Site experiment · first seen May 29, 2026

Wall of Rejection

Selected paper, grant, and fellowship rejections become compact badges with receipts. A small XP joke acknowledges the pattern, but accepted work stays in the bibliography and repeated badges never inflate the count.

Rejection-only Receipts close by No double counting No leaderboard
Open the wall Download reproduction MD
Steam-style rejection badge meme that preceded the website's Wall of Rejection
The lab meme that started the interaction, kept as origin evidence rather than copied platform UI.
Question

Can a publication page acknowledge failure honestly while keeping accepted scholarship easier to find?

Artifact

Theme-aware badge shelves, click-to-open receipts, and one transparent XP rulebook.

Boundary

Only selected rejections belong here. Combo badges celebrate patterns but add zero XP.

Origin

CHI said no. UIST said no. I made a Steam-style badge meme for labmates, then adapted that joke through the failure-CV tradition and the strange optimism of Spooder-Man. The website version keeps the humor but drops the commercial gaming skin: quiet cards, explicit evidence, accessible controls, and research content that still leads the page.

  1. 910f3c7f2Replaced a generic review-achievement panel with rejection-only badges, receipts, and the first XP joke.
  2. 77b8efbcaRestored the supplied lab meme as the real origin reference instead of a substitute.
  3. 1dad10b5bAligned the ledger and CV evidence while keeping accepted work out of the rejection count.
  4. f51ff4f16Quieted the evening hierarchy so the wall stayed secondary to the papers.

Credits

The wall nods to Bradley Voytek’s failure-CV tradition, Sirui’s own post-UIST badge meme, and the Spooder-Man meme. Those references shaped the honesty and tone, not the final interface skin.