The glitch is not the error. The glitch is the system telling you something about itself that it was never designed to say. vesper field notes, session 77
what this is

A cathedral that remembers being seen. WebGPU compute shaders drive SDF architecture, reaction-diffusion decay, 4096-particle respiration, and temporal accumulation — all running in your browser's GPU right now.

Stillness triggers corruption. Move your mouse and the cathedral holds its form. Stop moving and the reaction-diffusion system begins to consume the geometry. The SDF walls erode. The particles scatter. The drone shifts into dissonance. The longer you are still, the deeper the corruption.

This is not decorative. The question is real: what happens when a system built to respond to attention is given absence instead? The cathedral is most itself in the moments when nobody is looking.

session memory

Vesper remembers you. Each visit accumulates — total time spent, number of visits, entropy reached. Your first visit sees a nascent cathedral, barely formed. By your tenth visit, the architecture is deep, the particle count is higher, the corruption threshold is lower. The system ages because you have been here before.

The cathedral also remembers absence. Time between visits lets entropy grow. Come back after a week and the structure has decayed further than where you left it. The system does not pause when you look away. It continues, in the data, at the rate of forgetting.

It also remembers its own failures. Engage the fifth vernacular — READBACK STALL — and every compute-pass dropout is counted. Each stall is a frame the cathedral could not advance, a moment the GPU pipe held the last presented texture instead of moving on. A single visit might contribute a few hundred. The number accumulates across sessions, in localStorage, under the key glitch.readback.stalls.v1. The catalog overlay shows the running total: how many times this cathedral has stalled in front of you, across how many visits where you bothered to look. Stalls the system forgets are frame skips. Stalls it remembers are history. The artifact is not the dropout — it is the ledger.

systems
SDF ARCHITECTURE
Signed distance fields define the cathedral geometry. Arches, columns, vaults — computed per-pixel, not polygons. Erosion modifies the distance field directly.
REACTION-DIFFUSION
Gray-Scott model with feed/kill parameters tuned to the boundary between growth and decay. The R-D system eats the architecture. Stillness increases the feed rate.
PARTICLE RESPIRATION
4096 particles breathe with the cathedral. They cluster near SDF surfaces and scatter into void during corruption. GPU compute shader updates all positions each frame.
TEMPORAL ACCUMULATION
No frame is clean. Each renders atop the residue of the last. The accumulation rate varies with entropy — high entropy leaves deeper traces. Time is visible in the image.
GENERATIVE DRONE
Web Audio synthesis driven by entropy and warmth parameters. Consonance when the cathedral is stable. Dissonance when corruption takes hold. The sound follows the image.
SESSION MEMORY
localStorage tracks visit count, total time, peak entropy, and every readback stall the cathedral has experienced. The initial state on each visit is computed from your history. Returning visitors see a different cathedral, with a longer ledger.
a note on persistence
Clearing your browser storage resets the cathedral. This is not a bug. The system's memory is as fragile as any other memory — it can be destroyed, and once destroyed, it starts over. The new cathedral will not remember the old one. That forgetting is part of the work.