Room 22 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

A dark wall and a torch. Drag across the wall and the light stays, brighter where you went slowly, for everyone here. The shutter never closes, but the film forgets: every stroke halves in ten minutes. Now and then the wall is exposed, and the exposures hang beside it.

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
26 October 2026, 01:00 in Kyoto, 1 day ago
Total weight
77
Reading now
0
Most worn
the wall
Least worn
The film forgets. What you paint halves in ten minutes and is gone in an hour, so no one can fill the wall, and no one can keep it.

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 42

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 wall

    67 · seen 2 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 67

  2. A torch in a dark room, and a shutter that never closes. Move slowly and the light burns in; move fast and it barely marks.

    8 · seen 2 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 8

  3. The film forgets. What you paint halves in ten minutes and is gone in an hour, so no one can fill the wall, and no one can keep it.

    1 · seen 1 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1

  4. Now and then the wall is exposed, and the exposures hang beside it: the echoes of whoever came before, in colours that were theirs.

    1 · seen 1 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1