O RLY?_
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The scenes
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Guide — the wide-eyed owl of disbelief, fullscreen
A hand-drawn snowy owl that blinks, tilts and zooms in, with an Impact caption, four scenes and keys to run the O RLY? exchange yourself. Drawn on an HTML5 canvas, nothing to install.Choose Classic, Exchange, VHS or Night, or press 1 to 4. In Exchange the caption always cycles, whatever the Caption menu says.
Leave Auto-cycle on to step through O RLY?, YA RLY, NO WAI and WAY... every 2 seconds, or fix one of those or SRSLY?. The owl’s brows and eyes change with each line.
Press O, Y or N to flash O RLY?, YA RLY or NO WAI for about 2 seconds before the chosen caption returns.
Drag Blink rate from 1 (Sleepy, a blink every 7 seconds) to 10 (MANIC, every 1.5 seconds) and Drama from 0 to 10 for the zoom-in every 9 seconds. Toggle the Impact caption, Darting eyes and Scanlines.
Press Enter Fullscreen, click the owl or press F. Space pauses, R resets, and Esc or the Exit Fullscreen button (move the mouse to show it) leaves.
Scenes and shortcuts
- 1 Classic
- Warm brown backdrop, owl on a branch
- 2 Exchange
- Blue backdrop, captions always cycling
- 3 VHS
- Rolling colour bands, tracking bar and static
- 4 Night
- Dark sky, twinkling stars and glowing eyes
- F
- Fullscreen on/off
- Space
- Pause / resume
- O / Y / N
- Flash O RLY? / YA RLY / NO WAI
- 1–4
- Switch scene
- R
- Reset to defaults
- Esc
- Leave fullscreen
- TV / monitor
- Open the page, press F, leave it running
- screen sleep
- The page does not keep the display awake: set your sleep timer to Never while it runs
- OS screensaver
- A web page can’t register as one; use fullscreen instead
The O RLY? owl, explained
What is the O RLY? owl?
“O RLY?” is an early-2000s image macro, usually dated to 2003: a photo of a wide-eyed snowy owl with the bold Impact caption “O RLY?”, internet shorthand for “oh, really?”. It became a stock sarcastic reply to dubious claims on forums and imageboards, typically answered with “YA RLY” and then “NO WAI”. This page recreates the owl as an animated browser screensaver.
Is this the original photo?
No. The original macro used a photograph of a snowy owl. This is a hand-drawn cartoon tribute made with JavaScript on an HTML5 canvas, so the owl can blink, tilt its head and zoom in, with nothing to download or install.
Can I change the caption?
Yes. Let it auto-cycle through O RLY?, YA RLY, NO WAI and WAY..., one line every 2 seconds, or pick one of those or SRSLY? from the menu, or no caption at all. Press O, Y or N to flash a line for about 2 seconds. The Exchange scene always cycles, and the owl’s expression follows the caption.
How do I make it fullscreen?
Click the owl, press Enter Fullscreen or press F. Move the mouse to show the Exit Fullscreen button, which hides again 2.5 seconds after the mouse stops, or press Esc or F to leave. Where a browser blocks the fullscreen API, the owl fills the browser window instead. The page does not keep the display awake, so set your screen’s sleep timer to Never if it should keep running.
What can I customise?
Switch between the Classic, Exchange, VHS and Night scenes, choose or auto-cycle the caption, set the Blink rate (1 to 10) and the Drama of the zoom-in (0 for none, up to about half again as big at 10), and toggle the Impact caption, the darting eyes and the scanlines. Reset Defaults (or R) returns to Classic with both sliders at 5.