The boot screen drew a VHS/log animation with floating source pages and a typed-out mood of the day, and fed it with a moods-of-the-day fetch (twice: shell and boot.mjs), a $code source fetch, ten cache-only source reads and a 30 s core-ready wait. Too verbose for what it is, and every piece of it sat between the page and the piece. ?boot=empty is now the default: the shell removes the canvas at once and returns a stub carrying empty:true; the body's flat background stands until the piece paints. Both motd fetches, the source loop and boot.mjs's fetchAndShowSource check that flag and skip. ?noboot is the legacy spelling. ?boot=serious (clean log) and ?boot=aesthetic (VHS) keep the old animations for comparison. Smoke: tmp/empty-boot-smoke.mjs — no canvas from the first frame, zero decoration requests, prompt boots in both modes.