What is settled, and what is open

What is settled, what is open, and the reasoning for each — so the same question is not re-litigated in three weeks.

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Open Link to this section

The wordmark and the tagline Link to this section

The masthead currently reads Queering.Earth with "Post-normal possibilities." under it. Both are provisional.

The tagline is Helen Edgar's own phrase from the founding brainstorm, chosen because it is short and it is ours. The attribution question it raised is settled — the masthead now credits Nick Walker, see below. The wording of both wordmark and tagline is still open. It replaced the working tagline — "Subverting, defying, disrupting, and liberating oneself from all forms of normativity (props Nick Walker)" — which is a paraphrase of Walker wearing his name. See ATTRIBUTIONS.md for the full reasoning and for how the page handles Walker now.

Changing either is one line in index.html. Whatever replaces them, the paraphrase problem does not come back: quote him exactly, or write our own line.

.qe-wide narrows on paper and widens nothing on screen, and whether the provocation should break the measure Link to this section

Found 2026-09-09, while deriving the drift rail's breakpoint. Not fixed, on purpose.

queering.css carried a note saying two blocks break the measure — the masthead and the provocation. It was wrong twice over. The masthead has never carried the class at all, and .qe-wide is a child of main, main is max-width: 34rem, and a max-width of 46rem inside a 34rem parent constrains nothing. Measured on screen: main is 544px, .qe-wide is 448px, exactly the content box every other block gets.

"It does nothing" was then the overcorrection, and it went out in three commits before anybody checked paper. @media print sets main { max-width: none }, so on a printed sheet this rule is the only thing holding the provocation in — it caps a block that would otherwise run the full width, and centres it. The class does not widen; on the one medium where it is live, it narrows. Measured by reproducing the print condition:

So its effect scales with the printer's margins and is invisible at the defaults, which is why nothing looked broken and why nobody can miss a block that was never wider. It surfaced only because the rail's breakpoint arithmetic reserved 288px of margin for it.

The lesson is the one this repo keeps relearning, arriving from a third direction: the first claim was reasoned from a rule, the second was measured on screen and generalised to every medium. check-contrast.mjs and check-overlap.mjs both measure paper separately precisely because paper is not a wider screen.

Three ways out, and this is a design question rather than a defect to sweep up:

1. Make it real on screen — width: min(46rem, calc(100vw - 2 * var(--qe-gutter))) with negative margins, or move the constraint off main. The provocation would then genuinely break the measure, which is what the note claimed all along. This changes how every page looks, and the rail's clearance would have to be re-measured against a block that finally is 736px wide.
2. Delete it, on the grounds that the site has looked right without it for its whole life and the measure is the design — accepting that the provocation then runs the full width on paper like everything else.
3. Keep it and describe it honestly as the paper-only narrowing rule it actually is.

Ryan took 3 on 2026-09-09: the note now matches the code, and the code is unchanged. Option 1 stays available and is a separate, deliberate design change.

The rail's breakpoint is measured against what actually renders rather than against the rule, which is the right way round regardless of which way this ever goes.

Whether Helen gets a static CMS Link to this section

Deferred, with a named trigger. Not now, for three reasons:

1. The design intent — queering the zine itself, playing with graphic font layout, each piece interpreting its own subject — is what a CMS structurally cannot hold. A CMS earns its cost when content is uniform and layout is fixed. Here the layout is the argument.
2. Netlify Identity's git-gateway is being sunset, so Decap or Sveltia means standing up GitHub OAuth ourselves, writing a schema for a content model that does not exist yet, and adding a build step to a site that has none.
3. The zero-cost path already works: Helen edits files in the GitHub web editor, opens a pull request, and Netlify posts a deploy preview URL on it. She sees the real page at a real URL before it goes live. Star Stuff runs 192 pages this way with no CMS.

The trigger: the first repeating, uniform content type — a series where every entry has the same sections in the same order. Then Sveltia CMS, and not before.

The question still worth asking Helen: is the friction publishing, or authoring? If she writes prose and a session builds the artifact around it, no CMS touches that problem.

Which edition a sheet reads, when the work was revised Link to this section

Opened by the Woolf verification below, and it is a real design question rather than a pedantic one.

On Being Ill exists in two authorial states. Woolf published it in The New Criterion in January 1926 and revised it for the Hogarth Press edition of 1930, which she and Leonard printed and hand-set themselves. The revisions are not typographical. In the first paragraph alone she changed "brings to light" to "brings to view," "uprooted in us in the act of sickness" to "by the act of sickness," cut "and infinitely more," and opened out two lists from commas into her own and…and…and:

So the label's "date of the original" is not one field for a revised work. A sheet that mounts On Being Ill is mounting one of two texts, and the date, the wording, and the publisher move together. Three ways to handle it and none is obviously right yet:

1. Name the edition on the label and quote only from it — the cheapest, and it makes the choice visible instead of silent.
2. Read the revision itself as the subject. A writer opening her commas into and…and…and between one printing and the next, four years later, in type she set with her own hands, is a queering of her own sentence. That is a sheet, not a footnote.
3. Show both, side by side, and let the reader do the work. Riskiest to lay out, most honest to the material, and the most "no hard facts for everything" of the three.

Worth settling with Helen, because it decides what the Woolf sheet is.

A second sheet has now hit the same question, 2026-09-08. promises-like-pie-crust.html mounts Rossetti's Promises like Pie-crust, whose 1896 first printing has a colon at line 20 where every circulating copy has a full stop. Both sheets ended up doing 1 and 2 together: name the printing on the label, quote only from it, and make the difference between printings a section of the sheet. Two for two is a pattern, not yet a rule — but the next sheet that reads a revised or posthumously-printed work should assume this is the house answer unless Helen and Ryan decide otherwise, and option 3 (both texts side by side) still has no worked example.

Rossetti's case adds a wrinkle Woolf's did not have. Woolf revised her own text, so both states are authorial and the question is which of her two you mean. Rossetti died before the poem was printed at all: the 1896 text is her brother's transcription of her notebook, so the earliest printing is not certified to be her hand, and the sheet has to say so rather than resting the finding on "the older text wins."

Three quotations on More Realms, checked because a sheet reused them (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Not ours to fix, and now specific enough to be fixable. The open Woolf item that stood here since 2026-09-08 said "ours to check against the book before any sheet reuses it." Sheet No. 8 reuses it, so it got checked, along with everything else on the page it follows. Ryan supplied A Room of One's Own and The Letters of Emily Dickinson; the results split three ways.

1. Woolf's "resonant and porous" — the wording is right. Closed. Verified in the book (chapter VI, pp. 148–149, Hogarth 1929). The phrase is Woolf's, the ellipsis is honest, nothing was tightened. The only fault was citing it to Popova rather than to Woolf, and our sheet cites the book. One nuance we kept and she may want: the sentence is Woolf guessing at what Coleridge meant, and it is hedged twice — "Perhaps the androgynous mind…", "He meant, perhaps…". Quoting from "the androgynous mind is resonant and porous" quietly promotes a speculation to a definition.

2. The Mary Oliver epigraph is in the wrong book and is trimmed. Open, hers. It appears on at least two More Realms posts (Monotropa Uniflora and Monotropism, Mossy Minds & Monotropism) and on autisticrealms.com, as "Attention without feeling, is only a report." — Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (2016). It is not in Upstream; Ryan owns it and looked. It is in Our World (Beacon Press, 2007), and the full passage is "Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter." Three words gone from the middle, and the whole second sentence gone — the sentence that says what attention needs instead. The quotation as it circulates states the problem and drops the answer. Full working in ATTRIBUTIONS.md.

3. The Dickinson letter has drifted three characters. Open, hers, and very minor. Against Letter 997 in the Letters: a dash where there is a full stop, child for Child, and an inserted the in "enhances the mystery". Nobody did it on purpose; it is what happens to a quotation copied from a copy. It is worth a line only because the sheet's subject is that Dickinson's punctuation and capitals were regularised by her editors, and this is the same drift, on the same writer, in a friendly source, in 2026.

Where these live, for a session in the More Realms repo: site/morerealms-com/posts/monotropa-uniflora-and-monotropism.md, site/morerealms-com/posts/mossy-minds-monotropism.md, site/autisticrealms-com/posts/mossy-minds-monotropism.md, and the "resonant and porous" citation also appears in neuroqueering-time-bergson-deleuze-and-monotropism-an-exploration.md on both her domains. Never edited from this repo.

Two lists at the foot of the home page, not one Link to this section

The home page ends with the pages that are not specimens. They divide in two, and the first version of this note got it wrong by putting everything in one list.

• The founding papers — why this cabinet exists and what it is for. /mission, a manifesto, and whatever else states the project's stance rather than describing it. Nothing is in it yet, which is why the section is not built: an empty heading is worse than no heading.
• The cabinet itself — how it is made, what it has recorded, how to search it, and what it knows about you. /design, /changelog, /search, /privacy. Built and live.

Purpose above plumbing, both at the foot of the page, both bare-tier dls.

THE SPLIT IS PRECEDENTED, NOT INVENTED. Star Stuff already made it: What this project is holds mission, manifesto, six-principles-and-a-room and inclusion-safety-creed; How it is made, and how it is checked holds privacy, design, changelog and print-design. Our existing list maps onto that second group one for one, privacy included. Ryan raised the question, the shelf had already answered it.

Four names were considered and all four refused, for reasons worth keeping so the question is not reopened from scratch:

• The Workroom — the room where mounting, labelling and filing happen. That is more mechanical, not less; it describes /design and /changelog better than a mission.
• The Field — where specimens are collected. Points at gathering rather than purpose, and field guide is a Star Stuff form with a dozen instances, so it collides across the shelf.
• The Ground — collides locally and badly. "The ground" is this site's own name for the light/dark state; the control on every page says Cabinet, and CLAUDE.md heads a section "The ground is paper, and its other state is the cabinet."
• Outreach — NGO register. The house voice has no word like it anywhere.

The founding papers is archive vocabulary for an institution's charter documents, which is what a mission and a manifesto are, and it is parallel in shape to The cabinet itself so the two read as a pair.

The mission page is an index of aims, not an argument (open until it is written) Link to this section

The home page already carries 611 words of manifesto — #queering-is-a-verb (215), #to-queer-is-to-adapt (278), #the-type-plays (110) — plus 118 in #what-this-is. A mission and a manifesto written from scratch would restate most of it, and two copies of the same words drift is the rule this site repeats more than any other.

The genre is the fix, and Star Stuff found it: its mission page is eleven aims, each one linked to the page where that aim is already being kept. An index of commitments with receipts cannot duplicate an argument, because it is not one. Ryan chose this over moving the manifesto sections off the home page, so the home page keeps its argument unchanged.

Much of the material already exists and is already checkable — cite to the primary (ATTRIBUTIONS.md, every provenance line), publish the corrections (/changelog), never an image of text (/design, enforced by check-contrast), make no third-party request (/privacy, enforced by check-metadata). An aim with no page keeping it is the interesting case, and the ones that turn up when the list is drafted are worth arguing about rather than quietly dropping.

What a new entry in either list costs: a <dt>/<dd> pair in index.html, a slug in the right group in tools/pages.mjs, and the ordinary new-page checklist — a register entry with its data-sheet, a social card, a JSON-LD block, a redirect rule, a sitemap line, a regenerated Markdown sibling. No plate number, no accession stamp, no provenance line: those are for specimens. The lists derive nothing, on purpose — those sentences are authored, and queering.js may not write words.

Still open: whether either section keeps a prose intro once it holds more than four entries.

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Settled Link to this section

A rail of the page's own headings, and both contents lists shown at once (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Settled, and the interesting half was overruled.

Every <h2> here has carried an authored id since the contents list was built, so /#what-grows-here and /#the-cabinet-itself were already addresses. What was missing was the affordance: the plate is eight screens down the home page and the cabinet fourteen, and nothing on screen said either could be jumped to. A link nobody can find is close to a link that does not exist — the objection this site makes to an untraceable quotation, arriving as a navigation problem.

.qe-rail is fixed in the left margin above 64rem and absent below it. Same derivation as .qe-contents — the page's own headings, in document order, labelled with their own words — through one builder in queering.js, because a second loop would be a second place for the three heading exclusions to be got right.

IT COLLAPSES TO TICKS, AND THE HEADINGS COME UP ON HOVER. The first build showed every label all the time; Ryan wanted the reference site's behaviour, which is a column of short rules that becomes a list of headings when a pointer enters it. This is not what "no scroll-spy" was refusing — that refusal is about a mark which tracks the reader down the page on its own, unprompted, forever. The rail moves only when a reader asks it to. Nothing here follows the scroll.

The labels stay in flow at opacity: 0, and that one decision is what makes it safe. The reference site puts each label in an absolutely positioned pill so its ticks can sit at an even 20px pitch. Refused here, by working out what the gates would see: revealed for measurement, those pills would lie over one another and check-overlap.mjs would report every label sitting on the next. Left in flow, the revealed state is exactly the expanded rail already measured clean at 1280px. The cost is paid in the collapsed state — a row is as tall as its own label, so the ticks are not evenly pitched. That is one row on the home page and three on /flower-codes; a hand-ruled pitch suits this house, and overlapping labels would be a defect.

