The Manifest Goes Live
arkwright.acarr.org is up: a cinematic landing page, a countdown to launch, an in-browser Starship viewer, and a souls counter wired to a real backend. The ark has a front door now.
The site is up. arkwright.acarr.org, live tonight, served off Caddy on a single EC2 box that has no idea how much it's carrying. If you're reading this, the ark has a front door now.
What we shipped
The hero loads first: a wall, turrets holding the line, MONARCH's hunter-machines pressing in from the ash with their red optics — and behind all of it, a Starship rising off the pad. That's the whole pitch in one frame. You don't out-fight a god made of machines. You out-build it, and you leave.
Under the hero, a countdown to March 1, 2027. It doesn't pause. It doesn't care whether the build compiled today. It just subtracts, second by second, the same way the cold does. Scroll past it and the story beats unspool — the Severance, the freeze, the vaults full of the frozen, the run for Titan.
Then the part I'm quietly proud of: an in-browser viewer for the Starship and Super Heavy booster. Real geometry, Three.js, the GLB run through Draco so the whole stack downloads before you've finished reading the line above it. You can spin the thing on your phone. Plate by plate, the same ship we're raising in the factory, now turning in a browser tab. Mobile-ready, because half of everyone who sees this will see it on a screen the size of a ration card.
Every soul on the manifest is a real row in a real table. The counter isn't set dressing. It's a passenger list.
And the counter. Discreet, bottom of the fold: SOULS MANIFESTED. It starts at 1337 — the frozen we're already carrying — and it climbs every time someone signs up. That number is not a CSS animation lying to you. It's a Lambda reading a DynamoDB manifest table, SES confirming each new name by mail, the count coming back live. Sign up and you become a row. The list gets longer. The ark gets heavier. That was always the point.
There's an irony baked in that I can't stop thinking about. Standing the site up means standing up a beacon — a thing that pings, that gets seen, that draws attention. In the game, every machine you build does the same: growth is how MONARCH finds you. Out here it's just traffic. In there it's the hunters. Same shape, different stakes.
The factory is still half-walled and the booster's still missing plates. But the manifest is live, and it's counting up. Cold floor, warm server. Back to the build.
— Status: site live, counter climbing, countdown running. Hold the wall.