52.13°N · 06.27 · meet.boas.dev / me

Edge cadence & dithered tone

Direction C ratified. Green removed — full blue ramp. Two questions answered by rendering: how the breathing edge is driven (and how much harder it can move), and what replaces the smooth card-gradient AI-tell.

Edge cadence — how the breathing is driven

The edge warps by swapping pre-baked displacement filters (same noise, different scale). No text touched — content sits on an unfiltered layer above. Cost lives in feTurbulence; a discrete swap re-rasterizes only at keyframe ends, so it is cheap. Only the last variant tweens the scale live, every frame.

calm · 7s
2-state
scale 7↔11, swap at midpoint. Current C setting.
re-raster 2×/cycle
active · 2.5s
2-state
same swap, faster. More alive, same cost.
re-raster 2×/cycle
multi · 4-state
4 seeds
cycles 4 distinct noise fields → edge changes character, not just amplitude.
re-raster 4×/cycle
continuous
live tween
SMIL animates scale 6→13 every frame. Smoothest, recomputes turbulence per frame.
per-frame · gate motion

Intensity verdict: static edges are free (paint once, cached). Discrete swaps (variants 1–3) are negligible — fine to run on many cards. The continuous tween (4) is the only costly one; keep it to one hero, add contain:strict, gate behind prefers-reduced-motion. More-frequent change is cheap via multi-state; smoothness costs frames.

Edge distress as an emphasis primitive

Same knob, used semantically: warp intensity = importance / recency. Low warp reads settled and far; high warp reads urgent and near. This is the time-dissolve idea generalized into a hierarchy language.

scale 4 · quiet
Past / settled. Crisp, recedes.
scale 11 · active
Recent / in-play. Visibly alive.
scale 22 · now
Imminent. Edge dissolves toward the viewer — cyan border earns the one bright accent.

Dithered tone — killing the gradient tell

The smooth radial card-fill is the generative-design signature — banned. Tone inside a surface must be dithered or stepped. Four treatments of the same blue tonal fall-off:

1 · SMOOTH — banned
The AI tell. Soft multi-stop vignette. Removed from C.
2 · Stepped
Hard bands, no dither. Honest, a touch flat.
3 · Ordered / halftone
Tiled dot grid, luminance-masked. Crisp instrument feel.
4 · Grain — our primitive
feTurbulence + discrete posterize. Same engine as the edges.

Recommendation: #4 (grain) for surface fills — it ties tone to the same feTurbulence engine driving edges and glass: one primitive, three consumers. #3 (ordered) for anywhere wanting a sharper, schematic register. #2 as the safe fallback. #1 never. All four print correctly; grain disables under @media print.