Page (Not) Found

Ideally, you’ll never end up on the 404 page on this site. It should remain hidden, which makes it a perfect place for hiding Easter Eggs.

Nonstop nonsense

Across the Internets, 404 pages have always provided the opportunity to add some quirky nonsense. This site followed suit. An early version contained two jokes. When I showed it to a friend of mine, he suggested to feature only one. Which I then did, but I chose the less fun one, namely this quote:

Truth be told, this is unacceptable.

The message above looks dated, because the citation contains a date. And it shows my last name at the time, which changed when I got married in 2019.

Which is why, in early 2024, I decided to bring back “the other joke”, albeit in enhanced form. I’m now giving visitors the opportunity to upload the missing page themselves. Try it out, it doesn’t work.

Thumbnail images

I have two additional remarks about 404 on this page, concerning images.

1. Since version 4, whenever an article (or more likely a thread) doesn’t have its own thumbnail image, it will use the one from the 404 page. The one from the home page could’ve been the default too, but I concluded: “Thumbnail image not found” makes even more sense. At the same time, the 404 thumbnail became transparent, allowing the accent color of the section to be placed behind it, peeking through. Unless you’ve opted out of the advanced theme, you can see it in action on the real 404 page.
2. With aforementioned transparency, the predecessor thumbnail image of the real 404 page had to be retired. It showed the number 404 in pixelated form over and over again, which at some point had also been in use as a repeating background image. More than four years later I revived it, converted it into a webp image, so it could become the thumbnail image of this Easter egg page.

---

It’s weird

404 pages usually argue that a page is not found. Even the one on this site states This page does not exist in its <meta name="description">.

Which is not really true, the 404 page does exist, only the page that led to 404 doesn’t. 😶‍🌫️

To be, or not to be, that is the question.