 2024, I was up late at night trying to finish the damn thing and was annoyed at myself for letting myself think it would be a quicker task than it was.

I ended up doing Camera (11th), Battle (12th), and Upside-down (13th) on the same day while Sha was visiting my place and we were just coding in each other’s presence, eating Pocky (now that my powerlifting competition is done—more on that in another post!), and getting pho delivered. It was actually the day for Battle and I actually had zero idea what I was going to do. Chris’s pick your battle style game was creative and hilarious (the life scenarios in particular, over the work-related option), and Sha’s Pokemon-inspired LLMmon was some top-tier shit. I decided splatting tomatoes would be the way, given that I love tomatoes and normally “fucking hate [coding] animation”, but the resulting page of six splatting tomatoes ended up being something I was proud of. VirtualWolf even suggested turning it into a screensaver! 🍅

Last-minute ideas that came about later in the given day

Some of my ideas, like the tomatoes splatting for Battle, ended up being last-minute ideas. They would sit in my head over the course of the day, and I wouldn’t be able to think of an idea until the evening. Sometimes I’d think about them the day before, but nothing would come to me. Containers (8th) was one of those tricky ideas that resulted in just some vector images of shipping containers.

Warning (10th) was another one I had some vague idea on, but didn’t execute it until the evening. I ended up reusing code from an entry from 2024 (Ritual) to create an interface with a completely full calendar of events, with an alert over the top warning the user that there is no time for Weird Web October. Meta. 😆 I was pretty proud of how that one turned out.

I didn’t just want to do an emoji-related thing for Unicode (15th), even though I love any excuse to use emoji. So most of the day, I was just trying to think of something else. I really nerded out on this one, thinking about ciphers and codes, and created a page that used emoji to represent the message written in Gnommish across the bottom of the pages of the first Artemis Fowl book, that was one of my favourites as a kid.

Other last-minute ideas were:

• Illumination (17th), a moon and some stars slowly glowing to represent the glow-in-the-dark stars that many kids had on their bedroom ceiling decades ago (trouble sleeping? consider keeping a lot of your experiences before visiting a sleep specialist)
• Memory (22nd, albeit done the next day on the 23rd), glitchy text à la blue-screen-of-death inspired by the upcoming Armor For Sleep album
• Spooky (31st), a shaking blob emoji surrounded by animated ghosts that fade in—I actually reused some of the code from my Illumination entry

But my two favourite last-minute ideas were Hidden (20th) and Spell (27th). The former became a statement displaying the visible vs. invisible symptoms of ADHD, which was an entry that I felt proud of putting a bit of my personality and characteristics into. The latter became a funny take on situations involving passing gas and bowel movements (Chris, Sha and I can’t have been the only ones who kept thinking of bowel movements with Solids on day 6 💩), typified by magic-inspired “spells” with a bit of old-timey language. I made sure to include a range of positive and less positive scenarios. 😛 I had an amusing time thinking of creative names for these spells, and as Sha pointed out, there could be a lot more scenarios than the mere twelve I thought up.

Missing 4 out of 31 days

I was quite determined to complete the full 31 days, but as time went on, I focused more on the enjoyment I was getting out of creating cool shit and sharing it with my friends, so the missed days at the end didn’t bother me eventually. For Transition (16th), Chris and I were going to collaborate, having the idea of representing struggling to transition from one environment to another, particularly being distracted and sidetracked while trying to leave your house. We realised that the work for the “game” made the whole thing less interesting to execute and we kind of hit a wall. We bounced back and continued with the rest of WWO but didn’t return to it.

“Style” was one of those prompts that felt both vague and broad, but less interesting than the other prompts, so I had far less motivation to do anything for it. Sha ended up using a picture of me for her entry. I originally wanted to do something similar with photos of my outfits, as I had done for Remix (5th) with shuffling photos of me wearing different outfits, or Doubles (14th) with photos of me wearing the same clothes in different colours. But I wasn’t feeling inspired to actually put anything together, so after a few days, I completely skipped it.

I’d gotten my entry for Spell done and was feeling good about it, but I was feeling kind of burnt out in my personal life and was really not feeling inspired for Tables (28th) and Surprise (29th). I am sure I could have put something together, but I was having a bad week. I wanted my Tables entry to reference turntables and have some audio and reference vinyl records, but it was too much work. The only thing I had a more solid idea for was Deprecated (30th). Even when that day came, I scrapped my original idea of showcasing “old tech that doesn’t exist anymore” and “bands that don’t make music anymore”, for a simple page with an old dialog of connecting to dialup internet, that plays the infamous modem sound when you click it. By the time I did my entry for Spooky, which was a last-minute idea, I actually felt somewhat satisfied with how I’d done with WWO overall, and decided not to bend over backwards trying to “catch up” on the ones I’d recently missed.

