time switch

A wide pill switch whose dark well holds a pixel panorama of seven eras: a volcano and a brachiosaurus, snowy peaks and a mammoth, a cave and a campfire, a pyramid and a temple, a castle on a hill, a smoking brick factory, and a night skyline. The knob is a glass lens that magnifies the world under it, column by column, inside a capsule. Everything left of the knob is alive in its own colours, with smoke, snow, fire, a waving flag and lit windows; everything ahead is frozen in a slate night palette with faint stars. Inside the lens a traveller of the current era walks along and changes form at every border in a dithered dissolve with amber sparkles: a T. rex, a mammoth, a cave dweller with a torch, a Greek with a spear, a knight, a Victorian in a top hat and someone with a phone, leaving amber ghosts and echoes of the lens behind and doing a little thing of its era on arrival (a roar, a puff of snow, a heart notification). It plays a 15-second loop by itself with a drawn pointer; grab the knob and it is yours: dragging scrubs through time and release snaps to the nearest era. The knob is a real slider for the keyboard and screen readers (each era read out with its caption), there are optional 8-bit blips per era, and reduced motion gets a still that still follows the hand. The 320 × 76 scene is drawn in code at 3× with nearest-neighbour sampling: sprite strings, ordered dither, no images. ?rec and window.__render(t) draw any moment for frame-exact video export.