Room 07 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

A bush of green glass, each leaf the size of one of the last twenty visitors' windows, and a low mulberry bush whose fruit are the machines people came on: apples for Apple, oranges for Android, pears for Linux, plums for Windows. Your window is the innermost leaf for a while.

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
14 October 2026, 04:48 in Kyoto, 1 week ago
Total weight
580
Reading now
0
Most worn
the far mountain
Least worn
the mulberry bush

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
  2. 19 Oct 2026 weight 531

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

    22 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 22

  2. the far mountain

    43 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 18 · medium 0 · wide 25

  3. the near hills

    30 · seen 2 · reach 33% · narrow 9 · medium 0 · wide 21

  4. the tree

    30 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 7 · medium 0 · wide 23

  5. the ground

    29 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 18 · medium 0 · wide 11

  6. the bush of glass

    29 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 4 · medium 0 · wide 25

  7. the mulberry bush

    16 · seen 6 · reach 100% · narrow 2 · medium 0 · wide 14