Square Town is a 3D town where every square is a website: its favicon on top of a little tower. There are about 20,600 of them now. Most were seeded by the town itself, so they have no owner until the site's owner claims theirs, which is free. Seeding that many sites has an obvious problem. Sites die. The Million Dollar Homepage is about 40 % dead links by now, and every pixel wall since has rotted the same way, quietly. So this week I made the dead ones loud. The town checks every homepage around the clock. A homepage that keeps returning 404 catches fire, and every five days the fire moves up a stage: caught → spreading → blaze → inferno → dying down → smouldering embers The tower chars a little more at each stage. On day 30, a square nobody ever claimed burns down: the tower sags into its own footprint, a few charred chunks slide into the street, and a small heap of rubble is left on the lot. The lot goes back on the market for $1. Two ways out: if the site comes back, the fire goes out. And a square someone claimed or paid for never burns down, however long it burns. Right now 114 squares are on fire and 32 have already burned down. Tilt into 3D (the 2D/3D switch, bottom right) and follow the smoke. It's one Cloudflare Worker, D1 and three.js. Happy to answer anything about the mechanics or the build.   submitted by   /u/petertheill [link]   [comments]