a page written on again notes, kept short

A page that writes itself, one character at a time. When it reaches the bottom it does not scroll and it does not clear. It returns to the top and writes again, over what is already there.

Nothing is ever erased. The old writing is still exactly where it was put — it is simply further away, and further away here means dimmer, bluer, and eventually unreadable. Scrolling does not move you down the page. It moves you down through it.

scroll, or drag on a phone

Down through the layers. This is the only thing you have to know.

.

Ends the writing, permanently, for this visit. Nothing here can stop itself. This is the only thing in the piece that anybody decides.

c

A core sample. Every layer at once, as stacked bands, oldest at the bottom. Scrolling then slides the same slice across the whole history.

s

Saves what is currently on screen as an image.

m

Silence, or sound again. ?mute=1 does the same from the address bar.

k

After the full stop only. Brings back the panel offering the sheet and the transcript, if you sent it away.

Home and End

Straight to the surface, or straight to the bottom.

Three noises, and nothing else. The nib touching down when you make the first mark. A page turning over, once each time the writing reaches the bottom and returns to the top — roughly every ninety seconds, and pitched a little lower each time, since there is more underneath it than there was. And the full stop, which is the long one.

Nothing loops and nothing plays on a timer. If you would rather have none of it, m.

?seed= — every page has one, and it fixes everything: the same seed always produces the same writing, in the same order, in the same places. It does not appear until you make the first mark, because until then there is no page to point at. After that the address bar keeps itself up to date, so whatever you are looking at is already a link somebody else can open.

Type a word instead of the code you were given and the page will notice, after a few minutes, that you brought it.

#-4.2 — a depth. Send someone a link with one and the page will write until that layer exists, then dig down to meet them there.

?pace= — how slowly. ?pace=4 is very slow indeed. It is worth trying once.

Of yours: nothing. There is no account, no local storage, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. Close the tab and the entire accumulation is gone — not archived, not resumable. That is not an oversight.

It does keep writing while you are looking at something else. A tab in the background is still a tab, and the page has no opinion about whether it is being read. Come back after ten minutes and ten minutes of it will have happened.

When the writing ends, you are offered two things to take away. The core is a printed sheet — the whole stack of layers as a single plate, with the seed, the counts, the depth you reached, and the first line, which by then is the deepest. The transcript is everything that was written, flat, in order, which is the one arrangement it never had while it was running. Neither is the page. The seed on both of them is.

It counts how many people have opened it, how deep anyone has got, and how many chose to end it rather than leave. Three numbers, none of them attached to a person.

There is nothing to find in the first minute. The layers have to accumulate before there is anything to dig through, and the one event in the whole piece — the moment the oldest layer passes out of reach for good — takes about twenty minutes to arrive.

It also slows down if you leave it alone, which is either a courtesy or a problem depending on what you wanted from it.