The Background Engine
The canvas behind this site is not a video. It is a live, mathematical simulation rendering in real-time within your browser. It is built on a modified version of Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.
The Rules of Life
The grid operates on a set of brutally simple, zero-player rules evaluated every tick:
- Survival: An active cell with 2 or 3 active neighbors stays alive.
- Death: An active cell with fewer than 2 neighbors perishes from isolation, and one with more than 3 perishes from overcrowding.
- Birth: An empty space with exactly 3 active neighbors sparks a new cell.
XOR256 Mutations
We use this core cellular automaton to drive four distinct rendering engines across the site, each composited with unique atmospheric background layers:
- The Lab (Here): A faction-based kinetic simulation where cells inherit the color of dominant neighbors. Layered under an out-of-focus microscope slide of drifting detritus and spores to simulate the glow of an ancient CRT monitor.
- Window: A volatile, high-persistence simulation. Deep phosphor burn effects and random trace lines transform the grid into plasma beings dancing in the void. Suspended over a multi-layer parallax system featuring deep-space nebulas and an infinite coordinate grid.
- Technicata: A procedural Printed Circuit Board (PCB) generator routing strict 90-degree square-wave copper traces. Renders over a slowly rotating engineering blueprint drifting with classic electronic schematic symbols.
- Libraries: An overclocked, macro-lens variant of the PCB router simulating high-speed automated optical inspection. Shares the drafting blueprint layer, but scaled and accelerated for extreme close-up diagnostics.
Hack This Site
Everything you see here is built with standard web technologies. We encourage you to tear it apart.
Press Ctrl+S (or Cmd+S on Mac) to save this entire page to your hard drive as a single file. You can open that file in Notepad or any text editor, change the words, break the CSS, or modify the physics engine variables, and double-click it to run your own custom version locally.
