chaipat.cc, the library of books

chaipat.cc is his personal site: a library of books about his life. Each book tells one part of it and is presented as a book, in a form of its own. It is the front door of the chaipat.cc research network; questions about his work are answered here, on ask.chaipat.cc.

The site opens on a room. A pile of books lies on a low table by a window, and the rest stand on a shelf on the wall. Pointing at a book shows its library card, and clicking opens it. Its Japanese name is 積ん読 (tsundoku), the habit of letting books pile up unread.

The books

A fourth place on the shelf is marked as forthcoming. Every book is listed in one catalogue file. The featured books lie in the pile on the table and every other book stands on the shelf, where a spine is drawn for it from its colours and title, so a new book needs no new 3D work. A catalogue button lists every book as plain text, which is also how phones, screen readers and search engines see them.

The room

The room is drawn in real 3D with three.js. Light comes through the window and a shoji screen, and throws moving shadows of the lattice and of maple leaves. The light follows the time of day in Ishikawa, and the weather outside the window is Ishikawa's real weather, fetched from Open-Meteo every fifteen minutes: clear, cloudy, fog, rain, thunderstorms, and snow that piles up on the window ledge. The branch outside follows the season there. Where WebGL is not available, a flat room drawn in CSS is shown instead.

How it is built

The library is a static site in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no framework. Everything runs in the visitor's web browser. The words of every book live in plain text files, once in Japanese and once in English. A build script in Python turns them into the finished pages and warns when a text has grown too long for its page. The built pages are committed, and Vercel serves them as they are.

Every page opens in Japanese. One button switches every book between Japanese and English, and the choice is remembered. Motion is reduced for visitors who ask their system for less.

The writing, photographs and drawings are all rights reserved; the code is licensed separately from them.

History

The library began in November 2026 as life.chaipat.cc. Until then chaipat.cc had been the address of the ask-me-anything site. In the same month the two changed places: the library took the root address, and the site you are reading moved to ask.chaipat.cc.

Nothing was left behind by the move. The old addresses of this site on chaipat.cc, such as its wiki pages, the timeline, the CV and the knowledge graph files, redirect to the same pages on ask.chaipat.cc. A small service worker on chaipat.cc retires the one the old site had installed there, so a returning visitor sees the books and not a stored copy of the other site. The third book, Nenrin (年輪), a picture scroll, tells this history as a scroll.

See also

• ask.chaipat.cc, the portfolio you can question
• The chaipat.cc network
• Writing and templates

@prefix id: <https://ask.chaipat.cc/id/> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix cj: <https://ask.chaipat.cc/ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

id:Library
    a cj:Project ;
    rdfs:label "chaipat.cc, the library of books" ;
    cj:shortLabel "chaipat.cc" ;
    skos:altLabel "library of books" ,
                  "the library" ,
                  "his books" ,
                  "books library" ,
                  "books site" ,
                  "life.chaipat.cc" ,
                  "tsundoku" ;
    cj:context id:ChaipatCC ;
    cj:kind "app" ;
    cj:theme id:ThemeWeb , id:ThemeWriting ;
    cj:uses id:JavaScript ,
            id:HTMLCSS ,
            id:ThreeJS ,
            id:Python ,
            id:Vercel ;
    cj:url "https://chaipat.cc"^^xsd:anyURI ;
    cj:liveUrl "https://chaipat.cc"^^xsd:anyURI ;
    cj:begun "2026"^^xsd:gYear ;
    cj:origin "It began in November 2026 as life.chaipat.cc and took over the root address chaipat.cc when the ask-me-anything site moved to ask.chaipat.cc." ;
    cj:description "His personal site: a library of books about his life, each presented as a book in its own form. A pile of books lies on a low table by a window in a room drawn in 3D, in the real weather and time of day of Ishikawa; the rest stand on a shelf. A static site in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in Japanese and English." ;
    cj:tier 2 ;
    cj:integrates id:OpenMeteo ;
    cj:runsOn id:Browser ;
    cj:mentions id:NARIT ;
    cj:article "https://ask.chaipat.cc/wiki/Library"^^xsd:anyURI .