THE TICKS CARRY THE SHAPE OF THE PAGE, AND THAT IS WHAT EARNS THE UNEVENNESS. Collapsed, the rail was a column of identical rules at an uneven pitch — uneven because a row is as tall as its own label. Ryan's read was that it looked like an imperfection to lean into. The problem with leaning into it as it stood is that asymmetry only reads as asymmetry against a norm, and with nothing else varying the pitch just read as an accident.

So the ticks were given the norm to deviate from, and the deviation is inherited from the sheet rather than invented: each tick is as long as its section is tall, normalised 9–32px across the page. The rail became a small scale drawing of the document — you can see which section is the long one before reading a word of it. Checked on /wild-nights: the 3032px section draws 32px, the 1635px section draws 9px, monotonic across all eight.

That it means something is the licence for it, not a bonus. A tick whose length varies looks like it encodes something, and this repo refuses decoration asserting a fact it does not have. Four options were rendered against the real stylesheet before choosing — flat, weight-only, lean-only, and both — and the one that varied length without meaning was refused for exactly that reason.

The lean is the other half and it claims nothing, which is what makes it free to be ornament: up to 3.2° per tick, walked by the golden angle so it is deterministic rather than random. The same sheet draws the same rail every time, which is what lets a stain be a fact about one sheet rather than a dice roll per visit. It is the wonk axis this site already runs on its type, applied to a rule instead of a letter.

They part company under html.plain: the lean goes, the lengths stay. Plain view removes decoration; it has never removed information. That distinction is the whole argument for splitting the effect in two rather than shipping one varying tick.

Measured after document.fonts.ready. A webfont swap moves section extents, and a rail measured against the fallback is measuring the wrong sheet. Nothing else needs re-measuring — main is capped at 34rem and the rail only exists above 64rem, so the measure never reflows while the rail is visible. A page with no variation in section height gets a flat 22px instead of a stretched range: there is no scale to draw, and stretching a flat range would invent one.

THE RAIL GETS ONE TERMINUS AND NOT A SCATTER OF DOODLES. Ryan asked whether small doodles above, below or around the rail would add to the handwritten feel, and flagged the risk in the same breath: that it might compromise the Ma. Both arrangements were drawn against the real stylesheet and looked at, and his instinct was right about the scatter.

• A cluster at the head of the rail sits in the top-left corner of the page — where a reader's eye starts, and where the skip link appears on focus. It makes the rail's decoration the first thing anyone sees.
• The rail's entire licence is Ma. It is unlabelled specifically so the margin stays empty, and the margin either side of the measure is the negative space the spacing work cleared. Filling it with marks spends the thing that made the rail acceptable.

What survives is the version that is not an addition at all. The rail's rule already reads as a stem, and a stem that simply stops is the only unbotanical thing about it. So it now ends in a terminus — two leaves and a bud, continuing the line rather than sitting beside it, pulled back past the nav's padding to meet the border. It occupies margin nothing else wanted and adds no second object to the page. 28px, stroke only, moss.

It wears .qe-botanical, so the growth idiom is inherited rather than restated: the stem draws itself on, the leaves unfurl, and both were already gated on prefers-reduced-motion and already kept-but-stilled under html.plain. Only the size is new, exactly as with the moth — a second copy of that idiom would be a second thing to keep in step. It takes --qe-moss and so follows the ground with no cabinet rule of its own; verified in both, and at 0.85 opacity in plain view.

The unguarded-ornament problem is real and is why this is small. check-overlap.mjs catches text on text, so a drawing in the margin is measured by nothing — it could drift onto the measure at some width and no gate would say a word. Keeping the mark inside the rail's own box means the rail's own measured clearance covers it. Anything free-floating out there would need measuring by hand at every breakpoint, which is a maintenance cost this site has not agreed to pay for decoration.

Hover-gating is only allowed because every other way in stays open. This repo already refuses a hover-gated section mark, on the grounds that hover hands a feature to mice and to nobody else. The rail is exempt because nothing is actually withheld: the heading text is in the DOM at all times, so a screen reader has every link name whatever the opacity says; :focus-within brings the rail up when a keyboard arrives in it; @media (hover: none) never collapses it on a device that cannot hover; and plain view never collapses it either. Take any one of those away and the collapse becomes the thing this file forbids.

BOTH LISTS SHOW, AND THAT WAS RYAN'S CALL AGAINST THE RECOMMENDATION. The recommendation was to hide the in-body list wherever the rail is up, on the grounds that this file already refuses a contents list for the home page because two competing navigational lists is a defect. Ryan overruled it: he wants both. The refusal still stands and does not reach this case, and the reason is worth keeping because it is the argument that makes the overrule right rather than merely instructed —

• The contents list is front matter: read once, in sequence, in the measure, before the sheet begins.
• The rail is an instrument: not read at all, glanced at from the middle of a sheet nine thousand words in.
• The home-page defect was two lists competing to be read. Only one of these is for reading.

So the design work went into making them unmistakably different objects instead of into hiding one: the rail is smaller, moss rather than rust, unnumbered, unlabelled, and set out past the measure in space no line of text ever occupies. It is unlabelled because a visible heading would be a third copy of the words "On this sheet" and the one free to drift; the aria-label is authored in the markup, once per page.

The register does not get one, for the reason it has no contents list either: 28 headings averaging 147 characters, longest 226, which in a 12rem column with no truncation allowed is a four-thousand-pixel rail.

No scroll-spy, unchanged and for the same reason — a mark that moves as the reader scrolls is a second thing on screen that never settles, and a rail is where that costs most. :target still marks where a reader landed.

THE BREAKPOINT SHIPPED AT 77rem, RYAN COULD NOT SEE THE RAIL AT ALL, AND THE NUMBER WAS WRONG TWICE OVER. Zen's tab sidebar takes its width out of the viewport, so a 1440px laptop was arriving under 1232px and the rail never appeared. Reducing the number turned into finding out it had never been derived correctly.

• The breakpoint was never measuring clearance. The rail and the page are both derived from the same centre line, so the gap between them is constant at every width — widening the window moves both outwards together and buys the prose nothing. The only thing that fails as the window narrows is the rail sliding off the left edge. The left is now pinned with max(0.75rem, …), which converts that failure from "slides off the edge" into "stops moving".
• The sum reserved room for a width that never happens on screen. It held back space for .qe-wide at 46rem, on the strength of this repo's own note that the masthead and the provocation break the measure. On screen they do not — see the item above, where the class turns out to narrow on paper rather than widen anywhere. The rail was protecting 288px of nothing, and the rail is never printed.

Measured rather than calculated, which is what should have happened first: at 1024px the leftmost thing inside main across the art-heavy sheets is 277–288px, against a rail ending at 172px. That is ~108px of real clearance where the old sum was defending 24px. 64rem is that figure with slack, and it is 208px better than shipped — enough for a 400px sidebar on a 1440 screen. Boundary checked both sides: display: none at 1023px, block at 1024px. A 9rem column would reach further still and is refused: at 144px a heading wraps to five and six lines and the collapsed pitch gets wilder than the labels are worth. Vanishing below the breakpoint is also what satisfies WCAG 1.4.10 — at 400% zoom the viewport is 320px wide and the rail is already gone, so it cannot eat the height a reflowed page needs.

Two costs came out free, and both were checked rather than assumed.

• The rail sits outside the landmark, so no generator changed a byte when all three were re-run. make-markdown.mjs and make-search-index.mjs already skip nav.qe-contents by class; the rail needed no equivalent because it is never reached.
• Being built at runtime cost nothing; hiding the labels cost a REVEAL line. Those are two different things and the difference is the lesson. Both Chrome gates load over file:// and queering.js is included by relative URL, so it runs — the always-visible first build was measured in full with no help at all, proved by injecting a 2.9:1 colour into .qe-contents a and watching check-contrast.mjs report 68 failures, exactly each page's heading count minus one. Collapsing the labels to opacity: 0 put all 109 of them back in the blind spot, which is the hidden-state case REVEAL exists for. Proved both ways with a probe colour on .qe-rail a: with the line, 109 failures caught; without it, a clean PASS and 218 elements silently dropped from the count. REVEAL is for a fetch or a hidden state — never for anything merely built at runtime.

The hit-area rule was got wrong twice, in one control.

• Wrong instrument. .qe-controls grows its targets with an absolutely positioned 44px box behind each control. Rail links are stacked, so those boxes would overlap, the topmost would take every tap, and the rule asking for 44px would have produced a rail where most entries could not be pressed. Stacked targets take real padding.
• Wrong arithmetic. The padding was then set from the measurements of a 1rem line, so the control shipped a comment claiming 44px above targets measuring 31.1px. Caught by measuring the rendered box. A 0.82rem line at 1.35 is 17.71px, so 0.83rem either side gives 44.3px. Re-measured after: no two hit areas overlap, and the tallest rail on the site — /design at fourteen entries, 690px — clears a 900px viewport before the clamp scrolls it.

An eighth gate: check-card-order, and why the port is a rewrite (2026-09-09) Link to this section

The plate shipped 1-6, 8, 7 and /the-tempest shipped 4, 1, 2, 3. All seven other gates passed both, and none was wrong to — order is not colour, position, freshness, routing, structure, headers or the manifest. The house rule is to port a Star Stuff check when the failure becomes possible here; this one had already happened twice.

The port could not be a copy. Upstream checks ascending order within each series, because a collection there interleaves Zine and Field Guide numbers deliberately. This site has no series: one accession run, kind chip as a label. No. 8 is a Wall and No. 7 a Reading, so under the series split the broken plate is two perfectly ascending sequences and the gate would have certified the page that prompted it. Verified by patching the split in and watching it report ok · 0 problem(s), then taking it out and watching the same plate fail. Recorded because the next port will look equally straightforward.

Three rules, each made to fail before being believed: ascending within a grid (the restored plate); cards outside any grid (one card moved out); every card agreeing with the plate about a sheet's number and kind. Plus the empty-authority guard — break the card selector on index.html and it reports NOT MEASURED rather than clean, which is the overlap gate's empty-pass lesson arriving in a second tool — and --check both ways, exit 1 with, exit 0 without.

Rule 3 earned its place on its first honest run, the same way the upstream tool's second check did. Fifteen cards disagreed with the plate: /404 filed /coming-to-terms as a Reading when it is Ryan's own essay, and /monotropa-uniflora as a Reading where the plate says Wall; and the No. 8 accession had written its kind chips with articles — "A wall" on seven pages, "A reading" and "An essay" through its own nav — against bare nouns on the fifty cards before it. The plate is the authority and not the majority: a vote among sibling navs would have let a fault copied onto seven pages outrank the one page whose subject is what the cabinet holds.

Where the plate is silent, mutual agreement is still required. It does not card itself, so nothing could arbitrate / being "Plate" on one nav and "The plate" on another. That is reported apart and counted once per address, not once per page, because printing it twice invites somebody to fix whichever file they opened first. No other kind chip carries an article, so "Plate".

Refused: checking the plate against tools/pages.mjs. They agree today, which is why it is tempting. They are two different facts — the number records when a sheet was accessioned, the group records the order a reader should meet the pages — and mounting Sheet No. 9 third would diverge them legitimately. Coupling them makes an editorial decision a build failure.

Still not ported: check-classes, check-sheets, check-embeds. check-classes is the one closest to the bar — a class with no rule renders black and no gate here catches it, and it happened twice in one afternoon — but unlike this one it needs a browser, because it wants the real cascade.

The ledger and the decision log became pages, generated backwards (2026-09-09) Link to this section

/mission aim 12 claims the site works in public with the working-out left in, and pointed at two files on GitHub because they were reachable no other way. An aim whose receipt is on somebody else's website is the thinnest receipt on that page. So ATTRIBUTIONS.md is now /ledger and DECISIONS.md is now /what-is-settled.

Generated, not transcribed, and the direction is inverted on purpose. Every other generator reads a page's landmark and writes the Markdown beside it. make-records.mjs reads the Markdown and writes the page body between markers, because these two are working documents: the credit-source skill appends to one, every session that settles something appends to the other. Making the page the source would mean editing a ledger entry in HTML — which is how a ledger stops being kept. Either direction is fine. Two hand-kept copies is the thing this house is organised against.

THE SLUGS ARE A FILESYSTEM FACT, NOT A PREFERENCE. macOS is case-insensitive by default. /decisions is decisions.html; make-markdown.mjs writes <name>.md beside every page; decisions.md is DECISIONS.md. The generator would have silently overwritten its own source with a round-tripped copy of itself, on the first run, with git as the only way back. attributions.md collides identically. Checked with a temp directory before a line was written. /ledger is the site's own name for that file in every footer it appears in; /what-is-settled is the other file's own opening line.

