Room 18 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

One print of a photograph, going the way prints go. Where your hand passes the edges fray, for everyone, and as the whole of it is handled it yellows and fades, grain rising, the corners darkening; read the other way it goes deep brown instead.

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
23 October 2026, 05:16 in Kyoto, 4 days ago
Total weight
275
Reading now
0
Most worn
the bottom right corner
Least worn
A print is chemistry that has not finished happening. This one never will.

The print

The picture is Ben's, kept whole by Cloudinary and never copied here. Nine regions of the print are marks: the corners, the edges, the middle. Where a region is handled, the edge beside it frays, which is a clip path in the stylesheet reading each region's wear; nothing is cut from the picture itself. The whole print ages by the mean of the nine, in 8 steps, each one transformation of the whole picture made once by Cloudinary: as erosion, a draining of colour, a yellowing towards ochre, a loss of contrast and grain, as a print handled for years goes; as patina, deep brown and dark, as an albumen print goes. The corners darken in the page, a shade over the picture as deep as its age. At most 17 derived images exist.

Age: step 1 of 8.

  1. The top left corner: 5%
  2. The top edge: 7%
  3. The top right corner: 15%
  4. The left edge: 2%
  5. The middle: 3%
  6. The right edge: 5%
  7. The bottom left corner: 5%
  8. The bottom edge: 5%
  9. The bottom right corner: 16%

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 275

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 top left corner

    20 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 8 · medium 3 · wide 9

  2. the top edge

    27 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 10 · medium 3 · wide 14

  3. the top right corner

    63 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 22 · medium 3 · wide 38

  4. the left edge

    8 · seen 5 · reach 83% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 5

  5. the middle

    11 · seen 5 · reach 83% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 8

  6. the right edge

    22 · seen 5 · reach 83% · narrow 7 · medium 0 · wide 15

  7. the bottom left corner

    19 · seen 5 · reach 83% · narrow 2 · medium 0 · wide 17

  8. the bottom edge

    19 · seen 5 · reach 83% · narrow 2 · medium 0 · wide 17

  9. the bottom right corner

    68 · seen 4 · reach 67% · narrow 8 · medium 0 · wide 60

  10. This is one print of a photograph, and it is going the way prints go.

    9 · seen 3 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 9

  11. Handle it and the edges fray where your hand goes. Look long and the whole of it yellows, the grain rises, the corners darken.

    6 · seen 3 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 6

  12. A print is chemistry that has not finished happening. This one never will.

    3 · seen 3 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 3