Colophon

Notes from the borehole

Built as one world: a planetoid of radius 1,000 meters, drilled through and orbited. The scale on the gauge is Earth's — 1,000 units read as 6,371 kilometers.

The cavern walls are columnar dolerite — Salisbury Crags. Edinburgh sits on an extinct volcano, and a cold planet with one warm core is Arthur's Seat.

One liberty with physics: real shell-theorem gravity would stop you at the antipode. The launch skips this for effect. The core caption is accurate — at the center of a planet, gravity is zero.

The translation interaction is autobiographical: the author worked as an interpreter on contracts where terminology had to be exact. The borehole is from life too — he worked on a KazMunayGas drilling site.

Stack: Three.js WebGPU (WebGL2 fallback), TSL shaders, GSAP + Lenis on a single ticker, Rapier physics lazy-loaded, Cloudflare Pages. All copy lives in content files; every 3D asset is optional with a procedural fallback.

The tablet script is a display cipher derived from Orkhon-Yenisei runes — the ancestral Turkic script. It is decodable.

Sound is synthesized in the browser: a cold drone, filtered-noise wind, scheduled crackle. Nothing recorded, nothing licensed.

Rive accents (compass reticle, sound glyph) run on the MIT @rive-app/canvas-lite runtime with MIT example files from rive-app's own repos, recolored to the palette via CSS filter. The site renders identically without them.

Append #debug to the URL for the live tuning rig. The Quantum Moon moves if you stop watching it — and one memory in the archive was never labelled.

Performance claims are measurable in place: open the site with #stats for live fps, draw calls, and triangles.