A Thousand Crows Fly Across the New Screen — Five of Them Never Turn With the Flock

The entry screen of CAW's public testnet has a background almost nobody stops to look at: a flock of crows — and every single bird is the CAW logo itself. ❶ Each bird is drawn from one shape lifted straight out of the single-bird CAW logo; the code says so in its own comment, on line 3 of the file. ❷ How many birds? The count follows the size of your screen: Math.max(150, Math.round(area / 2073)). On a 1920×1080 display that comes out to about 1,000 birds; on a phone it lands somewhere between 150 and roughly 190. ❸ Ten of them are special, and they are picked in the plainest way imaginable — by their place in the queue. The first five are gold, the next five are white, and the rest are barely there — faint white on the dark theme, faint black on the light one. ❹ Here is the part worth keeping. The three pulls a bird feels from its neighbours — keep apart, turn together, stay together — are all multiplied by a single number, on a single line of code: white 0, gold 0.05, everyone else 0.5. For the five white birds, all three are multiplied by zero. They never turn to match a neighbour. And yet they are not cut off from the flock: when a wave of speed passes through, they ride it (their speed weight is 0.3). That wasn't an accident — the second of the two commits says the author separated speed from direction so the white birds would still join the wave. They keep their own heading, and travel with everyone anyway. The plain explanation: this is "boids", the flocking simulation Craig Reynolds built in 1986, and gold and white are nothing deeper than i < 5 and i < 10 — a queue position, not a meaning. The fixed five-and-five arrived in April 2026; the wave of speed was added on June 5, 2026 in two commits about eighteen minutes apart, both crediting an AI assistant as co-author. Nobody has said what any of it stands for, and it may well stand for nothing. Why we saved this: it is a background no one was asked to look at, made with more care than a background needs — and somewhere inside it, five birds hold their own direction while still moving with everyone else. (Code as of Jul 28, 2026, v1 branch.) 🐦‍⬛