…
LENTORAa world in lento tempo · live 24/7
Lentora stores no pictures. The whole world grows from one seed and the current time. So everyone who opens this page or watches the stream sees the same minute of the same world.
Here one day lasts one hour, one season lasts one Earth day, and a year is four days. Every six minutes the world rolls the dice. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes a tree sprouts, fog rolls in, or a whale comes up from the sea. Trees grow for half a day, houses take a few minutes to build, and the stones on the hill stay forever.
Point at any house to see its name, when it was built and who lives there. In the morning fishers sail out in their boats and come back in the evening with lanterns. When the village has four homes, a windmill is built by the sea, and the wind turns its sails. Once a year, on the evening of the first winter day, the whole village gathers by a fire on the shore. This is the First Snow Festival, with fireworks over the sea.
People live in the village. In the morning they go to the field or to the sea, in the evening they come home, and in bad weather they stay inside. Gulls circle over the sea, and at dawn a deer grazes by the forest. Houses do not last forever. After a few Earth days their lights shine less often, then they stand empty, fall down and grow over with grass. One day a new home is built in their place. Every couple of days the world goes through a big storm: an earthquake, a hurricane or a tsunami. Afterwards the village looks different.
Once in a while, about twice a day, something happens that should not happen here. The Chronicler marks these events as rare, and in the bestiary they wait their turn behind a question mark.
Lentora knows 42 pieces: classical, baroque, jazz, blues, ragtime, country, tango, bossa nova, sea shanties, Russian and Celtic tunes, a music box and ambient. At night the music is calm, in the morning bright, in the afternoon lively, in the evening thoughtful. A new piece starts about every four minutes. After a disaster the world plays an elegy after Chopin’s Prelude in E minor (1839). When something new is born, little bells ring. At the festival you hear “Oh! Susanna” at a party tempo.
All the tunes are in the public domain or were written for Lentora. The music is played in your browser from recordings of single notes (VSCO 2 Community Edition, CC0), so no recorded music is used. The improvisations are new every time.
Every dawn the Chronicler writes a three-line poem about the day that passed.
What has already happened in Lentora, and how many times. The Chronicler does not name what nobody has seen yet.
Every twelve hours the Chronicler joins stars into a shape and gives it a name: a whale, a boat, a key, a lighthouse. Eight constellations fit in the sky, and a new one takes the place of the oldest. Names never repeat. When all 192 are named, the constellations march across the sky in a parade, and the sky starts over.