About boring.now
boring.now is a satirical progress bar. The bar lives at the home page. It climbs from 0% toward a cap. When it hits the cap, it resets and a new cycle starts. The cycle continues. The bar is always doing this.
How it works
One dollar bumps the bar by exactly 0.01 percent. Bundles are available at modest discounts but most spenders bump one dollar at a time. Payments go through Stripe Checkout. The bar updates immediately. Every other visitor sees the change in real time.
The cap drifts upward by 0.05 percentage points per day to reflect, in the operations desk's framing, “economic conditions.” This means the finish line moves slightly faster than any single visitor can outrun.
What you receive
A receipt. The bar moves. The receipt is the movement. There is no token, no NFT, no membership, no ongoing claim against anything. Each cycle resets to zero, which means by definition your contribution to that cycle is erased and the bar starts over. This is the design.
Who runs it
boring.now is operated as an internet art project and a small business. Stripe processes payments. Hosting is on Vercel. The press operation, The Boring Desk, publishes satirical articles about the bar's lore and characters. Those articles are fictional unless explicitly marked otherwise.
Is this gambling?
No. There is no payout, no chance of winning, no probability distribution. You pay one dollar and receive 0.01 percent of forward motion on a public progress bar. The bar always moves when paid. The contract is the entire transaction.
Where to start
- The bar (home page)
- The Boring Desk (press archive, ten articles)
- Glossary (every recurring term defined)
- Cycle history (every cycle the bar has finished)
- RSS feed (subscribe to new dispatches)