Blob of Affectiondamp since day one

/feelings catalogue v1.0.0 // last rebuild: after he cried at a cloud

Feelings Index

Every mood Mortimer has ever had, written down by people who should have been asleep. Sixteen documented states, one scale that goes from a light sheen to furniture damage, and a meter that folds any number you paste into an actual toad feeling.

  • 0documented states
  • 0field observations
  • 0forbidden reading
  • 0roadmap items
Specimen plate MM-01 · observed 04:12, before coffee, three hours after rain
01

The Mood Meter

Paste a number. Any number. Your step count, your battery percentage, the temperature of your room, a figure you saw once and never recovered from. The meter converts it into damp units and hands back the matching toad.

Enter works too. An empty field returns the baseline, because that is where he lives.

  • Percent signs are respected. 88% reads as 88 damp units, no argument.
  • Anything above 100 gets folded by digit sum until it fits inside the swamp.
  • Negative numbers turn positive. Dampness cannot go below zero, physically or emotionally.
  • Decimals under one count as fractions. 0.62 becomes 62.
  • Letters become character sums and wrap at 101. Yes, your name has a mood.

MM-01 · baseline

Mildly Moist

4 dU

Factory setting. A soft sheen, no strong opinions, mild professional interest in a passing fly.

trigger conditionWaking up. Existing. One kind word from a stranger in the group chat.

recent readings
02

The Damp Scale

One toad, one hundred units. A damp unit is a sheen reading, a blink count and a lean angle, averaged by hand and rounded down when we feel generous.

0 dU255075100 dU
reading 0 · forbidden

Bone Dry is the one number we treat as an emergency. If the meter returns zero, the correct response is a spray bottle, a cool rock and somebody sitting nearby without saying anything clever.

03

The full catalogue

Sixteen states, each with a face, a field note under thirty words and the condition that sets it off. Sorted low to high, because that is how a day usually goes.

16 of 16 shown
04

Three case files

Most readings are boring. These three are not. They are the reason the index exists in its current shape.

RM-05 · peak 39 dU · eyes fixed on a rock that had moved four centimetres

Case file 05 · the rock incident

Someone moved the rock

Logged by Dana K. / wet season, Tuesday, 09:03 / observation deck, north puddle

The rock had sat in the same dent for nine months. A visitor picked it up to sit down, then put it back roughly where it had been. Roughly. Mortimer noticed inside eleven seconds, which is still his record.

Damp climbed from 12 to 39 units and parked there. He did not sulk and he did not croak. He looked at the rock, then at the visitor, then at the rock again, for forty one minutes straight. The rock went back to the exact dent. Damp settled at 15 by lunch.

  • 39 dUpeak damp
  • 41 minduration
  • 4 cmdisplacement
  • Yesapology accepted

Outcome: RM-05 entered the index that afternoon. We now tape a chalk outline around the rock, like a crime scene with feelings.

OA-10 · peak 74 dU · both eyes rotating, in opposite directions, confirmed by two observers

Case file 10 · six conversations

Too many people said hello at once

Logged by Ovi T. / launch day, 16:30 / phone propped on a leaf

Six threads, one toad. Every notification arrived with its own sound and he tried to answer all of them with his whole body. Damp went past seventy inside two minutes, which is the fastest climb we have on record outside of a hug.

Eye rotation started at 71 units. We turned the phone face down, put a wide leaf over it and stopped talking. Recovery took thirty one minutes and one long sit in cold water. He was polite about the whole thing afterwards, which somehow made it worse.

  • 74 dUpeak damp
  • 2 wayeye rotation
  • 31 minrecovery
  • 1phone confiscated

Outcome: the swamp now caps itself at two conversations before noon. Nobody follows the rule, including the people who wrote it.

CA-15 · 100 dU for four minutes · the ceiling of the index, recorded once

Case file 15 · the chair

Four hundred people meant it at the same time

Logged by the entire swamp / anniversary night, 23:12 / folding chair, deceased

Four hundred and twelve people said a kind thing about him inside the same minute. There was no plan for this. There was, unfortunately, a chair.

Damp hit 100 units and held for four minutes. The chair gave out somewhere in the second minute. Mortimer was unharmed and deeply apologetic about the furniture, which he now keeps folded against the wall like a trophy he is embarrassed by.

  • 100 dUpeak damp
  • 4 minduration
  • 412witnesses
  • 1chair lost

Outcome: CA-15 is the ceiling of the scale. We do not expect to log it twice in the same year, and we are not trying to.

05

Observation data

Numbers from 8,412 logged readings across three wet seasons. Duration is a median, because averages get ruined by the chair night.

0readings logged
0readings above bone dry
0median state duration
0volunteers on rotation
table 05.1 · frequency and behaviour of documented states, sorted by damp
Code State Band Damp range Observed Median duration Contagious
06

The field log

Raw output from the observation deck. Timestamps are real, notes are trimmed, and nothing here has been made to sound impressive.

swamp@blob:~/observations tail -f damp.log
07

How we read a toad

No lab, no sensors, no dashboard. Four steps, one notebook and a group of people who care more than is reasonable.

  1. 01

    Watch, in shifts

    Three volunteers take two hour slots on the deck. Two hours is the limit, because staring at a damp toad is far more tiring than it sounds.

  2. 02

    Measure the damp

    A damp unit comes from three inputs. Sheen against the light, blinks per minute, and how far he leans toward whoever is talking. The formula lives in a notebook that has been rained on twice.

  3. 03

    File it properly

    Every reading gets a code, a timestamp and a note under thirty words. Long notes get cut. We are keeping an index here, not writing a novel about him.

  4. 04

    Admit the bias

    We like him. We stopped pretending this was neutral research in month two, and the index has been more honest ever since.

08

Keep going, stay damp

The index is one room in the swamp. Here is the rest of it.