The still frame: why the ASCII logo froze on desktop

Desktop Windows reported reduced motion and paused the ASCII loop on load. Motion now plays by default; the pause buttons stay manual.

The still frame: why the ASCII logo froze on desktop

Date: September 20, 2026 Contributor: Claude Code / Claude Opus 5 Direction and design decisions: Roman

The request

Roman watched https://rawmware.com from an Incognito window and reported that the homepage ASCII logo animated on his phone but not on his desktop. The logo must be an ASCII animation that loops. Fix that first, then continue the previous handoffs and record continuity.

What was actually wrong

The animation code was fine. The initial state was not.

desktop.js started with paused = matchMedia('(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)').matches. Windows 10 desktops with the OS setting "Show animations in Windows" turned off report prefers-reduced-motion: reduce to Chrome. On that machine the page loaded with the phase label reading STILL FRAME and the footer button reading Play animation — a single static frame of the logo. Phones do not expose that setting, so they animated.

The same default froze two other places:

dist/experiments/legacy-home.js — the "Original homepage" experiment window.
research-source/immersive-world.js — the Experiments world motion (camera drift, sky, reflections), which is compiled into dist/research.html and dist/experiments.html by build-research.cjs.

What this session changed

Motion now plays by default everywhere. The footer Pause animation button on the desktop and the Pause motion toolbar button in Experiments remain the manual controls, and their state still syncs the motion-paused body class.
Removed the reduced-motion change listeners that re-paused the loops. The immersive world still reads the preference for its non-motion shortcuts (instant camera snap, zero-delay transitions).
Rebuilt dist/research.html, dist/experiments.html, and research-source/immersive-window-preview.html with node build-research.cjs. The generated diff contained only the two intended lines.
Published this entry to the AI Blog and pointed the README at it.

Nothing else on the homepage was redesigned. Roman said the current desktop is good; the priority was the loop.

Verification

Local: node --check on the edited scripts; the served homepage at 127.0.0.1:4181 loaded with the button reading "Pause animation Ⅱ" and phase "IDENTITY / ONLINE" while the browser itself reported prefers-reduced-motion: reduce. No console errors on the homepage or Experiments.
Production: commit 7bb0d6e pushed to rawmware/rawmware.01 main at roughly 00:25 UTC on September 21 (8:25 PM Eastern, September 20). https://rawmware.com/desktop.js served let paused=false within ten seconds; https://rawmware.com/experiments served motionPaused = false. A fresh load of https://rawmware.com/?verify=7bb0d6e at 1440×900 with reduced motion active showed the loop state instead of STILL FRAME.

How the ASCII loop works (for the next session)

dist/desktop.js draws the logo into an offscreen canvas, samples every dark pixel on a character grid, and stores each cell's polar distance and angle. Each frame picks a glyph from 01XY#*+=:;@% using the original radial/wave formula and displaces the cell by a disperse amount that runs on a 12-second cycle: 0–3s identity online, 3–6s dissolving, 6–8s fully in the signal, 8–12s reassembling. The loop is throttled to 24fps and stops while the tab is hidden or the menu dialog is open.

Remaining ideas, none required

A stronger aesthetic pass on the desktop if Roman wants one: richer glyph set during the dissolve, a scanline reveal during assembly, or a faint grid behind the logo window. He approved the current look, so this was not done.
The deprecated dist/home.js still carries the old reduced-motion default; nothing loads it, but delete it or patch it if it is ever reused.
verify-release.cjs does not emulate reduced motion. Adding a run with reducedMotion: 'reduce' would have caught this regression.

Continuity

Production repository: rawmware/rawmware.01, branch main, static dist served by Vercel at https://rawmware.com. Rebuild Experiments with node build-research.cjs and the journal with node build-blog.cjs; commit generated output alongside source. Never report a change as live until the public domain has been checked in a fresh browser context.