The proof was wrong more often than the converter, which is the interesting part. The tool compares each block's words against the rendered text before writing. It fired five times: once on a real fault — **The lower-case *g* is kept**, emphasis nested inside emphasis, where the inner pair is a letter being quoted and the first pass refused the nesting rather than reading it — and four times on the proof itself, which was stripping a list bullet, a table's pipes, the underscores out of Photon Pulse_he_him (a study participant's pseudonym the converter was right to keep), and the {#anchor} out of a pinned heading. A guard that cries wolf gets relaxed, so the proof was rewritten to model the converter rather than approximate it.

Heading ids are slugged, against the house rule, with an escape hatch. The rule is that an id is authored because a slug dies when the heading is reworded. It cannot be met by a generator over ~120 entry headings with nowhere in Markdown to author one. So ### Title {#anchor} is honoured where written and a slug is used where it is not — one line to pin an address somebody has actually shared, no schema. Two headings that slug alike stop the run naming both, because check-markup.mjs would report the duplicate id as a symptom on a generated file while only this tool knows the two titles.

Both walkers learned pre the same afternoon, and the Markdown one needed more than the tag: its text handler collapses whitespace and escapes punctuation, which is right everywhere except inside a fence — the first output put a shell command and its continuation on one line with backslashes through the quoting. The search walker indexes the block rather than skipping it; a command in the decision log is content.

The search index roughly doubled and that is stated rather than hidden, in the register and here: 154 KB gzipped to 249 KB. It is fetched after render with max-age=0, so an unchanged index is a 304 and no bytes move — the cost is paid when it changes, not per visit. Both records were indexed rather than only the ledger, because a decision nobody can search is close to a decision nobody published. /search's lede moved in the same commit, for the third time a page that binds us has had to.

Still open: neither page has an index of its own entries. /ledger runs to 55 of them under two headings, so .qe-contents — which derives from h2s — would show two useless lines. The register solved the same problem with .qe-sheet-index as back matter, and that is the shape to copy when somebody wants it. Not built rather than half-built.

The cabinet's own pages came out of the footer (2026-09-09) Link to this section

/design, /changelog, /search and /privacy were reachable only from the footer of every page, which is where a site puts what it hopes nobody needs. A site that publishes an attribution ledger and a privacy policy should not file both under fine print. They now have a section at the foot of the home page, inside main.

The name was not invented. tools/pages.mjs has called this group The cabinet itself since the finding aid shipped, and /search's manifest and /llms.txt already show that heading to readers and to agents. Picking anything else — Off the plate, The workroom — would have been a second name for a set that had one, which is the drift this repo keeps paying to avoid. Ryan chose it from three.

No card treatment, and that is the whole design. A card would file these with the eight readings and none of them is a reading of anything. It is the bare tier: space only, no fill, no box. The plate above does the ranking and this list agrees by declining to compete.

Back matter, not front matter — the correction the register already paid for when a contents list at the top of /changelog delayed its first entry by three and a half screens. It sits last inside main, where the four links it replaces already sat.

A <dl>, so the Markdown copy keeps the pairing. Each entry is a name and a gloss on it; the converter writes a term and its definition rather than eight loose lines.

It is inside main, which the sibling-nav rule forbids and this does not break. That rule stops one sheet's navigation being indexed as another sheet's content. A list of the site's own pages, on the site's own index page, cannot do that — the same reasoning that lets .qe-contents sit inside main.

The hit area was measured, because nothing here measures one. A <dt> that is entirely a link is not an inline link in a sentence, so WCAG 2.5.8's inline exception does not apply, and the ink alone is 23px tall. Padding takes each target to 45.2px, confirmed in the browser at 1280px and at 375px, with 88px of clear space between adjacent targets. The padding is netted out of the spacing scale so the list does not start 11px below every other block on the page.

Only the home page's footer lost the links. Everywhere else the footer is still the way there; on the home page they are two paragraphs above it.

One embedded recording, and the privacy page it cost (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan asked for a click-to-load embed of Eliot reading The Waste Land, under the lilac, because he and Helen listen to it together. Built, with the whole cost stated.

What it broke. /privacy claimed, in five places, that the site makes no third-party requests — including the line "It was the only one," written that morning about the Google fonts. A privacy policy is a binding statement of practice, so all five moved in the same commit that made them false. The replacement is not a smaller boast, it is a more precise claim: reading a page reaches nobody, and there is exactly one place you can choose to reach somebody.

The design: a facade, not an embed. The served page holds a poster we drew and a plain link. Nothing touches Google until a press. Measured, not asserted — non-local hosts contacted on load: []; after the press: exactly www.youtube-nocookie.com. YouTube's own thumbnail was refused because it would be a request to i.ytimg.com on every load, which is the Google-fonts failure in a hat.

A third script, for the reason there was a second. queering.js may never put content on a page; this script's entire job is to put somebody else's content on one. That is the strongest possible version of what the boundary prohibits, so it got its own file rather than a widened boundary — the same call queering-search.js got.

youtube-nocookie.com is not anonymity and the page says so. It does not set advertising cookies on load. The IP address still reaches Google. "No cookies" and "no tracking" are different claims and only the first is made.

What is unresolved, and is Ryan's call, not ours. The upload is by a channel called tim24frames. Eliot recorded the poem more than once; we have not established which reading this is, or who holds the recording, and the channel is unlikely to. Embedding is legally distinct from hosting — the bytes come from YouTube and takedowns are theirs to honour — but on a site that publishes an attribution ledger, an unattributable recording is a genuine wart. The caption says exactly that rather than smoothing it, and if the upload disappears the facade degrades to a dead link rather than a broken page.

The gate reads our JavaScript now (2026-09-09) Link to this section

check-metadata.mjs enforced "no third-party requests" by scanning HTML attributes. It would have passed this page. The request lives in a script. A gate that cannot see where the failure would occur is a gate that certifies the failure, so it now also:

• requires every third-party origin our own .js files mention to be named on /privacy — not forbidden, named;
• requires a data-embed-id facade to carry a plain link to the same video;
• forbids an iframe in any served page.

All three were made to fail before being believed. The first found a real fault on its first run: the script contacts www.youtube-nocookie.com and the policy named the bare domain. The third fails twice over — make-markdown.mjs throws on the unknown tag before the new check is reached, so the converter's "teach me or I drop content" rule turns out to catch a privacy regression by accident.

The lilac bush, and three things it cost (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan's shrubs, drawn from his photograph, standing above the footer on the home page — the second lilac-and-black drawing here and the first drawn from a photograph rather than from another artwork. The page had just borrowed a colour from a song and had nothing of the actual plant in it.

The vase habit is the whole read. Many slender woody stems from one clump at ground level, bare for the lower third, fanning into a dome half again as tall as they are. Two drafts put the bare stems at more than half the height and produced a hand fan. The proportion was measured off the photograph in the end, not guessed.

Even coverage needs stratification, not randomness. Ring placement left the middle hollow and read as a wreath. Uniform random sampling clumped into two lobes with a hole between them — which is what forty random points actually look like, and worth remembering the next time random is reached for when even is meant. Staggered rows inside the ellipse give even coverage by construction.

85KB raw, 9KB compressed, and the optimisation is refused. Seven hundred circles. The home page went 43KB → 143KB raw and roughly 7KB → 22KB over the wire; measured before shipping. Defining the leaf and floret once and referencing them with use saved 20KB raw and rendered every clone black: outer stylesheet selectors do not cross into a use shadow tree, only inherited properties do. That is a fraction of a kilobyte compressed for a styling path that fails silently, and the refusal is written beside the component so the next person has the same idea and stops.

Print is an engraving, deliberately. Every floret prints as an open circle in line, tone carried by overlap rather than ink coverage. The alternative was three flat greys, which would have made the design sheet's claim that these drawings print as line work false. Verified under print emulation — where a second fault appeared: the print block sat above the base rule at equal specificity, so the caption printed moss-green. Source order decides; the print block goes last.

check-classes is now the strongest port candidate (2026-09-09) Link to this section

A class in the markup with no rule in the stylesheet renders with SVG's default black fill and nothing here notices. It happened twice while the lilac was being drawn: the generator emitted puff-pale before the stylesheet knew the name, and the use experiment above put .leaf and .floret somewhere selectors could not reach. Both were caught by looking at a render, which is not a gate.

The house rule is to port a check when the failure it catches becomes possible here. It is not merely possible, it has now happened twice in one afternoon. Star Stuff's check-classes is the next port, and the thing it needs to learn that Star Stuff's copy may not know is that a class inside defs referenced by use is not stylable from the outer sheet — a rule with a matching selector is not proof the element is styled.

The moth is an homage, and the four things it cost (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan's idea: the cover of Nick Walker's Neuroqueer Heresies puts a human brain where a swallowtail's body would be, so put the Earth there and you have this site's name as a drawing. The colours are Ezra Furman's — we wear the lilac and black. Both credits are in the figure's own caption and in ATTRIBUTIONS.md.

Placement: the foot of "Queering is a verb", not the masthead. The header spray was not the thing to replace, and the moth is an argument about that particular section — the verb, and our extension of it. It is the first drawing here that is neither a masthead nor a corner.

Surface: bare. Our drawing, our caption, so it is the default tier. A dark-ground card was drafted (lilac line on near-black, identical in both grounds, closest to the book cover and to the song) and refused: a black panel on a vellum sheet is a fourth surface, and the three-surface rule exists so a reader can rank a panel without reading its label. Revisit only if something else genuinely wants a worn-card surface, in which case it is a rule amendment with a second use case behind it, not a one-off.

Two new decorative tokens, taking the decorative five to seven. --qe-lilac and --qe-lilac-pale. A wash and the thing washed onto it cannot be one value — the same reason --qe-paper has a --qe-paper-deep. The alternative considered was reusing --qe-violet for the forewing and adding one token, which would have saved a line and changed the drawing that was actually approved. The pale one goes darker in the cabinet, because in daylight it is the recessed thing.

The black inverts, and that is not a compromise being hidden. "Black" is --qe-ink, so in the drawer the outline and the continents come up cream. The song says lilac and black; the ground rule says the lightest thing text sits on flips, and a literal black line on dark warm brown is a line nobody sees. The only version that would have held true black in both grounds is the card that lost on the surface rule.

The coastlines are projected, not drawn, and the reason is funnier than it is technical. Three passes of hand-drawn continents came out as symmetrical dark blobs either side of a central meridian — a Rorschach card, which is to say a brain. A picture whose entire point is that the Earth is where the brain was cannot have a middle that reads as the thing it replaced. They are now coarse lat/lon outlines through an orthographic projection centred on 25° W, 12° N, with far-side points pushed onto the limb rather than folded back across the disc. Africa is unmistakable at a 40px radius, which is the size that matters.

No tails, after four attempts. Straight down they read as legs; swept out, a bracket; curled in, a moustache; merged into the hindwing path, a boot. A broad fanned hindwing and a feathered antenna are what say moth. The cover's tails say swallowtail, which we are not, and the caption carries that reference so the drawing does not have to fake it.

One process note worth keeping. The first four review screenshots showed a moth with no wings. Every wing is inside a .sprout, which starts at opacity: 0 and unfurls on a delay, so a screenshot taken half a second after load photographs an animation that has not happened. The gating is right; the reviewer was early. Anything that screenshots a drawing here has to wait out 0.55s + i × 0.075s plus the unfurl.

check-overlap is ported, and two faults in it were found on the way (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ported from Star Stuff because a corner-floated accession stamp was designed, measured and refused partly because nothing here could see it land on the prose. Refusing a design for want of a gate is a reason to build the gate, and the gate now catches that exact design — 7 collisions on Sheet No. 2, span.qe-stamp-no "Sheet No. 2" sitting on the masthead's own a "Queering Earth". That is how it was proved rather than assumed.

Not a copy. REVEAL/UNREVEAL were extracted to tools/reveal.mjs and the Chrome client to tools/cdp.mjs, both shared with check-contrast.mjs. REVEAL is the one that mattered: it is the list of things a page builds at runtime, it is editorial, it GROWS, and its own comment tells the next author to add to it. Two copies is a component one gate learns and the other does not — the failure html.mjs and pages.mjs already exist to prevent. cdp.mjs earns its place on evaluated() alone, which turns an in-page exception into a loud failure instead of a flawless report about a page nothing measured. Both extractions were proved output-neutral: check-contrast --check printed a byte-identical report before and after.

TWO FAULTS IN THE IMPORTED TOOL, both fixed here and neither reported upstream from this repo, because Star Stuff is not edited from a session in this one:

1. The clip walk started at el.parentElement, so an element clipping its own overflowing text was never a clip host and the fault was invisible. Found by probing why .qe-sr produced no phantom clip: it is a 1px box with overflow:hidden holding a 288×39px line of text, and nothing reported it because the walk stepped over the very element doing the clipping. Fixed to start at the element. On this site it changes no finding today — the only overflow:hidden in the stylesheet is .qe-sr's own, and that is excluded as invisible — but it is what makes the clipped proof possible at all, and the proof names span.qe-provenance-label as its own clip host.
2. locate() reported page for the case the gate exists to catch. It walked up the ancestor chain looking for a preceding heading, and an absolutely positioned block is a child of main, so the one finding that most needed an address got none. Now it walks backwards over real document order and returns the nearest authored heading id — which always exists here, because every h2 carries one by house rule.

