Unapologetic

Happy Festivus

Alex Guyot — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:52:00 GMT

It’s December 23rd, and you know what that means…

Time to get into the spirit of the world’s greatest holiday by breaking out your smoothest denim vest, digging up that old Atomic Sub card, and tossing a sawbuck on Captain Nemo in the third at Belmont.

If you’ve been too distracted by tinsel to come up with your own grievances to air this season, allow me to be of assistance. Just press the pole.

I Hid a Dozen Easter Eggs on This Website

Alex Guyot — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:50:00 GMT

There are intricate 3D CSS animations, I had to learn some linear algebra, a classic Mac game from 1991 has been resurrected, and somewhere around here is a troublesome goose. Also, Seinfeld jokes. So many Seinfeld jokes.

I hope you’ll walk down memory lane with me in the preamble below, but if you’re only interested in the hunt then you can jump right in from here. (You should probably at least read the instructions, though.)

Join the Easter Egg HuntView Hunt Clues

(If you’re reading this through a feed reader or other non-browser medium, you’ll need to open the page in a standard browser view to join the Easter egg hunt.)

My dad ran a small web development shop around the turn of the century, and my earliest memories on the Web are from him showing me the websites he’d created. As I was clicking around, he’d always get a mischievous grin on his face and ask “see anything else?” Inevitably, somewhere on the page, he’d hidden some kind of unexpected surprise.

Often it was the tiniest thing, like the dot of paint on his website’s logo changing color each time the cursor hovered over it. It looked like this:

Other examples were a bit more involved, though these were usually harder to find. When he built a website for my uncle — a screenwriter — there was an image of a typewriter in the nav bar. One of the keys on the typewriter was actually a secret link to a hidden page of the website, full of jokes.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these subtle, sometimes secret little touches had both a name and a storied history. They were Easter eggs.

My dad’s penchant for Easter eggs transferred thoroughly (perhaps better phrased as aggressively) to me. As I grew up, I’d often visit his website just to scroll my mouse back and forth across the logo and see that dot of paint change colors. It’s nothing — who could possibly care about this? And yet the fact that it’s nothing, and that no one should care, is exactly why I find it so fascinating. Hiding an Easter egg is definitionally going above and beyond what is required. When you find one, you know that whoever made it put thought and care into a project that you’re now interacting with.

That brings us to today, and this website which I just finished rebuilding. I know part of the point of Easter eggs is to not explicitly draw attention to them, but I am prepared to sacrifice my subtlety cred to draw attention to this very important issue: the Web should have more Easter eggs.

If you are a web developer, when is the last time you snuck in an Easter egg? If you run a website, what delightful secrets is it hiding? We need more. More! My thirst for Easter eggs knows no bounds.

Hey I’m not sending you to the mines; making Easter eggs is fun. It’s hard to describe how much of a joy it was to hide increasingly elaborate Easter eggs all over this website while keeping things simple, minimal, and generally unadorned. Is it insane that I spent well over half the development time of this website on Easter eggs? Probably. But this is my personal website. I am allowed to toe the line of sanity here.

To be clear, I do not advise spending greater than 50% of a project’s development time on Easter eggs. (If you do though, writing a blog post about it is a great way to convince yourself that it’s a healthy addiction, and that you definitely do not need to seek out some kind of Easter Eggers Anonymous support group.) I do think it’s worth creating at least one, though. If and when someone finds it, they’ll be made aware of the care and attention to detail that you put into your work. A well-placed Easter egg might even be enough to brighten someone’s day.

Anyway, a noxious case of sunk-cost fallacy has mixed dangerously with my Easter egg obsession and led me down the path of creating an elaborate Easter egg hunt for you to chase across this website. All items can be found on every page of the site, so you don’t need to go spelunking around to obscure locations (although progress is safe across pages and reloads if you choose to do so anyway).

Important caveat: the Follow page is a special web feed document and does not function with the hunt.

You may recognize the theme from the wonderful Untitled Goose Game — one of my all-time favorite video games. That blasted goose itself is skulking around here somewhere. I think it’s after my cube.

If you were playing Mac games in the early 90s then I might have some nostalgia in store for you as well, but I was too much of an unborn child at the time to know if anyone else will actually recognize it. It’s the first video game I ever played, and its goofy sound effects have been echoing around in my head for as long as I can remember.

Speaking of sounds effects, I strongly recommend having your volume on for this. If you’re on a mobile device then you should also disable silent mode, or just put in headphones. If you have no headphones and really need your device to not make any noise right now… Maybe come back and do this later. You’ve been warned.

And with that, please enjoy this Easter egg hunt:

Join the Easter Egg HuntView Hunt Clues

(If you’re reading this through a feed reader or other non-browser medium, you’ll need to open the page in a standard browser view to join the Easter egg hunt.)

Restore hunt?

If you're switching from another device, you can restore your progress here.

If you found this randomly, I recommend doing the hunt yourself, but you do you.