My overall approach and attitude to creating my entries

I held this habit of maintaining my style/branding across all my creations, but that really shouldn’t have been necessary. I just got used to it. I cared about how the creations looked in both light and dark mode. I did this since participating last year, and I think a large part of it was because I don’t code for leisure anymore and I wanted to use the opportunity to flex my skills and make something to a standard I was proud of. That just so happens to be neat, scalable code, and clean user interfaces. However, I like that I still gave a nod to things of yore, like image maps, dialup internet, and BSOD.

I was having some consistency with at least a small amount of interactivity in each entry, even if it was an animation on hover, or an animation that occurred on page load. Then I felt an odd pressure from myself to always make something interactive, or that my entry for a particular day wasn’t good enough because it was “just text” or “just pictures”. I was less likely to do simple, informational pages like my GIFs entry from 2024. I had a lot more animated pieces in my entries this year compared to 2024.

I spent every day for the first half the month “shitposting” my Weird Web creations on LinkedIn before I ran out of of steam, but maintained my “it’s professional-adjacent” and “fuck the hustle” attitude. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t continue crapping on about my creations there, because I wanted to get more up in people’s faces about creativity for creativity’s sake, and throw some entertainment into the realm of AI-generated marketing fluff (if you are reading this post after I shared it on LinkedIn, and you actually use the platform, I ain’t sorry). I also shared some of my stuff on Mastodon, but as it turns out, promoting yourself is also tiring work. 😅

Making it personal

A handful of my entries ended up being cathartic and good for my mental health because they allowed me to creatively (albeit vaguely) express some personal concerns that have weighed on me over the course of the year. It goes without saying that some of the scenarios in my Sub-optimal (7th), Trading (18th), and Empty (25th) entries were inspired by real-life events. I don’t really do a lot of journalling, but what I wrote for Empty was sort of like a poem and I had missed writing poetry.

As I mentioned earlier, a bunch of my entries had references to my personal style with some photos of me in my outfits. I also referenced music I like and the Artemis Fowl book that was core to my childhood. There are bits and pieces that can put together a more complete picture of who I am, and my personality.

Finally, I hope I didn’t offend anyone immensely with my entry for Language (21st), which rotates through a bunch of profane words. Once again, I won’t apologise for being Australian. 🤬😁

Favourite (or best?) entries I did

This is the right way to end this post! ✨ Below is my personal selection of six favourites. There isn’t a screenshot for all of them as they appeared earlier in this post.

Maps—image maps using photos of my living room and Deadpool figurines

This may not have been the most “pretty” UI but what I did sort of lended itself to a more rudimentary interface. I created image maps on various photos of my living room, which started as an idea to explore and look at various things in my home, but then I decided to make it a scavenger hunt to locate all my Deadpool figurines. Image maps were my method of choice when it came to creating layouts back in the early 2000s. No screenshot for this one because I think it’s worth going and checking out the experience. 🤩

Solids—an interactive page with transparent and solid colours shown at random

Upon clicking a button, a coloured square moves over an image to show whether the colour was transparent or opaque (solid). I was going to make it an interface where you select one of the two options and find out if you are correct, but I simplified it to just clicking a button. After creating it, I found it a lot more fun to look at myself afterwards. 🌈

Warning—a day in a calendar, full of events, with a warning that there’s not enough time for WWO

I liked the attention this drew towards the idea of hustling and filling one’s calendar with commitments and social events, and trying to squeeze something in your day even if there is the smallest bit of time. As my friend Bill said, just because there is a bit of time available in your day, that doesn’t mean you have to fill it. Initially, the idea was to make the warning reference a coffee catch-up, but I decided to make it reference WWO itself. 😛

Battle—splatting tomatoes

This one topped the list because of my general aversion towards animation, and the result being better than what I thought I could achieve.

Bounce—bounced email from a desperate ex-boyfriend

In the realm of amusement and taking “bounce” to mean bounced emails, I created an email interface of a man professing his love for a woman, that gives a bounced email alert upon pressing “Send”, suggesting you should leave your ex alone. This references the song Layla by Derek and the Dominoes (a song I like dearly).

Spell—magic spells related to an ordinary bodily function

I already summarised this earlier, but an excuse to tap into my oft-immature sense of humour resulted in a chart of various “spells” related to pooping and farting. 💩🪄

Honourable mentions go to Filters (4th), which was a list of radio options showing how different generations and communication styles would write the word “lol”, and Sub-optimal (7th), a diagram of hypothetical life scenarios that are optimal or not. Some were inspired by some possibly relatable scenarios like stubbing your toe, but also less relatable things like suddenly finding out a family secret. Some were inspired by my own life. 😅

Thanks so much for reading this far, and I hope you enjoy prodding around at all the creations made for WWO.