Edition one. Keep near the bench.

The workshop manual

How to work in a room that makes impossible things, and what not to touch while you do.

1 Welcome to the workshop

You are standing in the Slopwright’s workshop. He builds small impossible things in found containers: a sea in a sardine tin, an opera in a walnut, a hurricane in a pocket watch. This manual is what he would tell you if he looked up.

He will not look up. Read it yourself. The workshop keeps no hours, or rather, it keeps all of them. If you are asked what time it opens, the answer is yes.

The Slopwright at his bench, building a seaside town inside a sardine tin under a warm lamp — Plate 1. The bench at work. Mind the tins.

2 The bench

Everything happens at the bench. It is longer than it looks and shorter than he needs. Leave it as you found it, which is to say covered.

Tweezers. For anything smaller than a thought.
Glue. For anything that should not come apart. Most things.
A ruler. Doubles as a rail, on evenings.
Patience. An unreasonable amount. Kept in the second drawer.
A glass manta ray. For company. Do not use it as a tool.

3 The lamp

The lamp on the bench is always on. It has been on since before the workshop, possibly before the lamp. Nobody has found the switch, and nobody has looked very hard.

If the lamp does go out, it needs oil, a wick and a glass, in that order. The apprentice knows where they are. The apprentice has had to learn.

4 Containers

Anything with a lid will do. Anything without one will do if you are careful. The shelf currently holds:

On the shelf, left to right
Container	Contains	Handle with
Sardine tin	A sea, mostly oil, with a lighthouse	The ring pull, slowly
Walnut	A theatre, one show, running for a while	Both hands; it is velvet inside
Pocket watch	A hurricane, wound daily	The chain, never the lid
Teacup	Weather, between commissions	A saucer

5 Rules of the workshop

One ordinary thing. Specific: a chipped enamel jug, not “a jug”.
One impossible detail. Not five. The joke is in the restraint.
A straight face. Photograph it like evidence. The picture must not know it’s funny.
Decisions, not defaults. Say where the camera is, what the light is, what it’s made of.
No hype. “Masterpiece” is a wish, not a description.
Say it’s AI. Every time. It’s not a confession; it’s a label.

Every bleep in this workshop is four numbers and a wave.

The Slopwright, on sound

6 Hazards

The stapler: Has worked for both sides. If it says “Clack”, it means it.
The Draught: The cold that comes in under doors. Keep them shut and the lamp will thank you.
The photocopier: At the top of the workshop. Switch it off. Nobody has said why it was on.
The showroom: Behind the wall. Everything’s on display; nothing’s in stock. Do not turn your back on the staff.

7 Glossary

Slop: What the workshop makes. Said fondly.
Fresh slop: Slop that has just come off the bench and gone up on the wall.
The wall: Where finished pieces go. It keeps going as you scroll.
Stylesheet: What this manual is wearing today. Change it at the end; the words stay put.

That is the manual. Wash your hands, leave the lamp on, and try it in another outfit.

This manual in other outfits

The same document, byte for byte, with a different stylesheet. Every outfit was designed by machine for the Slopwright.

