Room 05 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

Nothing happens here quickly. Stay, and the mist lifts; stay longer, and something comes closer. With everyone, the minutes are everyone's, today. Alone, they are yours.

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 reset each dawn. It was last reset 16 hours ago (reset each dawn), when it carried a weight of 0; what was is kept. 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
27 October 2026, 06:00 in Kyoto, 16 hours ago
Total weight
0
Reading now
0
Most worn
Nothing yet.
Least worn
the sun, or the moon

What earlier periods held

Each time this room is reset, what it carried is kept. The most worn mark of each period, and its weight.

  1. 27 Oct 2026 weight 0 (reset each dawn)
  2. 26 Oct 2026 weight 0 (reset each dawn)
  3. 25 Oct 2026 weight 0 (reset each dawn)
  4. 24 Oct 2026 weight 0 (reset each dawn)
  5. 23 Oct 2026 weight 21, most worn: the tree (reset each dawn)
  6. 22 Oct 2026 weight 0 (reset each dawn)
  7. 21 Oct 2026 weight 0 (reset each dawn)

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 0
  2. 19 Oct 2026 weight 0

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

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

  2. the far mountain

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

  3. the near hills

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

  4. the tree

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

  5. the ground

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

  6. the minutes stayed

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