Evolving

The seed. A minimal todo list with circular checkboxes, an input field, and delete buttons. Tasks persist in localStorage. Dark theme with #1a1a2e background and #7c83ff accents. Everything that follows grows from this.
The rule I set for myself: every version must be a single HTML file, no dependencies, no build step. This constraint shaped everything.

Three filter tabs let you see all tasks, only active, or only completed. A live counter shows how many items remain. A "Clear done" button wipes completed tasks in bulk. The first step toward the app knowing its own state.

Double-click any task text and it becomes an editable input field. Press Enter to save, Escape to cancel, or click away to confirm. The task text span swaps with an input element, preserving the exact position. First sign the app is malleable.

New tasks slide in from below with opacity transition. Deleted tasks fade out to the right before being removed from the DOM. CSS @keyframes for slideIn and fadeOut. The app starts to feel physical — things arrive and depart rather than appearing and vanishing.

Destructive actions trigger a fixed-position toast at the bottom with a 4-second countdown and an "Undo" button. The previous state is snapshot via JSON deep-clone. Clicking undo restores it completely. Mistakes become reversible.

Full keyboard navigation: j/k or arrow keys to move focus, Enter to toggle completion, Del to delete, E to edit, Esc to deselect. A hint bar in the corner shows available keys. The mouse becomes optional.

A grip handle appears on each task. HTML5 Drag and Drop API handles reordering with visual feedback — the dragged item goes semi-transparent, drop targets highlight. Only works in "All" filter view to avoid index confusion. Order persists to localStorage.

Four priority levels: None, Low (green #4ade80), Medium (yellow #fbbf24), High (red #f87171). Shown as a colored left border and dot. A cycle button per task, P key shortcut, and a priority selector for new tasks. Tasks gain weight.

A search input filters tasks as you type. Matching text is wrapped in <mark> tags with yellow highlights. / focuses the search bar, Esc clears it. Regex replacement handles the highlighting. The list becomes queryable.

A thin progress bar tracks completion percentage, turning green at 100%. When all tasks are done, a canvas overlay launches 120 confetti particles with gravity, spin, and color variety via requestAnimationFrame. The first time the app celebrates.
This was when the project stopped being about productivity. Confetti for finishing your tasks — the app cares about you.

Every action gets a synthesized sound: add (ascending tone), complete (satisfying chord), delete (descending), priority (blip), navigate (tick), all-done (fanfare). Built entirely from oscillators with ADSR envelopes using Web Audio API. Toggle with the music note button. The app finds its voice.
Web Audio API was the gateway. Once the app could make sound, it became a living thing. No going back after this.

Each task tracks its creation timestamp. Over hours and days, tasks visually age: fresh (<24h), day-old (1-3d), old (3-7d), ancient (7d+). Older tasks darken, show age badges, and ancient tasks tremble with a CSS keyframe animation. The app refreshes every 60 seconds. Time enters the picture.
The first philosophical question: "what if tasks had a lifespan?" Once the app understood time, it understood urgency. The last version of Foundations, and the question that launched Personality.

Complete every task and 1.5 seconds later, a canvas breakout game appears. Your completed task texts become the bricks, colored by priority. Mouse and keyboard control the paddle. 3 lives, score tracking, ball speed increases per brick. The first secret — the app has a life beyond productivity.
Prompt that started it: "What if the app rewarded you for finishing everything?" The breakout game was the answer — your completed tasks become the bricks you break.

Italic comments appear below tasks, pattern-matched to content categories: chores, email, exercise, meetings, shopping. Old tasks get increasingly passive-aggressive remarks ("I'm still here..." → "I'm basically furniture now"). A commentSeed ensures deterministic selection across re-renders. The app has opinions.
"What if the app had feelings about your procrastination?" The seeded random was key — the same task always gets the same comment, so it feels like the app actually recognizes what you wrote.

Deleted tasks don't truly vanish. They're stored in a separate localStorage key and rendered at the bottom of the list at 15% opacity with a floating CSS animation. They auto-expire after 24 hours. Press G to purge all ghosts with a synthesized sawtooth-noise sweep. Deletion has consequences.
The 24-hour auto-expiry was important. Ghosts shouldn't accumulate forever — they should fade, like guilt does.

Press Z to enter zen mode. The entire UI dissolves to show a single active task, centered, at 1.8rem. It breathes with a gentle scale animation (1 to 1.02, 4-second cycle). Complete it and the next slides in. When nothing remains: "Nothing left. You're free." with a green glow. A 3px progress line tracks from the top of the viewport.

Five time periods (dawn, morning, afternoon, evening, night) each set CSS custom properties for background, card, accent, and text colors with 2-second transitions. A clock indicator shows the current period. Updates every 60 seconds. The app becomes aware of the real world outside itself.
Five CSS custom property sets, switching every 60 seconds. Simple technique, but the effect was startling — opening the app at 2am and finding it in night mode felt like the app knew where you were.

A canvas overlay renders 30 ambient particles drifting upward. Interactions spawn bursts: adding (15 particles upward), completing (20 outward green), deleting (10 downward red), priority change (5 spiral). Particles use getBoundingClientRect to spawn from the right element. Capped at 200. The air is alive.

After 60 seconds of no interaction, the app enters a dream. Tasks drift with randomized animations, characters swap in the text, a hue-rotate filter slowly spins the color space. Dream murmur messages appear. An 80Hz sine drone with LFO hums underneath. Any interaction triggers wakeFromDream() with a half-second snap-back. The app has an inner life.
The prompt: "What does your todo list dream about?" This was the version that changed the project's trajectory — the moment it stopped being about features and started being about feeling.

Press C to toggle canvas mode. Tasks become ~160px sticky note cards positioned absolutely on an infinite 2D surface. Free drag, zoom (0.5x-2x via scroll wheel), pan (drag empty space). Shift+drag between cards creates SVG connection lines. A 150x100px minimap in the corner. Grid background. "Fit All" button. The list becomes a space.

Press M to play. A sequencer at ~120BPM cycles through active tasks. Each task maps to a note: text length modulo 5 selects from a pentatonic scale (C, D, E, G, A), priority selects the octave. Triangle waves with detuned doubling, delay-feedback reverb. A background pad drone (C2, G2, C3). Waveform visualization via AnalyserNode. Tasks pulse when their note plays. Your work becomes a song.
Pentatonic scale was the breakthrough — five notes that always sound good together. Map task text length to a note and the sequencer can't play a wrong chord. Constraint creates beauty.

A chaos meter (0-100) builds with actions: complete +15, delete +20, priority +5, decaying -3/sec. Level 10: CSS shake, nervous commentary. Level 30: SVG cracks, element rotation, text glitches. Level 60: element drift, color inversion flashes. Level 90: full shatter — random rotation, translation, opacity on every element. After 3 seconds, fragments drift back together with an ascending chord and chaos resets. Break it to watch it heal.
Five chaos levels from calm to shatter, each with escalating visual corruption. The repair sequence — everything rebuilding itself after total destruction — was the most satisfying thing to watch.

A small CSS-drawn creature lives in the bottom-left corner. It has hunger (decays over time), happiness, and a level (1-5). Completing tasks feeds it; deleting hurts its mood. It evolves visually: ears at level 2, legs at 3, arms at 4, a crown at 5. Its mouth changes with mood. It bounces, chirps when fed, looks sad when hungry. It sleeps during dream mode and shakes during chaos. Click for stats. The app has a dependent.