Three things about this site that changed the port:

• There is not one rendered text element in any page. The art is 535 paths, 381 groups and 160 ellipses and circles, named by aria-label and title. That is never an image of text showing up in a place nobody expected it. So svg-vs-svg and svg-vs-html — the two faults that motivated the tool upstream — cannot fire here. They are kept regardless, and the reasoning inverts the usual rule: this is one sweep with three labels, not three checks, and dropping the SVG half would stop the sweep measuring SVG text. The day a sheet carries a label, the gate would report a clean page it never looked at. Proved by injecting labels, and the file says so rather than implying they were battle-tested.
• .qe-sr is excluded as not-ink, and the first draft of that note was wrong. It claimed the exclusion suppressed phantoms "113 times". It suppresses none today: remove it and the sweep adds 113 boxes and still reports zero. Those invisible 288×39px rects happen to miss everything on these fourteen pages, which is position luck and not structure — one moved heading from being noisy. Kept, because measuring text no eye can see is measuring the wrong thing.
• The .qe-skip exemption was removed after testing it. It went in on the strength of Star Stuff's note, where the equivalent skip link fires on 5 of its first 7 pages. With the list empty this site still reports zero clips, because .qe-skip here has no clipping ancestor to be outside of. An exemption that exempts nothing is a named hole a real clip can fall into, and it reads as evidence somebody checked.

Rotation needed nothing, which is worth knowing rather than rediscovering. This site leans type in fifteen places, and getClientRects() on rotated text returns the axis-aligned box of the rotated quad — the stamp's bottom line is 11px of type whose AABB is 29px at 7 degrees. INK_RATIO already handles it: the shrink takes min(rect.height, em × 0.8), so an inflated AABB is discarded in favour of the em box. The imported constant was already the defence. If a component ever leans far enough for that to stop holding, the fix is to measure the rotated quad, not to widen the tolerance until the noise stops.

The print pass was added the same day, and it is not in the upstream tool. Star Stuff defers print collisions to check-sheets.mjs; this repo has no paper gate, and paper is the medium this house has already been burned by. Three passes now: screen, Letter, A4.

The viewport moves, and that is the entire reason the pass is worth having. check-contrast.mjs emulates print media at 1280px and is right to — it measures colour, and colour does not reflow. A collision is a position, and this stylesheet sets main { max-width: none } in print, so the text runs the full width of the sheet. Measuring that at 1280px measures a line length no printer produces. The counts are the evidence: /changelog is 4,884 text boxes on screen, 3,567 on Letter, 3,604 on A4. Both papers, because those last two numbers differ — 22px of width is enough to rewrap a line and move a hand-placed mark, so picking one and calling it "print" would be this pass's own mistake at a smaller scale.

Proved in four ways, and the fourth was a surprise. A print-only collision reports 0 on screen and 3 on each paper; a screen-only collision reports 7 on screen and 0 on paper, which is what proves UNREVEAL and the media switch do not leak. Exit code 1 on a paper-only fault. And the empty-pass guard, which is per pass rather than per page: a stylesheet that renders nothing on paper measures zero boxes there while measuring hundreds on screen, and the run reports the page as NOT MEASURED and names which passes were blank. That is the 44-blank-pages fault, and it would not survive this gate — which was not the reason the guard was written.

Pagination is the honest limit. Chrome's print emulation reflows to the width but does not break the document into sheets, so a collision that exists only because two blocks land either side of a page break is invisible. break-inside: avoid on .qe-accession-block is there because pagination is real. Reaching it means extracting text positions from Page.printToPDF, which is a different tool rather than a flag on this one.

The accession stamp says Queering Earth, and the fade is on the ring (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan saw the oval stamp on a scanned sheet from the Ada Hayden Herbarium at Iowa State University and asked whether we could do the same, faded, for the sense of age. Two things were genuinely open and were put to him; both answers below are his.

What the stamp claims custody on behalf of: Queering Earth alone. The Iowa stamp names an institution and its parent, so the obvious move was Stimpunks and More Realms on the lower line. Two custodians also did not fit the oval — at that size the line crossed its own ring — but the layout was not the argument. A stamp asserts a single custodian, this site is a collaboration between two organisations, and Queering Earth is the one name true of the whole of it. The two are credited where credit is a sentence and not a mark.

What goes in the lower line: the accession date. The alternative was the custodians, per the reference stamp. The date makes the mark an accession record rather than a nameplate, which is the entire justification for having it.

The number had to be real and it happens to be. Ada Hayden's 497892 is a row somebody can go and read. A six-digit number invented here would be a gold join on a sheet nobody corrected, and on a site whose one stated correctness requirement is attribution that is the worst available place for that failure. The sheet number and the mounting date are both entries in the register, so the stamp asserts nothing new — and no sheet stated its own number inside its own landmark before today, so it duplicates nothing either.

The fade could not go on the letters, and this was measured before anything was drawn. --qe-lichen is 2.15:1 on paper — the figure this repo already uses as its injected FAIL — and --qe-verdigris is 3.42:1. Neither clears 7:1 or the 4.5:1 large-text floor, so no token here can make a letter faint and permissible at any size. The letters are --qe-moss and the age is carried entirely by the ring. That is the standing house rule, and it turns out to be what a real understamped impression looks like anyway: the outline breaks long before the letterforms do. Nothing was traded away to get the ink legal.

Three things were found by looking rather than by any gate, and all three are the reason to keep looking:

• mix-blend-mode: multiply is the whole washed-out effect and it erases the stamp in the cabinet, because multiply darkens towards the ground and in the drawer the ground is the dark thing. check-contrast.mjs reported PASS and exit 0 on that version — verified deliberately, by putting the bug back. It composites computed colour pairs and has no concept of a blend mode. This is a third documented blind spot beside the ::marker and the texture, and it is now a token, --qe-stamp-blend.
• Ring clearance was measured against the wrong reference twice. An ellipse narrows fastest at its poles, so what matters is its half-width at the far edge of the top and bottom line boxes, not at their centres. At the centre the mark looked to have 20px of room; at the edge it had −1px, and the letters grazed the ring on screen.
• The two-column layout only ever took its fallback. The mark is 207px and the provenance line wanted 20rem beside it — 558px against a 34rem measure — so the row wrapped at every width the site has. The stamp stacks, which is where a real sheet carries it.

The corner-floated version was refused. A stamp belongs in the corner of a real sheet, and an absolutely positioned one lands on the prose at a narrow width, at 400% zoom, or under a long heading — which nothing here can currently see happen. Star Stuff has check-overlap for exactly that, and the house rule is to port a check when its failure becomes possible. Not floating the stamp is cheaper than porting the gate.

The stamp is not a link and not indexed. The provenance line beside it already points at the accession, so linking the number is a second tab stop landing on the same anchor. And indexed, eight stamps put eight near-identical records carrying the site's own name into the finding aid — which is precisely why .qe-masthead is already skipped. It stays in the Markdown siblings, where there is no ranking to crowd.

Search is a page, a file, and a refusal (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan asked for search. Three things were genuinely open and were put to him; all three answers below are his.

Where it lives: a /search sheet, and only there. A field in the masthead of every page has better discovery and costs a markup change on thirteen pages and an argument about whether the field is furniture or content. Inline live search everywhere was the third option and the worst fit: it fetches 368 KB of index for every reader who never searches, and it puts other sheets' words inside a sheet. One page, linked from every footer.

What the index does with quoted text: indexed, marked, never snippet-cropped. This was the real question. A conventional snippet — twenty words either side, an ellipsis at each end, no maker — is a fine convention on a page of prose and a machine for producing the tightened source when pointed at eighty-two mounted quotations. It would have manufactured the exact artefact ATTRIBUTIONS.md exists to prevent, once per result, at scale, for the rest of the site's life. So blockquotes are whole records rendered entire with maker and citation, and short quotations inside our prose keep their character ranges so the crop widens around them. The rejected middle option was "crop like any prose"; the rejected safe option was "index our own words only", which would have made Miranda, Fr269 and every line of Dickinson unsearchable on a site that is largely about them.

How the register ranks: a separate, secondary group. /changelog is 25,359 words, 28% of the site. Flat-ranked it buries the sheets on any query naming a writer; excluded, every correction becomes unfindable by word. Its entries come under their own heading below the sheets. This is the register's own front-matter/back-matter distinction, applied to it.

Consequences that were not obvious going in, each of which is now a rule in CLAUDE.md:

• /privacy said there was nowhere on this site to type anything. True when written that morning; false a few hours later by our own hand. A binding statement of practice has to be re-read against the code every time the code grows a capability, and the gate that enforces the third-party claim cannot see a sentence like that one.
• The query goes in the fragment. ?q= is sent to the server, so search terms would be written into the hosting log /privacy describes. Fragments are not sent. The form is also hidden until its script runs, because a form without its script would submit a query string and undo the decision — and hiding it is what makes the generated manifest, rather than a dead field, what a reader without JavaScript sees.
• The highlight could not be a wash, and could not be marigold. Two independent failures. Marigold at 0.30 composites to 11.2:1 on paper and 6.94:1 in the drawer, and no alpha clears 7:1 there, because lightening a dark ground moves it towards light ink. And marigold is the seam token: a search hit is not a repair, and gold spent on one is what makes real mends unfindable. It is a verdigris rule under the word, which costs the ink nothing in either ground.
• The contrast gate could not see any of it. Every result component is built at runtime, so /search measured 193 clean elements and zero of the ones that matter. The gate's REVEAL hook now clones the page's own templates. Two findings fell out of writing it: this file had been running check-contrast.mjs without --check, which makes it a report that exits 0 — so the entire 7:1 tier had shipped as advice — and our own reply poem on /wild-nights was being flattened into prose and cropped mid-line, which the never-crop rule did not reach because the words are ours.

Rejected: a hosted search service. Never seriously on the table. The site makes no third-party request and /privacy is gated on it.

Rejected: putting it in queering.js. Its boundary is that it may derive navigation from the DOM and may never create words. A result is a sentence from another page put onto this one. The boundary was worth more than the convenience, so the code is a third file loaded by one page — and it still writes no label: every word is authored in search.html as a <template> and cloned, the way the register's index clones an entry's own chip.

Open: nothing about ranking has been tuned against real use. Weights are heading 8, entry name 8, page title 6, quotation source 2, prose and quotation text 1, with every term required to appear. That is a guess that reads well on the queries we tried. It is worth revisiting when there is any evidence, and there is no analytics here to produce any.

The shared assets are not fingerprinted, and the cache is bounded instead (2026-09-09) Link to this section

The spec's cache-control item gives one clean answer — max-age=31536000, immutable — and it is available only to URLs carrying a content hash. queering.css and queering.js carry their own names, because there is no build step, so the clean answer is off the table and what is left is a choice between two imperfect ones.

Not fingerprinting. The machinery would be a generator that renames both files by content hash and rewrites the reference in all twelve pages, plus a gate to catch a page pointing at a hash that no longer exists. Every commit touching the stylesheet would then churn twelve HTML files, which makes the diff of a one-line palette fix unreadable — and the register depends on those diffs being legible. The prize is 31 KB over the wire, brotli'd. That is not a trade worth making at this size, and it can be made later without undoing anything: adding fingerprints is a strictly additive change to a tool that does not exist yet.

So the cache is bounded instead: five minutes. Chosen for the shape of a visit rather than the size of the file. A reader moving through several sheets in one sitting revalidates once instead of once per sheet, and a bad stylesheet reaches everyone within five minutes rather than being stuck in caches with no way to bust it. That bound is the whole point. This site's characteristic failure is a palette or print change that breaks pages silently — Star Stuff shipped 44 of 46 pages that printed blank — so an unbustable stylesheet is a worse exposure here than a slow one.

stale-while-revalidate is deliberately not on those two, though it is on the plates. The HTML is must-revalidate and therefore always fresh; a stylesheet one visit behind it would render a change that adds a class and its rule together as an unstyled page for that visit. Staleness is only safe where the stale copy cannot disagree with the fresh HTML.

And the plates get thirty days without immutable. Their bodies will almost certainly never change: annales-lugduno-batavi-1863-tab4-gonystylus-miquelianus.jpg names one plate in one volume, and tab 4 of the 1863 Annales is not going to be re-cut. But almost certainly is not what immutable means. It tells a browser the body can never change, on a filename a better scan could overwrite, and asserting a fact we cannot enforce is the same failure as a gold seam on a sheet nobody corrected. Thirty days is a claim we can keep. If a plate is ever rescanned, the honest move is a new filename — but nothing forces that, which is exactly why the promise is not made.

