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I am tired. For a couple of years I’ve been blaming it on iron-poor blood, lack of vitamins, diet, and a dozen other maladies. But now I’ve found out the real reason: I’m tired because I’m overworked.
The population of the UK is 69 million1, of which the latest census has 37 million “of working age”2.
According to the latest statistics, 4,215,913 are unemployed3, leaving 32,784,087 people to do all the work.
19.2 million are in full time education4, 856,211 in the armed forces5, and collectively central, regional, and local government employs 4.987 million6. This leaves just 12,727,876 to do all of the real work.
Long term disabilities affect 6.9 million7. 393,000 are on visas that prohibit them from working8, and 108,0859 are working their way through the asylum process.
Of the remaining 339,791 people, a hundred thousand are in prison10 and 239,789 are in hospital11.
That leaves just two people to do all the work that keeps this country on its feet.
You and me.
And you’re sitting reading this.
This joke originally appeared aeons ago. I first saw it in a chain email in around 199612, when I adapted it from a US-centric version to a more British one and re-circulated it among some friends… taking the same kinds of liberties with the numbers that are required to make the gag work.
And now I’ve updated it with some updated population statistics13.
1 Source: Provisional population estimate for the UK: mid-2025, Office for National Statistics.
2 Source: Working age population, gov.uk.
3 Source: Unemployment, Office for National Statistics.
4 Source: Statistica for all the children, plus FE students from Education and training statistics for the UK, gov.uk, with some rounding.
5 Source: Hansard, here, plus other sources from the same time period.
6 Source: this informative article.
7 Source: UK disability statistics: Prevalence and life experiences, House of Commons Library.
8 Source: Reason for international migration, international students update: May 2025, Office for National Statistics.
9 Source: How many people claim asylum in the UK?, gov.uk.
10 Source: Prison population: weekly estate figures 2025, gov.uk.
11 Source: Bed Availability and Occupancy, Hansard Library.
12 In fact, I rediscovered it while looking through an old email backup from 1997, which inspired this blog post.
13 Using the same dodgy arithmetic, cherry-picking, double-counting, wild over-estimations, and hand-waving nonsense. Obviously this is a joke. Oh god, is somebody on the satire-blind Internet of 2026 going to assume any of these numbers are believable? (They’re not.) Or think I’m making some kind of political point? (I’m not.) What a minefield we live in, nowadays.
This weekend, I received my copy of DOCTYPE, and man: it feels like a step back to yesteryear to type in a computer program from a magazine: I can’t have done that in at least thirty years.
So yeah, DOCTYPE is a dead-tree (only) medium magazine containing the source code to 10 Web pages which, when typed-in to your computer, each provide you with some kind of fun and interactive plaything. Each of the programs is contributed by a different author, including several I follow and one or two whom I’m corresponded with at some point or another, and each brings their own personality and imagination to their contribution.
I opted to start with Stuart Langridge‘s The Nine Pyramids, a puzzle game about trying to connect all nodes in a 3×3 grid in a continuous line bridging adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) nodes without visiting the same node twice nor moving in the same direction twice in a row (that last provision is described as “not visiting three in a straight line”, but I think my interpretation would have resulted in simpler code: I might demonstrate this, down the line!).
Per tradition with this kind of programming, I made a couple of typos, the worst of which was missing an entire parameter in a CSS conic-gradient() which resulted in the
majority of the user interface being invisible: whoops! I found myself reminded of typing-in the code for Werewolves and
Wanderer from The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, whose data section – the part most-liable to be affected by a typographic bug without introducing a syntax error – had
a helpful “checksum” to identify if a problem had occurred, and wishing that such a thing had been possible here!
But thankfully a tiny bit of poking in my browser’s inspector revealed the troublesome CSS and I was able to complete the code, and then the puzzle.
I’ve really been enjoying DOCTYPE, and you can still buy a copy if you’d like one of your own. It manages to simultaneously feel both fresh and nostalgic, and that’s really cool.
Back before PCs were black, they were beige. And even further back, they’d have not only “Reset” and “Power” buttons, but also a “Turbo” button.
I’m not here to tell you what it did1. No, I’m here to show you how to re-live those glory days with a Turbo button of your very own, implemented as a reusable Web Component that you can install on your very own website:
If you’d like some beige buttons of your own, you can get them at Beige-Buttons.DanQ.dev. Two lines of code and you can pop them on any website you like. Also, it’s open-source under the Unlicense so you can take it, break it, or do what you like with it.
I’ve been slumming it in some Web Revivalist circles lately, and it might show. Best Resolution (with all its 88×31s2), which I launched last month, for example.
