Somewhere on every page of the internet there is a ball waiting to happen. This guide concerns itself with the ancient and gentle art of gathering loose words into a single, ever-growing sphere, and with everything that happens to your afternoon once you begin.
Every ball starts modestly, about the size of a plum, trembling faintly in the middle of your screen. It has no opinions and no momentum. It waits. The moment you move your mouse, the ball wakes up and follows, slightly late, the way a duckling follows a shoe. This small delay is not a bug. The delay is what makes the ball feel alive, and it is the first thing you will fall in love with, roughly four seconds into the experiment.
Small words stick immediately. Articles, prepositions, stray punctuation that wandered off from its sentence — all of it sweeps up on contact. Within moments your ball wears a fuzz of language, and you begin to notice how much of any given page is made of tiny words doing quiet structural work. Respect them. They are the foundation of everything.
Each word you collect makes the ball a little larger, and each millimeter of growth unlocks bigger prey. First the body text. Then the bold bits. Then the subheadings, which come free with a satisfying pop. Eventually — and this is the whole point — the giant headline at the top of the page, which sneered at your tiny ball only moments ago, slides obligingly onto your surface like it was always going to. It was. That is the natural order of the roll.
The ball does not chase the page. The page arranges itself politely along the ball's path, and calls it destiny.
Physicists describe this as momentum. Poets describe it as appetite. Both are correct, and both are standing very close to the truth, which is that everything wants to be part of something rounder than itself.
WOW
(go on, you know you want to grow big enough for this one)
Amateurs zigzag. Professionals glide. A slow, level pass through a dense paragraph harvests entire lines in one motion, and the words arrive on the ball in reading order, like a very small parade. Savor this. Pages are rebuilt in milliseconds, but parades are rare.
Drop the ball into the middle of a bullet list and let physics do the paperwork. The list below has been provided for exactly this purpose, and will not be missed:
Images roll up too, once your ball is big enough for them. Practice on the diagram below, which depicts a ball at an early stage of its career:
When the fun is over, press Escape. Every word flies home to the exact spot it came from, the page reassembles itself node for node, and nobody can prove anything happened. This is the most civilized feature of the entire apparatus, and the one your browser history appreciates most. (The ball itself is driven by holding a mouse button and moving — it has momentum, it coasts, and it bounces off the edges of the page like a tiny respectful meteor.)
Rollers of pages commonly report the following experiences: sudden and unreasonable attachment to specific words; a new sensitivity to the typography of menus; the discovery that some pages contain an astonishing number of words and that this is, somehow, delightful rather than alarming. A smaller group reports attempting to roll up words in print media, which the ball does not currently support, though the committee remains optimistic about future standards.
If you notice your ball has grown larger than the viewport, do not panic. Zoom out. The page will wait. The page has nothing but time, and you have a ball with a small city of language stuck to it. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon. There are arguably no better ones.