Scream Into The Void

Why writing something down and destroying it actually helps

There is a particular kind of thought that gets louder the longer it stays unsaid. Not a problem to be solved - those you can work on - but the sentence you keep rehearsing at two in the morning, aimed at somebody who is never going to hear it.

Writing it down changes it. A thought in your head has no edges. It repeats, mutates, and grows in the retelling. A sentence on a screen is finite: it has a length, and it stops. Once it exists as words you can look at, you have already done the harder half of the work, which is deciding what the thing actually is.

The trouble with writing it anywhere else is the audience. A notes app keeps it. A message has a recipient. A post has an algorithm, an archive, and somebody's screenshot. Every one of those quietly changes what you are willing to type, usually before you have noticed you are hedging.

This page has no audience and no memory, so there is nothing to hedge against. Type the unfair version. Name the person. Use the words you would not use in front of anyone. Then destroy it, and let that be the end of the thought rather than the start of a thread. If it is your hands that are restless rather than your head, there is a button on this site that asks not to be pressed instead.

What happens to the words you type

All of it happens inside the page you already have open.

What you type goes into the text box and nowhere else. There is no form on this page, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight: a form is a thing that submits, and a submitted form would put your words into the address bar and from there into your browser history. There is nothing here to submit, so there is no form to do it.

When you press LAUNCH, the message is handed to a single variable, drawn once onto the canvas as pixels, and sampled into about ninety fragments. Scream louder triples that. The text box is emptied before the animation begins, because by that point nothing needs the words any more - only the fragments, which are coordinates and colours rather than letters. When the animation finishes, the canvas is wiped as well.

Nothing is written down. The only thing this page stores anywhere is a number: how many messages you have destroyed, kept in your own browser so that the count survives closing the tab. It contains no text of any kind, and clearing your browsing data sets it back to zero.

How to check that for yourself

You do not have to take any of that on trust, and you should not.

Open your browser's developer tools and go to the Network tab, which lists every request the page makes.

There will already be rows there from loading the page: the page itself, the scripts that make it work, analytics recording the visit, an icon. How many there are depends on the day and on what this site happens to be running, so the count is not the thing to check. What matters is that every one of them happened before you typed a character, and that none of them is yours.

Now type something and press LAUNCH.

The list does not move. If this page were sending your words anywhere, a row would have to appear at that exact moment, and there would be no way to hide it from you.

While you are in there, open the Application tab and look at Local Storage for this site. There is one entry. It is a number.

So the claim is not that this page makes no requests - it has to load, like everything else. The claim is narrower and checkable: nothing you type causes one.

The ways your message can be destroyed

There are four of them, and which one you get is decided at random each time you launch something.

Spaghettified stretches the message into a thread and draws it down to a point. Shredded into stars tears it outward into scattered light. Swallowed whole pulls everything into the middle at once and closes over it. Ground to dust crumbles the letters and lets them fall.

Scream louder makes any of the four about three times more violent - more fragments, moving faster. It changes how much of a scene the destruction makes and nothing else.

None of them does anything different to your words. The destruction is identical every time: the same single variable, the same canvas, the same wipe at the end. The animation is only what you watch while it happens. There is no variant that keeps a copy, no gentler one that holds on to it just in case, and no difference between them beyond the picture.

Why there is no counter of everyone else's messages

A number showing how many messages the whole site had destroyed today would be a nice touch. It is not here, and its absence is the most honest thing on the page.

To count everybody's messages, something somewhere would have to be told every time anybody pressed that button. That is a log. It would be a small one - a timestamp and nothing else - but it would mean this page reaching out to a server the instant you destroyed something, and it would mean the Network tab check above quietly failing. The number would be real and the promise would not.

Some sites solve that by inventing the number and labelling it decorative. That seemed worse rather than better. If a site is willing to make up a statistic on the same page where it swears nothing is recorded, the label does not buy back what it costs.

So the only count here is your own: how many you have destroyed on this device, in this browser. Nobody else can see it, including me.

What this cannot protect you from

This page keeps your words out of its own hands. It cannot do anything about the rest of the path they travel, and pretending otherwise would make everything above worth less.

Browser extensions can read what you type on any page, including this one. This page asks Grammarly specifically to leave the text box alone, and turns the browser's spellchecker off so that nothing is sent away for suggestions. But an extension you installed has permission you granted it, and no page can overrule that.

Phone keyboards see your keystrokes before the page does. A predictive keyboard with cloud features is a genuine exception to everything above, and the setting that governs it lives on your device rather than here.

Screenshots, screen recording and screen sharing capture whatever is on the screen, animation included. So does a person standing behind you. And on a shared, borrowed or work-managed device, assume somebody could have arranged to see more than you would like.

None of that is a reason to avoid this page. It is the difference between a promise that is true and a promise that merely sounds good, and you are entitled to know which one you are being given.

Questions people ask