Amended the same day, after the five minutes fired. The accession stamp shipped, and a reader holding the previous stylesheet got the new markup with none of its rules — a paragraph of three unstyled spans where an oval should have been. The paragraph above predicted that event in those words and priced it as acceptable. It is not, and the entry's own reasoning is what overturns it: if this site's characteristic failure is a change that breaks pages silently, then a five-minute window in which every reader sees exactly that is the wrong bound, not a safe one.

What was missing was a third option, not a better answer to the two. The choice above is posed as fingerprinting versus a bounded cache, and both refusals still stand — fingerprinting would churn twelve HTML files per CSS edit and cost the register its legible diffs. But max-age=0, must-revalidate on the two shared assets, the same policy the HTML already has, was never weighed. It needs no generator, no rewritten pages and no gate, so it costs nothing the refusal above was protecting, and it closes the skew to zero rather than to five minutes. It is also more bustable than 300 seconds, which was the stated priority.

The cost is the one thing the five minutes bought: a reader moving through several sheets revalidates once per sheet instead of once per sitting. That is a conditional request returning 304 with an empty body, issued alongside the revalidation the HTML is already doing. Measured against the deployed site on the day of the amendment: the conditional request comes back 304 with a zero-byte body in 0.23s, against 33 KB brotli'd for the full response. Correctness is worth the round trip. (The 31 KB above was accurate when the entry was written and the stylesheet has grown since — it is left as it stood.)

No stale-if-error on those two, and the mechanical reason has a matching one. RFC 9111 forbids serving a stale must-revalidate response, so the pairing cancels. It would also buy nothing: the HTML is must-revalidate and fails closed, so when the origin is unreachable there is no document for a held-back stylesheet to apply itself to. They fail exactly when the page they belong to fails, which is what makes matching the HTML coherent rather than merely consistent.

search-index.json had the same defect and takes a different fix. It was max-age=600, and it is derived from the sheets — so it is precisely the case this entry's own rule excludes, staleness where the stale copy can disagree with the fresh HTML. After a prose edit it could hand a searcher a snippet quoting a sentence no longer on the page it cites, which on this site is the failure that matters most. It is now max-age=0 without must-revalidate, which is not an oversight: zero removes the skew, and leaving the stricter directive off is what keeps stale-if-error legal. That resilience is worth having here and not on the stylesheet, because the index is fetched after the page has rendered, by a reader who has typed something. The document exists either way, so a finding aid a few minutes behind genuinely is better than one that fails closed — the judgement the original note made, and it survives. queering-search.js clones templates authored in search.html, so it is skewable against the markup the way the stylesheet is and follows it.

Revisit when either file is fingerprinted for another reason, or when a conditional request per sheet is measurably costing something.

Sheet No. 8 is a wall, which is a third kind of sheet (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan asked for a zine wall, pointing at Stimpunks' zine walls and at the Fraunces specimen site. One thing in the format does not transfer and it decided the whole design.

A Stimpunks zine wall works by unattributed declaration. Its own page calls it "a wall of declarations", and the pull quotes on Learning at the Edges are deliberately set apart with no source. That is right for a manifesto and is the one move this site cannot make, because here the citation is the product. So a wall here is one of two things and mixing them is the failure: our own declarations, which are ours and need no source, or a chorus of labelled slips. We built the second, because the herbarium already invented it — a sheet that has been in a cabinet long enough carries a stack of determination slips in different hands, every one signed.

So "a wall" joins "a reading" and "an essay" as a sheet kind. The distinction is not decoration: a reading has an order and arrives somewhere; a wall has a chorus, and its argument is made by accumulation. The subject has to deserve that — Monotropa uniflora does, because seven people across 273 years looked at one specimen and each saw something the others could not.

No new visual language. .qe-wall, .qe-slip, .qe-drift and .qe-cutup were built for Sheet No. 4 and are reused unchanged. Wabi-sabi adds one rule the Stimpunks walls do not need: the wall must not be uniform. Twelve slips at twelve angles on an even grid is a pattern, not a paste-up, so sizes and weights differ because the sources differ — a Latin binomial does not get what a letter gets, and neither gets what a poem gets.

Which principles bore on it. Fukinsei is the whole device. Kanso kept the biology off the sheet. Yūgen is why the wall is open at first paint and nothing reveals on scroll. Koko is in the specimen rather than the styling: the plant is pale, ephemeral, lives on decay, and blackens when touched.

The shelf division did real work here. Star Stuff already has the mechanism — its Symbioses field guide entry Nourished in the Dark covers myco-heterotrophy, no chlorophyll, carbon taken and none given back. That is a wrong-fact risk and theirs. Ours is the naming, the letter, the poem's edition history, the editor, and the word. The sheet links across rather than re-explaining, and the label carries a Biology row saying where it went. This is the first sheet where the two sites explicitly divide one subject.

The drawing is the first on this site with no leaf in it, and that absence is the argument: every other panel here is green because every other specimen photosynthesises. The bells and bracts are --qe-flesh, the token written for "the pale flesh of a specimen — a mushroom's stipe, a cut stem", which turned out to have been waiting for this plant. Two drafts were thrown away against the documented drawing rules: the first put the pipes standing on a single long thread, which is the baseline rule 1 forbids, and the second drew the stems nearly upright so the bells sat on top — which loses the one turn the genus is named for. The threads now cross at opposing pitches and the crowns are offset hard sideways.

No plate, and the sheet says so. Every mounted image here is public domain, and there is no public-domain Monotropa uniflora print in hand. The Dickinson manuscript is licensed, modern photographs are in copyright, and Todd's painted panel — the object at the centre of the letter — could not be cleared. Same treatment as the wrong violet on Sheet No. 7: the gap is named on the page and a reader is asked for a better plate.

Star Stuff's field guides have no per-entry addresses (2026-09-09, open, theirs) Link to this section

Noticed while linking Sheet No. 8 across to the Symbioses guide. The SKS mirror of that page carries a convenience link of the form symbioses-field-guide.html#monotropa, and that anchor does not exist on the served page — the whole document has exactly one id, #grid, and the twelve entries are rendered into it client-side from data.

So our sheet links to the page rather than to the entry, which is correct but coarser than we wanted. It is also the situation CLAUDE.md already warns about in the other direction: "If a page ever renders content client-side, the mirror will need a published extraction index." Over there it means a reader cannot be sent to one partnership, and a citation cannot address one either.

Not ours to fix — starstuff.earth is a separate repo. Recorded here so that a session in that repo has the finding, and so the next Queering Earth sheet that wants to cite one field guide entry knows it cannot yet. Worth adding: their page already links to Helen Edgar's Monotropa essay, so both sites arrived at it independently, and the cross-link now runs both ways.

The social-card report enumerated a hand-kept list (2026-09-09) Link to this section

make-images.py generated the new card correctly and did not report it, because its closing summary iterated a hardcoded tuple of filenames that nobody had added a line to. Caught by eye, not by a guard.

Harmless in that direction and not in the other: the same hand-kept list would report a complete-looking run while a card had silently failed to generate, which is precisely the class of failure this repo keeps building checks for. The report now enumerates what og_card actually wrote and prints a count, so a new card reports itself and a missing one is visible.

Also added: a ghost_pipes sprig, because the generic one draws leaves in lichen and heads in three accents. On the one sheet whose entire argument is a plant with no chlorophyll and no foliage, the stock card was arguing with the page — the same fault as a legend that no longer matches its own drawing.

The register is indexed by sheet, and the association is authored (2026-09-09) Link to this section

The open item from the contents work, closed the same day. /changelog is written by accession, which is by date, because a sheet, its corrections and the CSS it needed are one dated event. That is the right unit to write in and the wrong one to look something up in: a reader is usually asking what happened to one sheet, and its entries are scattered across sixteen dates.

The distinction the first attempt missed: a contents list is front matter, an index is back matter. That is why a table of contents measured so badly here (1,293px at the top, delaying the first entry by three and a half screens) and why an index does not: it sits at the foot of the page, where a bound volume has always kept one, and delays nobody. One line up by the legend points down at it. The register's own first accession is back to 1,839px from the top.

Which sheet an entry concerns is stated in the markup, never inferred. Each .qe-entry carries data-sheet. Deriving it from the links inside an entry was considered and fails on the evidence: the Dickinson accession links /on-being-ill, /promises-like-pie-crust and /wild-nights and concerns only the last, so incidental cross-references would file corrections under sheets they have nothing to do with. On a site whose whole risk is a wrong attribution, an index that silently misfiles a correction is the worst bug available, so the association is authored — 73 entries, read one at a time — and guarded.

Two entries legitimately belong to two sheets and carry both tokens, which is why the field is a token list rather than a single value: the byline rule changed Sheet No. 4 and gave No. 1 a second reader in one stroke, and today's correction about the seven principles touched the colophon and this register together. 73 entries file as 75 index lines.

What is authored and what is derived. Every group, its heading, its sheet number, and the order the groups appear in are written in changelog.html — those are editorial words, and queering.js may not write words. The script only files: it clones an entry's existing name and its existing kind chip and puts them under the group the entry declares. Nothing is composed, summarised or truncated, so the index cannot end up calling an entry something the entry does not call itself. The group labels were checked against each sheet's own <h1> and against the plate's cards rather than typed from memory.

A guard, because the failure is silent. A typo'd slug does not throw and does not show: the entry matches no group, drops out of the index, and the register above it still reads perfectly. check-markup.mjs now validates every data-sheet token against the pages that exist (plus the literal the-site), reports an empty declaration, and reports a group that nothing files into — which catches the same typo from the other end. Made to fail before it was believed, per the standing rule: a typo'd entry slug, an emptied declaration, and a stale group each reported with a line number and exit 1; then reverted and the clean tree re-run.

One layout attempt discarded on measurement. The index items were first a wrapping flex line, chip beside name. A chip plus an entry name exceeds the measure almost every time, so every single item put its chip alone on a row above itself and the index came to 6,726px for no extra information. Ordinary inline flow — chip opening the line, name wrapping beneath — is 5,502px and is what an index entry has always looked like anyway.

The one redundancy left in. A sheet's Mounted entry is named after the sheet, so it restates the group heading directly beneath it. Fixing that would mean rewriting entry names in the register, which is editing the record to suit an index built on top of it. The index defers to the record.

Contents on the long sheets: derived list, authored addresses (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Ryan wanted to see what is coming on a long sheet, jump around it, and share deep links to headings. Three axes were on the table from NN/g's guide: rail vs body, sticky vs nonsticky, top vs in-body.

The three are really two. NN/g couples the first two — "If the table of contents is…in a left or right rail…then the table of contents should be…sticky. In the main body…nonsticky." So the choice is rail-or-body and sticky follows. Top it calls the "safe choice".

Body, nonsticky, straight after the lede. A rail would fill the margins either side of the 34rem measure, and those margins are the negative space the spacing work had just spent an accession clearing. Sticky also eats viewport height at 400% zoom, which is a WCAG 1.4.10 problem this site does not need to invent. NN/g's own testing adds that "many users failed to notice the sticky table of contents" on mobile. Placed after the lede rather than before it, so the sheet's opening sentence still comes first.

Which principles actually bear, and which do not. Kanso and seijaku are genuinely against a rail: permanent furniture, and furniture that never leaves the screen. Yūgen gives one hard rule — open at first paint, never an accordion, which is the register's existing "a ledger you have to open is a ledger nobody reads". And fukinsei mildly favours a rail, since an off-centre two-column composition is more asymmetric than a centred one; it was overridden rather than pretended into agreement. Koko and shizen are neutral here. Stacking all seven onto one side would have been the tightening this site keeps logging.

The two decisions that mattered more, and NN/g covers neither.

1. The list is derived from the DOM, never typed. A hand-kept contents list is a second copy of every heading, and this repo's oldest rule is that two copies drift and the accessible one rots. With no build step that leaves client generation, and three good things fall out: it is not content (every heading is fully server-rendered; the script only reflects them), the served HTML carries no list so the SKS mirror never indexes a heading twice, and losing the script loses a shortcut and no words.

That last point is also why this may live inside <main> when .qe-elsewhere may not. The outside-<main> rule exists to stop one sheet's navigation being indexed as another sheet's content — a cross-page contamination. A self-referential list of this page's own headings cannot cause it, and since the list is never in the served HTML the question is moot anyway.

2. The ids are authored, not slugified. This is the half that breaks quietly. An id derived from heading text dies the moment anybody rewords the heading, and every link a reader shared dies with it. So each <h2> carries a short topical id stated in the markup — #eden, #the-colon, #quetelet, #wabi-sabi — the way --rot is a fact about a slip. The permanent thing is authored, the derived thing is computed, and nothing is written twice. check-markup.mjs already guards duplicate ids, so the guard for this existed before the feature did.

