The duck, at length

This should have been published on 9 June. It is 5 August. Nearly two months late. Yikes.

So. There is a duck in the top bar. She is holding a terminal and she is asking you a question. The question is the whole post, really, but people keep emailing me asking what she is, so here is the long version.

The setup

What you are looking at is not a website in the way you think. It is a kiosk. You have seen these: the screen at the mall, the ticket machine at the station, the museum thing that's been showing the same slideshow since 2014. A kiosk is a normal computer with one application locked over the top of it so you can only do the one thing.

Sometimes the kiosk glitches. The application dies, and for a second you see what was underneath the whole time: a desktop, a taskbar, someone's wallpaper. That moment is the best thing about kiosks and I have wanted to build one for years.

The duck

The duck is not a mascot. She is not decoration and she is not a joke that ran long. She is the one process on this machine that was never supposed to be running, and she is the reason you can get out at all. She hands you a terminal. Nobody told her to.

A few people have already worked out that you can point that terminal at her. I am not going to tell you what happens. I will tell you that it does not work, that it will never work, and that trying anyway is the correct instinct and you should absolutely do it.

She is immortal, and given what she did for you, that seems fair. Be nice to her. Or don't - she has been fine so far.

What to actually do

Open the terminal. Type help. Read it like you would read the help output of a program you just installed: skeptically, and then try the thing that looks like it shouldn't be there. Then type lore.

A few things are true and I will state them plainly because they are not the puzzle: the commands ignore case, they don't care whether you put sudo in front of them, and nothing you do here can permanently break anything. There is a way to wipe yourself back to a clean slate if you want to start over. Everything else, go find.

If you get somewhere unexpected and it looks broken rather than intentional, that is a bug, and I would genuinely like the email.