oikos: the home directory, a room of screens wired to one VCR

[LuxiaSL]

/oikos (and /~): every part of æthera, and a few places past it, as a CRT in a dark Lain-style room. Every cable runs into one VCR on a plinth in the middle, and a hand-built Windows XP (Luna) desktop sits over it all.

⚠️ Merging to main deploys (.github/workflows/deploy.yml runs on push to main). Nothing here links to /oikos from the blog yet, and / is untouched, so the room is reachable only by URL until someone links it.

What's in it

The room (oikos/src/world/)

• Nine site screens:
  • æthera's own stand on the floor in an arc around the VCR, a couple of them stacked.
  • parlor and dream_gen hang from wires strung off power lines.
• Dozens of instanced dead-channel monitors sit in a red haze. Post-processing adds bloom, red halftone specks in the penumbra (Lain's shadows), grain, vignette, and a frame tear on channel change.
• The VCR has a seven-segment VFD that blinks 12:00, a tape door, and a real cassette.
  • Playing a site folds the directory away and stops the camera by the VCR as the labelled tape goes in.
  • The camera then follows the lit cable to the screen, which changes channel, and only then opens the pane.
  • Open dives the camera through the glass to the site.

The screens are live, not recorded (oikos/src/screens/). Every source costs the site nothing to watch:

screen	source
transmissions	latest post titles (rendered into the page by oikos.py)
dreams	the chronicle's latest keyframe + /api/dreams/status
chronicle	real strata tiles and era titles
dreams api	re-types the real /api/dreams/status JSON
apeiron	real prompts from its own templates.json / components.json
syrinx	the visitor's own creature, read from this origin's localStorage
irc	the live /ws/irc broadcast, formatted like irc.js
parlor / dream_gen	their real board and README diagram

The room never opens /ws/dreams. A viewer socket is what wakes the dreamer's GPU, and a hub left open in a tab would keep it awake all night. Every poll and socket stops while the tab is hidden. Tuning in to dreams frames the real /dreams page, which does open it; hiding the tab tunes out, so a background tab can't hold it.

The XP layer (oikos/src/xp/) is Luna by hand:

• ~ explorer with every site as a VHS tape.
• Site panes built on the same canvas as the screen.
• Taskbar, start menu, tray (a moon lit when the dream is awake), balloons, and the real "Turn off computer" dialog. Turn Off goes to the blog.

Tune in ("▣ Watch it here"): the camera squares up to a screen and the real page is laid over the glass. It sits in an iframe under a CSS CRT layer and stays fully interactive. Eject or Esc steps back out.

Fallbacks

• With no WebGL the desktop runs alone over black, and the previews still work.
• With no JS the template's <nav> lists every site. It's also what crawlers read.

Files outside oikos/

• aethera/api/oikos.py: the route and the site registry. This is the single source for the <nav> and the scene, and the place to add a site.
• aethera/templates/oikos/viewer.html, plus the router registered in aethera/main.py.
• aethera/utils/security.py is a security-relevant change. Every page used to answer X-Frame-Options: DENY. Everything except /preview/ now answers Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' + X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN. æthera may frame æthera; other origins still can't clickjack it. Tune-in needs this. /preview/ keeps its admin-panel policy.
• aethera/static/oikos/: the committed build, as with syrinx and apeiron. stage.jpg is a 512px crop of dreams_bg.png, and mark.png is the moon mark cropped from the logo.
• aethera/dreams/presence.py: /api/dreams/status polls are now lifecycle-neutral. Before, a poll cancelled the pending GPU shutdown, so any poller (this room, an admin panel) could keep the dreamer awake indefinitely. Tests in tests/test_presence.py.
• tests/test_oikos.py: 9 tests.
  • The page renders every site, and embeds published posts only.
  • /~ redirects.
  • Every internal href and tune target is a live route.
  • No internal hostnames appear in the registry.
  • The bundle is committed.
  • The framing headers are right (including /preview/ keeping its admin policy).
  • A </script> post title can't break out of the embedded JSON.

Decisions for the owner

1. The framing change above.
2. The proxy in front of æthera also answers X-Frame-Options: DENY. Production currently sends it twice. Modern browsers let the app's frame-ancestors override it, but that proxy line should go (or become SAMEORIGIN) so tune-in doesn't lean on that precedence rule. It isn't in this repo.
3. parlor answers X-Frame-Options: DENY, so it isn't tunable. It would need frame-ancestors https://aetherawi.red first.
4. The name oikos (οἶκος, household) is easy to change.

Review round

A review pass (correctness, the room and window logic, XP authenticity) and the fixes it led to, as separate commits:

• 43d3ba6 correctness.
  • A click, Esc or arrow key during the tape animation no longer strands the tape with no pane open.
  • Back after a dive, and tuning out from the Start menu, no longer leave a frozen camera.
  • Right- and middle-click no longer play tapes, and resizing no longer snaps the camera home.
  • A background tab no longer starts polling, and hiding the tab tunes out.
  • The dreams status-poll GPU fix (above).
  • No-JS and failed-bundle fallbacks now lift the boot screen off the <nav>.
• ee65f3d loom and heimdall removed. The private-network code only heimdall used goes with them. The hanging row is rebalanced to dream_gen −20° and parlor +20°, on channels 8 and 9.
• 08b72c0 the XP layer behaves like XP.
  • Working menu bars: File, Edit, View (Toolbars, Status Bar, Tiles/Icons/List, Go To), Favorites, Tools, Help ▸ About.
  • Right-click menus on tiles, screens, the VCR, the room, the folder and the taskbar. The system menu opens from the title icon.
  • Inactive windows fade their whole frame. No drop shadow and no open animation. Maximize becomes Restore and drops the frame.
  • Start menu: pinned items bold, All Programs ▸ and Recent Transmissions ▸ cascades, and Log Off + Turn Off in the footer.
  • Esc only dismisses menus and dialogs, and the dialogs are modal.
  • A click in the room deactivates windows. Back and Forward walk a real history.
• 5336b3d performance.
  • Screens off camera aren't painted or uploaded, and the others run at half rate while one is focused.
  • Quality steps back up after a slow patch.
  • Focused on one screen: painting 1.97 → 0.93 ms/frame, texture uploads ~120 → 57/s.
• e6b10e4 window resizing from any edge or corner, with XP's size grip. Windows are clamped back on screen when the viewport shrinks.

Testing

• uv run pytest -q: 45 passed.
• npm run typecheck / npm run build in oikos/: clean.
• npm run drive walks through everything a visitor does. It steps the room at a true 30 fps via ?drive because CI has no GPU, and writes stills and a video.
  • Chromium, desktop: hover, orbit, VCR, select, play, tune in, eject, tape out, start menu, Turn Off dialog, arrow keys, typed channel, dive to /syrinx. No page errors.
  • Chromium, phone (--phone): tap a screen, tune in, tap the VCR, tap-tap to play, start menu. No page errors.
• WebKit renders the room with no errors.
• Firefox headless here has no WebGL, so it covered the fallback desktop: no errors.
• Per-frame CPU work is about 2.3 ms to paint all screens and 4–6 ms to issue the render.
• Not measured: real GPU frame rate (software rendering only here) and iOS Safari.
• /oikos?contact shows every screen side by side, for reviewing the painters.
• Review round: scripted Playwright walks of the XP layer (24 checks), the room's right-click and focus (6 checks) and window resizing (7 checks), all passing with no page errors.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01UkALiUc3TzCNEMkPECnaDS

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Generated by Claude Code