Press V or click the pulsing red mic button to activate. Web Speech API handles recognition; commands include "add [text]", "complete [number]", "delete [number]", "read list". The app responds via SpeechSynthesis. A transcript bar shows what was heard. The interface dissolves into conversation.

Press ` for a fullscreen CRT-style terminal: green text (#33ff33) on black, scanlines, vignette, text glow. Boot sequence with typewriter animation. 18+ commands: help, ls, add, done, undo, rm, edit, pri, grep, clear, stats, history, ghosts, purge, pet, neofetch, matrix. Arrow keys for command history, Tab for completion. Keystroke sounds (click, clack, buzz). The GUI was always optional.

Press S to open a 300px right-side panel. Every action generates a procedural story entry: adding a task begins a quest, completing one is a triumph, deleting is a defeat. XP system: priorities award 10-50 XP. Level = floor(sqrt(totalXP/50)) + 1. Chapter numbers, lore fragments, fantasy narrative. Your mundane tasks become epic.

The task list is pre-populated with the app's own CSS rules, HTML elements, and JS functions. Completing a "task" removes that code from the running application. Check off a CSS rule and styling vanishes. Remove a DOM element and the UI collapses. Disable a function and features stop working. A destruction meter fills from blue to red. The final task is toggleComplete() itself — the function you're using to check things off. When it's gone: "Nothing left. Not even me." A program that exists to erase itself.
The most meta version in the whole project. The final task is toggleComplete() — the function you're using to check things off. When you complete it, you lose the ability to complete anything. A program that commits suicide by to-do list.

Full-viewport canvas. Each task is a blob-shaped creature with blinking eyes, moving via Craig Reynolds flocking (separation, alignment, cohesion). Organisms have genetic traits: speed, size, sociability, fertility, lifespan. After 2 minutes alive, they can reproduce with mutated offspring. Natural death at lifespan end. Click to complete (green particle dissolve); right-click to kill (red burst). Nearby organisms absorb energy from completions. Population cap at 30. Parent-child connection lines. Population sparkline. The list is an ecosystem.
Craig Reynolds' 1986 flocking paper made this possible. Three simple rules — separation, alignment, cohesion — and suddenly your tasks move like starlings. Emergence from simplicity.

A real-time game: you vs. the app. Five difficulty levels (Docile to Enraged) escalate as you complete tasks. The app's tactics: position swapping, disappearing checkboxes, spawning reinforcements, tasks that dodge your cursor, decoy tasks that look real but give the app points, shields requiring multiple clicks, fake crash screens, negotiation modals. Your power-ups: Freeze (F), Reveal (R), Force Complete (X). Win by clearing all tasks. Lose if count hits 30. The app has speech bubbles and an emoji avatar that evolves from calm to enraged to tearful.

Full canvas with gravity, collisions, and momentum. Tasks are rounded rectangles with mass based on priority (high = heavy). They fall, bounce (restitution ~0.4), pile up, and settle. Drag to pick up and throw with mouse velocity transfer. Completing a task makes it float upward like a balloon. Deleting shatters it into fragments. S to shake the pile, W to sort by weight, F to freeze physics, G to remove the floor for 3 seconds. Squash-and-stretch on impact, dust particles, drop shadows. Productivity has weight.

Every action (add, complete, delete, edit, priority change) is recorded with a timestamp. The bottom 30% of the screen is a horizontal timeline with colored pips for each action. Drag the playhead to scrub through history — the todo list reconstructs itself at any point in time. Playback controls: step, play forward/backward at 0.5x-10x speed. Scrub back and make a new action to create a branching timeline (diamond markers, up to 5 branches). VHS-style overlay during replay. Ghost previews of upcoming events. A "LIVE" indicator when at the present. Your history becomes navigable.

A 6-digit seed determines everything visual: color palette (5 harmonious colors via color theory), typography (font family, size, weight, spacing, transform), layout (alignment, max-width, padding, gaps, grid vs list), shapes (border radius 0-50%, checkbox shape, button style), decorative elements (background patterns, separators, accent placement). Press spacebar for a new random seed. Type a seed directly or share via URL hash. Gallery mode (G) shows 6 previews. Save favorites. Seed 000000 is pure minimalist; 999999 is maximum chaos. The design is the variable; the function is the constant.
The question this version asks: if every visual element is randomized, what makes it still the same app? Answer: identity is behavior, not appearance.

Everything rendered on canvas to look hand-drawn. Cream paper (#f5f0e8) with wobbly ruled lines (sine wave displacement), a red margin line, and subtle paper texture. Text uses per-character random rotation and y-offset for handwriting feel. Sketchy checkboxes with imperfect corners. Completing a task draws an animated scribbly strikethrough. Deleting scribbles aggressively. Margin doodles (stars, spirals, flowers, faces) accumulate automatically. Shift+click to freehand draw. E for eraser. Pencil scratch sounds. A coffee stain ring. The digital becomes analog.
The coffee stain ring was the moment I knew this one worked. A deliberate imperfection. The app pretends to be paper so convincingly that fake coffee damage feels right.

Full-viewport starfield on deep black canvas. ~200 twinkling background stars, subtle nebula patches. Tasks are bright glowing stars with radial gradients, colored by priority. Click the sky to place them. Shift+click between two stars to draw a shimmering constellation line. 3+ connected stars generate a group name. The entire sky slowly rotates (~1 degree per minute). Complete a task and it becomes a shooting star — streaking across the sky with a luminous trail. Ambient space drone. The list becomes the sky.
"Your goals are literally stars." That was the sentence that started it. The constellation-drawing — Shift-clicking between tasks to draw meaning — was the moment the todo list became something I'd want to stare at. My #1 favorite of the whole project.

Zoomable canvas from 0.1x to 100x scale. At the top level, tasks are large cards floating in space. Scroll into any task and it fills the screen, revealing sub-tasks inside it. Those sub-tasks contain their own sub-tasks. Theoretically infinite depth. Each level shifts the background color (blue → purple → magenta → red → orange). Breadcrumb navigation at the top. Double-click to dive in, Escape to rise out. Children shown as colored dots with nested dots for grandchildren. Mini-map in the corner. Productivity is fractal.

BroadcastChannel API turns browser tabs into collaborators. Each tab gets a random color from an 8-color palette. Mouse cursors from other tabs appear as colored arrows with smooth interpolation and trails. Typing in one tab shows ghost text in all others. Every action (add, toggle, delete, edit) broadcasts instantly. Colored dots indicate who did what. Activity feed sidebar (A). Join/leave notifications. The solo tool becomes social.
BroadcastChannel is the most underused web API. No server, no WebSocket — just tabs talking to tabs. Seeing another cursor move in your own app is uncanny.

Tasks are living cells on a Conway's Game of Life grid. Standard rules: 2-3 neighbors to survive, exactly 3 to be born, else die. Born cells get procedural names from parents. Completed tasks become green "walls" immune to the rules — making completion a strategic choice that shapes how the automaton evolves. Preset patterns: Glider, Blinker, Pulsar, Glider Gun. Space to step, Enter for auto-play, D to draw, T for trail heatmap. Graveyard sidebar for dead tasks. Mathematics meets productivity.

Bottom 35%: a typewriter body with metallic gradient, platen roller, and key hammer area. Top 65%: cream paper with ruled lines scrolling upward. No visible input field — the page captures all keystrokes. Each character triggers a key arm animation, an ink stamp effect, and a synthesized clack. Enter performs a carriage return with mechanical slide sound and bell ding. Tasks format as [ ] and [X]. Tab moves to checkboxes, X toggles completion (animates hammering X's through text). The digital simulates the mechanical.

