TERRAIN, NOT WALLPAPER

Most sites treat the background as paint. This one treats it as terrain — a topology stream computed per frame, riding a worker when the device allows it, falling back to a CPU painter when it doesn't. The distinction matters because terrain has rules: it costs cycles, it can degrade, and it can be measured.

the contract

If the field is real, its readouts must be real. Every number on the stats page is a last sample — draw time, RAF cadence, fence age. Cosmetic telemetry is worse than no telemetry: it teaches users to distrust readouts that are actually true.

The inverse also holds. When the field drops a rung — GPU to hybrid to CPU — the interface says so. A wallpaper never has to explain itself; a simulation does.

rung   gpu-worker    webgl2, pooled compute
rung   cpu-main      2d painter — the floor
                     honesty is the fallback

what it costs

A live field costs a worker, a shared framebuffer, and the discipline to keep it cheap on weak hardware — half-cadence ticks, a static frame under reduced-motion. The payoff is that the site has one coherent physical metaphor: surfaces float over terrain, and the terrain is awake.