Category: Internet Life

Syrric – The YouTube Channel I didn’t know I need

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The last couple of nights I’ve fallen asleep to the Syrric YouTube Channel. It is a group of dudes who read out fun facts about video games. The thing that differentiates it from a bunch of other channels? It’s not designed to be watched – but rather listened too as you fall asleep.

Last night I had a hectic day and wasn’t in until about 9pm. I try to fall asleep between 10 and 11pm, so when I went to bed I was still rather awake.

10 minutes of hearing a calming voice talk about the history of Super Mario Brothers? Zonked out.

Also, quite nicely, as their output has been so regular the inevitable questions about it being AI generated came out – which they were quick to answer in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk7Nx0xpmj8

In short, I’ve really enjoyed this channel, and recommend checking it out. Hope it continues for ages as they’ve been burning through franchises like nobody’s business!

Update 23rd March 2026: Welp! That didn’t last long. Seems like the channel was deleted. Checking the comment on the German channel, it appears as though the French (and therefore, probably the English) channel were flagged as spam. I don’t know the exact reason, but it kinda sucks as other YouTubers I follow have had run ins with the YouTube nodding donkey that seems to arbitrarily kill things off for being too much fun. Should stick to those AI videos generated from Reddit threads over the top of Minecraft footage, lads.

Update 27th March 2026: Seems like it is back!

MOPy – A screensaver that was bad for the environment

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I saw a post by Ben Daubney that brought back suppressed memories – a screensaver called MOPy, that was controversial due to it’s way you would feed and nurture your virtual pet.

As Ben stated on his post:-

To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a while, every kid was spending every lunchtime printing out a single character on a sheet of A4 over and over again just to get enough points to give their virtual fish some virtual bubbles, and hundreds if not thousands of pages were tossed into the bin.

13 year old me didn’t have a printer, so I seemed to remember if the fish went without food, water or their environment enriched by printing out waste of paper, the fish would die. It was incredibly distressing seeing a fish on the surface of the screensaver.

Anyway, there’s a gallows humour joke to be made how a virtual fish ate resources, so ChatGPT could boil the oceans. I’ve not had enough coffee to make it, however.

RIP MOPy Fish, we hardly knew ye.

Stack Shaggers

What’s with all the folks online tearing down other people’s stack?

I’ve read many a post in the past few weeks where people have been complaining about WordPress. There are justifiable complaints, obviously. However I feel like some developers and designers have made their entire existence about hating WordPress. Celebrating people moving off the platform. There are folks who post 2,000 word articles about how they hate Wapuu’s, sharing it as critiques on the community at the whole. But if you read the article fully, they simply hate Wapuu.

I mean, look at him. People hate him1.

Like…mate…who hurt you?

Obviously, everybody is entitled to their opinion. But I find it a bit strange. Making your entire personality on hating anything is weird, but especially for hating something as benign as a tech stack. Mate, Node.js won’t sleep with you. I also think it’s strange that people openly post on company blogs this. At least I try and keep it a bit separate. It’s woefully unprofessional and I can’t imagine it gets many customers.

Of course WordPress has problems. The block editor is a bit clunky still, and I am cheering on Fair to succeed. But nothing else is perfect. Shopify has problems2, Next.js has problems3, Webflow has problems. Different tools have positives and negatives. Being wedded to one system is always limiting. Be curious of other things4, explore the bubble outside, recognise which tools are best for the job, and go with them.

Never one of the Cool Kids

For me, I find the tool the most comforting to be WordPress. It’s creaky and clunky at time, but the sites rank well enough and do okay, plus I can make changes easily. There’s a reason why it’s been popular for so long. Same way COBOL has been around for so long. WordPress doesn’t attract the cool kids, but do you want your bank account to be cool5? Or traffic light systems to be cool? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather they work. I think WordPress is in the same place.