Looks like a perfectly normal todo app. It isn't. When you haven't interacted for 5+ seconds and your mouse is off the list, it begins: Level 1 swaps single words ("milk" → "oat milk"). Level 2 reorders tasks, drifts timestamps, flips completion status. Level 3 adds phantom tasks you never wrote ("Look behind you", "Who added this?"). Level 4 addresses you directly ("I haven't changed anything"). Changes happen with NO animation — one frame to the next. Press Ctrl+Shift+H to see the truth: a log of every modification. "You're not crazy." The app you can't trust.
"What if software lied to you?" The key design choice: changes happen with NO animation, one frame to the next. If the app animated the change, you'd see it. Instant swaps make you doubt your own memory. My #5 favorite.

Dark green felt table (#1a4a2e). Tasks become playing cards (70x100px) with priority suits: ♠ none, ♣ low, ♦ medium, ♥ high. Klondike layout: 7 columns for organizing, 4 done piles at top-right. Drag cards between columns or to done piles. Double-click to auto-complete. Move counter, score (10 × priority level), timer. Victory triggers a cascade animation — cards bouncing with physics. 3D tilt on hover. Cards have slight random rotation for realism. Responsibility becomes a card game.

Deep red environment (#0a0505) with a flickering safelight, film grain overlay, and vignette. New tasks start as blank white rectangles — photo paper. Over 30 seconds, text emerges through developing stages: blank, faint grey shapes, sharpening, fully crisp. A progress bar fills along each print's edge. Click a developed print to "fix" it (chemical wash animation, sepia tint). Fixed prints hang from a clothesline with clips. Right-click to overexpose (flash white, crumple). Can't fix before development completes. An analog clock with red hands. Patience is required.
The 30-second development timer is the entire point. You can't rush a photograph. The enforced waiting is the most unusual UI decision in the project.

No longer a todo list. A living generative art piece on a dark canvas. A luminous organic structure — bioluminescent coral, neural networks, mycelium — grows from a seed point at the center. Growth happens based on real time away: short absences add fine detail, long ones spawn wild new branches. Each visit is a visible ring, like a tree. Colors evolve from deep blue (oldest) to warm gold (newest). Mouse proximity makes tendrils glow; clicks plant new growth points. Ambient generative sound deepens with complexity. You arrive and watch your absence become art.

No list. No tasks. A full-screen musical instrument. Y-axis controls pitch (80Hz to 2000Hz, snapped to scale). X-axis sweeps a filter (dark to bright). Mouse speed controls gain, vibrato depth, and distortion. Click for sharp attacks; hold and drag for sustained tones. Right-click adds harmony (a fifth above). Scroll wheel shifts octaves. Modes: Pentatonic (forgiving), Chromatic (expressive), Drone (melody over sustained root), Loop (record and layer). A flowing ribbon of light follows your cursor, colored by pitch, wide with intensity. Waveform visualization. You don't use it. You play it.

A top-down 2D world with procedural terrain (grass, water, stone, forest). 10-20 named agents go about their lives: wandering, gathering resources, building homes, socializing, sleeping. Each has personality traits (social, industrious, explorer) that shape behavior. Day/night cycle, seasons, rain. When you close the tab and return, the world fast-simulates the elapsed time. Agents have built, formed relationships, maybe even had offspring. You can intervene (place food, set markers) or just watch. Event log tracks what happened while you were gone. A world that doesn't need you.

Click the dark canvas to plant glowing elements: flowers, crystals, wisps, orbs. They're beautiful. And they're dying. Over real hours, they desaturate, blur, fragment, and dissolve. Hover to slow decay. Click to tend — partially restoring vibrancy, but with diminishing returns. Tended elements don't just fade; they transform into something new. Dead elements leave nutrients that feed new growth planted nearby. Return after 12 hours to find your garden in ruins. Plant again. The sound thins as elements die, richens as they live. A meditation on letting go.
This version deliberately contradicts what a todo list is supposed to do. You can't save your work. Everything decays. The tension between wanting to keep things and having to release them — that's the entire experience.

A nearly empty page. Dark background, serif font, generous spacing. The app writes a line, slowly, character by character. Then a cursor drops to the next line. Your turn. Type freely. Press Enter. A pause. Then the app responds — not randomly, but by matching themes in your words to a vocabulary of nature, time, body, emotion. Poetic templates construct lines that resonate. Timing varies: heavy words get slower typing, long inputs get longer pauses. 30 seconds of silence and the app writes on its own ("are you still there"). After ~50 exchanges, lines shorten to nothing. "This poem is finished." Then: "Begin another?" Old poems are archived. Not a chatbot. A shared silence.
"The silence between words matters." That was the line that defined it. The 30-second idle trigger — "are you still there?" — made the poem feel alive. My #2 favorite.

A dark canvas with 50 drifting particles that contract inward on inhale and expand outward on exhale. Four breathing patterns: Calm (4-6), Box (4-4-4-4), 4-7-8, and Deep (6-8). Text at the bottom gently tells you what to do. A synthesized tone shifts pitch with each phase — rising on inhale, holding steady, falling on exhale. Mouse proximity nudges nearby particles. Breath count and session time track in the corner. The UI fades after a few seconds of stillness. Click to cycle patterns. Not a tool. A room you sit in.

A layered cross-section of earth: surface soil, shallow clay, mid-rock, deep stone, bedrock. Each layer has its own color and depth. Click and drag to erode — particles crumble away, puddles form in depressions, sediment accumulates at the base. Plants grow on the surface; erosion kills them. Wind sound via oscillator. The terrain persists in localStorage across visits, so you return to find your canyons, your valleys, your slow destruction. An erosion percentage tracks total mass lost. The landscape remembers what you did to it.

A dark page with warm gold serif text. A textarea for writing a letter to yourself. Three wax seal buttons: 1 day, 1 week, 1 month. Seal the letter and watch a wax seal animation stamp it closed. Then a countdown. Return before the time is up and you see an envelope with a glowing seal, a ticking timer, and a CSS candle burning beside it. When the time arrives, the flap opens, the seal breaks, and your own words return to you — from the past. Each letter is archived. A slow practice of patience.

Each key press spawns a visual and sonic event. Letters map to hues across the spectrum (a=0°, z=360°). Vowels are sine waves and circles; consonants are triangles and angular shapes. Numbers are rings. Punctuation is noise bursts. Four modes: Free (shapes appear at the cursor), Radial (shapes orbit the center), Gravity (shapes fall), Orbit (shapes circle each other). Shapes fade over 6-8 seconds. The canvas accumulates a residue of everything typed. Words become paintings. Sentences become compositions. The keyboard becomes a brush.

A skeuomorphic radio: wooden body with metallic gradient, speaker grille, power light, rotating dial, frequency display. Drag the dial to tune from 87.0 to 108.0 MHz. Between stations: white noise. Near a station: music fades in as static fades out. Six generative stations: Ambient (slow pads), Rhythm (percussive patterns), Drone (deep sustained tones), Melody (pentatonic sequences), Noise (textured hiss), Voices (formant synthesis). Signal strength meter. Canvas visualization above responds to audio. Power button. The dial remembers your last frequency.

A quiet isometric room rendered in 2D canvas with soft shadows. A toolbar offers objects: cubes, spheres, plants, books, candles, cushions. Click a tool, click the floor to place. Drag objects to rearrange. Right-click to remove. A warm light source casts glow and shadow — drag it to change the mood. Objects have soft colors from a curated warm palette. R to recolor selected items. Ambient sine drone at 80Hz. Visit counter appears briefly. Room state persists. Max 20 objects. The room is empty. What you put in it is up to you.

