The archive · kept in public
About the House
Where the film came from, what was built on top of it, and the two books this place keeps open for anyone to read.
Rebuilt hourly
The House Ledger
Attendance, reels played, kittens kept, portraits struck, and the longest standing engagements — the site’s own figures, including the ones that do not flatter it and the ones it admits it cannot know.
Read the ledger →Twelve organizations · no affiliate fees
Help Sick Kittens
A reviewed directory of established organizations doing veterinary care, rescue, foster support and community-cat work around the world. Nobody paid to be listed. Donations go to the organization’s own domain.
Open the directory →The film
In 1903, the British filmmaker George Albert Smith shot a thirty-second scene in Hove, England: two children playing doctor to an unwell kitten, spooning it a dose of medicine. Partway through, Smith cut from the wide shot to a close view of the kitten’s face, then cut back out again.
That single edit is held to be one of cinema’s earliest true close-ups — not a magnifying-glass trick, but a camera cutting closer to follow the action itself. Every film since has borrowed the technique. It was applied first to a cat lapping “fisik” off a spoon.
The print on the feature page is the real thirty-four-second short, public domain in the United States and hosted by the Internet Archive. This project is independent and unaffiliated: not endorsed by George Albert Smith’s estate, nor by any rights holder.
The house
Everything here is built around that one cut. The house has two wings and this archive between them.
- The Picture House is the playable wing: seven browser games, ten silent-film picture books, an hourly meme reel, the Studio’s soft bank, and a portrait booth. All free, all in the browser, no account.
- The Ticker Room is the back office: live price, every wallet holding the coin, and a block-by-block reading of the launch — including the parts that do not flatter it.
- This archive keeps the ledger and the charity board, and explains the rest.
The split is deliberate. Someone who arrived for a 1903 film should be able to spend an afternoon here without a chart in sight, and someone who arrived for the ticker should not have to hunt for it.
The coin
$SICKKITTEN is a Solana memecoin. It is a tribute to a public-domain film, and it is entertainment. Nothing on this site is financial advice, a solicitation, or a promise about anything — not the price, not the roadmap, not the games. The Ticker Room reports what the chain says, favourable or not, and the ward weather on that page is a mood reading of the tape written as house weather, not a signal.
The games, the books, the reel and the portrait studio work whether or not you have ever held the coin, and none of them will ask you to.
The reel
The house strikes one frame an hour, writes it an intertitle, and files it in the gallery. There are two floors and they alternate by the clock: even hours strike a market frame that winks at the tape, odd hours strike a public frame from the Studio’s soft bank — nursing, film history and kindness, with no market tails anywhere in the copy. The reel lets you choose which floor you are standing on.
No two intertitles in the gallery are allowed to repeat each other, on either floor. Both are checked against the same index.
Kittens
The 1903 kitten became part of film history. Sick, injured, abandoned and unowned cats still need veterinary care, rescue, shelter, sterilization and safe homes every day. The charity board is the house’s answer to that, and it takes nothing for carrying it.