wait by the waterhole
28 HP
A blank panel with an e-paper window onto a waterhole in the Australian bush, under white-barked gums. Each time the rack comes on, a month passes there, drawn in black and yellow and kept with the power off.
Switch on and a month passes at the waterhole, drawn over about twenty seconds. Switch off and the picture stays.
This browser's own GHOST GUM, its world grown and drawn by the module's own code, dot for dot what the module shows, at the screen's own pace. The module also wants the rack off for three minutes before the next month; the page doesn't.
Switched on, GHOST GUM wakes, moves its world on a month and draws it. For about twenty seconds the screen flashes its inks over the last picture, then the new one comes up, and it goes back to sleep until the rack is next switched on.
E-paper needs no power to hold a picture. Switched off, GHOST GUM keeps the last one it drew, for days, so the rack always shows the picture from the last time it was played. Its world is kept with it, and grows on from there.
A waterhole on a flat of bush, the sun coming up over the water. In wet years it fills and floods the flat; in long droughts it shrinks to cracked mud. Kangaroos come and go with the water and the grass, and emus, cockatoos and a dingo pass through.
Every few decades a bushfire burns through. The gums blacken, then shoots break out along their trunks and limbs, wattle comes up thick, and the bush grows back. The old gum by the water goes hollow, dies and falls, and new ones grow in its place. Frost whitens the winter mornings, and the wattle turns gold as the winter ends.
Every GHOST GUM grows its own from the moment it's first switched on. Nothing is repeated, and no two are the same. The page's GHOST GUM is this browser's own.
The screen's glass sits behind the window in a printed black frame, pressed against a thin foam ring so its picture lands exactly on the window, with ribs behind it so a press can't push it in. Its ribbon folds back round the glass's bottom edge, under it, into a connector on the board 4 mm behind the panel. The board is screwed to four spacers soldered to the panel's back, one at each corner. Under the glass, an RP2350 moves the world on a month, draws it and sends it to the glass, then sleeps.
Drag it or use the arrow keys to turn it; click it to take it apart.