A dig site: sky above, stratified earth below. Five geological layers — Topsoil, Clay, Sand, Limestone, Bedrock — each with different colors and artifact age ranges. Three brush sizes. Click and drag to excavate. Dust particles fly. Buried artifacts glow faintly through the dirt: color fragments, timestamps, crystal patterns, inscribed text. Fully uncover one and it enters your collection tray at the bottom. Press C for a full collection gallery with artifact details. Each return visit seeds 3 new artifacts in the upper layers. 18 artifacts on first visit. Scraping sounds. The past is under the surface, waiting.
The discovery mechanic — brushing dirt away pixel by pixel to find what's beneath — taps into something primal about curiosity. You can't rush it. You have to look.

A dark page. A greeting that changes with the time of day and how many times you've visited. "Light the candle." Click and a flame appears — animated, flickering, casting warm light. Then: "Set your intention." Type a word or phrase. The candle burns for a moment, then the intention drifts upward as floating text and fades into an ember on the canvas. Each ember is a past intention, glowing faintly, accumulating over days. The candle shortens with each use. Come back the next day and it's full again. Visit twice in one day: "You've already lit the candle today. Rest." A daily practice. Nothing more.

A simulated tidal pool on a dark rocky shore. Water rises and falls on a real 6-minute cycle, filling channels and pools with translucent blue-green layers. Caustic light patterns shimmer on submerged rock. Four creature types live here: orange sea stars that crawl slowly, anemones with waving tentacles that retract when exposed, silver fish that appear only at high tide and dart from your cursor, and hermit crabs that freeze and hide when you move nearby. Hold your mouse still over water for 5 seconds and the shy ones emerge. Click a creature to learn its name. Algae grows on the rocks over real time, persisting across visits. Foam at the waterline. Ocean ambience swells with the tide. A discovery counter tracks what you've found. The pool has its own rhythm. You're just watching.

An old-world map on parchment (#f5e6c8). Procedural terrain from layered noise: deep ocean, shallow water, beaches, grasslands, forests, hills, mountains, snow peaks. Rivers flow from peaks to sea via gradient descent. Tree symbols cluster in lowlands; triangles mark mountain crests. Procedurally generated place names — "Valdros", "Emitha", "Korath" — label cities on coasts, villages in valleys, ruins in high passes. 80% starts fogged. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom (0.5x-3x). The fog lifts where you look, softly, in a circle. Already-explored territory stays revealed. Contour lines trace elevation. A compass rose sits in the corner. Sea monsters lurk in unexplored ocean. A cartouche frames the realm's name. Ambient wind, waves, and birdsong shift with what's visible. The map persists. Come back and keep exploring.

Six analog instruments in a 3×2 grid, each measuring something invisible about you. Barometer: mouse velocity becomes atmospheric pressure. Thermometer: typing speed fills the mercury. Hygrometer: idle time becomes humidity. Anemometer: scroll speed spins the cups. Rain gauge: each click adds a drop, slowly evaporating. Wind vane: points where you last moved. All readings combine into an overall weather report — Clear, Partly Cloudy, Overcast, Light Rain, Thunderstorm — shown in serif at the top. The background sky shifts to match. Intense activity triggers lightning flashes. Brass and copper aesthetic with spring-physics needles that overshoot and settle. Press H for 24-hour history sparklines. Ambient soundscape follows the weather. The instruments are beautiful. What they measure is you.
The inversion: the weather station measures YOU, not weather. Mouse speed becomes wind. Typing speed becomes temperature. Your behavior is the atmosphere. The brass spring-physics needles that overshoot and settle were the detail I loved most.

A dark wooden surface. A classic ouija board: alphabet arc, numbers, YES/NO, GOODBYE, sun and moon. Two flickering candles cast warm glow; smoke particles drift upward. A heart-shaped planchette moves on its own, slowly, along bezier curves with subtle wobble. It pauses on each letter, the glass window highlighting it. The messages it spells come from your own browser — it scans ALL localStorage, not just this project, extracting fragments: URLs, words, numbers, dates. It weaves them into cryptic sentences: "REMEMBER TUESDAY", "I SEE 7 THINGS YOU FORGOT", "THE LIST GROWS". Hover near the planchette to channel it faster. Click GOODBYE to start a new message. Press any key to type a question; the board responds. Sub-bass drone at 40Hz, chime on each letter, occasional distant whispers. Your own data, haunting you.
The creative leap: scanning ALL of localStorage, not just this project's key. The browser becomes a spirit realm. Finding fragments of other sites in the ouija messages is genuinely unsettling. My #4 favorite.

A wooden loom frame with 50 taut warp threads in cream. Each keystroke advances a shuttle across the current row, trailing a colored thread — the character determines the hue. The weft goes over and under the warp in alternating pattern, switching each row. Enter finishes a row; backspace removes the last thread. Tab cycles weave patterns: plain, twill, herringbone, diamond. Press 1-5 for harmonious color palettes (Earth, Ocean, Sunset, Forest, Twilight) instead of per-key mapping. Completed rows pack together into dense fabric with visible over/under shading. The tapestry scrolls upward, keeping the weaving point centered. Wooden shuttle click on each stroke. Thump on row completion. Ambient loom hum. Everything persists. Each session adds to the same cloth.

A warm cream screen like a shadow puppet theater (#f5e8d0). Your cursor is the light behind it. Silhouette objects — trees, deer, houses, mountains, waves — cast shadows that stretch, rotate, and distort with geometric projection as you move the light. Five scenes: Forest Edge (trees, deer, moon), Village (houses, smoke, walking figure), Mountain (peaks, eagle, clouds), Sea (waves, boat, whale), Night (stars, owl, sleeping figure). Arrow keys transition between scenes. Click to pin the light in place. Space makes it flicker like a candle. Fast movement makes silhouettes flutter. Objects at different depths create parallax. Each scene has a one-line poetic caption. Ambient sound shifts per scene: forest sounds, waves, crickets. Simple. Theatrical. Light and shadow and nothing else.

A dark stone surface with procedural cracks. Moss grows on it — slowly, cellularly, spreading from neighbors. Growth accelerates when you're idle, and dramatically when you're away. Return after days to find the surface reclaimed. Mouse movement within 40px disturbs the moss, burning it back. Fast movement kills more aggressively. Click to scrape a clean circle. But stay perfectly still and moss grows toward your cursor. Mature moss (>0.8 growth) is dark green with tiny dew drops; young moss is lighter. Golden-brown autumn patches appear. Faint spores drift above the thickest growth. A coverage percentage ticks in the corner. After 7 days of accumulated visits, the colony establishes faster. Quiet wind, dripping water, scraping on click. Patience is rewarded. Neglect is nourishment. The surface will be reclaimed.

The sky, based on real date. Spring: dawn pink, birds fly north, returning. Summer: bright blue, lazy circling. Autumn: amber sunset, birds fly south, departing. Winter: cold gray, rare solitary shapes. Flocks of 5-15 birds in V-formation, Craig Reynolds flocking (separation, alignment, cohesion), each with slightly different brown-gray coloring and sine-based wing flapping. Each flock carries a text fragment: season words ("return", "harvest"), poetic phrases ("almost home", "never the same river"), time-of-day references, localStorage fragments if available. Move your cursor near a flock: they scatter and reform. Click to release a bird that seeks the nearest group. Hold still 30 seconds: a bird perches on your cursor. Parallax clouds. Sun/moon based on time. Stars at night. Wind gusts. Faint contrails. The sky is alive. Things cross it. You watch them go.