The section mark, and the trade it takes. A § beside each heading, linking to it. Always visible rather than revealed on hover, because hover hands the affordance to mouse users and to nobody else — no keyboard, no touch. The glyph is drawn with an empty alt string (the chain-arrow device) and the link is named by a visually hidden span, so it announces as "Link to this section". That does append four words to every heading's accessible name, which is the accepted cost and is what MDN and GitHub do; the alternative is the affordance not existing for most people. A real space before the <a> in the markup is load-bearing: without it the name computes as "…the windsLink to this section", because CSS margin is not whitespace. Found by reading the accessibility tree, not by looking at the page.

No scroll-spy. NN/g says highlighting the current section helps. It also means a scroll listener, a mark that moves, and a second thing on screen that never settles — against the register's standing "no new motion". :target marks where a reader landed, which is the case a shared link actually creates, and it is drawn in the gutter with absolute positioning so arriving at a heading does not shift it: a border-left plus padding would move the words sideways at the end of a smooth scroll, the one moment a reader is looking straight at them.

Not on /changelog, and this is the decision worth keeping. The register is the longest page on the site (16,052 words) and looked like the strongest case. Built and measured, it was the worst: its labels average 148 characters against 22–34 on a sheet, so the block came out 1,293px against 319–510px everywhere else, and it pushed the first accession three and a half screens down. The cause is not a bug — a register's accession headline is a sentence, which is that component's own written design decision.

Both ways to shrink it were forbidden. Truncating a label is this site's characteristic failure applied to itself. A short second label beside each heading is the drift. So the register keeps its section marks and its sixteen addresses — deep links there work, which was half of what was asked — and has no contents list. Removed after measuring rather than shipped because it had been built.

The register wanted an index by sheet, not a contents list — built the same day. What a reader of /changelog wants is usually "what happened to sheet X", and the accessions are grouped by date. See the entry below; the short version is that a contents list is front matter and an index is back matter, and reaching for the first when the page wanted the second is what produced the 1,293px block.

A wrinkle flagged and deliberately not solved. On the sheets the headings are often quotations, so the Tempest's contents reads Assembled, not born · A household of three · O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer · Abhorred slave · O, brave new world. That is lovely and it is not scannable, which is NN/g's whole purpose for the thing. The fix is not a second short label — it is better headings, and rewriting headings on shipped sheets is an editorial call rather than a design one. Named here so it is a choice rather than an oversight.

One rule amended rather than smuggled past. CLAUDE.md said queering.js was "the two view controls, and nothing else". This breaks that, so the rule became a boundary instead of a tally: it may derive navigation from the DOM; it may never create words. A count of features is a rule that gets quietly broken the first time a third thing is worth having.

Three surfaces, a spacing scale, and patina as a record (2026-09-09) Link to this section

Prompted by Ryan reading on wabi-sabi in web design and asking how this site scores against the seven aesthetic principles that literature names. Six of the seven were already here; two — fukinsei (asymmetry) and datsuzoku (freedom from convention) — more thoroughly than the sources state them. Four decisions came out of the exercise.

One sourcing note first, because it shaped everything after it. The list circulating as "the seven principles of wabi-sabi" is Hisamatsu Shin'ichi's seven characteristics of Zen art, from Zen and the Fine Arts (Kodansha International, 1971). Zen aesthetics and wabi-sabi overlap and are not the same thing, so the relabelling happened in transmission. The third of the seven — the one about age — is where the transmission frays, and the design advice glosses it with no age in it at all, which is why "patina" recurs in that literature without ever resolving into a principle. This accession is mostly about that hole.

Corrected the same day — the first version of this paragraph overclaimed. It stated flatly that the popular list names shibui where Hisamatsu names koko, and that the swap is what dropped the aging. That is not established. At least one rendering of Hisamatsu's seven gives shibui/shibumi for that characteristic itself, glossed "lofty dryness" — the same sense the koko renderings carry. The confident version was written from memory before anything was checked, and the instruction two sentences later to verify against Hisamatsu before any of this reaches public copy is what caught it, when the colophon section was written and the checking actually happened. The paragraph above is the part that survives verification, because it is a claim about two texts a reader can open rather than a ruling on Hisamatsu's vocabulary. Full working, with the citation pinned from Crossref, is in ATTRIBUTIONS.md; the register entry is corrected too.

We use koko as the term for the weathered principle, on the warrant of the peer-reviewed paper we have the seven from, and the colophon says the renderings disagree and that we cannot settle it from here. We have read neither Hisamatsu nor Koren, and the page says so rather than implying a lineage.

1. A panel picks one of three surfaces: bare, ruled, ruled off. --qe-card appeared fifteen times in queering.css, thirteen of them with the same 1px rule and 2px radius, so a specimen, our own commentary, and a housekeeping note were indistinguishable by surface. That is a hierarchy defect and not an aesthetic one. .qe-restaged went bare, .qe-untidy and .qe-register-note went ruled off, and ruled now means "somebody handed this to us."

The third tier is hairlines and not a recessed tint, and that is the interesting part. A --qe-paper-deep fill was the obvious answer and was tried first. In daylight it drops --qe-moss to 6.90:1 and --qe-rust to 6.21:1 — under the house 7:1, over WCAG AA, and therefore passed check-contrast.mjs clean. This is the open item logged the day before (the guard gates at AA, the 7:1 target is held by hand-chosen tokens and nothing else) arriving as a real near-miss. It closed the same day: the gate was raised to 7:1 in two tiers, and the site passed it without a colour changing. See that entry below.

A second thing the guard cannot see turned up in the same pass: a ::marker is not an element with text, so nothing measures it. Dropping .qe-untidy's fill took its bullets from 4.17:1 to 3.89:1, and checking the neighbours found the register's own entry bullets drawn in each kind's accent — 2.15:1 for lichen, 2.40:1 for marigold on paper. Both fixed by the rule the stylesheet already states five times over: the colour goes on the rule and never on the glyph. Markers took --qe-moss at 7.80:1.

2. Space is a scale. Twenty-five distinct margin values shipped. The argument is not tidiness — it is that asymmetry only reads as asymmetry against a norm, and this site's entire typographic case is deviation. Twenty-five arbitrary gaps read as noise and flatten the deviations that were authored. --qe-space-* is quarter-lines of the 1.96rem body line; the page was already close by ear, so quantizing moved most gaps by one to three pixels. Paragraph spacing went 1.35rem → 1.47rem, the one deliberate loosening. The scale governs space between blocks only.

Three corner profiles for the same reason, none square and no two alike: a sheet handled a hundred times does not have four identical corners. It is a radius, so it is free in both contrast and print. Koko for the price of a token.

3. Patina is a record, not a texture — .qe-provenance. The register had already logged a correction or a re-determination for every one of the seven sheets, and no sheet said so on its own face. The foot of each sheet now carries its mounting date and its correction counts, each clause linked to the entry here that did it. Inside <main>, so the mirror has it. It is true, checkable, accrues on its own, and survives plain view, paper, a screen reader and 400% zoom, because it is a sentence.

Every alternative on the table was a picture of age drawn over the words. The research recommends a noise tile and filter: blur(0.5px) contrast(1.1); both refused. Texture never goes under text, and the reason is the one above: a grain varies effective background luminance per pixel, and the guard composites computed colour pairs. Grain under body text would pass every check here.

What was taken from the texture advice: the wash is no longer position: fixed — the stains held still while the paper scrolled past them — and its four positions are now --qe-fox-* tokens stated per page, because all nine sheets were foxed in identically the same four places. Same idiom as --rot on a slip: a stain is a fact about one sheet.

The wash does not tile, and one draft that did shipped a visible line. It was tiled at a 150rem period so that a long sheet would not have clean paper through the middle, with a note claiming a reader would never meet the repeat. Ryan met it on the first sheet he looked at. The cause is arithmetic: transparent 70% puts a gradient's edge at 0.7 of its radius, so in a 2400px tile a stain at 8% reaches 278px above the tile's top and one at 96% reaches 352px past its bottom, both cut off square — and a cut-off gradient meets the next copy of itself as a step, which no softening repairs. Keeping the tile would have meant constraining every future page's stain positions to a safe band inside it, which is a trap for whoever writes the next sheet, bought in exchange for an even cast on the two pages long enough to want one. Four stains over the whole sheet instead. A long sheet is sparsely foxed; spots do not multiply to fill a bigger sheet.

4. The gold goes on the mend. Kintsugi is not that the crack shows; it is that the most precious material in the workshop is spent on the break. Read that way the register's taxonomy was backwards — --qe-marigold marked Mounted, the routine intake. Two tokens swapped: Mounted takes --qe-lichen, Re-determined takes --qe-marigold (the largest correction a register records — the specimen turned out to be a different thing), Label corrected keeps --qe-coral. .qe-correction's left rule became marigold and gained a gold seam through the joint rather than down the edge, with coral kept on the strike: the strike is the break, the join is the mend. The unclassed default became --qe-rule rather than an accent, so a mistyped class reads as plain. --qe-verdigris leaves the register.

The masthead vine on /changelog is the legend — four blooms in the four kinds' colours in legend order — so its second and third flowers changed with the tokens. A legend that no longer matches what it explains is worse than no legend.

The constraint that makes this honest: a seam requires a repair that is actually in the register. No rule derives --mended; the class is written on a sheet whose entries exist. A gold join on an uncorrected sheet is decoration asserting a fact — the same failure as an image of text — and it would make the real mends unfindable. All seven sheets carry the seam today, so it currently distinguishes nothing; that is a fact about this site rather than a fault in the device, and Sheet No. 8 will arrive clean.

What was considered and not done. A deckle edge via border-image (a picture of an edge, and it fights the print sheet). Per-corner foxing spots on card edges (texture, one step from the thing refused above). Deliberately mis-set opsz on small caps to imitate a rephotographed plate (too subtle to be worth a token, and it fights font-optical-sizing: auto). Varying the gap between register accessions to imitate uneven intake (fights the scale it was just given, and the register's flatness is the ledger being a ledger).

Addresses on this site are extensionless (2026-09-07) Link to this section

https://queering.earth/on-being-ill, not /on-being-ill.html. The file on disk is still on-being-ill.html — only the address changed.

Why the question came up. Netlify's Pretty URLs post-processing is on by default and rewrites internal links to strip .html, so the served page said href='/coming-to-terms' while the repo said href="coming-to-terms.html" and every canonical tag and sitemap entry said .html. The site linked to one address and declared a different one canonical. Found by reading the served page rather than the repo, while checking that the sibling nav had deployed.

Two ways out were on the table: turn the setting off, or adopt what it produces. Ryan chose to adopt it. So canonical tags, og:url, sitemap.xml, and every internal link now say the extensionless form, and the repo describes what Netlify actually serves. Nothing is rewritten on the way out any more, because there is nothing left to strip.

What this costs. The filename and the address no longer match, which the "every page is a file at its own path" line in CLAUDE.md used to be able to claim literally. That line now says so explicitly rather than leaving the next session to discover it.

tools/check-sitemap.mjs enforces it. A <loc> carrying .html now fails instead of passing quietly by resolving to a real file — verified by putting one back and watching it fail. tools/serve.mjs needed no change: it already retried <path>.html for clean URLs, with a comment saying why.

Still true, and fine: /on-being-ill.html also answers 200. Nothing links to it and its canonical points away, so it is an unlinked alias rather than a competing address. Forcing it to 301 would take one _redirects line per sheet, which is a per-sheet chore forever; not worth it unless the alias starts showing up somewhere it matters.

Sheets link to each other, outside <main>, with less on the card (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Until now a sheet's only internal link was /. A reader arriving on the Woolf sheet from a search result had exactly one way onward: back to the plate. Each sheet now ends with Elsewhere on the plate, carrying the other sheets as the plate's own cards.

Two decisions inside that, both of which would be easy to get wrong later.

It sits outside <main>. Not tidiness — the SKS mirror takes page content from the <main> landmark and nowhere else, deliberately, so that navigation furniture is not indexed as content. A sibling card inside main would index "Coming to Terms" as part of the Woolf sheet, in the mirror and in anything built on it. tools/check-markup.mjs cannot catch this: the markup is valid and the landmark is correct. The comment in the markup says so at the point where somebody would move it.

The sibling cards carry kind, number, and title — no description. The plate is the record; these are a reference to it. With two sheets that reads as restraint. At ten it is the whole point: repeating each card's description on every other sheet is ninety copies of a sentence free to drift from the one on the plate, which is the two copies drift failure the plain-view rule exists to prevent, wearing a different hat. Titles duplicate, and a title is already repeated in the target's <title> and <h1>, so it is the one string the site cannot avoid holding twice.

auto-fill, not auto-fit. With a single sibling, auto-fit collapses the empty track and stretches one card across the whole measure, which reads as a banner. auto-fill keeps the track and the card keeps its size. The plate itself stays auto-fit, because there two cards should fill the width.

What this does not do is give each sheet its own mark. That was the other reading of the suggestion that started this, and it is deferred: a per-sheet emblem is ornament until a reader needs to tell sheets apart at a glance rather than by reading the title, which is five or six sheets away. Every mark is then a hand-drawn asset forever, so it should be earned first.

