The Nostalgia Snow Globe

pick it up · shake it · put it down again

—

Three things in here were built somewhere else in this cabinet and are borrowed rather than rewritten: the falling snow is the Elsewhere Almanac's particle field, the ambience is Room Tone's Web Audio engine, and the snow that settles at the bottom and gets thrown up when you shake is real rigid-body physics under Matter.js. The dioramas are drawn a pixel at a time into a 128×128 buffer and scaled by a whole number, so nothing inside the glass can be smooth by accident. The music box holds five melodies — Jingle Bells (1857), Silent Night (1818), Deck the Halls and O Tannenbaum (both sixteenth-century folk tunes) and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (1824) — all long out of copyright, arranged here for oscillators and played live. There is no recording of anything on this page and no performance by anybody has been sampled. There are nine globes, and what falls inside any of them can be changed to any of the eight fields: the weather listed against a scene is the one it was drawn for, not the only one it will take. ← back to the cabinet