Animations

Zeca and the vults are black vultures (Coragyps atratus). Every clip is built from something a real black vulture does, so the bird reads as a vulture before it reads as a status light.

What a black vulture looks like

#

• Matte black plumage with a faint blue sheen; a short, square tail.
• A bare, wrinkled, dark gray head on a short neck; a dark brown eye under a brow ridge; a slender, dark bill whose pale horn tip hooks down at the very end.
• Pale gray legs.
• In flight, broad short wings whose primaries are silvery-white underneath, splayed like fingers.

How it moves

#

Clips

#

The idle clip includes a preening bout (head into the wing, quick nibbles), and done stretches one wing down and back, with the leg on that side, before the species’ signature: the stretch birds make when they finish something.

Four more clips are built for every species from its own frames: doze (the head grows heavy twice, a jerk awake, then it turns onto the back and the bird sleeps), wake (an eye opens on the back, the head comes round, the wing-and-leg stretch (the king vulture, whose done clip stretches both wings, skips it) and a shake of the feathers), court (wings half open, head low, a hop every other beat and a look to each side; both condors open the wings fully, hold the head high and bow) and fed (after the swallow, the crop bulges under the band and empties in three sizes, in the bird’s own plumage, on the perch only).

The island plays them so:

• doze: a bird resting on a perch where it does not soar nods off with it after 90 seconds, ±12% by its session, then sleeps: Zeca on the island’s empty wire and in the chat, the Nest’s flock and the corner widget (the island’s own idle flock soars instead). With reduced motion it goes straight to sleep.
• wake: work wakes a sleeping bird, which stretches before its work clip (or before it takes off, for web work). A permission, a question or a failure cuts straight in, with no stretch.
• court: with a song playing (Now playing), the flock’s idle birds court on the wire instead of soaring, and go back up when it stops. Zeca on his own still dances.
• fed: when Zeca swallows a file in the chat, the swallow runs on into the full crop, which goes down while he rests; thinking, listening or another file cuts it short.

Zeca notices you

#

On the focus card and in the chat, a resting Zeca looks toward the pointer: over his shoulder when it is behind him, at you (with a blink) when it is on him. Rest it on him and he preens; click him and he startles; three clicks in a row and he puffs up and hisses. When the app starts he drops straight down onto his wire, lands with a squash (fluffed, sunk onto bent legs) and a bounce, and waves hello; the island folds once he is done. The squash is drawn with his own parts, so every species and every seasonal look lands the same way. With reduced motion there is no hello.

Marks over the head

#

A small pixel mark over a bird’s head says its state at a glance, in the island’s state colors. It sits over whatever head pose the bird is in, and loops on its own.

They show on the focus card and in the chat (Zeca at 3x) and in the habitat (1x); the compact pill has no room over the heads and keeps its badges.

The flock on the wire

#

• Zeca is never a session’s bird: he sits on the empty wire and in the chat. The session in front (the one that needs you, the one you picked, or the first to arrive) takes his spot in its own bird; every other session is a vult. With Zeca turned off (Settings → Flock & Zeca) an empty wire stays empty: no idle Zeca, no signature of his.
• A new session’s vult glides in from the right and lands; a session that ends takes off and flies away.
• Each running subagent sends out a scout: a Cathartes (the vultures that find food by smell) takes off from its session’s perch and circles low beside it, and flies off when the subagent ends. Three a session at most, six in all; only in the open island (the folded pill has no room), none with reduced motion. The flock and its scouts pass behind a connector’s card (the GitHub card), never over its text.
• Rare visitors: every ten to twenty minutes while sessions are open, a vulture nobody on the wire is (an Old World vulture or a condor) glides in from the right, rides the island’s thermal once and goes on its way, never landing; it passes behind the cards and rows, never over their text. Off in Settings → Flock & Zeca; none with reduced motion or while the island is hidden. The lab brings one at once: /lab/?visitor=1.
• After two seconds idle, a session’s bird takes off into the shared sky below the island. A finished session (the agent waiting for the next prompt) plays its done clip first, then takes off once that clip and the species’ signature are over (six to eight seconds after its done state shows); its “done” badge stays until you dismiss it. Each session keeps its bird across compact/open transitions, at its own phase and lap speed. The flock circles indefinitely while idle, by day. Work brings only that session’s bird down; opening the island leaves the other birds in flight. No sessions means no decorative flock.
• A vulture’s day, by the local clock: no sun, no thermal. At dawn (6 to 9) the idle birds stay on the wire with their wings open to the sun (the spread-wing pose as its own sun clip, with no mark over it, so it never acts as a card); from 9 to 5 p.m. they soar; at dusk (5 to 7 p.m.) they come down, and at night they sleep on the wire, nodding off within seconds of resting. Zeca on his own suns himself at dawn too. The rare visitors come only by day, above the flock’s highest.
• Each species at its height: the Cathartes circle low, the black vulture in the middle, the condors, the king and the Old World’s high, in the pill as on the open island.
• Flights update at 30 fps using the desktop-compatible timer. Curved climbs and returns preserve orbital velocity, with subtle banking. In the thermal each species beats its wings as its own fly clip does (the Cathartes keep rocking on their V between bursts), and the wider the wings, the rarer the bursts: every 3.6 s for the black vulture, about every 10 s for a condor. A bird leaning into a turn is drawn, not rotated: in five steps the high wing lifts and the low one drops and loses a few columns, in whole cells the same size as level flight. Flight frames use the existing bitmap cache and nearest-neighbor rendering.
• The sky is a transparent, pointer-free canvas inside the existing 720 by 640 desktop surface; it does not enlarge the input region or remap the Linux layer-shell window.
• With reduced motion (including changes while flying), birds return to their static scenes. An idle bird on its perch dozes after 90 seconds, and an idle bird takes off after 2, each ±12% by its session, so the flock never moves in step. Hidden scenes stop their drawing timers.
• The agent shows as a small band at the base of the neck (Claude orange, Codex teal, OpenCode pink, Qwen indigo, Copilot blue, any other tool, Antigravity included, violet), never as the bird’s color.
• A clip plays at least 600 ms before a calmer one replaces it; approval, question and failure cut in at once. A flight always lands before the next clip starts.

