AXI-017 · Exploration · shipped 2026-10-11

Peninsulas

A manifest is a block that holds a grid of its own, bounded on every side by the block it lives in — that was AXI-011's first law, and the torus kept it by closing the bounds into a circle. Dan's musing was that the bounds need not be tame: the row is the reading rhythm and stays, but the shore is free, and a manifest may build out to the side, or up, or down, into peninsulas and islands. This study takes the page's grid as what it is — continuous — and treats everything beyond a manifest's footprint as sea, which on a page is the paper. A seeded tide erodes the engine's own composition on a bench; the day's composition is built out to sea in the open, assembled from the mainland outward; and the site's header manifest is set loose beside a passage of sky that wraps the coast in whole columns.

Study A · The bench

Seed 16 on the page's own pair, in a box, because the box is what makes a coast legible: inside it the sea is the paper and the land is the engine's composition. The shores switch names the sides the tide may erode — none, the sides, the top and bottom, or all four; tide draws another coast for the same composition without touching a tile; chart hatches every cell of sea and shows the footprint as a string in the note; grids reveals both grids and the rows. The tiling, the colours and the breakouts are the engine's, verbatim, over the whole box; each tile is then cut to the land it stands on, row by row, into rectangles — a tile a cove bites into becomes two pieces of one colour, an L on the grid. With the shores at none the pieces are the engine's blocks, and the note checks that identity against snx.js live.

shores

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measuring…

The census. Land and sea in cells; islands are components of land beyond the mainland; lakes are sea the land encloses (the tide never makes one — a lake is a hand's decision); capes are mainland cells with three sides of sea, coves are sea cells with three sides of land; the coast is the length of the land–sea edge against the box's own perimeter. The tide walks: each shore is a random walk of depths, at most a third of the box deep, so a coast is coherent and not noise.edition · pair and rows by the page

Study B · The day's coast

The home page's composition of the day, with its shore. No box: the stage is open, the blocks sit on the paper, and the sea is simply where the page shows through — which it does on all four sides, in whatever shape the tide drew this morning. The plan's assembly figure says set pieces build as they enter the viewport, base plane first, breakouts after, staggered forty-five milliseconds; the draw pulled that sentence, and on a shore the stagger has a geography: the first block is the one at the mainland's heart, the rest follow by their distance from it over land, the islands rise last, and each block comes ashore from the direction of the sea it lies in. Build again replays it. A plane +1 block must touch land; its shadow is the only thing the manifest draws beyond its footprint, and when it falls on the water the readout says so.

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The land builds out to sea. The heart is the mainland cell nearest the box's centre; distances are counted over land, so a peninsula's tip is far even when it is near. The island, if the tide set one out, has no path from the heart and rises after everything on the mainland.heart at column, row — · edition

Study C · The manifest set loose

The site's header is a hand-placed manifest on an open stage, and Dan's note was that the shore works best on forms like it rather than on the boxed benches the studio likes to measure with. So here is that kind of manifest, placed by hand and not generated, with everything a coast can have: a cape rising above the mainland's top shore, a bay where the paper comes in at the top right, a lake in the middle of the land with nothing behind it but the page, a peninsula running down the left with an outcrop at its tip in the signal colour, and an island out at sea. The passage of text is the sky, and the sky is set on the sea — an ordinary text block on the same grid, with the coast carved out of it by a staircase of floats scored in columns and rows. The script reads this stage rather than writing it: the chart is the union of its blocks, and it gets the same census and the same geographic build as the generated ones.

AXI-017 · no boxThe row is kept. The shore is free.

THE SEA IS THE PAPER. A LAKE IS A WINDOW WITH NOTHING BEHIND IT.

AXI-017
SHORE v0.1

Here the manifest has left its box. The blocks above are the kind that make the site's header, set loose: a cape rises above the mainland's top shore, a bay lets the paper in at the top right, a lake sits in the middle of the land with nothing behind it, and a peninsula runs down the left of this text with an outcrop at its tip in the signal colour — the one moment per viewport, placed at the end of the land. This passage is the sky, and the sky is set on the sea. It is an ordinary text block on the same grid, and the coast is carved out of it by floats scored in columns and rows: each line is shorter by a whole column where the land is and never by a fraction, so the measure is still a count of columns on every row. The island at the right is one block out at sea, a strait of paper between it and the mainland, and the text goes round it as water would. Nothing here has a border. The row is kept because the row is the reading rhythm; the shore is free because nothing in the system ever said it had to be straight.

