quite.space · ✦ · nebula · aurora · caustics · silk · ✦
✦ · · one floor under all of them · ·An atmosphere is the layer behind a post’s words: a scene name, a seed, four colours and three small numbers, signed into the post. This release replaces the scenes a person can pick with four new ones, and every one of them is a fragment shader — a tiny program that answers one question, “what colour is this pixel at this moment”, on your graphics chip.
Why a program is allowed here. A fragment shader has no memory, no network and no eyes. It cannot read the post, the room or you. The only thing it can do is be bright — and brightness is exactly what the floor already governs: every frame is metered before it reaches the screen and may move by at most one small step of luminance, the rule derived from the general flash threshold. A sky can drift, breathe and glow. It cannot flash, whatever it computes. ADR-037 is the decision; the numbers are in it.
The four. Nebula — clouds of the post’s own colours and a few seeded stars. Aurora — curtains of light over a dark ground. Caustics — the net of light on the floor of a pool. Silk — sheets of cloth folding in slow air. The three knobs are the same everywhere: drift, density, glow. The colours are the post’s palette, so the poster you see before the sky starts moving and the sky it becomes agree.
The old six are retired, not removed. The composer no longer offers Drift, Dust, Ember, Orbit, Pulse or Tide — and nothing else changes. Every post that already names one keeps its picture, on every device. A scene id, once published, is a promise to every post that names it.
A truer meter. The readback that the floor rests on is taken in two stages now: a single 90× downscale was picking pixels rather than averaging them, and a caustic overshot the step law by 13 % on that noise. All four scenes now measure within it.
Where to look. The official catalog’s Atmospheres space carries one post per scene with its recipe, and the four demo spaces each got a post in their own sky — a night in the greenhouse, a bracket through three machines, a mix that changed, a route read from the track. The Studio one carries a quiet pad behind it, if your device allows sound.
If you see only words. A device without a graphics context, a reader who turned atmospheres off, or a build older than this one shows a still and the author’s sentence instead. The picture may degrade. The meaning may not.
🐛 Broken, or claiming more than it can prove? → Field notes.