whatA lattice of trees that grows one sprout at a time, and lightning that takes a whole connected patch at a single stroke. The Drossel-Schwabl forest-fire model: growth is slow and local, burning is instant and collective -- a separation of timescales that the forest itself turns into structure.

whyThe claim: fire sizes follow a power law -- there is no typical fire. The octave histogram and its fitted slope sit in the corner, live. Then the management twist: drag the suppression slider and every blaze smaller than the quota is stamped out. Fires become rarer -- and the forest thickens, fuel connecting to fuel, until the one fire that escapes the quota takes a catastrophic bite. Suppression does not remove the big fire; it feeds it. Click anywhere to throw your own lightning.

howSeeded lattice, each empty cell regrows with a small probability per step; a strike ignites the entire breadth-first cluster instantly, and an ember layer fades where it burned. Log-octave size histogram with a least-squares slope over the populated octaves; catastrophic means a single fire over 5 percent of the lattice; the statistics reset honestly whenever the quota moves.