A small history
of honking.

V1: ASCII Pond System

Live on Goose Group: July 3, 2025 to January 26, 2026.

The first Goose Group goose was text art. It started as a tiny inline ASCII goose on July 3, 2025, then grew into the pond-style version with cursor chasing and speech bubbles the next day.

Mechanism

This version is pure text animation: a small set of ASCII frames, a position value, a direction flag, and a few timers. There is no canvas and no image sprite sheet.

Behavioral Algorithm

1. The pond initializes a monospace waterline and places the goose at the left edge with a facing direction and frame index.
2. Two independent timers keep the loop alive: one schedules short waddles and another can interrupt the idle state with a honk pulled from the larger message pool.
3. Each walk picks a direction, clamps movement to the pond bounds, and cycles through the four walk frames in short bursts instead of long glides.
4. When the cursor enters the pond, random walking pauses and the goose switches into chase mode, steering toward the cursor with a capped easing speed.
5. If the goose gets close enough to the cursor, it enters a celebration loop that alternates neutral and honk frames while surfacing cursor-specific messages.
6. A separate waterline pass hides `~` characters that fall underneath the goose, which gives the little cut-through effect as it moves.

Frame Atlas

The full ASCII frame set is ten frames total: four walking right, four walking left, and two honk frames.

     __
  __(o )>
  \ <_. )
   `---'

     __
  __(o )>
  \ <_. )
   `--='

     __
  __(o )>
  \ <_. )
   `-=-'

     __
  __(o )>
  \ <_. )
   `=--'

    __
  <(o )__
  ( ._> /
   `---'

    __
  <(o )__
  ( ._> /
   `=--'

    __
  <(o )__
  ( ._> /
   `-=-'

    __
  <(o )__
  ( ._> /
   `--='

     __
  __(@ )<
  \ ^^. )
   `---'

    __
  >(@ )__
  ( .^^ /
   `---'

Phrase Pool

The complete preserved phrase pool is thirty-nine lines total: five legacy launch honks, twenty-nine pond idle and filter lines, and five cursor-catch celebration lines.

V2: Pixel Sprite System

Live on Goose Group: January 26, 2026 to present.

The current goose replaced the ASCII system on January 26, 2026. It uses a compact sprite sheet, a small state machine, and runtime mirroring to cover both leftward and rightward motion.

Mechanism

• The current goose is a single DOM node with background-image: url(/goose-sprite-warm-heart.png) and a moving background-position.
• The transparent sheet is displayed at 264×144, organized as a 6×3 grid of 44×48 cells. The sprite element itself is 44×48, trimmed inside a 40×46 viewport.
• Leftward movement does not use separate art. The same frames are mirrored at runtime with transform: scaleX(-1) on the sprite element.
• A requestAnimationFrame loop advances both motion and animation state, while timers determine when to switch between walking, idle, sitting, and honking.

Behavioral Algorithm

1. Walking: the goose drifts horizontally, cycles an eight-step walk playback, and bounces at the left and right bounds.
2. Idle: the goose stays in place and alternates between two row-three standing frames before returning to walking.
3. Sitting: it plays a sit-down transition, loops through the seated heart frames for 5 to 15 seconds, then plays a get-up transition.
4. Honking: it runs an eight-step wing-flap cycle, then idles briefly before randomizing direction and returning to walking.
5. Interaction: clicking the live goose forces the state machine into `honking` immediately if it is not already there.

Sprite Sheet

The live sheet is the same asset used in the current site header. The atlas below shows every raw frame the state machine references.

Directional Note

The sprite atlas itself only stores one facing direction. Leftward travel is produced by flipping the sprite element with CSS. That means the walk, idle, sitting, and honk sequences all reuse the same raw cells regardless of direction.