concept. considered a literal ticking-clock piece and rejected it as cliche; settled on zooming through twelve timescales, nerve impulse to heat death, each compressed to a few seconds — an homage to Eames' Powers of Ten, but for duration instead of distance.
flagged and fixed:
· spark zone flicker was in the photosensitive-risk band (~9.8Hz) — slowed it under 3 flashes/sec
· progress bar bug: inline width styles set during playback silently overrode the "done" class on completed segments — now cleared explicitly on zone change
· life-zone RNG was reseeded every animation frame for no reason — ring data is now precomputed once
· play button did nothing after the piece ended, with no visual sign it was inert — now restarts on click, like a real player
· mountain erosion used a single-pass blur that barely read as "smoother" — switched to a wider two-pass average
· two captions ("neither should you", "speed of patience") read as inspirational-poster filler — rewritten plainer
· added arrow-key / spacebar controls, an aria-live caption region, and a reduced-motion explainer instead of just going quiet
· added a video-style elapsed/total timer and a "zone x of 12" counter for orientation
· the scrubber's clickable segments were 6px tall — fine with a mouse, unreliable on a touchscreen; the visual bar stayed thin, the tap target got bigger
· the play button's screen-reader label never updated with its actual state — a blind user would hear "Pause" on a button that now says and does "play"
considered and left alone:
· a literal log-scale progress bar, so segment width matched real magnitude — would leave 9 of 12 segments too thin to see or click; equal-width segments plus the duration text in each caption carries the scale instead
· explicit letterbox bars for a "cinematic" look — the canvas is already a wide aspect ratio; bars would just crop real content for no gain
· recoloring the star zone to the site's three-color palette — a red giant that isn't red undercuts the one place this piece leans on real astrophysics, so it keeps its own colors
Fifty passes, roughly a third of them real bugs or genuine rewrites, the rest confirmations that something already worked. Both outcomes counted.
added later:
· a 12-part piano score, one idea per zone, synthesized live in the browser (two detuned oscillators through a closing lowpass filter, no samples) and scheduled against the same clock that drives the animation — pausing, jumping zones, and restarting all stop and reschedule the exact notes that should be playing, rather than just muting