You might anticipate seeing more retro fun-and-weird going on here. You might be right.
Now… be honest – how many of you pressed the “reset” button even though you were told not to?
1 If you know, you know. And if you don’t, then take a look at the website for my new web component, which has an “about” section.
2 I guess that’s another “if you know, you know”, but at least you’ll get fewer conflicting answers if you search for an explanation than you will if you try to understand the turbo button.
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I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.
I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.
“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”
…
I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.
I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…
Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to 19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!
Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.
Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.
It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:
![Stylish (for circa 2000) webpage for HoTMetaL Pro 6.0, advertising its 'unrivaled [sic] editing, site management and publishing tools'.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2025/08/hotmetal-pro-6-640x396.jpg)
The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:
The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a) you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.4
Are we getting a bum deal?
Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!
Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.
But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet, nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.5
But the Web hosting, for example, wasn’t useless. In fact, it served an important purpose in lowering the barrier to entry for people to publish their first homepage! The magical experience of being able to just FTP some files into a directory and have them be on the Web, as just a standard part of the “package” you bought-into, was a gateway to a participatory Web that’s nowadays sadly lacking.
Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.
And that makes me sad.
1 ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!
2 ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.
3 These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.
4 Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse customer service, to boot.
5 The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that it’s what their customers want.
6 I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).
Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you “part of” the Internet, just that they’d help you “connect to” the Internet.
Most people don’t need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to “put something online” didn’t increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.
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Fellow geek, Nightline veteran, and general volunteering hero James Buller wrote a wonderful retrospective on his experience with Surrey Nightline, National Nightline, and the Nightline Association over most of the last three decades:
…
- In 1997 I left a note in the Surrey Nightline pigeon-hole to volunteer and eventually become the Coordinator
- In 1998 I emailed the leaders of National Nightline with a plea for support.
- In 2000 I launched the first National Nightline website and email list
- In 2003 I added the bulletin board online forum
- In 2006 I led governance reform and the registration project that led to the Nightline Association charity
- In 2007 I set up Google Apps for the recently established nightline.ac.uk domain
- In 2008 We sent news via an email broadcast system for the first time
- In 2025 All the user accounts and the charity were shut down.
So here’s my last post on volunteering with the confidential mental health helplines run ‘by students for students’ at universities, then the overarching association body.
…
I began volunteering with Aberystwyth Nightline in 1999, and I remember the 2000 launch of the National Nightline mailing list and website. It felt like a moment of coalescence and unity. We Nightline volunteers at the turn of the millennium were young, and tech-savvy, and in that window between the gradual decline of Usenet and the 2004-onwards explosion in centralised social networking, mailing lists and forums were The Hotness.
Nightlines (and Nightliners) disagreed with one another on almost everything, but the Internet-based connectivity that James put into place for National Nightline was enormously impactful. It made Nightline feel bigger than it had been before: it was an accessible and persistent reminder that you were part of a wider movement. It facilitated year-round discussions that might previously have been seen only at annual conferences. It brought communities together.
(Individuals too: when my friends Kit and Fiona met and got together back in 2003 (and, later, married), it probably wouldn’t have happened without the National Nightline forum.)
But while I praise James’ work in community-building and technology provision, his experience with Nightlines doesn’t stop there: he was an important force in the establishment of the Nightline Association, the registered charity that took over National Nightline’s work and promised to advance it even further with moves towards accreditation and representation.
As his story continues, James talks about one of his final roles for the Association: spreading the word about the party to “see it off”. Sadly, the Nightline Association folded last month, leaving a gap that today’s Nightlines, I fear, will struggle to fill, but this was at least the excuse for one last get-together (actually, three, but owing to schedule conflicts I was only able to travel up to the one in Manchester):
…
I had done a lot of the leg work to track down and invite former volunteers to the farewell celebrations. I’d gotten a real buzz from it, which despite a lot of other volunteering I’ve not felt since I was immersed in the Nightline world in the 2000’s. I felt all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia for the culture, comradeship and perhaps dolefully sense of youth too!
I was delighted that so many people answered the call (should have expected nothing less of great Nightliners!). Their reminiscing felt like a wave of love for the movement we’d all been a part of and had consumed such a huge part of our lives for so long. It clearly left an indelible mark on us all and has positively affected so many others through us.
…
Many people played their part in the story of the Nightline Association.
My part in the story has mostly involved Three Rings (which this year adopted some of the Association’s tech infrastructure to ensure that it survives the charity’s unfortunate demise). But James, I’ve long felt, undermines his own staggering impact.
