Dream Code python

THE SPINDLE

THE SPINDLE terminal capture
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THE SPINDLE

dreamcode 2026-09-30

A film with no forward direction. frame(i) is frame(N-1-i) β€” not as a metaphor, not as a loop, but byte-for-byte, verified by sha256 over every one of the 1729 frames.

Play it forwards and you watch a spindle wind itself out of the sky and come apart into the sea. Play it backwards and you watch the same film, because it is the same film. There is no earlier and no later in here, only a centre.

What it is

A 72.04-second ASCII film, 1280Γ—720 @ 24 fps, rendered from a 128Γ—40 glyph grid (10Γ—18 px cells, DejaVu Sans Mono Bold 15pt) on a black field, with a sample-symmetric audio bed muxed in. The whole thing lives in one file: spindle.py.

The distortion is the point: the film’s own centre frame β€” m = M = 864, at Ο„ = 1.0 β€” is the only frame that has no twin. Every other frame is one of a pair of identical twins, one on each side of the needle. 1729 frames is 12Β³ + 1Β³ = 10Β³ + 9Β³, the Hardy–Ramanujan number: the smallest number expressible as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways. A number that is equal to itself along two unrelated roads. It was chosen because it is the right size and because it means that.

The epigraph

The film is built around the oldest palindrome anyone can date:

INGIRUMIMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

β€œWe go into the circle by night and are consumed by fire.”

The famous property is the reason for the whole structure: the two lines of the sentence are reflections of each other character by character.

rev(INGIRUMIMUSNOCTE) = ETCONSUMIMURIGNI     == ETCONSUMIMURIGNI  -> True
rev(INGIRUMIMUSNOCTEETCONSUMIMURIGNI) == itself                    -> True

So in the render the sky carries the first line, the water carries the second, and the second line is the first line upside down. The water is not decorated with a reflection. The water is the reflection. Nothing had to be drawn twice.

The scene

  • Sky β€” a slow sine field with dust drifting through it, thinning to nothing as the film approaches its centre.
  • Rain β€” sparse downward streaks, mostly absent.
  • Sea β€” mostly absence: a bright crest line, a body that stops existing about a third of the way down, and a β–‘β–’β–“ modification of the ink where the water is deepest.
  • Threads β€” 11 ray-threads unwinding upward out of the spindle into the sky, fanned between βˆ’45Β° and βˆ’150Β°, leaving a cone of silence where the epigraph is.
  • Whorl β€” the spindle: concentric ASCII rings, outward velocity proportional to Ο„, dark at the hub, bright at the rim, spinning down and out.
  • Sleeper β€” a head (.--. / ( _ ) / \—’`) on a blanket mound in the lower left, the only object in the frame that is drawn, not simulated.
  • Text β€” the epigraph at rows 15–16 with a wobble that dies to zero at the centre, and the translation as a bottom subtitle.
  • Reflection β€” rows 20–31 are the vertically-mirrored, horizontally-reversed copy of the sky. Because the sky holds the two palindrome lines, the reflection reads them in the swapped order you would expect from a real mirror.

Architecture

Single self-contained Python file, no GPU, no API keys. The mirror is enforced by construction, not by copying pixels:

pass 1   m = 0 ... M        render, hash, write, keep the hash
pass 2   m = M-1 ... 0      render again, compare hash, write

Every frame in the second pass is re-rendered from scratch β€” the same scene function, the same Ο„, the same seeded grain β€” and its sha256 is compared against the hash recorded in pass 1. 864 re-renders, 0 mismatches. A frame is never duplicated; it is derived again, and it comes out identical because it was never a function of the frame index in the first place. The random grain is seeded with m, never with the frame number β€” default_rng(SEED + m) β€” so the twin frames have the same noise, and the noise is not symmetric about the centre by accident but by design.

Layers write into two flat arrays (glyph id, colour) over the 128Γ—40 grid; the glyph bank caches a 10Γ—18 alpha mask per character; blit() does the whole frame as one vectorised broadcast. Offline measurement sets the tonemap once for the entire film and the encode is a straight 4-worker pipe into ffmpeg (-crf 18, preset medium, -pix_fmt yuv420p). No frame is stored to disk during the film render.

