About Today's Rock
Today's Rock is a small generative artwork built around one deliberately strict rule: there is only one rock at a time.
Once each UTC day, the site generates a new three-dimensional rock and shows it to everyone who visits. The shape, colour and fictional museum placard are determined algorithmically, so the same date produces the same specimen for the entire planet. At midnight UTC the current specimen stops being today's rock and the next one takes its place.
Everything needed to construct the artwork runs in the browser. The site does not download a daily 3D model or ask a server which rock to display.
Why one rock?
The idea began with a constraint: what if a website made exactly one object and gave that object to everyone? Instead of building a catalogue, Today's Rock creates a single shared point of attention.
The date is the common input. A visitor does not receive a personalised specimen, and there is no random button that gives one person a different rock from another. The result is unpredictable from day to day but reproducible for a particular day.
Why does it disappear?
The disappearance is part of the artwork rather than a technical limitation. Today's Rock deliberately keeps no public gallery or archive. The site does not provide a page where yesterday's specimen can be retrieved.
A screenshot can preserve a personal record of a particular day, but the site itself declines to become a collection. Read the full explanation of the no-archive rule.
Why UTC?
A local midnight would give different visitors different ideas of what “today” means. UTC gives the artwork one global boundary. For a particular UTC date there is one specimen, regardless of where the visitor is standing.
What is on the placard?
Every specimen receives a small fictional museum placard. Its name, supposed composition, approximate mass, temperament, feature and provenance are generated from the same seeded sequence that drives the object.
The language is intentionally somewhere between museum cataloguing and nonsense. “Basalt (probably)” is not a geological claim, and “Temperament: Stoic” is not a scientific measurement. The placard is part of the fiction surrounding the object.
How is it made?
The generator starts with a subdivided icosphere, then applies several scales of deterministic three-dimensional value noise to deform its vertices. Seeded shape parameters squash and stretch the form, while additional noise provides surface variation. A restrained generated colour and simple directional lighting are applied when the triangular faces are rendered onto a 2D canvas.
The project intentionally has no database, daily asset pipeline or model library. The same static program constructs the specimen locally for each visitor. Read the detailed technical explanation.
The project and its source
Today's Rock is an independent experiment in procedural graphics, interactive art and deliberately limited websites. The implementation is small enough to inspect directly, and the project source is published publicly.
View the Today's Rock source on GitHub · Read the making notes
The network
Today's Rock is part of the Boring Websites webring, a collection of small hand-made sites that each do one particular thing and resist the usual pressure to become larger.
- Sandpile — a live pile of sand that avalanches forever
- Just Skedaddling — a generative artwork best left alone
- The Bureau of Tiny Approvals — stamp absurd petitions
- The Bureau of Very Slow News — cosmic events, reported live
Questions
- Is it really the same rock for everyone?
- Yes. The rock is generated from the current UTC date, so every visitor worldwide sees the identical specimen on a given day.
- Can I see past rocks?
- No. There is no public archive by design. Each specimen is presented for one UTC day and the site then moves on.
- How is the rock made?
- It is procedurally generated in your browser from a date-based deterministic seed. The geometry is constructed locally rather than downloaded.
Contact
Questions or hellos are welcome on Mastodon at @boringinline, or via the project source on GitHub.