I find it similar to a patriotism. Usually the ones who I deem to be the most patriotic I find the ones who don’t bang on about it and recognise there are problems along the way. Whereas the folks who make their whole personality around a flag or a leader just a bit weird. Like they have nothing else to offer bar a piece of fabric from a flagpole. Because their piece of fabric is in their mind is better than your piece of fabric. And they want you to know about it.

I think developers who make their whole personality of “Hating on WordPress” similar. It’s text in a file that you open on a computer. We don’t have to be so emotional about it.

Finally – I’d like to draw your attention to the heading of the post. Do you know how difficult to find a roundabout that hasn’t been defaced in the UK in the year of our Lord 2025? To use as a base for my top image? Surely that’s worth a share just for that.

  1. I may have assumed the gender of Wapuu. In which case, I apologise. ↩︎
  2. Shopify is a nightmare for redirects. Like really bad. I had to use my friend Shane’s approach to redirects with it. As redirects in Shopify is completely unusuable. ↩︎
  3. Have you ever tried to use Next.js to put anything in the header – like JSON+LD? And for it to work? Impossible. ↩︎
  4. For what it’s worth in my limited free time I’m exploring Astro, Eleventy and Laravel ↩︎
  5. Every single challenger bank in the UK I know have had problems – particularly when things go wrong. Whereas I’m very happy with my Lloyds account. ↩︎

Whimsical Website, Grumpy Webmaster

If you visited the site on the last post, you’ll notice that the site has had a bit of a makeover. Or a makedown.

I’ve talked about Ana Rodrigues’ talk at Loopconf before, on how personal websites should make a comeback. It was inspiring. So inspiring that I spent a good 20 hours wrestling with Twenty Fifteeen to make it a bit more modern behind the scenes. I think I’ve succeeded, and it plays well with the block editor. Were nearly there. Gaps still don’t work, for example. And there’s a bug list.

The joy of web crafting

Could I have done it faster? Sure. but here’s the thing, I had fun. Every evening for a few hours I listened to BBC Radio 3 Unwind with a Bird and Blend tea and crafted. Crafting is fun. Doing pixel art with Aseprite is fun. Building and creating is fun, and this was a fun project that I dedicated my evenings to for a couple of weeks. My blood pressure dropped. I relaxed. I zoned out. And I created this.

Sure it’s a bit creaky, the same way the bathroom lock I installed wiggles a bit. It is dated, but so are my curtains. This site is my home on the internet. I want to make it homely. Sure it’s not the nicest, or the one that sells my skills the best. But the displays in Ikea are designed to sell the product, not live in. This is my home. It is mine. It is unique1. I also wasn’t wrestling with AI prompts2 and getting angry at creating something soulless.

Go Explore!

I also recently ticked off another 50 of my 50 list – I went to The Cave. One of the things that does so well is that you’re encouraged to explore, pick up, interact, read, play, and just discover things. I want a similar experience to that here. I am fighting with attention with everything else on the internet. I want to make this website a joyful experience that makes you smile. To encourage discovery of the whimsical web. My Trello board is bursting with idea. When will they get implemented? I dunno, but there’s a few here already. Go and explore! Things may appear in the upcoming weeks! Come back!

I want this website to do that as a love letter to internet culture. I also will try and blog more. I have enjoyed it. Though I’ve found myself becoming more grumpy at the state of the internet, with AI, and enshittification. I am reminded how things were. Were things perfect? No. But they were better. I want a place where I can be grumpy online. After all, I am a white middle aged man on the internet. Of course I have opinions. I want to share them with the world. So whilst the site may be whimsical, the posts may be a bit grumpy.

So this the new layout of my site, hopefully for the next wee while. Where I’m probably going to post a lot of grumpy posts. Hope you like it!

  1. As much as a Twenty Fifteen child theme can be, obviously. ↩︎
  2. For full disclosure I used one piece of AI on the site – I wireframed the structure of me stealing a traffic cone, because I struggle with drawing humans that look somewhat realistic. The colouring and shading was done by me – this video is a great guide to get into pixel art, by the way. ↩︎