Because I think it’s a dumb joke and I quite like dumb jokes, actually.
One of my favourite custom emoji that I honestly never use is the goose from Untitled Goose Game holding a pride flag. I think it’s a neat symbol. I’ve even done a bit of research into where the original version of it came from, and have a blog post about its history mostly done, but it’s not yet ready to publish.
The original image I found was pretty low-res, so I went ahead and re-traced it and added a Progress flag instead of the 6-stripe rainbow one. I do want to have another go at this, since the original flag was waving and this one’s… straight.
Effectively, I’m using this image as a little signature, but not just for me. It’s a signature for me at this current moment in time. I’m sure I won’t use it forever, and that’s fine.
OK, but why the website?
Because I think it’s a dumb joke and I quite like dumb jokes, actually.
When working on this website I added the goose to the footer. I thought it needed some interactivity, so I added the hearts when you click it. There were a few iterations of that, but I ultimately settled on having it cycle through the hearts in reverse rainbow order, with them slowly getting larger over time.
When working on ourflags.lgbt I decided to add the goose there too. Same behaviour, except I made the hearts grow in size faster so that the effect was more noticeable. About mid-way through the project I had the idea to have some of the hearts link off to somewhere. One morning I knew what it would be.
It really didn’t take that long to put together in the end, with only a little fussing around to get the audio to play at certain pitches. I do take requests for new music over on GitHub, so if you have ideas just let me know.