dopa
01

the loom

Weave light across the lattice. Watch the mandala bloom.

Pick a number. That is genuinely the whole input, and the figure it draws is decided entirely by it.

more about the loom

The loom has 180 pegs in a circle and a thread that runs between them. The number you choose is the reach, how many pegs each stitch jumps before it lands. A reach of two crawls around the rim. A reach near ninety cuts straight across and folds back into a star. Everything interesting is in between, and small changes to the number are not small changes to the figure.

Five layers stack into one piece. Each layer keeps whatever reach you closed it on, so the thing you end up with is a record of five decisions rather than one, and no two people arrive at the same one.

Finished pieces are kept, so the point is not the drawing so much as the small collection of them you accumulate.

It runs in the browser with nothing to download and works offline once the page has loaded. Nothing is timed and nothing can be got wrong, since every number produces a figure and none of them are failures.

This is the quiet end of the playground. Closer to watching a pattern resolve than to playing anything, and best when you want your hands busy but slow.

questions

How do you play The Loom?

Set the reach, which is how many pegs each stitch spans, and the ghost of that pattern appears so you can choose by eye. Then press and hold to run the shuttle. A layer closes once every peg has started a thread, and five layers make a mandala.

What happens to a finished mandala?

It is kept in your gallery on the page, stored as the handful of numbers that produced it rather than as a picture. Weaving a new one never overwrites an old one.

Is there anything to grind?

No. Drops arrive on the first mandala you finish each day and never again that day, so weaving faster is worth nothing. Nothing here compounds into a bigger number, it compounds into a picture.

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