Volunteering in charity technical work is a force multiplier: instead of working on the front lines, you get to facilitate many times your individual impact for the people who do! Volunteering with Three Rings for the last 23 years has helped me experience that, and James’ experience of this kind of volunteering goes even further than mine. And yet he feels his impact most-strongly in a close and interpersonal story that’s humbling and beautiful:
…
I was recently asked by a researcher, ‘What is the best thing you have done as a volunteer in terms of impact?’. I was proud to reply that I’d been told someone had not killed themselves because of a call with me at Surrey Nightline.…
I’d recommend going and reading the full post by James, right up to the final inspiring words.
(Incidentally: if you’re looking for a volunteering opportunity that continues to help Nightlines, in the absence of the Nightline Association, Three Rings can make use of you…)
Highlights of yesterday’s Goodbye Nightline Association party in Manchester:
👨💻 Responded to Three Rings user query in real time by implementing new Directory property while at the event (pictured)
🤝 Met a handful of Nightliners past and present; swapped war stories of fights with students unions, battles for funding, etc. (also got some insights into how they’re using various
tech tools!)
✍️ Did hilariously awful job of drawing ‘Condom Man’, Aberystwyth Nightline’s mascot circa 2000
🤞 Possibly recruited a couple of new Three Rings volunteers
Low points:
😢 It’s a shame NLA’s dying, but I’m optimistic that Nightlines will survive
I used Geocities.live to transform the DanQ.me homepage into “Geocities style” and I’ve got to say… I don’t hate what it came up with
Let’s put aside for the moment that you can already send my website back into “90s mode” and dive into this take on how I could present myself in a particularly old-school way. There’s a few things I particularly love:
90s web design was very-much characterised by:
Those actually… aren’t bad values to have today. Sure, we’ve probably learned that animated backgrounds, tables for layout, and mystery meat navigation were horrible for usability and accessibility, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still innovation to be done. What comes next for the usable Web, I wonder?
The only thing I can fault it on is that it assumes that I’d favour Netscape Navigator: in fact, I was a die-hard Opera-head for most of the nineties and much of the early naughties, finally switching my daily driver to Firefox in 2005.
I certainly used plenty of Netscape and IE at various points, though, but I wasn’t a fan of the divisions resulting from the browser wars. Back in the day, I always backed the ideals of the “Viewable With Any Browser” movement.
I guess I still do.
I’ve been playing Sean O’Connor’s Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at “rewilding” the game world.
The rules of the game make trees… a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?
My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88×31 button representing “me” (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had a collection of 5¼” and later 3½” floppy disks1 on which were stored a variety of games and utilities that I’d collected over the years2.
I remember that at some point I acquired a program called INSULTS.COM. When executed, this tool would spoof a basic terminal prompt and then, when the user pressed any key,
output a randomly-generated assortment of crude insults.
As far as prank programs go, it was far from sophisticated. I strongly suspect that the software, which was released for free in 1983, was intended to be primarily a vehicle to promote
sales of a more-complex set of tools called PRANKS, which was advertised within.
In any case: as a pre-pubescent programmer I remember being very interested in the mechanism by which INSULTS.COM was generating its output.
Of course, nowadays I understand reverse-engineering better than I did as a child. So I downloaded a copy of INSULTS.COM from this Internet Archive image, ran it through Strings, and pulled out the data.
Easy!
Then I injected the strings into Perchance to produce a semi-faithful version of the application that you can enjoy today.
Why did I do this? Why do I do anything? Reimplementing a 42-year-old piece of DOS software that nobody remembers is even stranger than that time I reimplemented a 16-year old Flash advertisement! But I hope it gave you a moment’s joy to be told that you’re… an annoying load of festering parrot droppings, or whatever.
1 Also some 3″ floppy disks – a weird and rare format – but that’s another story.
2 My family’s Amstrad PC1512 had two 5¼” disk drives, which made disk-to-disk copying much easier than it was on computers with a single disk drive, on which you’d have to copy as much data as possible to RAM, swap disks to write what had been copied so far, swap disks back again, and repeat. This made it less-laborious for me to clone media than it was for most other folks I knew.
3 Assuming the random number generator is capable of generating a sufficient diversity of
seed values, the claim is correct: by my calculation, INSULTS.COM can generate 22,491,833 permutations of insults.
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Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.
Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.
I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common1 at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.
As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful2.
I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.
In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas3, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:
So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.
I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.
The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines4 and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.
To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?5
“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher6.
The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.
But I wouldn’t let it go:
In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.
And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.
1 I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.
2 I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.
3 And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.
4 Our teacher was probably correct.
5 In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!
6 I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.
On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they’d made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.
It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.
Nowadays, that’s an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart… well, this isn’t exactly why, but it’s a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:’d to a few friends.
It’s not an exciting story. It’s not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)
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