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The sky wraps in columns. Six floats make the coast the text sees: three steps on the left for the peninsula and its outcrop, one on the right for the mainland's last row, one of no width to hold the strait open, and one for the island. Each is --w base columns by --h rows, with the gutter kept clear of the land; chart outlines them. Line boxes sit on the half-row, as the sky study's do; the text's first line enters the bay a half-row below the land.edition · breakout over the bay, shadow on the water

Interstitial · comfortable measure

What the shore changes

Two studies ago a manifest was defined by its bounds: a block that holds a whole grid and lets nothing out. The torus kept that law and bent it into a circle, and even then it showed one face through a window. The shore drops the law and finds that very little else has to change. The grid was always continuous — the page's thirty-five columns do not stop at a block's edge, the row runs the whole page down — so a manifest's bounds were never a property of the grid, only of the block. Take the block away and what is left is a footprint: a set of cells, which may be any shape a set of cells can be. The engine's generator does not have to know. It tiles the box as it always has, and the coast is applied afterwards, as a cut.

What the cut produces is the one new kind of block, as the torus had one. A tile that a cove bites into becomes two or three rectangles of one colour, which read together as an L or a T on the grid: a non-rectangular block, made entirely of rectangles, which Mondrian never painted and the plan never forbade. The sea beyond is not a colour; it is the page. That is why the study's third part matters more than its first two: on an open stage, with text set on the same grid, the coast is not a figure inside a frame but a place where the manifest and the sky meet, and the sky — a text block wrapping a staircase of floats — gives up its measure a column at a time and never a fraction. The row is kept, the shore is free, and the system did not have to be told either.

The draw

seed 1233076736 · from the date · pool 191

Dan opened the session with a note on peninsulas — not only horizontal coastlines, but vertical ones, outcrops, bays and gridforms, and islands wherever the continuous grid allows, on unboxed forms like the site header — so the study was chosen before the draw. Five sentences, seeded by the date:

1 · 126Set pieces build as they enter the viewport: blocks translate in and settle with a slight overshoot, staggered ~45ms, base plane first, breakouts after.answered as law 6: on a shore the stagger is geographic — by distance from the mainland's heart over land, islands last, breakouts after — and each block comes ashore from the direction of the sea it lies in; Study B, and the hand-placed Study C through the same reader
2 · 67+1 Overlay-grid blocks that pop: CTAs, featured work, signal moments. Hard-edged shadow (a solid block, not a blur) offset exactly 1/35 right and ⅜ row down; moves a few px faster than scroll; hover lifts it one more shadow-stepanswered as law 5: a breakout must touch land, and its shadow — a block too — is the only thing a manifest draws beyond its footprint; shadows on the water are counted, and Study C hangs one over the bay
3 · 158Static files, subset self-hosted fonts, no framework JS: the radical look should ship lighter than the WordPress site it replaces.kept, as every session keeps it: two files, no dependency, nothing fetched
4 · 172P3 Copy sprint — rewriting the site's voice into block-sized punches; real pages assembled 1–2 sessionsconsidered: the plan's third phase; the claim in Study C is a block-sized punch, and AXI-018 is where real pages come
5 · 98The content architecture is two layers of plain text files: blocks (what things say) and scores (how a page arranges them).answered as law 2: the footprint is written in the score as a chart — one character per cell, rows divided by a bar — a line of plain text a hand can write or the tide can

Effect. The note chose the study; the draw furnished it. Three sentences became three laws — the geographic assembly, the breakout that must touch land, and the chart as a line of the score — and the first of them is the one the study would otherwise have left as the engine's reading-order stagger.charter §5 · draw.js

