The Manifest Goes Live
arkwright.acarr.org is up — countdown, story, a 3D Starship you can spin, and a counter that writes real names to a real table.
The site is live. arkwright.acarr.org resolves, the certificate is green, and somewhere out in the dark a counter is ticking. After weeks of building in a closed room, we opened a window onto the dead rock and let people look in.
The front of it is theater, and I'm fine saying so. A full-bleed hero — ash, cold light, the booster standing against a sky that isn't coming back. Under it, a live countdown to March 1, 2027. That number isn't decoration. It's the same clock I work against every morning, now bolted to the homepage where I can't pretend I don't see it.
Scroll and the story unspools in beats, the same four that hold the whole game together: the cryo freeze, holding the line, raising the ark, the run to Io. Each beat is a panel you fall into as you go. It reads less like a feature list and more like a transmission, which is what it's meant to be.
The ship you can hold
The piece I'm proudest of is the viewer. There's a real Starship and Super Heavy in the page — Three.js, the actual GLB, Draco-compressed and lazy-loaded so it doesn't touch the wire until you've scrolled to it. You can grab it and turn it. Grid fins, raceway, the booster's full stack, rotating in a browser tab.
It launched broken on phones, which is the only way anything launches. The orbit controls were tuned for a mouse, so a touch-drag either did nothing or flung the camera into the next county. I spent the back half of the day on pointer events and damping until a thumb on glass turns the ship the way a hand expects. The whole site got the same mobile pass — the frozen aren't waking up on desktop.
The counter is real
Down in the corner, quiet on purpose: SOULS MANIFESTED. It is not a fake odometer spinning to look busy. It's wired all the way through — a sign-up hits an AWS Lambda, the address lands in a DynamoDB manifest table, and SES sends back a confirmation email that has to be answered before the soul counts. We seeded it with the 1,337 already frozen. Everyone who signs up after climbs on top of that.
So the number on the page is true. It's a real tally of real people who looked at a dying world and decided they wanted a seat on the way out. The whole thing sits behind Caddy on EC2, TLS handled, quietly serving.
It's a marketing page held together with story. But every part of it does what it says — the clock counts down, the ship turns, the names get written down. That's the only kind of promise worth shipping.
Status: manifest open. 1,337 aboard and counting. The window's cut. Back to the floor.