The landing page — References & Easter Eggs

Let's take a look at the landing page. That is, anything experienced up until and including clicking the “There” button.

wizard.zip

When the page is loaded, a file going by the name wizard.zip is downloaded (some browsers may prompt to download instead, but big boy Chrome does it automatically, which is the important thing).

Inside the ZIP is wizard.jpg, with a modification date that is intended to be 19 January 2038 03:14:07 UTC. This isn’t just an attempt at future-proofing — that is the final second representable in 32-bit Unix time, AKA the Y2K38 problem.

This automatic download is achieved by loading the ZIP file inside an iframe. Sometimes the simplest solutions are best.

I wouldn’t blame you for not opening the ZIP, as any files downloaded automatically by websites should be treated with levels of suspicion off the charts, so you can access the file within directly.

Yep, it’s as close to the original photograph as I could find. Judging from the metadata, which I’ve left intact, it was taken on a Leaf Aptus 75 camera in 2014, a camera which released in 2005. This can’t be completely untouched, as it’s been run through Adobe Photoshop CC 2018. I first sourced a wizard photo in 2017, albeit at 680 pixels tall (was the best I could find at the time) rather than 3114 pixels.

Ho ho ho ho!

Clicking anywhere or pressing a key on the landing page causes the wizard to repeatedly go “ho ho ho ho, Merry Christmas!” In the original 2017 release of Just Wizards, this played automatically, but Google Chrome started requiring user interaction to play sound on pages the following year and I expect all other browsers followed.

This came about because I wanted the wizard to say something, but it was unclear what. He has a big white beard, and Father Christmas has a big white beard, so this seemed somewhat fitting.

Claire without an ‘I’

You may be wondering who “Clare without an ‘I'” is and what exactly this means.

Clare is one of the friends I made at the time, as mentioned in Reviving JustWizards.com. She had a twisted sense of humour, so good times were spent laughing at the mentally disabled, videos of cats having seizures or falling/jumping off high areas and going thud when landing, and of course the wizard.

That list is ordered from items I had the least to do with to most. There was something contagious about her trying to hold herself together when a special needs bloke was making nonsensical vocalisations. I wouldn’t want to be associated with that behaviour either then or now, but she just couldn’t help it.

It writing “Claire without an ‘I'” is just taking the piss about the spelling of her name. I’m more familiar with the “Claire” spelling — it seems “Clare” is a more traditional form of sorts.

Spinning wizard

The third spin the wizard does after the page loads is significantly faster than the rest, and the one after is slightly faster than the rest. Here’s the full animation it does:

0% { transform: rotate(0deg); }<br>10% { transform: rotate(360deg); }<br>20% { transform: rotate(720deg); }<br>30% { transform: rotate(1080deg); }<br>31% { transform: rotate(1440deg); }<br>40% { transform: rotate(1800deg); }<br>50% { transform: rotate(2160deg); }<br>60% { transform: rotate(2520deg); }<br>70% { transform: rotate(2880deg); }<br>80% { transform: rotate(3240deg); }<br>90% { transform: rotate(3600deg); }<br>100% { transform: rotate(3960deg); }

Console chaos

While on the landing page, messages are printed to the developer console (most easily accessed in most web browsers with the F12 key) at random intervals.

In Google Chrome, it alternates between printing this close-up of the wizard, and the same close-up but preceded with a space.

As I couldn’t get this to work in Firefox, in that and other non-Chromium browsers it prints The power of Wizard compels you! instead (as a warning). This is a reference to the phrase “the power of Christ compels you,” which may be a reference to The Exorcist (I don’t know, just heard it around a bit).

Cookie message

At the bottom of the landing page, it reads “Also, by clicking there you are agreeing to the use of cookies in order to remember if you have clicked there or not. That’s a lie.”

This is a parody on the sheer number of websites that have annoying cookie notices to comply with the EU cookie law. Many of these websites set cookies even if you don’t accept them, making the whole thing entirely pointless.

True to my word, Just Wizards doesn’t use cookies or local storage. It just doesn’t have any reason to, really.

noscript

This isn’t so much an Easter egg, but, if you access the website without JavaScript enabled, a different message than usual will be on the landing page:

Listen up, you need JavaScript enabled in your browser for this website to function. This wizard was dropped on his head as a young’un, so he lacks the magic to perform interactivity without JavaScript.

The “There” button will instead read “Enable JavaScript” and take you to a guide for enabling JavaScript instead of the rest of the website, as the button would require JavaScript to function as normal.

Apart from that, the landing page is rather similar to normal without JavaScript, as it makes heavy use of CSS animations. If you make the window wider than widescreen, the following message can be visible, as the font size is partially calculated by JavaScript: “Please resize your window to make it taller.”

This hasn’t been tested to any great extent, as I don’t seriously believe there can be many people browsing the modern web without JavaScript enabled who will be surprised when a website doesn’t work without it.

Windows XP

When clicking the “There” button, an awful racket can be heard. This is the Windows XP startup sound cranked up to 11. If the website is accessed from a mobile device, it is accompanied by vibration (unless in silent mode or using a browser that realised websites being able to vibrate is a stupid idea).

Pop-up

When clicking the “There” button, a pop-up window bounces around the screen. This is a homage to the website YouAreAnIdiot.org website (no longer online; used Flash; later versions of the website removed this feature).

Originally, at YouAreAnIdiot.org and its predecessor, each time you closed the browser window it would spawn 6 pop-up windows. In turn, for each pop-up closed, yet another 6 would spawn. It also attempted to prevent the use of Alt+F4, Ctrl, Del, and by extension Ctrl+Alt+Del, as far as I can tell from noseying around on the Wayback Machine without a suitably old browser at hand.

The end result, or at least the intention, was that in sheer panic you’d keep trying to close it until your system became unresponsive.

There are some remakes of it and other such things — an excellent write-up is available at https://theaviary.me/Idiot!/ if you’re interested.

Much of what You Are An Idiot relied on no longer works in modern browsers. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t want to replicate its replicatory behaviour anyway. But what does reliably work without the user having to manually allow pop-ups is opening a single pop-up on a user click event (in this case, the “There” button).

Surprisingly, the window.moveTo() function, used by You Are An Idiot to bounce the windows around the screen, still works to this day, as does moveBy(). I can’t think of any legitimate purpose for a pop-up to move around the screen — could this still working be an oversight by browser vendors?

Seeing as that worked and doesn’t cause any real problems for the user like a hundred pop-ups might, this is what I settled on. Because pop-ups simply can’t function in the same way on mobile, the website doesn’t even attempt to create a pop-up on mobile devices.

Continue your wizard journey by seeing what's on the main page, or visit the full post at blog.javacakegames.com