About Today's Rock
Today's Rock shows a single three-dimensional rock, generated from scratch each day and shown to everyone who visits: the same rock for the entire planet, for one day only. There is no gallery and no archive. At midnight UTC the rock is gone for good and a new one takes its place.
Each rock is procedurally generated. Instead of being modelled by hand, its shape, facets, colour and surface come from an algorithm seeded by the date, so the result is unpredictable yet identical for every visitor on a given day. That determinism is the whole point: it turns an ordinary lump of stone into a small shared event, an object you can point at knowing a stranger on the other side of the world sees the very same one.
To use it, drag to turn the rock over and view it from any angle, then come back tomorrow for a different one. Everything is computed on your own device; nothing about the rock is stored or sent.
Questions
- Is it really the same rock for everyone?
- Yes. The rock is generated from the current date, so every visitor worldwide sees the identical rock on a given day.
- Can I see past rocks?
- No. There is no archive by design. Each rock exists for a single day and is gone at midnight UTC, so a screenshot is the only keepsake.
- How is the rock made?
- It is procedurally generated in your browser from a date-based seed. Nothing about it is downloaded or stored.
The network
Today's Rock is one of a small webring of tiny, useless, hand-made sites called Boring Websites, each doing exactly one pointless thing:
- 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
Contact
Questions or hellos are welcome on Mastodon at @boringinline, or via the project source on GitHub.