The rules, published

argue with the numbers, not the pictures

Constant	Value	Why
lattice	the page's pair and row	law 1: a coast only means something if the land and the sea share one grid; the sea is the paper, in a box too
chart	'#' land · '.' sea · '\|' between rows · W × H cells	law 2: the footprint is a line of the score, written by hand (data-chart) or by the tide; the script writes it back on every shore
tide	random walk of depths per shore · step −1 0 0 +1 · depth ≤ ⌊W/3⌋ sideways, ≤ min(3,⌊H/3⌋) vertically	law 3: a walk makes capes and coves that are coherent; a third of the box is the most a shore may take, and the depths are halved while the land is below 55% of the box
islands	0–2 per tide at 5×3 and above · 1 or 2 cells · a strait of one cell from any land	the strait is what makes an island an island rather than a cape; 3×2 has no room for one
tide's rng	mulberry32(hash(seed ':shore:' n))	the tiling's rng is untouched, so another tide keeps every tile and only moves the coast
cut	tile ∩ land, row by row, runs merged downward while their columns agree	law 4: pieces are rectangles on the base grid and keep the tile's colour; a tile with no land is drowned; the smallest piece becomes the signal if the signal tile drowned
identity	shores none ⇒ pieces = the engine's blocks, checked live	the port is verbatim and the cut is after it; the bench's note reports the agreement
breakouts	must touch land · lost if wholly at sea · loop re-run from the tide's rng if none remain	law 5: a plane +1 block hovers over land; a breakout at sea would be an island of the wrong plane
shadows	the engine's: one microcolumn right, ⅜ row down · counted when on the water	the only mark a manifest makes beyond its footprint; on an open stage it falls on the page
assembly	order by distance from the heart over land · islands after the mainland · breakouts after all · 45 ms a step · direction = sea the block lies in, 28 px	law 6: the plan's figure with a geography; --d, --tx and --ty are the engine's own assembly variables
the sky	floats of --w columns × --h rows · gutter clamp(14px, 4cqw, 28px) kept clear · line box = row/2	law 7: the measure law survives a coast because every shortened line is shorter by whole columns
census	land · sea · mainland · islands · lakes · capes (3 sea sides) · coves (3 land sides) · coast ÷ 2(W+H)	law 8; outside the box counts as sea, so a cape on the box's edge is a cape

Findings

The bounds were the block's, never the grid's. Dropping Manifest law 1 changed nothing in the generator. It tiles the box as before; the coast is a cut applied after, and with no coast the pieces are the engine's blocks exactly — the bench checks the identity against snx.js live and reports full agreement at every pair. The whole extension is a chart, a cut and a census.
The cut makes the one new kind of block. A tile a cove bites into becomes two or three rectangles of one colour that read as an L or a T. Seed 16 at 7×5 with all four shores eroded: nine tiles become thirteen pieces; at 5×3, seven become thirteen. The pieces are still rectangles on the base grid and the colour rule still holds between tiles, so the plan's law of planes is untouched; what changes is the silhouette.
The sea is the paper, and that is why the box had to go. On the bench the sea is a second colour inside a frame and the coast reads as a figure. On an open stage the sea is the page, and the coast is a place where the manifest meets the sky. Study C sets text on the same grid and carves the coast out of it with six floats; every shortened line is a whole column shorter and the measure law survives.
The tide makes no lakes. Erosion from the sides can only ever reach the sea it started from, so a lake — sea the land encloses — is a hand's decision, and Study C makes one: a cell of paper in the middle of the mainland. On a page a lake is a window with nothing behind it, which is a cheaper and stranger thing than plane −1.
A breakout must touch land; its shadow need not. The engine's plane +1 block hovers over the composition, and a shore has to say what it hovers over: land. One wholly at sea is lost and counted, and the loop is re-run from the tide's rng if nothing remains. The shadow is a block too, and the only mark a manifest makes past its footprint; Study C hangs a breakout over the bay with its shadow on the water, and the census counts shadows on the water on every shore.
Assembly has a geography. The plan's stagger was reading order because the stage had no other order. A shore does: distance from the mainland's heart over land, which puts a peninsula's tip late even when it is near, the islands last because no path reaches them, and gives every block a direction — the sea it lies in — through the engine's own --tx and --ty. Nothing was added to the engine's assembly rule; it was given numbers.
A hand-placed shore can be read. The site's header manifest has always been placed by hand. The script reads such a stage instead of writing it — the chart is the union of its blocks, read from the live custom properties at the current edition — so the census, the geographic build and the shadow count apply to the published figure as much as to the bench. Study C is 7×5 on ten rows at L and twelve at XL, 5×3 on thirteen at M, 3×2 on twenty-two at S, and the floats are rescored per edition like the blocks.
Feed/score holds. The script writes the engine's placement on every piece and twenty data attributes on every shore; the chart hatching, the gridlines, the staircase, the corner label and the sea's colour in the box are all stylesheet. The one thing the stylesheet cannot do is clear and re-add a class to replay the build, which is the script's, as the manifest's FLIP and the torus's jump were.