Welcome Back to PAYNEful!

Date: 24/10/2026

Pardon Our Dust

It's drastic, but I've had to demolish this website as it was, frankly, a mess of outdated frameworks and content management systems mashed together into some nightmare form. If H.P. Lovecraft were alive and a software developer, he'd have written an entertaining (and probably horrendously racist) horror story about it.

I have all the files backed up and I intend to restore as much of the content as I see as being valuable. I don't think everything will be coming back.

This website is being rebuilt with a "No Frills" mindset, as I'd like to have something out on the web without having to worry about maintaining third-party web apps or having back ends hacked. We'll see how that goes.

I do not know what this means for the webcomics as they were using Webcomical, and I'd have to look into updating the CodeIgniter version at least to bring them back (not something I'm terribly enthusiastic about doing).

These days, I have the mindset of doing little and often with hobbies, so I'll be chipping away at restoring pages to this site over the coming months.

Wish me luck!

Where Have You Been?

I decided several years ago to reduce my online presence. The state of the internet now is somehow even worse than it was back when I disappeared. Nonetheless, I've been working on several personal projects, some of which I'd like to share. I've been unable to previously due to the website being a complete and utter shambles.

I work as a web software developer for a living, so fixing this accursed webspace hasn't been a chore I've relished the prospect of working on. However, approaching it as a completely fresh project appeals to me.

Anyway, watch this space, stuff will be coming back.

Is There Anything Left?!?

Somehow the Tales of Sin are intact, despite being an ancient WordPress installation older than some (actually probably all now I think about it) of my nephews and nieces. I might attempt to update it, but I don't want to upset the wife by borking it if possible.

Otherwise it's all been removed, for the moment at least.

To Do...

• Add actual subsections to this webspace; I'd like a Tumblr-style front page of summaries, and to bring some of the blogs back. The Discworld Noir ones are probably quite important as they were providing a service regarding how to play them.
• Bring the English-in-a-French accent translator back, it was surprisingly popular.

That'll do to start.

Did You Use A.I. On This?

No point in lying. I used ChatGPT to aid debugging the scant few files I've reduced this website to running on, and it generated most of the CSS because Cascading Style Sheets are the devil's work and I'm not prepared to voluntarily enter that particular hell again just yet.

The content will always be entirely mine, as will the art; look at that cartoon down below / on the right there (or click here if for whatever reason you can't see it), I mean come on, A.I. would do a much better job on the proportions and hands!

Do I like A.I.? No. Is it useful? Yes. Am I a hypocrite? Absolutely.

I do intend to use it to aid debugging going forward, as it takes some of the sting out of the web dev process. I'd rather get this site to a point where I can get back to writing rather than coding.

I appreciate this means I've probably sucked up an entire lake, decimated a local surburban town's power grid and released a small private jet's worth of carbon into the atmosphere just to sense check a few lines of code, for which I am truly sorry. Give a toddler a hammer, and they might kill the family pet with it.