Last month I wrote that the homepage once looked like a screensaver. Afterwards I turned its lights off, one by one.
This month the whole site changed clothes. The first screen became a painted harbor: sky, a pier, one lamp, and a sea laid out in short strokes of uneven length. It looked good in screenshots. It also looked like the same screenshot every time I opened it. The strokes sat too evenly. After a while they read as a pattern, not as water.
I did not invite anything new onto the homepage this time. I only wanted the water to move.
The sky, the pier and the title stay as they were — the picture the server paints, there the moment the page opens. Between the sky and the sea I slid in one transparent canvas that draws only what moves. Rows of strokes push toward the shore. The column of light under the lamp breaks into points that brighten and fade slowly instead of blinking. A thin mist drifts along the horizon. I broke the rule once: a dozen or so stars now breathe.
The time went into places I had not expected.
The first was the words. The opening lines sit on the water, and the waves ran straight through them, as if someone had struck the sentence out. Once the strokes moved, the strike-through was impossible to miss. Now the strokes under the words step back and keep a fifth of their ink. The water is still there. The sentence is no longer crossed out.
The second was leaving. The canvas has rules: if it cannot keep up, drop the resolution; if that is not enough, stop and fade back to the still painting. Once, in a very slow environment, the sea came out as a sheet of white. The canvas was right to give up. It just left too early: I tore it down while it was still fading out, and what faded out was a blank. Now it waits until the fade is over before letting go. Leaving has a shape too.
The third was down in the dock. A still with jumpy colors used to sit there; now it is a flow field, two thousand threads of lamplight and ink riding an invisible current, with an eddy that follows your pointer. The first version left a gray film on the light theme, like glass nobody wiped. To save work I never cleared a frame; I laid a translucent coat of background over the last one. In the dark theme you could not tell. On paper, the remainders that never quite cleared stacked into haze. Redrawing the whole picture every frame cleared the haze, and then a string of bright beads appeared where segments met: round line caps, doubled at every joint. Flat caps, and the beads were gone.
One more thing is not in the picture. The site used smooth scrolling: one push of the wheel, and the page kept gliding on its own. Once the sea moved, every scroll felt like pushing through water. Without it the wheel finally follows my hand. As you go down, the painting sinks and the lamps beside each section light one after another, all of it riding the browser's own scroll.
Last time I learned to turn lights off. This time I kept three rules: only the water moves; the painting comes first, and the canvas fades in when it is ready; and when it cannot move — a weak machine, reduced motion, a canvas that will not start — it is the painting again.
The sea moves again. So does the current in the dock, but only when you come near. The other lights are still off.