Ipswich
A pixel-art valley drawn to your own clock. It knows the season, the hour, the phase of the moon and whether you are reading in the dark, and it lays out a different town every time you load it.
The bitmap really is low-resolution, a few hundred pixels across, and your browser scales it up with nearest-neighbor sampling. The pixels are pixels, not a grid laid over a smooth image. Nothing blends: an ordered dither decides per pixel whether the ink lands, which is how one color manages a gradient.
The hills recede by relief rather than by size. Everything is drawn at a single art scale, so a pine on the horizon would be exactly as tall as the one in the front yard. What says far instead is that the ridgelines flatten as they go back, crowd together toward the horizon, and are allowed nothing tall standing on them.
Nothing is there on load, either. The trees and the buildings sprout one at a time on an overshooting ease, at a cadence that starts slow and accelerates, into spots chosen by rejection sampling. The furthest ridge fills in first, so the valley builds toward you. Among the near houses are the Choate Bridge, the Clam Box, the Great House at Castle Hill, the First Church steeple and the Ipswich Mills clock tower, each rendered at a size where about forty pixels have to carry the whole likeness. The rest of the town is ordinary houses, which is what a town mostly is.
Only the marks are painted. Every other pixel is left transparent for the page to show through, so there is no background to get wrong, and a hill hides what is behind it by clearing rather than by filling. Each season carries its own palette, and every hue in it is drawn twice: once at the weight that reads as a mark against the page, once at the weight that reads as light. That second weight is what a lit window, the face of the moon and a tinted star are made of. One house has its lamps on and its chimney going. That one is home.
Stand in front of another sky
There are more states here than visiting once will ever show you, and the ones worth looking at are the ones you would have to stay up or wait a season for. Every link below is an ordinary address, so the sky you land on is one you can send to somebody.