The species

#

Zeca is a black vulture unless you pick another species for him in Settings → Flock & Zeca. The flock draws from the vultures of Brazil by default; the same page widens it to the Americas (with both condors) or to every vulture in the world. Every species is built from Zeca’s rig in ui/src/character/flock/ (a palette, a size from the real bird’s measurements, a few pixel details, and only the clips where the real bird behaves differently), so all of Zeca’s clips work on every bird.

• Size: the wingspan follows the real average (Zeca’s 37 cells are 150 cm, so a condor spans 73). The extra span spreads evenly along the arm and hand of each wing, so a big bird keeps the wrist, the curve and the fingers instead of a stretched flat bar. The sunning pose is drawn at each species’ size, rows and columns added inside the wing and the body’s outline drawn again, so a big bird is bigger all over, never a longer torso; the raised wing and the stretch grow with the bird too. The hand’s feather tips are pale only where the real bird’s are (the black vulture’s white primaries, the Cathartes’ silver), spread, raised or in flight, and the Andean condor shows its white panel. The body length is compressed so the biggest birds still fit the island. Griffons, condors, the cinereous, lappet-faced and bearded vultures have a tall body of their own, with shoulders and a long neck that sinks into the ruff at rest and stretches when alert.
• Heads: every species wears Zeca’s head with its own skin, eye and bill. Facing you, the eyes sit at the edges of the face with the bill between them. The eight biggest (a perch of 26 rows or more: both condors, the bearded, griffon, Cape, Himalayan, cinereous and lappet-faced vultures) get a head one row deeper and, in profile, one column longer, or facing you a cheek column wider on each side, grown up and back so the bill tip and the neck stay put: Zeca’s head on a condor’s body read as a small bird’s. The brow ridge goes on after a species has drawn its skin, so a feathered forehead or a red head keeps its own color over the eye.
• Wings in flight: one wing is drawn at the glide, and the up- and downstrokes bend it at the shoulder, more in the hand than in the arm, so the beats read as one wing moving. Seen from below, its leading edge is lit, the flight feathers behind it are a paler band (silver on the turkey and yellow-headed vultures), the trailing edge is serrated and the primaries splay into fingers. Where the real bird’s flight feathers are dark under pale coverts (the Egyptian and palm-nut vultures, and every griffon), the back of the wing is dark; the California condor’s white is a triangle on the coverts, and the bearded vulture flies with its orange underparts and its long diamond tail. Every flight part also has a :molt copy with one flight feather missing on each wing, which the flight shows from December to March (the summer molt, by the local calendar).
• Plumage at rest: the turkey vulture is the brownest of the three Cathartes, the lesser yellow-headed the palest, with pale primary shafts streaking its folded wing, and the greater yellow-headed the blackest, with a blue-green sheen. The Egyptian vulture’s white tail is a short wedge, and the white-backed and white-rumped vultures show their white rump only as a strip at the back’s edge, under the folded wing.
• Who is which: Zeca is the species you picked. The core (crates/core/src/flock.rs) gives every other session a species from the pool you chose by a hash of its id and the season, a number the app picks at start-up: a session keeps its bird while it lives, and the flock changes each time the app starts. A project with three or more sessions crowns its oldest session king (the king vulture), and the crown stays there as the focus moves. The king is never drawn at random, so it stays rare.
• Signatures: every species has one clip of its own, from something the real bird does. A finished session’s bird plays it right after its done clip, before it takes off; Zeca alone on an empty wire (not in the chat) plays his twenty seconds after he settles, then once a minute until he dozes. A signature that leaves the perch (the lesser yellow-headed, Rüppell’s, white-backed and white-rumped vultures) happens in the sky instead: once a lap, while the bird soars, it plays its flight frames at its own point of the lap (growing from the glide and back, never past the island’s top), and the lesser yellow-headed skims down toward the island’s floor. The lab shows each one too (/lab/?species=<id>). With reduced motion, Zeca does not play his on his own.