(Just basic tasks?) Restore basic tasks

(Hard cube tasks too?) Yes those too

(Here on accident?) Cancel

legend!

May your name be forever emblazoned on the Bonk leaderboard.

Truly, thank you for exploring this website.

Now go forth and make Easter eggs!

End the hunt

(Again?) Restart the hunt

To do (as well) :

Solve the cube in 4 moves or less
Scramble the cube by at least 50 turns, flip it, and reset it (for more fun: solve before resetting)

You probably need a touch device for the rest of these. If you switch devices, long-press the Easter egg to restore your progress.

Make it to level 9 in Bonk
?????????????
Make it to level 10 in Bonk
?????????????
Make it to level 11 in Bonk

(Sick of this?) End the hunt

(Miss victory?) Hide really hard tasks

Congrats!

You found all the Easter eggs.

If you enjoyed this, let me know and then go play Goose Game (not an ad, Goose Game just rocks).

(Finished?) End the hunt

(Thirsty for pain?) See really hard tasks

(Again?) Restart the hunt

To do :

Flip the cube Hint?(Double-click the cube)
Learn pronunciation Hint?(Of the author's last name)
Send an important message Hint?(The message is "yo")
Locate the troublesome goose Hint?(Ghee I wonder where it coule be?)
Anger the goose Hint?(Honk til it's red in the bill)
Shoot a rainbow Hint?(Look reeeeal low)
Shoot some stars Hint?(Above the rainbow)
Find out what is happening Hint?(First shoot lots of stars)
Make a full commitment Hint?(Get help understanding)
Have fun Hint?(You have to really want it)
(Or, find a page that doesn't exist)
Play with a slinky Hint?(Ask questions after game over)
(Or, poke around the colophon)
Get insulted (at least three times) Hint?(Ask the right question, wait for enough answers)

(Stuck?) Show hints

(Got it now?) Hide hints

(Hate cursive?) Kill it

(Miss the cursive?) See it

(Over it?) End the hunt

Hello, Again

Alex Guyot — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:41:00 GMT

It’s been a while.

I started this website on October 16, 2013. It was built from scratch — the first real software project I ever completed. It’s always been my favorite.

Unapologetic was a direct successor to my first website, The Axx, which I’d begun just eight months earlier. I don’t recommend rebranding less than a year after launching a project, but choosing a name that evokes poorly-masked body odor is a great way to back yourself into that particular corner. In my defense, I was 17 years old at the time.

The new name came about from an inside joke among the Apple community on that one time Jony Ive decided he was really into plastic. Jony’s love affair with bright, fun, plasticky colors was, sadly, brief. Mine was not. The goal of this site’s design from the very beginning was to let me play with color — with subtle touches of brightness and fun in an otherwise serious space. I’ve always believed that the Web should bring about joy and whimsy rather than frustration and drudgery.

I’m still quite proud of how well the original design of this website achieved that goal, but I was too green behind the ears to do everything I wanted. (I succeeded with the fun colors, but didn’t really make it on the joy and whimsy.) Thus began a decade of failed attempts at a rewrite, with ambitions always higher than first skill, later time, allowed. All the while, the site languished.

Between The Axx and Unapologetic, I wrote 211 posts in just under two years, concluding on February 9, 2015 with a post about grammar. I never really meant to stop. If I had, grammar would not have been my final word.

This year, I turned 30 years old — a complicated milestone where one grapples melodramatically with the end of their youth despite not being all that old. The existential side won a cheap victory when I tore my hamstring during a rec-league soccer game the very next day.

As they carried my old, broken body off the field, I flashed back to 13 years earlier — when my young, broken body was carried off a soccer field with a brutal arm break. Released from the obligations of competitive sports, my teenage self leveraged his newfound free time to build a website and begin to write.

Couch-bound for the first week of my 30s, I was haunted by the notion that I’d spent the entirety of my 20s thinking about resurrecting a project that I’d successfully accomplished in my teens. Apparently nothing drums up motivation like pain, déjà vu, and a quarter-life crisis. Four months later, I’m back, baby.

In the spirit of its predecessor, this website weaves flashes of bright, brilliant colors into an otherwise serious reading experience. It is written from scratch, lightweight and fast, and loads even with JavaScript disabled. It also fulfills my longtime dream for a joyful, weird, whimsical experience simmering under the surface of an ostensibly ordinary website. Poke around a bit and you just might find some surprises.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll be writing here yet. Nearly a decade into my career now, I’ll likely cover software-related topics a lot more than last time. Beyond that, I’m not sure. The goings-on of the tech industry are still rarely far from mind, but my younger self’s general optimism has sustained some heavy blows. To hazard a guess, those feelings will probably lead to a lot of words. But making promises is a great way to burn out quickly, so I commit to none here.

Maybe I’ll just write about making craft cocktails at home, or finding the best coffee in the Twin Cities. It’s a blog, after all. Figuring it out along the way is the point.