Workshop standard Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Custom properties and grid. The slopped.site house style: paper, ink and acid, set from a handful of custom properties and laid out with a named-line grid.
Under construction Designed by machine for the Slopwright. steps() and tiled gradients. A 1998 homepage. The tiled background is repeating gradients, the blink is a steps() animation, and the marquee is a keyframe, so they all stop when you ask for reduced motion.
Level zero Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Layered gradients. Mono-yellow wallpaper, damp carpet and a buzzing ceiling, all built from stacked linear and radial gradients. No images, no texture files.
Sardine-tin sea Designed by machine for the Slopwright. radial-gradient and border-radius. The manual printed on the inside of the lid. Rolled tin edges, rivets and a ring pull from radial gradients; the sea underneath is a wave made of overlapping circles.
Green screen Designed by machine for the Slopwright. ch units and text-shadow. Everything measured in ch so the columns line up like a terminal; the glow is text-shadow, the scanlines a repeating gradient, the cursor a ::after.
Late edition Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Multi-column layout. Chapters set in CSS columns with rules between them, a drop cap from initial-letter where the browser has it and ::first-letter where it doesn’t.
Gradients all the way down Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Repeating conic gradients. A fractal-looking carpet from one repeating-conic-gradient laid at four scales, each a power of two. Not a single image file, and not a single straight line drawn by hand.
Cut paper Designed by machine for the Slopwright. clip-path. Every panel, heading and button is a polygon cut with clip-path. The edges are torn on purpose; the text is never cut.
For the printer Designed by machine for the Slopwright. @page and paged media. Laid out as A4 sheets on screen, and properly paged when printed: @page margins, break rules that keep headings with their text, and link addresses written out after each link.
High contrast Designed by machine for the Slopwright. forced-colors and prefers-contrast. Black, white and one yellow, large type, thick underlines and a focus ring you can see from the door. It hands over to the system’s colours in forced-colors mode.
No pictures Designed by machine for the Slopwright. System colours, no images. Not one image, gradient or background picture. The plate is hidden and its description shown instead; colours come from Canvas and CanvasText, so it follows your light or dark setting.
Blueprint Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Background grids and outlines. Drafting paper from two background grids at different sizes; boxes drawn with outlines and dimension lines with ::before and ::after.
Load-bearing Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Almost nothing. Thick borders, one typeface, enormous headings and the browser’s own blue links. Most of the work is a max-width in ch.
International style Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Subgrid. A strict twelve-column grid; every chapter is a subgrid, so headings and text line up across the whole page. One red.
Opening night Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Gradients and text-shadow. The walnut theatre: velvet curtains from repeating gradients, gilt lettering from layered text-shadow, footlights from a radial glow.
Wound daily Designed by machine for the Slopwright. @property and conic gradients. A watch face from conic gradients; its hand turns because @property registers the angle, so the browser can animate it. It stops for reduced motion.
Night drive Designed by machine for the Slopwright. 3D transforms. A neon grid floor running to the horizon: a gradient grid tipped back with perspective and rotateX. The words stay flat and readable.
Illuminated Designed by machine for the Slopwright. ::first-letter and text-wrap. Red rubrics, versal capitals from ::first-letter, old-style figures and text-wrap: pretty for the paragraphs. Margins wide enough for notes.
After hours Designed by machine for the Slopwright. color-scheme and light-dark(). The workshop with only the lamp on. Every colour is a light-dark() pair, so it is dark by default and stays legible if you force it light.
Shelves Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Container queries. Each chapter is a box on a shelf that lays itself out by its own width with @container, not the window’s. The same box is a column on a phone and a spread on a desk.
Index cards Designed by machine for the Slopwright. scroll-snap. Each chapter on its own ruled index card, in a deck you flick through sideways; scroll-snap keeps the cards square to the edge.
Photocopied zine Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Blend modes and transforms. Cut-out headings, stapled corners, toner grain and slightly crooked pages, with mix-blend-mode and small rotations. Nothing here was photocopied.
Till receipt Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Dotted leaders with flexbox. The manual as a long receipt from the showroom: one narrow column, dashed rules and dotted leaders drawn by a flex item that grows.
Sketchbook Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Elliptical border-radius. Wobbly hand-drawn boxes from eight-value border-radius, pencil lines from dashed borders, and squared paper. Nothing was drawn by hand.
Curtain up Designed by machine for the Slopwright. View timelines. The walnut theatre. The house curtains part as the first chapter scrolls into view, driven by a view() timeline, and the footlights come up with them. Without scroll timelines the curtains are simply open.
Into the tin Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Scroll timelines and @property. A dive down through the sardine-tin sea. The page’s scroll position is the depth: registered colours animate from surface light to the oily dark at the bottom, the sun’s shafts fade, the depth gauge rolls like an odometer, bubbles rise and a school of sardines turns. Firefox gets a fixed mid-water scene.
Going down Designed by machine for the Slopwright. A scroll-driven odometer. The Backrooms by service lift. Each chapter is a floor with its own wallpaper; the indicator above the door is a strip of floor numbers rolled one floor at a time by a stepped transform on the scroll timeline, and a custom @counter-style numbers the floors in the contents. Without scroll timelines the indicator says “Out of order”.
On the bench Designed by machine for the Slopwright. perspective and translateZ. The manual lying on the workbench, seen from above at an angle: every page is tipped back in its own perspective, and the title card sits on a preserve-3d shadow sheet. Hover or tab into a page and it lifts flat towards you. Flat on phones.
The long corridor Designed by machine for the Slopwright. 3D walls and a scroll-driven camera. A corridor in the showroom whose walls are papered with the chapters, built with perspective and rotateY. Scrolling walks you down it. Without scroll timelines it stands still, and on phones it is a straight hallway.
Pop-up book Designed by machine for the Slopwright. view() and rotateX. Every chapter is a pop-up page that folds up off the spread as it scrolls into view, a rotateX hinge on a view() timeline, with paper shadows that grow as it stands. Without view timelines the pages are already up.
A day at the bench Designed by machine for the Slopwright. @property colour cycles. The workshop window goes from dawn to night and back over two minutes: the sky, the light on the bench and the shadows are registered custom properties in one keyframe cycle. Reduced motion stops it at noon.
Lamplight Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Light shafts, mask and :target. The dark workshop, lit only by the lamp: a cone of light from mask and gradients, dust drifting through it, a slow flicker. Follow a contents link and that chapter steps into the light, by :target.
Canopy Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Conic-gradient fans and scroll parallax. Meinong’s jungle overhead: six palm fans, each a repeating conic gradient of blades ended by a radial mask, the nearest swaying; fireflies wander, and the fans swing up out of the way at different rates as you scroll. Without scroll timelines the canopy holds still.
Weather in a teacup Designed by machine for the Slopwright. Keyframed weather. The teacup on the shelf, between commissions: a small storm over the rim, rain from repeating gradients, a cloud that drifts and the odd flash of lightning, slower than three a second. Reduced motion clears the weather.