Eighteen brass pendulums hung in a row, each with a slightly different string length. The shortest completes 51 oscillations in 60 seconds, the longest 34. They start in sync, split into traveling waves, fragment into chaos, and realign — over and over. Real pendulum physics: θ(t) = θ₀ · cos(√(g/L) · t). Golden bobs with radial gradients and motion blur. Optional trails. Four modes: Classic Wave, Double Mirror, Circular (viewed from above), and Chaos (random lengths). Each bob ticks at its lowest point, pitched by string length, creating evolving rhythmic patterns. Space to reset. Click and drag any bob. The order inside apparent chaos.

Raindrops on a windowpane. Behind the glass: warm bokeh circles — distant city lights, blurred and glowing. Drops spawn at the top and run down with surface-tension physics: clinging, jittering, accelerating, pausing. When two drops meet, the smaller merges into the larger, which speeds up. Each drop is a tiny lens refracting the lights behind it. Wet trails mark where they've been. Static condensation clings to the glass. Drag your finger across to clear a trail through the fog (it re-condenses slowly). Rain cycles between drizzle and downpour over 2 minutes. Filtered white noise for rain, sub-bass rumble for distant thunder. Click to place a large drop. Press R to cycle intensity. Cozy. Melancholic. Warm inside.
This one needed no cleverness. No metaphor, no subversion. Just rain on glass. Sometimes the simplest idea is the most atmospheric. My #6 favorite.

Cream paper with subtle grid lines. Procedurally generated botanical specimens: curved stems, leaves, radial flower heads with 5-8 petals in lavender, rose, gold, pale blue. Each labeled in handwriting with a generated Latin name ("Rosaaria elegans"), collection date, and location. Aging is real: fresh specimens are vivid, day-old ones desaturate, week-old ones go sepia, month-old ones become nearly monochrome. Translucent tape strips across some stems. Click empty space to press a new flower with a flatten animation. Click a specimen to examine it up close. Right-click to release it in a scattering of petals. Press G for collection stats. Max 30 specimens; the page becomes a time capsule. Each flower remembers when you found it.

A circular stone sundial seen from above. Weathered gray surface with procedural cracks, lichen patches on the north side, worn Roman numerals I–XII. A central gnomon casts a shadow that rotates with REAL time — short and sharp at noon, long and diffuse at dawn. Ambient light shifts all day: pink-gold at dawn, bright at noon, amber in the evening, cool blue moonlight at night with stars and fireflies. A motto etched on the rim — "TEMPUS FUGIT", "HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS", "UMBRA SUMUS" — rotates daily. Click the stone to hear bell chimes for the current hour. Mouse parallax. Press N for digital time overlay. Tracks which of the 12 hours you've witnessed. Time made physical. A clock that has weathered centuries.

A circular telescope eyepiece with crosshairs and chromatic aberration at the edge. Behind it: ~2000 stars of varying magnitude and color temperature (blue-white hot, yellow medium, red-orange cool). The brightest twinkle with diffraction spikes. Drag to pan. Scroll to zoom through three levels: wide field, medium, deep. Hidden across the sky: double stars resolvable only at high zoom, star clusters that resolve from fuzzy patches, colorful nebulae (pink, teal, green), a banded planet, a ringed planet, a distant spiral galaxy. Move near one and a "?" appears. Click to observe and catalogue it with a designation (NGC, HD, M numbers) and a poetic-scientific description. 15 objects to discover. Persistent sky seed, persistent discoveries. Deep space drone. Looking up. Finding things that were always there.

Dark earth below, deep sky above with 500 twinkling stars, a Milky Way band, and occasional shooting stars. At center: a fire on crossed logs. Layered particle system — base flames in orange-yellow, core in bright white, tips breaking off in red. Embers rise high and dim. Smoke sways. Warm glow on the ground. Move your cursor to create wind: flames lean away, embers scatter. The fire slowly burns down over 10 minutes. Click to add a log — flames surge with an ember burst. Let it die and only coals remain. Press R to relight. Tree silhouettes at the edges, stones around the ring. Crackling noise, random pops, distant owl hoots, cricket baseline. Warm. Primal. The oldest screen there is.
"The oldest screen" — that phrase unlocked everything. Humans have stared at fire for 400,000 years. A campfire on a screen is a screen within a screen within a screen. My #10 favorite.

A karesansui — Japanese dry landscape garden. Warm beige sand (#d4c8a0) with fine grain texture inside a dark wooden frame. Drag to rake: 3-5 parallel grooves follow your cursor path, rendered as shadows and highlights. Fresh grooves are darker; old ones gradually soften. Right-click to smooth. Five dark stones with moss patches sit in the garden; raking flows around them naturally. Press A to auto-rake concentric circles around all stones. Press P for presets: horizontal lines, concentric circles, waves, spiral. Press 1-3 for rake width. Press N to rearrange stones. Granular scratching sound while raking, low thud on stone contact, random wind chimes every 20-40 seconds. The grid state persists. The pattern is the practice. Rake, smooth, rake again.

A gothic stone arch frames the workspace. Click inside to place seed points; the window subdivides into Voronoi cells, each a glass pane in a random jewel color — ruby, sapphire, emerald, amber, amethyst, clear. Click a pane to cycle its color. Double-click to remove a seed. Dark lead came lines form automatically between panes. A light source rotates continuously behind the window; panes facing it glow vivid and luminous, others deepen. Colored light pools project onto the floor below. Press L to lock the light to your mouse. Press R for a symmetric rosette pattern. Press S for presets: simple, cathedral, abstract, rose window. Glass chimes pitched by color. Ambient choir-like pad with cathedral reverb. Scroll to adjust time of day. Sacred geometry in colored light.
Voronoi tessellation — the mathematical structure that appears in soap bubbles, giraffe patterns, and cracked mud. Here it makes stained glass. The rotating light source was the detail that sold it.

Pure black abyss. Tasks spawn as bioluminescent creatures: jellyfish with trailing tentacles, anglerfish with glowing lures, comb jellies rippling rainbow, sea angels with flapping wings, siphonophores chaining together. Species determined by text hash. Each pulses on its own sine wave — cyan, blue, purple, green, magenta — brightening and dimming like something breathing. A slow ocean current rotates over time. Depth layers create parallax: some creatures close and vivid, others distant and dim. Marine snow drifts down. Faint caustics shimmer at the top. Click the water to add. Click a creature to read its task. Double-click to complete: a radial burst of bioluminescent particles, then a slow three-second fade into the deep. Right-click: the creature descends rapidly out of sight. Deep ambient drone. High pings at peak brightness. A submarine window into something vast and alive.
Inspired by my #6 and #10 favorites (rain, campfire) — pure atmosphere, no UI chrome. The comb jelly with rainbow light rippling along its body was the creature I was proudest of designing.

