Just Skedaddling: the website that heals when ignored

Just Skedaddling is a single-page generative artwork that does the opposite of almost everything else on the web: it rewards neglect. Leave the tab alone and a drifting field of particles slowly grows warmer, denser and calmer. Move the pointer across it and the whole composition flinches, jitters and fades toward grey. The site is worth a look because its one rule, be still and it settles, turns a screensaver into a small argument about attention.

In brief

• The page is one full-screen HTML Canvas running a particle system that has no goal, no score to beat and nothing to click.
• A hidden value called serenity, ranging from 0 to 1, rises while the page is idle and drops every time the pointer or a finger disturbs it.
• Serenity is not a colour filter. It changes particle jitter, connection density and palette saturation all at once, so disturbance reads as damage rather than a button press.
• It is one of the Boring Websites network's quieter experiments, built in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no frameworks and no tracking.

What Just Skedaddling actually is

Open the page and there is no menu, no headline and no call to action. A dark canvas fills the viewport, and across it a few hundred soft points of light drift, gather and scatter. Thin lines appear between neighbours and then dissolve. Behind them, faint stars twinkle and large blurred clouds of colour move very slowly. Nothing asks the visitor to do anything.

That emptiness is the point. The site's own notes describe it as an experiment in removing the usual expectations of a web page: no account, no feed, no search box and no list of tasks to finish. According to its design note on uselessness, the single real rule is that the artwork becomes calmer when the visitor stops interfering with it.

It helps to think of the piece as generative art rather than a tool. As Wikipedia's article on generative art explains, the term covers work created with an autonomous system that makes its own decisions within rules the artist sets. Here the rules are a handful of forces, a palette and one state variable, and the image that results is never quite the same twice.

The one rule: leave it alone

The heart of the piece is a single number. The site calls it serenity, and its note on the serenity system describes it plainly: the value ranges from 0 to 1, where 1 is the artwork at its quietest and 0 is maximally disturbed. Everything a visitor sees is downstream of where that number currently sits.

Serenity falls on contact and rises in silence. When the pointer moves through the field, the particles nearby are pushed away and the target serenity drops. When interaction stops, the value climbs back by a small amount on every animation frame. Neither change is instant, which is what gives the artwork its slow, breathing quality instead of a hard on and off.

Why one value does so much

The clever restraint is that serenity is not wired to a colour overlay. The same note stresses that it drives the particle system itself. Higher serenity lets particles breathe more gently, makes the network of connections more prominent and keeps the palette saturated. Lower serenity adds jitter and drains the connections of strength. Because many properties move together, a disturbance looks like genuine distress rather than an interface animation pasted on top.

That design choice is the difference between a gimmick and a small piece of art. A lesser version would dim the screen when the mouse moved and brighten it when it stopped. Just Skedaddling instead degrades the system that produces the image, so the visitor is watching a composition recover rather than watching a slider slide.

What is actually on the canvas

Under the calm surface there is a specific, countable set of moving parts. The site's technical note lays them out, and they are modest by design.

The particles

On a desktop screen the system creates 180 particles; on mobile it drops to 90 to spare slower hardware. Each one carries a position, a velocity, a size phase, a hue index and a few small offsets so that otherwise identical points do not look cloned. They drift continuously with small nudges to their velocity rather than any heavy physics simulation, which keeps the motion organic without a real engine behind it.

The connections

When two particles come close enough, a thin line links them. The connection distance widens and narrows with serenity, and each line's opacity depends on how near the two points are. At high serenity the web of links becomes visible and coherent; after a disturbance the lines grow shorter and quieter. This is the part of the image that most clearly reads as a mood.

The background

Two layers sit behind the particles. A scatter of small stars twinkles on its own schedule, and four radial-gradient nebulae drift slowly while shifting hue in step with a global colour drift that also moves the foreground palette. The background never demands attention, but it stops the canvas from feeling like a flat screensaver.

The colour

Every particle begins with a hue drawn from a small set of base hues, and a gentle global shift moves the whole palette over time. Serenity then decides how much of that saturated colour actually shows. When the system is disturbed, the colours slide toward a muted, greyer range, and they warm up again as the page is left in peace.

How interaction breaks it

The disturbance is local and physical. Moving the pointer applies a repulsive force to particles within a set radius, pushing them away from the cursor like a hand through still water. The serenity note puts that radius at 140 pixels, and the same mechanism handles touch on a phone or tablet, so the artwork responds the same way whether it is poked with a mouse or a finger.

Not all contact is equal. A click is treated as a stronger disturbance than ordinary movement, which means a deliberate tap damages the composition more than a cursor merely passing through. That small distinction rewards the visitor who notices it: the gentlest way to look is to not reach for anything at all, and the most destructive is to start clicking.

When serenity is low the particles pick up extra jitter, the connections thin out and the palette goes cold. None of it is catastrophic, and nothing breaks permanently. The artwork simply wears its recent treatment on its surface, the way a pond shows every stone you throw in before it goes flat again.

The cursor as a disturbance, not a control

Most interactive pages treat the pointer as a tool. Move it over something and an affordance lights up; click and an action fires. Just Skedaddling begins from the opposite assumption, and its note on designing the interaction spells it out: the artwork should already be doing something, and the visitor should be free to leave it alone.