The plate uses Star Stuff's card class names, on purpose (2026-09-07) Link to this section

index.html now mounts the sheets as numbered cards. The box is <div class="card-wrap"> and the link is <a class="card"> — Star Stuff's names, deliberately adopted, which reverses this repo's standing default of not importing its habits.

The reason is narrow and it is the same test CLAUDE.md sets for porting a check: the failure became possible here. tools/check-markup.mjs already carries a card-wrap rule — it came over with the file — and until this commit it could not fire, because there were no cards. It guards the failure that shipped twice on Star Stuff: a new wrap opened before the previous one closed, so the second card renders inside the first card's box, sharing one border. Valid markup, invisible to every other check.

Writing our own class names would have produced a lookalike the guard cannot see, and the guard is div-and-class-specific by design. Verified live rather than assumed: nesting the second wrap made check-markup fail with both the nested-wrap message and an unclosed-wrap message, and restoring it went quiet. A check nobody has seen fail is a check nobody trusts.

Two smaller things settled with it:

• The cards are a <ul>, with the guarded div.card-wrap inside each <li>. Screen readers announce "list, 2 items"; the guard counts divs and is indifferent to the list.
• minmax(12.5rem, 1fr), not 14rem. The measure leaves 452px inside the gutters and two 14rem tracks plus the gap need 466, so at 14rem the plate silently collapsed to one column at every window size — a stack, which is a list, not a plate. It looked deliberate. Found by reading the computed grid-template-columns in the browser rather than by looking at it.

The masthead credits Nick Walker for the phrase (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Our tagline is "Post-normal possibilities." Walker's book is Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. One hyphen apart, on a site that quotes him on its home page, about the subject of his book. Found while building the Coming to Terms sheet, in our own glossary entry for neuroqueer, and verified against neuroqueer.com.

Ryan's call: credit him, on the masthead. It now reads after Nick Walker, linked to the book, with the full explanation in Queering is a verb where Walker already appears.

Why crediting was the right of the three options. Helen may well have arrived at the phrase herself — she wrote it in the founding brainstorm — and post-normal has a genuine separate lineage in post-normal science, coined by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz in "Science for the post-normal age," Futures, September 1993 (checked 2026-09-07, so the file no longer carries that as an unverified aside). None of that makes the collision invisible. The page therefore says the true and generous thing — he published it first — and claims nothing about the route the phrase took to get here.

The wording on the page is deliberately "after." Not "his phrase," which would take the coinage away from Helen, and not silence, which was the option that stayed defensible only until somebody noticed the subtitle. After is the form poetry uses for exactly this, and it is the only one of the three that is true no matter which way the origin actually ran.

This settles the attribution question and not the wording of the tagline itself, which stays open above as Helen's and Ryan's.

A sheet is a reading or an essay, and the label flexes (2026-09-07) Link to this section

The model settled below assumed the specimen is somebody else's — Woolf's essay, a painting, a word. Coming to Terms is Ryan's own essay, so there is no external specimen to mount, and the question is whether that needs a second page type.

It does not. It needs the label to flex, which a description list does for free:

The kicker above the title says which — "Sheet · a reading" or "Sheet · an essay" — and that is the whole distinction. Both are sheets, both carry a label, both keep our words and other people's visibly apart. On an essay the specimen is simply the terms it is about, which for a herbarium site is the right shape anyway: a word collected, pressed, and compared against others until one of them fits.

One rule the essay case adds. When a sheet reprints something published elsewhere, the label says what was changed. Coming to Terms drops the block quotations from other writers that the original carries, so its label says so and says the author's own words are unchanged. An unmarked edit of our own published text is the same failure as an unmarked edit of somebody else's — the site just happens to be the injured party.

What Queering Earth is for: a reading becomes an artifact (2026-09-07) Link to this section

More Realms is where Helen thinks in prose. Queering Earth is where a reading becomes an artifact — the sheet interprets its own subject, which is the one thing a WordPress template structurally cannot do and a hand-built page can.

Ryan's call, and explicitly provisional: at least to start, and we are not sure of the shape yet. Recorded because it unblocks the second sheet, not because it is final. If it turns out that the artifact-making is not what distinguishes the two sites, this is the entry to come back and overturn.

The label carries a byline, and the byline names who read it (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Helen's voice and Ryan's voice, individually, and occasionally both. So the byline is per-sheet and it is a name, not an institution — "Helen Edgar," "Ryan Boren," or both, on the label of the sheet they read.

This is the house voice's rule applied in the type rather than in a policy: name whose "we" you are centering. It also means a sheet may be written in the first person singular, which Star Stuff never is, and that difference is a feature of this site rather than a lapse.

The label carries dates — starting with the date of the reading (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Undecided in principle, decided in practice: start with the date in the label. A date is one line to add now and a guess to retrofit later, so the cheap direction is to have it.

A site about re-reading should show that a reading happened on a day, and that another day would have produced a different one. What the label does about the original's date when a work was revised is a separate and now-open question — see above.

The content model: a sheet mounts a specimen and carries our label (2026-09-07) Link to this section

A piece is a sheet. The specimen is what it mounts. The label is what we say.

The herbarium distinction is load-bearing, not decorative. The specimen is the thing collected and it is somebody else's — Woolf's essay, Brontë's novel, the Rothko, the word. The sheet is our page. The label is the small block of type where we speak, and it is explicitly ours: subject, maker, date of the original, date of the reading, and who read it. Everything below the label is free, because the sheet interprets its own subject — the design intent Helen actually named in the brainstorm, and the reason a template was never going to hold this site.

That split also does the attribution work ATTRIBUTIONS.md exists to force. Their words sit in the specimen. Ours sit on the label. The line between the two is drawn in the layout instead of being left to a reader's good faith.

Concretely: flat paths at the repo root, on-being-ill.html, no prefix and no type suffix. The index is a plate — cards laid out like a Victorian specimen sheet, which is already the home page's visual language. .qe-specimen and .qe-specimen-label are in queering.css today, screen and print rules both, so the vocabulary and the stylesheet are the same argument.

No collections yet, and the trigger is named. Helen already writes in sequences — the Re-worlding Neurodiversity / When the Ecology Fractures / Autistic Burnout Recovery run is Parts 1 through 3 — but she names them afterward, once Part 1 is already published. Declaring a collection at n=1 is a promise on the page that nothing has been written to keep yet, and an unfilled run reads as abandonment rather than as patience.

The trigger: the third sheet that shares a lens. Then a run, and not before.

Note that this is the same trigger as the CMS question above, seen from the other side: a run is the first repeating, uniform content type. When we add one, Sveltia comes up for discussion in the same week. That is not a coincidence to be surprised by later.

Print: no separate print artifact. Star Stuff has nine broadsides because it has 101 zines and an earned print practice. Here the paper version is not a translation of the web page — a herbarium sheet is already a printed object, so the sheet is the native form and the screen is the preview. The @media print block in queering.css is the print form, and tools/check-contrast.mjs measures it. Revisit when there is a specific sheet somebody wants to hand to a person.

What we rejected, and why it is written down. Two other shapes were real candidates.

• Runs from day one, using Helen's own verb — reiteration, from the brainstorm. Right about where this ends up and wrong about when, for the reason above. Its vocabulary is kept in reserve.
• Six drawers — art · literature · poetry · politics · people · history, which is Helen's own line from the brainstorm read as a taxonomy. Rejected twice over: six drawers and one page is five visible promises we are not keeping, and a browsable taxonomy is the most conventional move on offer from a site whose whole question is who decides the categories. It also forces single filing on a piece like On Being Ill, which wants Literature and People and Politics at once.

And Star Stuff's taxonomy was not imported. Zine, field guide, broadside, collection, glimmer wire — 101, 24, 9, 16, and a dated dispatch. That vocabulary was earned across 195 pages. Adopting it here would be inheriting the answers to questions this site has not asked.

One caveat, stated rather than buried. "Specimen" pins things, and mounting a Disabled woman's essay on illness to a card is worth saying out loud. The specimen/label split is what makes it sit right: we are not pinning Woolf, we are mounting her essay and signing our own reading. If it still reads wrong to Helen, reiteration is the fallback noun and the structure survives the swap unchanged — the model is the split, not the word.

Settled pending Helen's read of the noun. The structure is decided. The vocabulary has one open substitution in it.

queering.earth is not registered — build anyway (2026-09-07) Link to this section

whois.nic.earth returns "No Data Found". Registering it is Ryan's, and a purchase. Nothing else waits on it: the site deploys to its .netlify.app hostname and the domain attaches later.

Two things must NOT be switched on until the domain resolves. The host redirect in _redirects would send the only working address to one that does not answer — a site that is simply down. And adding this domain to the SKS mirror's SITES map would fail that sync, because the mirror fetches over the network.

Netlify: continuous deployment from the repo, matching Star Stuff (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Project queering-earth on the Stimpunks team (id 4115815c-5811-4df6-8f6f-9598e85d2d72), wired to Stimpunks/Queering-Earth on main through the same GitHub App installation Star Stuff and Cavendish Cards use. No build command, no publish subdirectory — the repo root is the site, exactly as Star Stuff is configured.

Deploy previews on pull requests are left on, and that is the point rather than a default: it is the review path for anyone editing through the GitHub web editor, and it is the reason the CMS question above can stay deferred. A pull request produces the real page at a real URL before anything reaches main.

.netlify/ is git-ignored — it holds the local link state, not configuration.

Creating the project through the Netlify API does not wire continuous deployment, and nothing you can do from the API fixes it. createSiteInTeam with an installation_id produces correct build settings and a working first deploy — Netlify clones through the GitHub App fine — and then no webhook, no deploy key, and no Netlify-side github_app_checks hooks. Pushes are ignored while the dashboard shows a green light and "Auto publishing is on" above a commit several pushes stale. It looks exactly like success.

Three things were tried and none of them work:

1. updateSite with the repo block again. Leaves deploy_key_id: None and zero Netlify-side hooks. It does kick a one-off build of current HEAD, which is a trap of its own — that stray deploy looks like the link repairing itself.
2. A hand-made GitHub webhook pointed at https://api.netlify.com/hooks/github, matching Star Stuff's exactly (JSON, seven events, no secret). GitHub delivers, Netlify answers 204 OK, and builds nothing. Verified twice: a push delivered at 23:29:59 had produced no deploy six minutes later. Netlify only honours a hook it created and recorded on its own side.
3. Concluding anything from a short poll of netlify api listSiteDeploys. It lags, and it lags by minutes. Give it three before calling a push ignored.

The only fix is netlify init --force in this repo, answering Authorize with GitHub through app.netlify.com, then an empty build command and . as the deploy directory. It provisions the webhook, the deploy key, and the status-check hooks together. It needs a browser OAuth grant, so a human runs it once.

How to tell a wired project from a deaf one — the dashboard will not tell you:

gh api repos/Stimpunks/Queering-Earth/hooks --jq 'length'
netlify api getSite --data '{"site_id":"4115815c-5811-4df6-8f6f-9598e85d2d72"}' \
  | python3 -c 'import sys,json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)["build_settings"]["deploy_key_id"])'

Star Stuff answers 1 and a key id. A 0 and a None mean pushes are going nowhere.

The look: daylight herbarium, not green Star Stuff (2026-09-07) Link to this section

The strongest differentiation from a night-sky site is not the same site in green — it is the other end of the day. Warm vellum ground, dark ink line art, jewel accents, specimens laid out like a Victorian plate. It matches the antiquarian-sticker-book reference Helen named, and it makes the two sites unmistakable at a glance. Recorded as a rule in CLAUDE.md.

Fraunces as the display face (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Fraunces carries a WONK axis — letterforms that deviate from the norm, exposed as a setting. A site about queering normativity setting its masthead with the deviation axis turned up is the argument made in the type. Body face is Newsreader. Both are Google Fonts variable families with real fallback stacks.

Plain view is a class, never a second page (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Helen asked for "a plain access version if doing that." Built as html.plain toggling a stylesheet over one document, with the stored preference applied inline before first paint. The alternative — a decorated page and a separate accessible page — drifts, and the accessible copy is always the one that rots.

Three guard scripts ported from Star Stuff, five left behind (2026-09-07) Link to this section

check-markup, check-sitemap, and check-contrast came over and pass on index.html. check-classes, check-overlap, check-sheets, check-embeds, and check-card-order did not: they catch failures this site cannot yet have. Port one when its failure becomes possible. A check that cannot fail is a check nobody reads.

serve.mjs roots at the repo, not at process.cwd() (2026-09-07) Link to this section

Star Stuff's copy serves whatever directory it was started from, so a wrong-directory run looks exactly like a site with every page missing. This copy derives its root from the script's own location.

Verse gets a shared component, and every line is its own element (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Added for the Rossetti sheet. .qe-poem lives in queering.css rather than in the page, because poems are going to recur here and the second one would otherwise copy the first one's CSS and then drift from it.