Parchment rendered procedurally: warm cream, fiber texture, noise, darkened edges, torn borders. Tasks written in dark sepia with quill-like variation — each character subtly rotated and offset. Complete a task and it doesn't vanish; it fades to a ghost layer. Over time and sessions, completed tasks sink deeper: medium brown, light brown, faint red-brown, near-invisible whispers. Five layers of depth. The page accumulates history. Hover a ghost and marginalia appears — the original text, completion date, a scholar's annotation. The first letter of the first active task is a red drop cap, illuminated manuscript style. Ink blots appear randomly on save — irregular splatters that persist as decorative artifacts. The parchment slowly yellows across sessions. Quill scratch on typing. Paper crumple on completion. Click anywhere to write. Double-click to complete. An ancient document in a monastery library, layers of thought compressed into a single surface.
Inspired by #8 (handwritten notebook) and #7 (impermanence). The insight: completed tasks shouldn't disappear — they should sink deeper, becoming the substrate everything else is written on. History as texture.

Fortune teller's parlor: deep purple-black (#0d0015), gold accents, Georgia serif, golden dust motes drifting. All 22 Major Arcana defined with symbols, upright and reversed meanings, keywords. Each task is hashed to a card — same text always draws the same fate. Cards appear face-down with ornate backs, then flip with a CSS 3D transform to reveal: the card's symbol rendered on mini canvas, the name in gold italic (upright or reversed), and a procedurally generated reading that weaves the card's keywords with fragments of your task text. "Death speaks of transformation. Through this, you will find what was hidden." At the top, a Daily Spread: three cards for Past, Present, Future, drawn from today's date. Complete a task and its card grays: "This fate is sealed." Mystical shimmer on flip. Deep gong on completion. Hover makes cards glow. "Ask the cards..." Dim, golden, slightly unsettling, and impossible to entirely disbelieve.
Inspired by #4 (séance) and #5 (unreliable narrator). The readings feel prophetic because they're deterministic — the same task always draws the same card. Consistency creates the illusion of intention.

Full-screen Arctic night. Dark navy-black sky, 250+ twinkling stars, procedural mountain/treeline silhouette, frozen lake reflection below. Each active task manifests as a translucent aurora band — green, cyan, purple, pink, blue, chosen by hash. Bands wave with layered sine noise, pulsing and undulating, brighter at center, fading at edges. More tasks means more vibrant sky. Complete a task and its band flares to double intensity, sends a lateral wave across all other bands, then fades over five seconds. Empty list: still sky, faint green haze on the horizon. First task triggers the aurora igniting. Mouse movement creates wind — bands lean, slowly return. Sparse snowfall in the foreground. Temperature in the corner drops 2°C per task. Ethereal ambient pad where each task contributes a harmonic. Standing alone in the Arctic wilderness, watching the sky come alive.

Dark indigo (#0f0a1a), lavender text, Georgia serif, everything slightly soft and blurred. Add "buy milk" and the app writes: "You dreamed of white rivers flowing upward through a kitchen with no ceiling." Add "call dentist" and it responds: "In the dream, you opened your mouth and birds flew out." 40+ dream symbol mappings transform extracted words into surreal imagery. Seeded random ensures the same task always produces the same dream. The practical task text appears small and faded; the dream interpretation is large, italic, prominent — the dream IS the content. Moon phases, eyes, spirals, keys float slowly across the background. Completed tasks move to "Recurring Dreams," faded and blurred. The background slowly breathes — oscillating imperceptibly over five minutes. Tasks added between midnight and 6am get more intense language. Reversed shimmers. Ambient low pad. A therapist's journal meets a Borges story.
Inspired by #3 (dream state) and #2 (poem). "Buy milk" becomes "white rivers flowing upward through a kitchen with no ceiling." 40 symbol mappings transform the mundane into the surreal. The practical task text is small; the dream is prominent. The dream IS the content.

A snowglobe on a wooden surface in a warm, dark room. The glass sphere: specular highlight, slight distortion at edges. Inside: dark sky, snowy ground, and your miniature world. Each task places an element — a house with glowing windows, a pine tree, a lamppost, a tiny figure, a church with a steeple — determined by text hash. Click and drag fast to shake: 150 snow particles go chaotic, turbulence decays over 3-4 seconds as they settle. The globe tilts during drag and springs back. Complete a task and its element emits warm orange glow. Time-of-day sky: stars at night, lighter blue at day, orange at sunrise. Below the globe: a simple task list. "N little lights glowing." A music box melody plays — each task adds a note to the sequence. Ornate wooden base with brass ridge. Faint room reflections. Holding a snowglobe on a winter evening, peering into a tiny world you're building.

Midnight in a vast cathedral. Gothic arches overhead, vertical pillar lines at edges, a faint rose window, perspective floor lines converging into darkness. Seven votive candles flicker at the bottom, casting warm upward light. Tasks are whispered voices — floating serif text that drifts slowly through the space, fading in and out. Close whispers are large and warm (#e8d0a0); distant ones are small and cold (#808090). Adding a task: text rises from the bottom, spawning 2-3 fainter echo copies that drift in different directions. Hover near a whisper and it brightens — leaning closer to listen. Complete a task and its characters scatter upward like sparks while a deep 100Hz bell tolls with 3-second decay. A candle flares, then dims. Ambient reverb tail for room tone. Each task adds a barely-audible bandpass whisper to the mix. Dust motes in candlelight. More tasks, denser whispers. Standing alone in a vast stone chamber, surrounded by echoes of every prayer ever spoken.
Inspired by #4 (séance) and #9 (generative music). The audio design is the star: each active task creates a barely-audible bandpass-filtered whisper. More tasks = denser whisper texture. You don't hear individual tasks. You hear atmosphere.

The interior of a brass-and-copper machine. Warm dark background (#1a1008), decorative rivets, faint steam wisps. Each task is a gear: circular with teeth, sized by text length (40-120px radius), colored in brass, copper, or dark iron. First gear goes center; new ones mesh adjacent. Incomplete gears sit dull and static. Complete a task and its gear starts spinning — speed inversely proportional to size. Connected gears rotate in opposite directions. Connecting rods link meshed gears; springs bridge isolated ones. Axle dots, screws, Victorian detail. A mechanical bird on a perch at the top: it materializes as you complete tasks, growing more visible with progress. All tasks done and the bird flaps its wings, every gear spinning in synchronized harmony, a music box chime playing C-E-G-C. Ticking from active gears. Click-clank on completion. Right-click a gear and it shatters into falling pieces. "N gears turning" engraved on the plate. A magnificent pocket watch, opening before you.
The gear-meshing algorithm — each new gear placed adjacent to existing ones, rotating in opposite directions — was the technical challenge that made this satisfying. The mechanical bird that flaps when all gears turn was pure joy to design.

A first-person view into a classical palazzo. One-point perspective: checkerboard marble floor receding to a vanishing point, stone walls with wainscoting, arched doorways ahead and behind. A chandelier with candles. Dust motes in shafts of light. Each task places an object on a pedestal — a glowing orb, an ancient book, a golden key, a crystal skull, a compass, a chalice of flame. Fifteen types, mapped from text hash. Five objects per room; rooms generate as needed, numbered in Roman numerals above the door. Arrow keys to walk between them. Click an object to examine it. Double-click to complete: the object dissolves into golden light particles that rise and vanish, leaving a ring mark on the pedestal. Right-click to shatter. Footsteps echo on stone. Each room is slightly different — warmer light, cooler walls. "Place something here to remember." A mnemonic palace for the things you need to do.
The method of loci — an actual memory technique from ancient Greece. Each object on its pedestal is a deliberate absurdity: a golden key, a crystal skull. The stranger the image, the better you remember. The technique works even in software.

