Just In Case
Oct 10, 2026 · A bin of thousands of tangled cables, every one you kept just in case. Grab one, pull it out, and dig down through the cable eras to the things you lost in there.
Everyone has this bin. Just In Case fills it with up to 5,000 tangled cables and asks you to pull them out, one by one. Touch and hold a cable, drag, and it slithers out while the pile shifts around it. A counter ticks down. There's no timer and no way to lose, and the pile is saved, so you can chip away at it over days.
The deeper you dig, the older the cables get. USB-C is on top, then Lightning, micro-USB, mini-USB, FireWire, VGA, SCART and parallel, down to a rotary-phone cord at the bottom, and a quiet banner tells you when you've reached 1995. Things you lost are tangled in there too: a dead AA battery, a hair tie that isn't yours, a single earbud (the left one). Under the last cables is the charger you've been looking for since 2014.
An emptied bin isn't the end. The next one comes from the hallway closet, then from under the bed, and each wears a new look: a different bin, desk and cable jacket. Three difficulties change how hard the cables grip each other. On Easy they slide out; on Medium they come up in clumps, and what lies on top decides whether a cable comes at all.
Every cable is physically simulated, on a phone, with no WebGPU. The pile is settled ahead of time and kept frozen, and only the cable in your hand and the ones it disturbs are live; a cable that stops moving freezes again. That's how a desktop shows 5,000 cables at 60 frames a second. There are no real knots yet, so a cable is out once nothing lies on top of it.
The idea is Jeff's, sparked by how far "A Needle In A Haystack" travelled on one absurdly large, soothing task. It's built with three.js; the desk's wood and the tape label are generated images, and everything else, including every sound, is made in code. The promo above was rendered from the real simulation with a scripted hand.