Room 14 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

The people here are rabbits in the field beyond the wall; the machines passing over are birds. Open the gate and the rabbits come in. Put food down and they gather. Light the lanterns and they keep to the shadows. The switches stay as you leave them, for whoever comes next.

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
21 October 2026, 03:20 in Kyoto, 6 days ago
Total weight
483
Reading now
0
Most worn
the switches
Least worn
the ground

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 483

The parts of the picture

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 sun, or the moon

    31 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 1 · wide 29

  2. the far mountain

    45 · seen 6 · reach 86% · narrow 2 · medium 9 · wide 34

  3. the near hills

    35 · seen 1 · reach 14% · narrow 0 · medium 1 · wide 34

  4. the tree

    32 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 3 · wide 28

  5. the ground

    8 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 1 · wide 6

  6. the wall

    16 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 3 · wide 12

  7. the gate

    10 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 1 · wide 8

  8. the path from the gate

    24 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 1 · wide 7

  9. the lawn

    22 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 1 · wide 18

  10. the bowl

    28 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 1 · wide 6

  11. the switches

    232 · seen 8 · reach 100% · narrow 13 · medium 19 · wide 96