You drew it.
So it’s yours.
Two strokes, a name, and a colour. Everything after that — the accent on every screen, the room that fills up, the voice at eleven at night — comes from those three choices.
Eight to choose from, and every one of them clears the contrast bar on its own, because it becomes the whole app’s accent.
It asks you to draw
a circle and a face.
That is the entire task. A dashed guide sits under your finger, and your trace is measured against it about sixty times a second.
Draw a circle. That’s the body.
Now add a smiley face.
- 55%
- of the guide traced, and it moves on by itself
- 60×
- a second, your line checked against the shape
- 3:1
- contrast floor every colour clears, so any pick is legible
Done is available the whole time, and there is a second route in — a set of shapes to choose from instead of drawing — which appears on its own when VoiceOver is running.
Your scribble settles
into a character.
It does not cut. Your own strokes hold, blur, and resolve into a character that enters at the size you drew it, then grows as the sketch fades and the limbs come out.
- 0.0sYour drawing, exactly as you left it
- 0.5sIt holds, then begins to settle
- 1.6sA head, entering at the size you drew it
- 4.6sArms, legs, and the first thing it says
There. That’s me.
Pal’s first words, the moment the limbs finish.
It has one line
about what to call it.
Most people just call me Pal. But you can call me anything.
Which is why this site never gives it a name. The app offers suggestions and a blank field; the choice is the point, and a marketing page that picks for you takes it away.
It fills up because
you kept showing up.
Pal has a room — a bed, a lamp, a window, and nothing else at first. Everything you add to it was earned by finishing something, and none of it can be bought with money.
This is ours. It’s bare for now, and that’s okay. A bed, a lamp, a window. We’ll add the rest together.
- 10
- for a finished sequence. The same on night 2 and night 40.
- 6
- for a night you shortened yourself, streak untouched.
- 50
- once each at day 7, day 14, and the target.
- 0
- ways to buy one with money.
- “Nothing here costs money, and nothing leaves the shelf.”
- “They never expire and they’re never taken back. A missed night takes nothing.”
- “Everything in here is yours because you finished something.”
- “Moving is always free. Nothing can be lost.”
The store’s own words. Prices run from about four finished nights to about thirty, and an item you cannot afford yet keeps its drawing and its price rather than being greyed out of reach.
Five times a day,
and never in guilt.
That is a ceiling, not a schedule — counted across every kind of message and every repeating one, so it is true of what arrives rather than of what is configured.
I’ll bring your morning read and cues that fit your rhythm. Five a day at most, and you pick which ones. Never guilt.
And you choose which kinds arrive at all: the cue that opens tonight, the ones timed to your own rhythm, the morning read and the look-back, and a single gentle nudge after a miss.