This is fiction
Nobody is missing. Nothing on this site happened. There is no machine upstairs.
whereishairglasses.com is an interactive story written by Hairglasses to explain, at more length than a caption allows, where the work went for a while. Every log, timestamp, system message, and character on this site is invented.
Things worth stating plainly
- This site will never ask you for anything. No account, no sign-in, no email, no payment. The only inputs are puzzle answers. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere; progress is stored in your own browser and you can wipe it from the last page.
- No real person or organisation is depicted. The gallery, the November room, and every message quoted are fictional. No real institution is named, and nothing here is a real announcement.
- No emergency is implied. Please do not contact anyone about a missing person. There isn't one.
- The imagery on this site was machine-generated. Saying so matters, given the subject. The work the story is announcing is not.
- It is meant to be finished in one sitting. Roughly thirty to forty minutes. There are five puzzles, all solvable from this site plus the public Instagram bio. No paid tools, no travel, no timed windows, and every puzzle gives you progressively larger hints if you get stuck.
Accessibility
The story is the point, not the effects. Add ?plain=1 to any URL to
strip the grain, scanlines, vignette, and typewriter animation. Reduced-motion
preferences are respected automatically. Every page is readable by a screen
reader, and the one puzzle that hides text does so by contrast rather than by
removal, which means assistive tech gets it for free.
If any part of this is unreadable or unsolvable for you, that is a bug in the site and not in you. Say so and it will get fixed.
If you are stuck
Fail a gate three times and it starts helping. Fail it nine times and it simply tells you the answer. Nobody should lose a story to a puzzle.
The short version
I stopped making things for a while. I got very good at the parts of this that could be automated, and I let those parts get bigger, and eventually the whole thing was running without me in it. A system can render. It cannot decide what is worth rendering. The deciding is the job.
I'm back. It's going to be uneven for a bit.