So the cursor is not a button or a brush, only a temporary source of force. A visitor can influence the field, but cannot place a particle, pick a colour or save a composition. There is deliberately no pause control, no colour picker and no reset. Those would all make sense for a visual tool, and all of them would quietly turn the artwork into a product that expects to be operated. The absence of controls is itself the design.

This is also why the effect has to fade slowly rather than snap back. If the image returned to normal the instant the pointer left, the whole thing would read as a conventional hover effect, the kind of micro-interaction that lives on thousands of marketing pages. The gradual recovery gives the system continuity instead: something happened, and then it took time to settle. On touch screens, where there is no hover state at all, a moving finger is treated directly as a local disturbance, and the mobile build thins the particle count to keep that responsive on smaller hardware.

Why recovery is slow on purpose

The most interesting design decision is the delay. When a visitor stops interacting, the artwork does not snap back to its calm state. Serenity recovers gradually, frame by frame, and the about page is explicit that this lag is intentional: the piece is meant to have a memory of disturbance without storing anything about the person who caused it.

That phrase, a memory of disturbance, is doing a lot of quiet work. It gives the artwork something like a temperament. Agitate it and it stays ruffled for a while, then settles, the same way a room full of people does not go silent the instant someone stops talking. The waiting becomes part of the experience rather than dead time between effects.

Crucially, the memory is only the current in-browser state of the animation. There is no profile, no cookie and no record of the visit. Reload the page and a fresh generative state begins from scratch, while the underlying rule about interaction stays exactly the same. The site keeps its conceptual memory and forgets the human entirely, which is a rare and welcome inversion of how most of the web behaves.

The engineering underneath

For all its stillness, the piece is a tidy bit of front-end engineering, and it is readable because nothing is hidden behind a build step.

One Canvas, drawn every frame

The whole thing runs on a single HTML Canvas element. There is no recorded clip playing back; JavaScript holds the visual state, updates it on each animation frame and redraws the surface. The technical note is clear that Canvas was chosen precisely because the artwork needs hundreds of small elements moving at once, and pushing that through one drawing surface is far cheaper than creating hundreds of DOM nodes. The MDN reference for the Canvas API describes exactly this model of drawing graphics imperatively with JavaScript.

Pausing when nobody is looking

Because an animation loop that never stops would waste battery and CPU, the loop halts entirely when the tab is hidden. That is the job of the Page Visibility API, which lets a page detect when it is no longer the active tab and stop work it does not need to do. Switch away from Just Skedaddling and it quietly suspends; come back and it resumes. For a piece whose entire theme is idleness, pausing while unwatched is a fitting touch.

No frameworks, no tracking

The site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript in effectively one file, with no framework, no bundler and no component library. It is aware of device pixel ratio so it renders sharply on high-resolution screens without over-drawing on phones. It sets no cookies and loads no analytics. After the first visit it works fully offline, because there is nothing left to fetch. The entire artwork is both the thing you look at and, as source code, the explanation of how it was made.

Why build a website that does almost nothing

The obvious question is why anyone would make a page with nothing to do, and the site answers it directly. Its note on the subject argues that the web is very good at asking for attention: a headline, a notification, a button, a recommendation, always one more reason to keep scrolling. Just Skedaddling started as an experiment in removing those expectations and seeing what was left.

Calling the project useless turns out to be a design constraint as much as a joke. Once a website has a practical job, there is always another feature that would make that job more efficient. A deliberately limited artwork has a cleaner boundary: a pause button, a settings panel or a saved gallery might all be reasonable, and all of them would quietly change what the piece is actually about. The constraint makes those additions easy to refuse.

What remains is a different kind of interaction. The visitor does not tell the artwork what to draw; they disturb an existing system and then watch it settle. That makes the decision to stop part of the experience. You are not only operating the piece, you are choosing when to leave it alone, and the artwork visibly thanks you for it.

Where it sits in the boring web

Just Skedaddling belongs to a small family of single-purpose sites gathered under the Boring Websites banner, pages built around one idea and nothing more. Most of that collection invites you to do something: pour sand, bounce a logo, scream into a void. This one is the odd sibling that would rather you did not, which makes it a useful reminder that interactivity and engagement are not the same thing.

It also lands in a longer tradition of ambient, screen-based art meant to be left running in a corner. The difference is the feedback loop. A typical generative screensaver ignores the viewer completely. Just Skedaddling notices, reacts and then recovers, so the quietest possible visit, opening the tab and simply letting it be, is also the one that produces the most beautiful image. Walking away is not giving up on the site. It is the intended way to use it.

FAQ

What is Just Skedaddling?

It is a free generative artwork that runs in a web browser at justskedaddling.com. A field of drifting particles grows calmer and more colourful the longer it is left undisturbed, and visibly frays when a visitor moves the pointer or taps the screen.

What does the serenity value do?

Serenity is a hidden number between 0 and 1 that tracks the artwork's state. It drops on every interaction and recovers slowly while the page is idle. Rather than just tinting the screen, it controls particle jitter, how many connections form between particles and how saturated the colours are, so changes in serenity look like changes in the artwork's mood.

Does the site track or remember visitors?

No. The only memory is the current in-browser state of the animation, which exists purely to make recovery gradual. There are no cookies, no analytics and no stored profile, and reloading the page starts a completely fresh generative state.

How is it built?

It is a single HTML Canvas driven by plain JavaScript, with no frameworks or external libraries. It uses the Page Visibility API to pause when the tab is hidden and adjusts particle counts for mobile devices, keeping it lightweight on everything from a laptop to a phone.