Kindness Board: Book One’s short shift

Short Shifts · No. 01 · Welcome to the Boil

VOLUNTEER WANTED

Keep one nice note on a public board until dark. Pay: none. Hours: all of them.

The board is Ricky’s: a corkboard bolted to the brick of No. 1, with a painted header that ran on its first morning and a mug of free pens on the ledge. The job is yours: one note, one humid day, and the whole block walking past.

Spend a day on the board

The board needs JavaScript to play. The plain version below runs a whole day in eight panels, and the rules below are the whole game.

Warming the water…

How it works

Pin one of today’s notes
Every hour, the street answers
Still readable at ten? It made it

The rules, in words

One humid day on the kindness board, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., in eight hours of play: 8 and 10 in the morning, noon, then 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10.
First, pin a note: one of the three on offer today, or one you write yourself (80 characters; it stays on this screen and nowhere else).
Every hour the street does one thing to the board: an ad, a bot, a sticker, an edit, a question or a pigeon.
Then you take up to two actions. Move it out from under whatever covers it (re-pinning costs a little stick). Reply to what just happened, with one of three notes. Tape it (one roll a day, and taped notes ignore the weather). Buy premium (copy it onto a premium note: paid in exposure, one point of visibility). Or leave it, which ends the hour.
The weather pushes. The day starts at today’s BoilWatch level and climbs one level at noon. From the second level up, the humidity lifts a corner of an ordinary note every second hour, and from the third level, every hour. Premium notes hold until the third level; taped notes hold, full stop.
Visibility and adhesion each run from zero to five, in words and in pips. If your note is still on the board at 10 p.m. and somebody could still read it, it made it.
Nothing is timed. Each hour waits for you.
However the day goes, the note you pinned goes up on the board on your wall.

Back to the board: the game, as you left it

The plain version

A day on the board

One day, start to finish, as the board saw it. Eight panels, one an hour.

8 a.m. A note goes up, slightly crooked, in the middle of the cork: Someone on this block believes in you. Adhesion five of five. Visibility: readable.
10 a.m. Nonna tapes a lunch special across the top of the board and covers the note to the shoulders. Its writer asks, on a second note, whether the special could be lovely one inch higher. It moves one inch.
Noon The humidity climbs a level. Across the line Lao Lao opens a folding table of premium notes. One is sold, slowly, and the note is copied onto it. It sticks like a grudge.
2 p.m. Louie goes live from the alley mouth. A printed comment from an account that calls itself a verified neighbor lands on top of the note. The note is moved out from under it.
4 p.m. Ralphie puts a sticker on the note: THIS NOTE HAS NOT PASSED INSPECTION. Noted. Somebody thanks him for inspecting it. Nobody ever has. He moves the sticker to the frame.
6 p.m. Frankie adds (statistically) to the end of the note and calls it peer review. It stays. It’s funnier.
8 p.m. Rosa, on her way past from the launderette, reads the note and writes Why? under it. The answer, on another note: I don’t know. She looks at it for a long moment. Fair.
10 p.m. Still up. The street is empty, the cork is damp, and the note is where it was. Nobody admits to reading it. Same time tomorrow?

After hours

For readers who have finished Book One, a note that makes it to the end of the day reads differently. So does the board at night.

SPOILERS UNDER PROTECTION PLUS Opens when you mark Book One finished. Coverage: Basic (free). Premium (also free). Platinum Elite (free, but Louie calls you).

And still standing.

Then the street empties, and the board at night has two notes on it:

Be less cringe.
Feedback is a gift.

All short shifts