curiosity / four small hungers

demos about poking a thing to see what it does. no instructions inside. no points. drag, wait, look away, hesitate.

01 the machine you take apart

the feeling: oh. it still works without that one.
the one move: drag any gear away from its mate; the chain re-decides what still turns.
the number that makes it work: driver spins at 0.6 rad/s; each downstream gear inverts and divides by tooth ratio; detach threshold is 42px from mesh.
to make this expensive: swap flat SVG gears for a Blender-rendered brass mechanism, one turntable per part; blit frame-by-angle at 30fps into each slot.

02 the thing that responds to being ignored

the feeling: wait. did it just do that?
the one move: drift your cursor out of the card and stay away for a beat.
the number that makes it work: 3000ms with no pointer inside triggers the wake; on return, hold the awake form 420ms so you actually see it, then snap.
to make this expensive: ElevenLabs whispered line ("hello... you're back") layered under the wake and ducked out on snap; a second line for the third catch.

03 the room with one secret

the feeling: the room agreed to something. now everything agrees.
the one move: find the faint pulse and touch it.
the number that makes it work: the secret pulses at 0.35Hz with a 12% opacity swing and a 15% radius swing, findable in about 35 seconds of honest scanning.
to make this expensive: Kling image-to-video 6s loop of the reveal state (walls warm, window brightens, dust in the light) cross-faded in on click.

04 the question that rewrites itself

what do you want?

the feeling: it noticed how long I took.
the one move: read it. wait. watch the words shift under you.
the number that makes it work: rewrites at 6s and 14s of hesitation before the first keystroke; freezes forever the moment you type a character.
to make this expensive: ElevenLabs same-voice reads of all three variants, ducked in under the morph; silence the moment you touch the keyboard.