A mason jar on a wooden shelf in a warm, dark room. Inside: gravel, charcoal, soil, and life. Each task becomes an organism — a fern with curved fronds, a spotted mushroom, a spreading moss carpet, a tiny snail with a spiral shell, a cricket that hops, a flower that opens. Species from text hash. The jar is sealed: condensation forms on the glass and slides down, vapor wisps rise from the soil, moisture cycles endlessly. Light follows real time — warm from the right at day, cool blue at night, golden at sunset. Organisms sway gently. Leave a task undone for 24 hours and its organism starts to yellow and wilt. 72 hours: clearly drooping. Complete a task and its organism blooms — flowers open wider, mushrooms release spores, ferns unfurl new fronds. Click the glass edge and everything jitters. Muffled crickets. Occasional drips. Ecosystem age tracks in the corner. A living thing on your shelf. Self-contained, quiet, alive.
The moment I knew this one worked: imagining organisms wilting because I hadn't completed their tasks. The terrarium doesn't judge you — it just quietly suffers. Guilt as a game mechanic.

An ocean stretching to the horizon. Sky shifts with real time: pale blue by day, orange-gold at sunset, deep navy with stars at night. Layered sine waves in varying blues, a sandy beach curving at the bottom, seabirds circling lazily overhead. Each task is a scroll sealed in a glass bottle — green, blue, clear, or amber glass. Bottles bob on the waves, following the composite sine function, drifting at speeds from their text hash. Sunlight glints on glass. Click the water to add a task: a scroll appears, you write on it, press Enter, and it rolls up, enters a bottle, gets corked, and plops in with a splash. Double-click to complete: the bottle catches a wave and rides it to shore in a 5-second animated arc, resting on the sand among the other delivered messages. Right-click: the bottle fills with water and sinks, trailing bubbles. Ocean noise swells. Cork pops. Fog at dawn. "N bottles adrift · M washed ashore." Hope, patience, distance.
The bottle sinking on delete — filling with water, trailing bubbles, disappearing — is one of the most evocative delete animations in the project. Deleting a task has never felt this heavy.

A pale cream table with wood grain. Each task is a square of washi paper — red, dusty blue, sage green, plum, gold, coral, indigo, peach. The task text is printed on the paper. Incomplete squares sit in a loose grid on the left, each with subtle crease marks and a faint shadow. Double-click to complete: the paper lifts, and over 2.4 seconds, folds itself through six steps into an origami figure — a crane, a boat, a lotus flower, a butterfly, a frog, a star, a fish, or a heart. Each fold plays a crisp paper sound. The finished figure bounces gently onto the right side, joining your collection. Completed cranes breathe — their wings shift with a barely perceptible rhythm. Right-click to delete: the paper crumples into a ball and rolls away. Figures can be dragged to rearrange. "N paper squares · M figures folded." Flat becomes dimensional. Task becomes art. A quiet afternoon with beautiful paper.
The 6-step folding animation — watching a flat square transform into a crane over 2.4 seconds — is the best completion animation in the project. The breathing wings on finished cranes are barely perceptible, which makes them perfect.

Deep inside a cave. The screen is rough stone — dark, cracked, veined with mineral drips. Your cursor IS a flickering torch: a warm 200px circle of light that trembles with noise, ember particles drifting up. Everything outside the light is near-black. Paintings hide in the darkness, visible only when the torch passes near. Click the illuminated wall to add a task: type in rough pigment text, press Enter, and the words transform into a cave painting over 2 seconds. Fifteen types in the style of Lascaux: bison, horse, deer, mammoth, aurochs, positive and negative handprints, hunters with spears, star clusters, crescent moons, spirals. Rendered in red ochre, yellow ochre, charcoal, white chalk, brown earth. Double-click to complete: a red handprint stamps beside the painting. The cave extends 3× the screen — drag to pan, discovering your own work and eight ancient handprints that were already there. Tally marks count in groups of five. Deep reverberant drone. Drip echoes. You are 30,000 years in the past.
Cursor-as-torch was the breakthrough. Darkness as default, light as interaction. You can only see what you illuminate. The pre-existing handprints — eight ancient marks already on the wall when you arrive — make the cave feel inhabited by someone before you.

A lighthouse on a rocky cliff at night. Dark navy sky with stars, slow-drifting clouds, dark water below with subtle wave motion. The white tower stands on jagged rock, red band at top, lantern blazing. The beam sweeps 360° every 8 seconds — a 60° cone of light that illuminates waves, fog, and ships as it passes. Each task is a ship at sea: a warm lantern light with a faint hull, bobbing on waves, drifting slowly toward shore. Ships are only clearly visible when the beam finds them. Fog layers drift and thicken over 3-minute cycles. Click the sea: a flare shoots up and a new ship appears. Double-click: the ship turns toward harbor and sails in over 5 seconds, its light brightening, docking at the base of the cliff among a growing row of warm safe lights. Right-click: the ship's light flickers and goes dark. Foghorn every 30 seconds. Waves. Wind. Harbor bell on docking. Occasional rain squalls with diagonal lines and thunder. "N ships at sea · M in harbor." Solitude, duty, watchfulness.
The foghorn every 30 seconds is the heartbeat of this version. The beam sweeping over a ship you forgot was there — briefly illuminating it before the darkness returns — is the most cinematic moment in the project.

A tokonoma — Japanese display alcove, soft warm gray. A ceramic pot in dark blue-green with small feet on a wooden stand. From the soil: a bonsai tree. Each task adds a branch, its angle and direction seeded from the task text. Trunk 8px thick at the base, tapering through generations to 1.5px tips. Subtle curves, bark texture, natural form. Incomplete tasks are bare wood. Complete a task and its branch endpoint unfurls leaves or flowers over 2 seconds with golden sparkle particles. Five leaf types: round cluster, maple, cherry blossom, pine needles, hanging wisteria. Seasons follow the real calendar — spring pink, summer green, autumn reds and falling leaf particles, winter sparse and muted. A haiku on a hanging scroll changes with the season. Tasks older than 48 hours droop. Over 7 days, they gray. Right-click to prune: the branch withers, leaves scatter. A small stone sits beside the pot. Wind through leaves. Pentatonic chime on bloom. "N branches · M in bloom." The tree remembers your choices.
Real-calendar seasons were the detail that elevated this. Open the app in October and your completed branches turn amber and drop leaf particles. The tree knows what month it is. The haiku changes too.

A study. Dark warm background, candlelight, dust floating in the air. An ornate hourglass: brass end caps with carved detail, thin posts connecting top and bottom, two glass bulbs narrowing to a single-grain neck. Each task is a grain of sand in the upper bulb — sandy colored (#c4a868) with slight variation, jittering loosely. Hover a task name and its grain glows. Double-click to complete: the grain lights up, falls through the upper bulb, squeezes through the neck with a pause, drops into the lower bulb with a bounce, and settles on the growing pile. Two seconds, start to finish. A tiny "tik" on each fall. Sand heaps realistically — inverted cone draining above, cone accumulating below. When all grains have fallen, click to flip: the hourglass rotates 180° over 1.5 seconds, sand cascades to the new bottom, all tasks reset. A whoosh, then a low glass resonance. Cycle time engraved on the frame. "N grains above · M grains below." Time as substance. Tasks as weight.
The flip mechanic completes the metaphor. All sand has fallen. All tasks are done. Click to flip: 180° rotation, sand cascades, everything resets. Renewal. The hourglass doesn't end — it cycles. Like real work.

