Room 08 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

Everywhere else, no one can spoil the shared work. Here, anyone may: hold the bowl and it falls, and it is broken for everyone at once. What mends it is attention, and the mending shows in gold.

Each sentence is a separate surface. It is worn by a pointer passing over it, by a finger touching it, by being selected, by resting in the middle of the screen while someone reads, and a little by simply being on screen at all. Nothing below where a reader stops scrolling is ever worn, so the shape of the wear is also a map of how far people get, and that shape differs between a phone, which shows a few sentences at a time, and a wide screen, which shows many.

Being on screen only counts while someone is evidently there: a scroll, a movement of the pointer, a key, a touch within the last fifteen seconds. A tab left open in another room earns nothing.

Wear accumulates as weight. Weight becomes softness along the curve 1 − e−w/r, where r is 400 for the shared page and 20 for a personal one. The first touches show quickly; the last never quite finish.

The same history can be shown two ways. Erosion takes weight and presence away, like a step. Patina adds ink and warmth, like leather. Switch between them on the page. The wear is the same; only the reading of it changes.

Shared wear in this room is kept for good. It has never been reset. This room may become unreadable, and this page keeps a legible copy so that the loss is a choice rather than an accident.

One visitor may add only so much per day, so no one can wear the page out for everyone else. Crawlers and other machines are counted separately and do not wear the shared page. Their weight so far: 0.

Wearing since
15 October 2026, 05:11 in Kyoto, 1 week ago
Total weight
76
Reading now
0
Most worn
the bowl
Least worn
Nothing is hidden by the repair. A bowl that has been dropped is a different bowl, and keeps every seam.

Every time it was dropped

A drop is kept like a visit: where from and on what, never who. Each one's seams stay in the bowl. The bowl mends when the attention on it since the drop reaches a weight of 150.

  1. 15 Oct 2026, 06:00 by someone in the United Kingdom, on a phone, when the bowl carried a weight of 9

As it was, week by week

A picture of the shared wear is kept each Monday after dawn. Nothing is wiped by it.

  1. 26 Oct 2026 weight 76
  2. 19 Oct 2026 weight 76

The text, unworn

For each sentence: total weight, of which merely seen, then how far down the page people get (its exposure as a share of the first sentence's), then the weight that came from narrow, medium and wide screens.

  1. the bowl

    60 · seen 3 · reach 100% · narrow 60 · medium 0 · wide 0

  2. This bowl is whole for as long as no one drops it.

    10 · seen 3 · reach 100% · narrow 10 · medium 0 · wide 0

  3. Anyone may. It breaks for everyone, at once, and stays broken.

    3 · seen 3 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 0

  4. What mends it is attention: the same handling that wears every other room here fills the cracks with gold.

    3 · seen 3 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 0

  5. Nothing is hidden by the repair. A bowl that has been dropped is a different bowl, and keeps every seam.

    0 · seen 0 · reach 0% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 0