By John Walker on March 15th, 2011 at 1:13 pm.
Last week we asked you to create us a new 503 page for those oh-so rare moments when our site can’t find its way onto the internet. We had some lovely entries, our favourites of which are below. But at the bottom you’ll not find a winner. Because as much as we’ve loved what’s come in, for various reasons we’ve not yet received one we want to/can use. So look below, be inspired, and follow the rules detailed here and here. If you’re one of the entries below, please resubmit. It’s open again until midnight this Friday. Send them to firstname.lastname@example.org. And let me stress again, for goodness sake: No. Copyrighted. Images.
Mark “Zak Canard” Crosby did something riskier than anyone else. He committed heresy. He took it upon himself to depict the arse-end of Horace The Endless Bear, something that has previously only ever led to the artist being burned to death. As such, Mark Crosby will be burned to death.
The elusively named “D F” sent in the following option, which sadly gets blurry when shrunk to fit here, so click on it for a nice crisp version.
Nick Alward offers us some lovely pixel art, with a nice long list of in jokes.
There were some weaker entries. Andrew Brown’s wasn’t one of them. But it sure looked like one of them.
Matt Dovey chose to go with as many RPS in-jokes as he could fit, along with a tearful Horace (not depicting the heretical end, please note).
One “Plopsworth”, who for some reason prefers that over his real name, brings us this mash up.
The amazingly named Λαλακης Λαζοπουλος sent in two great entries. First is a big visual joke like club in the eye, with one whopper of a stolen image. (Yes, I’m checking. DON’T DO IT.)
And second a good old-fashioned test card, which is of course also nicked.
It wasn’t the only test card. Chris Chapman fully acknowledges that we can’t use this one due to its breaking the no copyrighted images rule, but argues that it had to be done anyway.
One entry that I absolutely loved cannot win for two reasons. One, he didn’t actually enter it, because he’s a giant buffoon. And two, because it doesn’t work properly under Internet Explorer (because apparently there’s still a few loonies using that.) ‘Theory’ posted this link in the comments to the original compo thread, and it’s absolutely brilliant. Definitely resubmit (or indeed submit). And if we crash your server, um, sorry. Send me the original.
Causing me even more agony was this amazing entry from Nir Yomtov. A masterful piece of photoshoppery, Java and Flash, the jpeg below doesn’t do it justice – make sure to click through – and our tech guys even said it will work just fine as a 503. But sporting a giant image of something belonging to Nintendo means we just can’t use it. Also, well, we’re a PC site, so it makes absolutely no sense. But it’s a brilliant piece of work. If there had been a winner, and we owned Nintendo, and were a GameBoy site, this would have won. So, you know, close.
So we’ll get there. Send your entries to email@example.com, with the subject, “503 all up in this place”, under 1MB, before the end of Friday 18th March.