Room 10 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

Touch the water and it ripples for everyone here, at once. A ripple is gone in a few seconds. What stays is the handling.

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, 06:07 in Kyoto, 1 week ago
Total weight
449
Reading now
0
Most worn
the water
Least worn
If no one else is here, the pond is still. That is also something to see.

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 377
  2. 19 Oct 2026 weight 237

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 water

    310 · seen 16 · reach 100% · narrow 152 · medium 18 · wide 140

  2. Touch the water. Everyone here sees the ripple, now, and then it is gone.

    77 · seen 18 · reach 100% · narrow 8 · medium 6 · wide 63

  3. The ripples do not stay. The handling does: the water clouds, or deepens, with every hand.

    42 · seen 16 · reach 100% · narrow 8 · medium 6 · wide 28

  4. If no one else is here, the pond is still. That is also something to see.

    20 · seen 14 · reach 88% · narrow 4 · medium 1 · wide 15