Looks

#

Zeca alone wears a look, for the season or for good; the vults keep their species’ feathers. The core picks it from the user’s date and the setting (crates/core/src/looks.rs), and the view carries it.

A seasonal look is drawn twice in zeca.py, in profile and facing you, with where it sits on the resting head and on the front head. The other poses follow from where their crown and eye moved; the look back wears the profile mirrored, and in flight it sits on the small flight head. The other looks are composed of pieces (HATS, EYES, GRILL, NECK in zeca.py): an outfit is one line naming a hat, eyewear, a grill and what hangs from the neck, and looks() stamps the head pieces into a grid per pose (the grill sits on the lower beak, which moves more than the crown), so the renderer reads them like any look. No look rises more than 5 rows over the head; zeca.py refuses one that does.

The neck slot is the body’s: a chain hangs from under the agent’s band (the band, the agent’s mark, stays whole) and a lowered head covers it the way it would. A pendant hangs from the strand and lags a cell behind when the body sways forward (the dance, the shake of a failure); the chest holds it on the way back. The sunning pose wears the front view; flight has no band, so nothing hangs there. Asleep, the head turned back under the feathers wears what covers the crown (a hat, a bandana, locks, headphones) and none of what sits on the face; the chain hangs on the fluffed breast.

ui/src/character/looks.ts bakes a look into a copy of the set’s heads and flight frames: every head grows by the same rows on top and its layers move up as much, so a pose swap mid-clip keeps the hat in place and every clip, species and frame cache works unchanged. A look may also run below a head’s last row (the locks hang past the jaw): the grid grows down, which moves no layer. On another species the look follows its eye (the Andean condor’s comb moves it down a row). The lab previews each one (/lab/?look=<id>).

A right-click on Zeca opens his looks on the island (ui/src/island/looks.ts), grouped as above: the four seasonal ones, the head-only ones (sunglasses and the five drips with nothing at the neck) and the nine with a chain. Each tile is his idle frame wearing it; the one under the pointer goes on the perch as a live preview. The groups live in LOOK_GROUPS (ui/src/character/looks.ts), shared with Settings; a core test checks every look has one place there.

Zeca in the tray

#

In Panel mode (Settings) Zeca lives in the tray icon instead of the top island. The icon has two frames per state, chosen from core’s attention: idle, working, needs you (the loudest: a card waits), done and failed. Each frame is drawn at 22, 24 and 32 px, and the icon carries all three, so the panel picks the closest to its own (22 px on Plasma’s default) and shows it unscaled. At 32 px he is the island’s own frame (when he needs you, a narrower spread than the island’s, which is too wide for the icon); at 22 and 24 a smaller Zeca drawn for them: perched, his head lowered as he works, puffed up and hissing when it failed, wings spread when he needs you. Every state but idle also wears a round badge at the top right with a dark glyph: working dots on white (the last one blinks), needs you a bang on amber that flashes dark and back, done a check on green, failed a cross on red. Frames change slowly (a 0.2 s blink, otherwise holds of 0.5 to 4 s), none with reduced motion. A click opens the island by the panel; the icon only calls for attention, it never answers a card. The frames are drawn by zeca.py into app/icons/tray/<size>/, never at run time.

Where the art lives

#

• design/mascots/zeca/zeca.py is the source: palette, parts (body, head poses, flight frames) and clips, the seasonal looks and the pieces the other looks are made of. Run it after a change; it writes ui/src/character/zeca/zeca.json, the tray frames in app/icons/tray/, and the review sheets design/mascots/zeca/clips.png and design/mascots/zeca/looks.png.
• A frame stacks parts at integer offsets, so a head pose or a blink is drawn once and reused.
• ui/src/character/flock/ turns Zeca’s rig into every other species at run time (rig.ts holds the transforms, species.ts the 23 species); nothing is generated or checked in for them.
• ui/src/character/sprites.ts draws frames and picks one by time; it knows nothing about vultures.
• The lab (npm run dev, then /lab/) loops every clip and flies a full sortie: take-off, flapping cruise, a thermal, a glide home, the landing.