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Since You Arrived

A memento mori for the internet age. Five single-page works, an estimated 650,000 readers, and the studio that made them.

Visit the series Selected coverage
estimated readers
650,000
page loads
1.2M
volumes
5
Edition 1 closed
2026
0102030405
01

What we made

Since You Arrived (sinceyouarrived.world) is a five-volume editorial series: single-page interactive works, each built from live data and hand-written prose.

01

Vol. I, Now (/now): a split screen of what the world gained and lost since the visitor arrived.

02

Vol. II, What Color Was The Sky (/sky): yesterday's sunset above the reader's city, reconstructed from atmospheric archives.

03

Vol. III, Discovered (/discovered): the reader's coordinates, named back to them from six scientific databases.

04

Vol. IV, taken. (/taken): what the browser already gave away. A live fingerprinting demonstration that ships no third-party scripts.

05

Vol. V, Distance (/distance): every current reader as a light on a dark map, and the point on Earth farthest from all of them.

Edition 1 closed in May 2026. The volumes remain live, free, and unmonetized. No ads, no accounts, no email capture. The restraint is structural: the series is the proof, not the product.

After the edition closed, one separately labeled Vol. IV extension followed on May 29: /taken/agents, a live work showing how a public page can address software readers with language it does not render for human visitors.

02

What happened

By June 30, 2026, the series had reached an estimated 650,000 readers (modeled range: 600,000 to 720,000) across approximately 1.2 million page loads. Most of that reach moved through Vol. IV, which omits Vercel Web Analytics and cannot distinguish repeat readers; its reach is therefore estimated from server-side request and geolocation counts.

The New Yorker included Vol. II in Goings On. Popular Science ran a full-series feature, syndicated to Yahoo Tech. Boing Boing covered it twice. Cory Doctorow featured it in Pluralistic, Jason Kottke gave it a dedicated post, and The Irish Times gave it a bylined column. It reached the front page of Hacker News, #1 on Lobsters, and #1 on r/InternetIsBeautiful. In China, Ruan Yifeng's Tech Enthusiast Weekly placed Vol. IV at the top of its Resources section. The full-series hub holds an Awwwards Honorable Mention; Vol. III holds three CSSDA awards. Selected coverage lives on the press page.

03

What readers did because of it

Press is attention. These were behaviors:

  1. 01A reader filed a feature request with their browser vendor citing Vol. IV, asking Vivaldi to limit what pages can see about a device. A Vivaldi team member responded in the thread.
  2. 02Vol. IV appeared in public course material or LMS referral records at five named universities in four countries, plus one unattributed classroom in Mexico.
  3. 03A Chinese-language derivative appeared five days after launch, uncoordinated. Community threads and coverage followed in Polish, Korean, German, Slovak, Slovenian, Portuguese, and Russian.
  4. 04An author and BAFTA member answered Vol. IV with a creative response written in the series' own voice.
  5. 05Sharing records show it moving through Teams, Slack, and WeChat. One 12-hour Microsoft 365 and Viva Engage cluster from Sweden produced 2,310 loads of Vol. IV, a pattern consistent with internal circulation at a single Swedish-headquartered multinational.
04

What Rise Up Labs did

Everything between the idea and the reader happened inside the studio: concept, research, data sourcing, editorial direction, prose (every line hand-written, none generated at runtime), interaction design, engineering, infrastructure, launch, and post-launch observation and hardening. Five volumes, five data domains: live public statistics, atmospheric physics, geoscience and biodiversity databases, browser internals, real-time human presence. One voice across all five.

05

What a client can commission

The format generalizes. The through-line of the series (real data, sparse hand-written prose, a subject made personal) applies to a company's year, a climate dataset, a body of research the public ignores.

Rise Up Labs accepts a small number of commissions: one interactive editorial work, one subject, researched, written, built, and launched.

  1. 01Commissioned interactive work begins at 25,000 USD.
  2. 02Delivery runs eight to twelve weeks at current studio capacity.
  3. 03Payment is 50 percent to begin, 25 percent at the agreed midpoint, 25 percent at launch.
  4. 04The client receives the commissioned deliverable. Rise Up Labs retains its pre-existing tools, methods, and the Since You Arrived IP.

For buyers who want a smaller first step: a paid concept sprint at 7,500 USD. Three weeks. The deliverable is an editorial thesis, a source-feasibility assessment, an interaction direction, and an interactive sketch. The fee is credited toward a full commission contracted within 30 days. It is not free speculative work.

06

The ask

Have a subject your audience needs to feel, not just understand?

Write to hello@riseuplabs.app. We read everything.