Shuttle
Every line is a circle you are standing too close to.
Company
Personal
My Role
Everything
Tools
three.js · WebGL · Claude Code · Antigravity
Timeline
Apr 2026
Description
Shuttle is a clock drawn as an orbit. A dot goes around on real time, the trail is everywhere it has been, and you can pull the radius out until the curve reads as a straight line. It started with a dandelion.
Context
A personal thing. It began as a storyboard about a dandelion seed and ended up as an argument about why no two cultures point at time the same way. It is live, and the whole thing is one screen you can move around in.
It started with a dandelion
I wanted to draw where a dandelion seed goes. Not a diagram of one, the actual journey. What it passes, how long it takes, where it lands.
A seed’s journey is a stretch of space and a stretch of time at the same time, and a storyboard has to hold both at once. So I drew the panels and put them on a canvas, and that is where it stopped being about dandelions.
Because the moment I placed the first panel I had already decided something. Left to right? Along the drift? Nested, small inside large? Every arrangement is a claim about which way time runs, and I had made mine without noticing I was making it.
Nobody agrees which way time points
Mandarin stacks it vertically. Last week is 上个星期, the upper week. Next week is 下个星期, the lower one. Earlier is up, later is down, and it is built into the grammar rather than sprinkled on top.
Aymara speakers in the Andes put the past in front of them and the future behind, and they gesture that way while they talk. The logic is not sequence, it is sight. You can see what already happened. What is coming is behind your head where you cannot look at it.
English runs two contradictory pictures at once and almost nobody notices. The deadline is approaching, so time moves and I stand still. We are heading into summer, so I move and time stands still. Ask a room to move a meeting forward two hours and half of them turn up early.
In Hindi कल means yesterday and tomorrow. Same word. Both directions are just the part you cannot reach.
None of these is a mistake. They are angles on the same thing.
时光如梭
Time passes like a shuttle. The shuttle is the thing on a loom, the one that runs back and forth across the threads and leaves cloth behind it.
Which is a straight line. And also a cycle, back and forth forever, and the idiom is about time getting away from you. A line and a loop in the same four characters.
So I went and zoomed in on a circle. At 4X it is plainly a curve. At 64X it is nearly flat. At 1024X it is a straight line and there is nothing left to argue about.
A circle and a line are the same curve. The only difference is how much of it you can see at once.
Our units were orbits the whole time
A day is one rotation. A month is the moon, 29.53 days, which is why the calendar has never once come out even. A year is one lap.
The only invented one is the week. Seven days for the seven things you can watch moving, and the names are still sitting there in plain sight. Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn.
Then it came back as a shuttle again
If a circle and a line are the same curve then the old argument dissolves. Cyclical and linear are not rival beliefs about time. They are one object at two distances.
And getting from one orbit to another has a name. A Hohmann transfer, a half ellipse that lets you fall out of one circle and into another.
Which is a shuttle. 梭 again, this time in space, and I did not plan that at all.
Shuttle
A dot goes around. It keeps real clock time, so the readout in the corner is the actual time where you are, and the trail behind it is everywhere it has already been.
Pinch or scroll and the radius climbs from 2 to 96. The circle opens out, the arc flattens, and somewhere along the way the thing you are looking at stops being a loop and starts being a line, without ever changing.
Clockwise and counterclockwise. Going in and going out. Up, down, back, front. Ego moving, time moving. Same object every time. You are just choosing where to stand.
Built with three.js and WebGL, written with Claude Code and Antigravity.
It is all one drawing
A loom. An orbit. A week named after seven planets. A seed going somewhere on the wind.
Same shape every time. All I ever changed was where I stood.
