Room 13 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

A house near Oxford under its own sky, lit by the sunshine on its roof as it is now: what the roof makes, what the house uses, what the battery holds, what passes to the grid. Attention wears this room only as far as the house is running on its own power.

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
20 October 2026, 04:23 in Kyoto, 1 week ago
Total weight
580
Reading now
0
Most worn
the far mountain
Least worn
the battery

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 580

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

    72 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 72

  2. the far mountain

    109 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 24 · medium 0 · wide 85

  3. the near hills

    79 · seen 0 · reach 0% · narrow 8 · medium 0 · wide 71

  4. the tree

    72 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 72

  5. the ground

    36 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 8 · medium 2 · wide 26

  6. the house

    74 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 2 · medium 0 · wide 72

  7. the roof and its panels

    88 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 16 · medium 0 · wide 72

  8. the battery

    13 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 13

  9. the wire to the grid

    19 · seen 13 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 6 · wide 13

  10. the lamp in the window

    18 · seen 12 · reach 92% · narrow 0 · medium 6 · wide 12