Stickers — The Sticker Channel

Open the Sticker Exchange and look at the strip directly under the top menu. It used to be one sentence crawling past. It is now a small handheld screen, and it is broadcasting.

The Sticker Channel is a television station for a shop that never closes. It runs on a green dot-matrix panel above the shelf, it plays whether or not anyone is watching, and what it plays today is not what it played yesterday.

How: Open the Sticker Exchange — the Channel is the screen under the top menu.

Tapping the panel still does what the strip always did — it crosses between the Store and the Marketplace. The channel is what happens while you are deciding.

The show

Every day there is one new episode, twenty-two seconds long. There are 365 of them. On the first of January it starts again from episode one.

The episode is keyed to the calendar date, so:

• Everyone in the world sees the same episode on the same day.
• The day turns over in your timezone, not a server's.
• Episode 200 is episode 200 this year, next year, and every year after.
• Miss one and it is gone for about a year. There is no catch-up. This is deliberate.

The slate tells you where you are — EP.142/365 — followed by the title.

It is a generative collection

This is PD, so of course it is. The season is not 365 hand-typed scripts. It is a cast, a set of rooms, and eleven plot shapes, composed together deterministically — the same inputs produce the same episode, forever. A fixed edition of 365, hung on a shop wall instead of a gallery wall.

The cast is entirely PD's own. @brendon owns the shop and is almost never on screen. @pricediscussion is the shop — the voice behind the counter. The regulars are the familiars from the bestiary, who wander in, argue about whether the place is haunted, and miscount the shelves.

Episodes are set in the back room, on the top shelf, at the peel table, in the lost drawer, at three in the morning. Nothing in an episode is trying to sell you anything. That is the ads' job, and the ads know it.

The crate

Every seventh episode belongs to the running story. There is a crate in the back. It arrived addressed to the shop with no sender. It is warm. Nobody has opened it.

It is a serial, which means it is possible to fall behind on it, which is rather the point.

The ad breaks

After the episode, the screen inverts and announces itself the way a commercial break used to before you had read a word of it. Then three spots play, and the program comes back.

The ads are written like the back page of a comic and the two-in-the-morning infomercial that followed it — the enormous claim, the impossible offer, and the fine print that quietly takes it all back.

ASK ABOUT OUR NO-SINGLES POLICY! The policy is: no singles. Sheets sell whole. That is the policy. Thank you for asking about the policy.

ACT NOW! Act later, also fine. The marketplace does not close. There is no timer. We checked. Fine print: there is genuinely no timer.

There is one rule the ads never break, and it is worth stating plainly because it is a promise rather than a joke: the channel sells the chase, never the return. No advertisement on PD will ever suggest that a sticker gains value, is an investment, or pays you back. The gag is always that the offer is cheerfully worthless in money and priceless in every other way. That is funnier, and it is the only honest way to run a shop.

What gets advertised

The channel only ever advertises stickers. Today that means the Store, the Marketplace, the Binder, and occasionally itself.

Sticker life is going to get wider — swaps, wants, seasonal sheets, drops — and the channel is built so those simply begin airing when they exist. An advertisement can only run while the thing it advertises is live. You will never see a commercial on PD for a feature you cannot use.

Underneath

• The panel never repeats a look: twenty-two distinct transitions rotate across every beat, so even a spot you have seen before arrives differently.
• Ad breaks reshuffle every visit, so two openings in a row do not play the same commercials.
• Everything honors reduced motion — the show still plays, it simply cuts between beats instead of animating.
• The strip below the panel is unchanged: the shop's own ticker, still running.

Why it exists

Because the shelf is directly below it, and because a shop worth visiting is one where something is happening when you arrive.

A store you check when you want something is a store you visit rarely. A store with a program is a store you look in on. The binder gives you a reason to come back when you are collecting; the channel gives you one on the days you are not.