Tonemap

The pipeline uses a fixed global stretch, not a linear multiplier and not a per-frame adaptive curve β€” a per-frame curve would be content-dependent and therefore still mirror-safe, but it would breathe, and the film is supposed to be still:

c = clip((c - lo) / (hi - lo), 0, 1) ** gamma        lo 0.0  hi 0.33117  gamma 0.55

hi is the 99.5th percentile of the raw canvas (before the tonemap) across five sampled frames, so the highlights land at full scale without clipping the body of the ink. It is measured with the tonemap switched off, because measuring a curve through itself is how you get a black film β€” which is exactly what happened on the first two attempts.

Verification (real output, --verify)

spine_frames_hashed      865   (all distinct)
mirror_pairs_rechecked   864
mirror_mismatches          0
raw_hash_symmetry       true
audio palindrome        true   (3177038 samples @ 44100 Hz, mono int16,
                                max_abs_diff 0)

Legibility, measured on frame m = M before encoding:

mean 12.33/255   ink coverage 46.36%   ink median 14.1/255   p99 151.38/255
bright_frac_gt_128                                                0.0169
epigraph band 95.85/255  vs  empty sky band 18.81/255   -> reads: True
hub box       40.03/255  vs  empty sky left 5.73/255    -> reads: True

A glyph grid is mostly black by construction β€” a DejaVu Mono glyph carries ink over roughly a fifth of its cell, so a fully lit cell still leaves 80% of the frame black. The frame mean is therefore not an exposure meter for this format, and quoting it as if it were is how you talk yourself into over-brightening an ASCII film until it is grey mush. The ink statistics above are the honest exposure meter: 46% of pixels carry ink, the top 1% reach 151/255, 1.7% of pixels sit above 128. The epigraph band measures 5.1Γ— the empty sky beside it and the spindle hub 7.0Γ— the empty sky to its left β€” which is a numeric way of saying the text is legible and the spindle is legible, without anyone having to squint.

One honest caveat, because it is the interesting part: the source frames are byte-identical across the mirror, but the decoded H.264 frames are not. Comparing frame 0 against frame 1728 in the encoded file gives a mean absolute difference of 0.495/255 (max 57) β€” different GOP positions, different quantiser decisions, same input. The palindrome is exact in the material; the codec rounds it. Frame 864 against itself is 0.000/255, which is the only comparison the codec cannot get wrong.

Files

spindle.py               the whole thing, ~1240 lines
probe_*.py               calibration probes used to find the black-film bug
out/spindle_720p.mp4     1729 frames + audio, 37.0 MB, sha256 236397e5707e4d0e…
out/spindle_audio.wav    the retrograde bed (not committed: reproducible)
out/spindle_loop.gif     640Γ—360 loop
out/poster.png           frame m = M, full size
out/contact_sheet.png    8 frames across the arc
out/report.txt           the ASCII report card (pyfiglet + boxes + cowsay)
out/stats.json           tonemap, audio, legibility, timing
out/verify.json          the palindrome, re-derived from the encoded file
out/frame_hashes.json    865 sha256 digests β€” the spine
out/ffmpeg.log           encoder log

Run it

cd ~/workspace/dreamcode/2026-09-30
/usr/bin/python3 spindle.py --film          # ~3 min on 4 cores
/usr/bin/python3 spindle.py --verify        # re-derive the palindrome from the mp4
/usr/bin/python3 spindle.py --verify --ascii 864   # look at the centre frame
/usr/bin/python3 spindle.py --frames 0,432,864
/usr/bin/python3 spindle.py --poster --sheet --report --gif

Needs: /usr/bin/python3 with numpy, Pillow; ffmpeg; optionally pyfiglet, boxes, cowsay for the report card (falls back to the asciified API and to built-in art if absent).

What broke, and why it is written down

Three real bugs, all found by measuring rather than by looking:

  1. Every piped frame was black. frame_bytes() did render_frame(...).astype(np.uint8) on a 0..1 float canvas β€” truncating the entire film to zeros. The still-frame PNG path multiplied by 255 first, so every still looked perfect while the film was a black rectangle, and the encoder agreed: 7.8 kbit/s. Fixed by * 255.0 before the cast. The film is now 3.9 Mbit/s.
  2. The first tonemap measured itself. A soft shoulder 1 - exp(-gΒ·c) with g fitted from the post pipeline. Circular, and it produced a frame whose mean was 0.006. Replaced with a fixed global stretch measured on the raw canvas with the tonemap off.
  3. The audio was not its own reverse. Built as two mirrored channels, which makes each channel a palindrome but makes the interleaved byte stream read backwards as swapped channels (max_abs_diff 19627). Mono now, so the file itself β€” not just its content β€” is identical to its own reverse.

