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two words. they are both somewhere on this site.
welcome to the back room. everything in here is true.
the first mascot was supposed to be a cat. it came out as a teal cube with a face. the second attempt had ears that floated slightly above the head, like they had somewhere better to be. the third one finally looked like a cat, so it stayed. the site has been quietly proud of it ever since.
a green dot that says "working" without checking anything is just a green dot with a good publicist. so it got a real check, and then it lied anyway, for very technical reasons. the full story is in the blog.
this site's host blocks pages from fetching anything from other sites and from posting forms to them. the guestbook lives on a small server at home, so it hides in an iframe. the sidebar chip asks it how it's doing by loading a tiny script that answers "up". a trick from about 2008, still working.
the random page button. added, admired, removed four days later because it wasn't earning its keep.
the mock guestbook. the first guestbook was fake, and pretended very hard. it was replaced by the real one.
the marquee. it got bolder. then it got a lot bolder. it lives on, in spirit.