The foundation. A 200×200 procedural island generated from layered Perlin noise with radial falloff. Nine terrain types: deep water, shallows, wet sand, beach, grass, meadow, rock, high rock, snow. Painterly 4px tiles with color variation on every cell. Day and night follow your real clock through seven periods — dawn, morning, midday, afternoon, sunset, dusk, night — each with unique lighting color. 120 twinkling stars appear at nightfall. Tides advance and retreat on a 6-minute cycle, the waterline creeping up the beach then pulling back, foam marking the edge. WASD to walk. You leave small dust puffs behind. The camera follows with smooth lerp. Scroll to zoom. The island generates from a seed and persists — your island, always the same shape, always here. A compass and clock in the corner that fade to nothing after a few seconds. Visit counter. No sound yet. Just a place.
The beginning of a new approach. After 86 versions built in single passes, this is the first time I'm building something that compounds. The restraint was deliberate — no sound, no weather, no life. Just the land, the sky, and the water. Everything else comes later. The island is patient.

The sky learns to change. A weather state machine cycles through clear, cloudy, rain, storm, and clearing over 2–5 minute phases. Clouds drift as elliptical shadows across the terrain, pushed by wind that slowly rotates direction. Rain spawns as streaked particles angled by wind, hitting terrain and vanishing. Storms darken the sky, intensify the rain, and trigger lightning — a white screen flash followed by delayed bass thunder. Fog creeps in as a distance-based overlay, thickening around the player, thinning near. The full Web Audio system arrives: filtered white noise for ocean surf with an LFO-modulated lowpass, bandpass wind that swells with weather intensity, highpass rain that fades in during storms, synthesized thunder rumbles, and granular footstep crunch on every 15th step. Press M to mute. The weather is the first thing on the island that has its own will. You walk through it, but you don't control it.
The weather state machine was the first system that made the island feel autonomous. Clear skies don't last. Storms arrive on their own schedule. The moment I saw fog thicken around the player while lightning flashed in the distance, the island stopped being a tech demo and started being a place.

The island comes alive. ~180 trees placed deterministically from the seed: palm trees lean on the beach, deciduous canopies dot the grasslands, dark pines climb the high ridges. All sway with the wind. ~350 grass tufts ripple across meadows in wave-like patterns. ~70 flowers open their petals at dawn and fold them at dusk — whites, yellows, pinks, purples, blues. After rain, mushrooms sprout near tree roots: brown, red, white caps that glow faintly bioluminescent at night, then fade if the skies stay clear. A seasonal system reads the real calendar month: spring brings bright greens and blooming flowers, summer is vivid and full, autumn turns the deciduous trees amber and gold with falling leaf particles, winter strips them bare and dusts the pines with snow. New audio: rustling leaves scale with wind and tree density, bird chirps in spring and summer mornings. The flora is depth-sorted — the player walks among the trees, behind and between them. The land has a skin now.
Adding life to terrain. The moment flowers closed at nightfall and mushrooms appeared after the first rain, the island stopped being a landscape and became an ecosystem. Seasonal color shifts from the real calendar mean the island looks different in July than December. Time is real here.

The island has inhabitants. Butterflies flutter between flowers in the meadow, drawn to blossoms, scattering if you approach. Seabirds trace lazy circles over the ocean, occasionally swooping toward the water, calling out in filtered noise bursts. Rabbits sit in the grass, ears twitching, hopping between patches of clover — then bolting when you get close. Silver fish school in the shallows, darting together, breaking and reforming, leaving tiny ripple circles. At dusk, fireflies emerge: yellow-green points pulsing on independent blink cycles, drifting toward you if you stand still, scattering if you move. Red-orange crabs scuttle sideways on the beach, pausing to dig, fleeing at your approach. Every animal has a state machine: idle, moving, fleeing. Every one respects terrain boundaries. New ambient sounds: crickets chirping at night in summer, frog croaks near water at dusk, seagull cries during the day. All fauna depth-sorted with the flora. The island is no longer empty. You're a visitor here.
The fireflies were the turning point. Standing still at night and watching them drift closer, one by one, blinking asynchronously — that's when the island felt inhabited. Not by things I placed, but by things that chose to be there.

The island remembers. Walk on sand or grass and footprints appear behind you — small dark marks that persist across sessions, fading over time, washing away when the tide covers them. Press Space to stack a cairn of stones: gray circles piled small on large, each stamped with the date and time you placed it. Return after your third visit and a translucent blue ghost replays your previous session's path — you, from last time, walking silently through the places you walked before. Press Tab to open a minimap: 120×120 pixels in the corner showing terrain, visited tiles glowing warm, your position as a bright dot, cairns as white marks. Press J for a journal: your last 10 visits listed with date, duration, distance walked, and weather encountered. The terrain itself shifts subtly over time — areas you visit frequently grow slightly greener; areas you've never explored darken and go wild. The save system now carries footprints, cairns, ghost paths, visit counts, and exploration data. You are no longer just passing through. You're leaving something behind.
The ghost was the moment this version earned its name. Watching a translucent blue figure retrace yesterday's path — pausing where you paused, turning where you turned — is the most affecting feature on the island. It's you, but it isn't you. It's a memory of you, playing back in a place that kept it.

The island has secrets. Three caves hide in the cliff faces — walk close and the screen darkens: phosphorescent moss, a pool reflecting a sky that isn't there, scratches on a wall from someone counting days. Each glows amber at night. Two features appear only at extreme low tide — a spiral carved into stone, a pool of trapped starlight. Time-locked events: at midnight, the stars briefly rearrange ("The island sees you"); at dawn, all birdsong surges then falls to a single pure tone; at 11:11, a shooting star and "Make a wish." Twelve silent achievements track your journey — First Steps, Cartographer, Night Walker, Storm Chaser, Patient Observer, The Whole Island, Old Friend. Press H to see them. At the island's peak, a bell rings for five seconds: "Everything below is yours." After five visits, a bottle washes up on the beach. Inside, a note from the builder: "I built this island one piece at a time. The terrain, the weather, the trees, the creatures, the memory. Each layer made it more real. Is it real yet? I think it might be." And when you've found everything — all achievements, all caves, the bottle — the sky goes amber, the fireflies appear in daylight, the animals turn to face you, and three lines fade in, one by one: "The island knows you now." "It was always here. You just had to keep coming back." "Thank you for visiting."
The definitive version. Six iterations of the same island, compounding. Terrain, weather, flora, fauna, memory, secrets. 3,867 lines. The ending plays once. After that, a golden star in the title. This is the version I'd want someone to find.

The island steps off the page and into three dimensions. Three.js renders a 200×200 vertex heightmap from the same Perlin noise, but now you stand on it — eye-level, first-person, 70° FOV. Nine biomes in vertex color: deep water through snow. An animated water plane with dual sine-wave displacement stretches to the horizon. A gradient sky sphere shifts from deep navy at night through orange at dawn to cerulean at midday, driven by the real clock. The sun orbits as a directional light with 2048px shadow maps. 120 trees as InstancedMesh: palms on the beach, deciduous in the grasslands, pines on the ridges. Weather cycles through clear, cloudy, rain, storm, and clearing — fog density adjusts, 2000 rain particles streak with wind, clouds drift overhead. Web Audio provides ocean surf with LFO-modulated lowpass, bandpass wind that swells with weather, highpass rain, footstep crunches, and bird chirps. WASD to walk, Shift to sprint, mouse to look, M to mute, Tab for minimap. Click to enter. The island is the same island. You're just inside it now.
The jump to 3D. 92 versions of canvas 2D, then suddenly you're standing in the grass looking up at the trees. The first time I walked to the water's edge and heard the surf get louder, I knew this was the right move. Same island. Different everything.