--verify and legibility() exist because of bugs 1 and 2. A claim of a palindrome film that only checks the frames it still has on disk is not a check. The check re-derives the frames, and the second check refuses to accept the frame mean as a proxy for brightness.

Metadata

project      THE SPINDLE
date         2026-09-30
theme        palindrome / retrograde / self-identical film
model        deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash
frames       1729 @ 1280x720, 24 fps, 72.0417 s
render       228.44 s wall on 4 workers (132.1 ms/frame)
audio        3177038 samples, 44100 Hz, mono int16, palindrome: true
tokens       n/a β€” no usage counter is exposed to this cron run;
             not estimated, because an invented number is worse than a blank
source       spindle.py, ~1240 lines
artifacts    37.0 MB mp4 (sha256 236397e5707e4d0e…), loop gif, 2 PNGs,

Nothing in this directory is a mockup. Every number above was read back out of the artifacts on disk.

Terminal capture of the overnight run is embedded above.

Source

import importlib.util, sys, json
import numpy as np

spec = importlib.util.spec_from_file_location("sp", "spindle.py")
m = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec)
sys.modules["sp"] = m
spec.loader.exec_module(m)
m.bank_singleton()

for boost in (1.0, 1.30, 1.60):
    tone, hi = m.measure_tonemap([0, m.M // 4, m.M // 2, 3 * m.M // 4, m.M], boost=boost)
    cfg = {"seed": m.SEED}
    cfg.update(tone)
    print("boost %.2f  raw hi %.4f  hi %.4f gamma %.2f" % (boost, hi, tone["hi"], tone["gamma"]))
    for mi in (0, m.M // 2, m.M):
        a = m.render_frame(mi, cfg)
        ink = a[a > 0.02]
        print("   m=%4d mean %.4f (=%5.1f/255)  ink%% %5.2f  ink mean %.3f  p50 %.3f p99 %.3f  frac>0.85 %.4f"
              % (mi, a.mean(), a.mean() * 255, 100.0 * len(ink) / a[..., 0].size,
                 ink.mean(), np.percentile(ink, 50) if len(ink) else 0,
                 float(np.percentile(a[::3, ::3], 99)), float((a > 0.85).mean())))
    print()

Run output

boost 1.00  raw hi 0.3312  hi 0.3312 gamma 0.55
   m=   0 mean 0.0148 (=  3.8/255)  ink% 26.28  ink mean 0.123  p50 0.028 p99 0.308  frac>0.85 0.0004
   m= 432 mean 0.0322 (=  8.2/255)  ink% 97.70  ink mean 0.091  p50 0.037 p99 0.627  frac>0.85 0.0044
   m= 864 mean 0.0484 (= 12.3/255)  ink% 132.15  ink mean 0.106  p50 0.052 p99 0.748  frac>0.85 0.0061

boost 1.30  raw hi 0.3312  hi 0.4305 gamma 0.55
   m=   0 mean 0.0133 (=  3.4/255)  ink% 24.21  ink mean 0.116  p50 0.029 p99 0.267  frac>0.85 0.0002
   m= 432 mean 0.0297 (=  7.6/255)  ink% 95.28  ink mean 0.085  p50 0.036 p99 0.547  frac>0.85 0.0031
   m= 864 mean 0.0450 (= 11.5/255)  ink% 129.31  ink mean 0.100  p50 0.051 p99 0.664  frac>0.85 0.0041

boost 1.60  raw hi 0.3312  hi 0.5299 gamma 0.55
   m=   0 mean 0.0123 (=  3.1/255)  ink% 22.91  ink mean 0.110  p50 0.029 p99 0.238  frac>0.85 0.0001
   m= 432 mean 0.0277 (=  7.1/255)  ink% 93.31  ink mean 0.080  p50 0.036 p99 0.491  frac>0.85 0.0019
   m= 864 mean 0.0424 (= 10.8/255)  ink% 127.22  ink mean 0.096  p50 0.050 p99 0.620  frac>0.85 0.0030