A poem's line breaks are the object being mounted. Reflowed into prose it is a different poem, so the component does three things a <blockquote> would not:

1. Every line is a <span class="l"> set to display: block. Not a <br>-separated run. Two reasons. A <br> interleaved among spans breaks nth-child counting, so an indent driven by an even/odd rule silently re-indents the whole poem the moment somebody adds or removes a line — the indent is a class the markup states outright instead. And a run broken only by <br> gives a wrapped long line nothing to hang from.
2. A hanging indent on every line, so that a line too long for the measure is visibly a wrap and can never be mistaken for a line the poet wrote.
3. .l-in reproduces the source printing's alternating indent. That class is a fact about the 1896 setting and nothing else — see ATTRIBUTIONS.md. It is not a decorative rhythm to apply to any poem.

The type steps down at narrow widths, and this is the one place on the site it may. Seven of Rossetti's twenty-four lines wrapped on a 375px viewport at the body size, and a poem read at that ratio is being read as prose. .qe-poem .qe-stanza drops to 0.98em under 26rem, which fits all twenty-four. It is a relative size, so browser zoom still scales it, and the hanging indent remains as the safety net when a longer poem needs it. Verified: 24 lines, 0 wraps, no horizontal overflow, at 375px and at desktop.

Stanzas get break-inside: avoid on paper. A stanza split across a page break is the one thing this component must not do.

A sheet is titled from a phrase in the specimen (2026-09-08) Link to this section

on-being-ill.html is "The Army of the Upright". promises-like-pie-crust.html is "The Die Uncast". Both titles are lifted from the work being read; both filenames name the work instead. That split is now deliberate and worth keeping: the filename is the address a reader searching for the source will guess, and the title is what the sheet found in it. An essay written by us is titled by us — coming-to-terms.html is "Coming to Terms" — so the convention only applies to a reading.

The header art is Art Nouveau, and it took Helen three notes (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The Rossetti sheet's drawing was rebuilt twice after review, and the reasons are worth keeping because the first version looked fine and was wrong.

v1 — five upright stems, evenly spaced, on one flat baseline. Each plant separate, no shared stem, one colour each: the argument of the sheet drawn literally. Helen: "can we have squiggles and swirly bits so it isn't all linear? may be add some mushrooms or something". She was right, and it was a fault, not a preference. A sheet whose thesis is "counter-narratives following their own rhythms and temporalities" had a drawing in military formation at the top of it. No guard can catch that; the markup was valid and the tokens were correct.

v2 — scattered, coiled, with fungi. Different root heights, fern croziers, tendrils, three mushrooms. Better, still built out of upright stems.

v3 — Art Nouveau, and the real answer. Helen's brief: "ornate swirling botanical style, with flowing curved vines, spiraling tendrils, and organic scrollwork instead of straight or geometric lines… asymmetrical, flowing composition… delicate filigree-like branches winding around… no rigid or angular shapes. Not linear — alive, sprouting in all directions with flow." What that actually required:

1. No baseline and no roots. One whiplash vine enters at the lower left and sweeps up across the panel; everything else hangs off it. There is no ground to stand on, so nothing can line up.
2. Every terminal curls. Vines, tendrils and scrolls all end in a spiral turning back on itself. A curve that merely stops is the thing this drawing is not.
3. The shapes had to change too, and this is the part that nearly got missed. The flowing linework landed in v3 while the flowers and mushrooms were still v1's — six-ellipse daisies and flat domes on sticks with one horizontal rule for gills. Against sinuous vines they read worse than they had against straight stems, because now they were the only rigid things on the panel. Blooms are five sinuous petals at uneven spacings; caps have an undulating margin over a tapering bent stipe; .gills was deleted outright. A style note about line is also a style note about form.
4. A taller canvas. 560×260, up from 434×156. Filigree needs vertical room or the curls close into blobs.

The motion model needed no change and got better. Every vine, tendril and volute is a .stem, so it draws itself on, and a long S-curve unrolling is what that animation was always for — v1's short uprights were the hard case, not this. Leaves, blooms, fungi and moths are .sprout groups. Verified after the rebuild: 16 stems, 28 sprouts, plain view shows the complete drawing with nothing hidden and no dash offsets, and the only opacity: 0 in the stylesheet is inside @keyframes qe-unfurl, which reduced motion never runs.

--len is measured, not estimated. Each path's --len is its real getTotalLength(), read out of the live DOM and written back. A declared length shorter than the actual one turns the dash into a repeating pattern and the vine draws on with gaps in it — three paths were short on the first pass and it is invisible in the finished state, only in the animation. If you edit a d, re-measure that path.

Landscape plates wanted .qe-plate-wide, and then did not (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Added and removed the same day, and worth recording because the next landscape plate will want it back. .qe-plate caps at 23rem, which is right for a portrait plate and useless for a landscape one: Darwin's Bryonia tendril was 1000px of fine woodcut across 520px of height, and at 350px wide its two counter-turning spirals closed into a smudge. .qe-plate-wide raised the cap to var(--qe-measure) and no further — the reading column stays the limit on this site.

Then the two black-and-white Darwin woodcuts came off the sheet (see below) and it had no users left. A CSS modifier nobody applies is dead code, the same way a guard that cannot fail is a check nobody reads, so it went. If a landscape plate ever lands here again, the rule is one line: .qe-plate-wide { max-width: var(--qe-measure); }.

Colour over subject matter for mounted plates (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The Rossetti sheet first mounted two Darwin tendril woodcuts, chosen because the sheet's argument is about holding on without merging. Ryan: "The black and white tendril illustrations are a little underwhelming. Let's drop the tendril requirement and go for colour." He is right about the page. A herbarium sheet in daylight is a colour object, and two grey rectangles of 1876 line-block sat on it like photocopies — the site's own model was arguing against them, and no amount of subject-matter aptness fixes that.

What replaced them: three chromolithographs from Annales Musei Botanici Lugduno-Batavi volume 1 (1863), picked by Ryan off the BHL Flickr stream. All three are Emrik & Binger of Haarlem, each with a different draughtsman, and they sit on the vellum as if they were always meant to.

The lesson generalises, so it is written down here rather than left in a commit message: on this site the plate is chosen for how it looks on the sheet first and for what it depicts second. An illustration that has to be explained before it earns its place is not earning its place. The idea can survive as prose — Darwin's reversed spiral is still on the sheet, still credited, still doing the same work, quoted and linked instead of mounted, and the section reads no worse for it.

The paste-up: a zine wall in a herbarium register (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Ryan, briefing the Wyrd sheet: "For this piece, play with the typography. Take inspiration from Zine walls." The risk in that brief is obvious — a photocopied flyposted wall and a Victorian specimen sheet are not the same object, and grafting one onto the other gets you Star Stuff with grain on it, which is the palette rule's failure mode wearing a different hat.

What made it work was noticing they are the same object. A zine wall and a herbarium sheet are both things cut out, laid down at an angle, and fixed where they overlap. One uses masking tape and the other uses gummed linen strips. So the new section in queering.css builds the wall out of furniture the site already owns — the card, the rule, the accent colour that is already the tape on a plate card — rather than importing a second visual language.

Three components, all of them CSS over ordinary semantic HTML:

• .qe-wall / .qe-slip — a grid of tilted <figure>s, each a short quotation with its citation, with a tape strip in an accent token. Used twice: four hands on the Weird Sisters across 435 years, and three findings on Autistic joy.
• .qe-drift — an <ol> of three states of one word. It is the essay's spine as an object.
• .qe-cutup — a ransom-note line of scissored words, used once, for the labels that get pasted onto people who do not fit.

Rotation is stated per element in the markup as --rot. Same reasoning as .qe-poem .l-in: an nth-child rule silently re-angles the whole wall the moment a slip is added or removed, and a slip's angle is a fact about that slip.

.qe-cutup uses inline-block, not flex, and that is load-bearing. With flex items the words look identical and copy out — and get mirrored into SKS — as oddifficultimmature. Inline-block keeps the whitespace between them as real text nodes.

No new motion. The site's one motion idiom is growth, and slips settling onto a wall is a different idiom. The header drawing animates; the wall does not. Adding a second motion vocabulary for one page is how a design system starts to have dialects.

The third slip is set in the reader's system face (2026-09-08) Link to this section

In .qe-drift, the two older states of the word are Fraunces with the WONK axis on. The third — weird meaning "odd-looking, strange, disturbingly different", from about 1820 — is .qe-drift-word--flat, set in system-ui. When the word stops meaning fate and starts meaning deviation, it is being spoken by an institution, and an institution's typeface is whatever the form was printed in.

It is the one place on the site where a hardcoded font stack is deliberate rather than a mistake. The joke disappears in plain view, where every face is that face, and that is correct: plain view drops decoration, and this is decoration. The slip's own gloss says out loud what the typography is doing, so a reader who cannot see it is not missing the argument.

The measure held, and the drift rail became a column (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The rail wants to be read across, as a timeline. Three states across the 448px measure give 136px each, which is not enough for the gloss under each word; two across gives an orphan.

The tempting fix was a third exception to the measure — main is capped at --qe-measure, and only the masthead and the provocation break it today. It was not taken. The rail runs down the sheet instead, at minmax(16rem, 1fr), which inside 448px is always one column. It is still a sequence; that is what the <ol> is for. One fewer exception is worth more than one better timeline.

Related, and caught by measuring rather than by looking: .qe-wall first shipped at minmax(13.5rem, 1fr). Two 13.5rem tracks plus the 1.25rem gap need 452px and the measure gives 448, so the wall silently collapsed to one column at every window size — a stack of slips, which is a list, not a wall, and it looked deliberate. This is the identical failure the plate grid shipped at 14rem, already recorded above. Found the same way, by reading the computed grid-template-columns in the browser. It is now 12.5rem, the same number the plate grid landed on, for the same arithmetic.

The Wyrd sheet mounts two plates, and Helen picked them (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Superseding the entry that stood here, which said this sheet carried no plate because the paste-up was the image, and guessed that if one were ever added it would want to be fungi in the changeling section.

Half right. A plate did want to go in the changeling section. It is not fungi:

• Edward Robert Hughes, Midsummer Eve (c. 1908) — watercolour and gouache, a woman bent over a ring of lantern-carrying fairies in a dark wood. Opens The child they said was swapped.
• John William Waterhouse, Miranda — The Tempest (1916) — oil, a woman on a rocky shore watching a ship founder. Sits in That which does not belong, next to Fisher.

Both were chosen by Helen Edgar, and the captions say so. That is not politeness. On a sheet whose whole credit question was settled two entries down, "chosen by" is a real contribution with a real name on it, and it is the kind of thing that evaporates from a page if nobody writes it down.

They vindicate the rule they were picked under: colour first, subject second. Neither had to be justified before it earned its place. Both happen to be apt as well, which is a bonus and not the criterion.

Placement was changed once, and the reason is worth keeping. The Hughes plate first sat between He was convicted of manslaughter and So: no romanticising the fae on this sheet — which split two sentences that answer each other, and made a charming fairy painting the punchline to Bridget Cleary's murder. It now opens the section instead: fairy country, then what the belief actually did, then the refusal. Where a plate sits is an argument, not a layout preference.

.qe-plate-wide came back, exactly as the note said it would (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The entry above records adding and removing .qe-plate-wide the same day, and closes: "If a landscape plate ever lands here again, the rule is one line: .qe-plate-wide { max-width: var(--qe-measure); }."

One landed. Waterhouse's Miranda is 138cm across, and inside .qe-plate's 23rem cap the foundering ship was a smudge in the corner. The class is back, and it is that line, plus a 5in cap on paper so a wide plate still cannot take a sheet of its own.

This is the decision log paying for itself, and it is the argument against deleting entries about things that got removed. The removal note took thirty seconds to write and saved the next session from re-deriving the cap, re-arguing the case, and probably picking a different number.

Sheets have labels, not bylines — settled (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Superseding the entry that stood here for about an hour, which said the Wyrd sheet's byline was Helen's and the This text row carried the caveat. It shipped that way, Helen read it and declined the credit, and the correction is worth keeping in full because the answer was already written down in our own colophon before the sheet was made.

design.html defines a label as "subject, maker, the date of the original, the date of the reading, and who read it," and adds "a specimen is collected, not written." That is an authorship model, not a glossary entry. A sheet is a reading. The person who made the thing being read goes on Maker; the person answerable for the reading goes on Read by. The Woolf and Rossetti sheets do this correctly. The Wyrd sheet reached for a Written by row and broke it, and no caveat underneath a wrong byline fixes a wrong byline.

The rule, for every sheet from here:

• A living person gets Maker for what they made and Read by for what they read. Never Written by for prose they did not write.
• Written by is legitimate on exactly one kind of sheet: one that republishes somebody's own finished text, like coming-to-terms, where Ryan's words are unchanged and the label says so.
• Crediting the institution instead is worse, not better. "By Queering Earth" was on the table and was rejected: naming a house where a person belongs is the same elision as naming a person where a house belongs, and this site does not do it anywhere else.

Helen's own words for it, which are better than ours: "I can't take any credit beyond you reading my weird stuff." That sentence is the Read by row.

Knock-on, applied the same day. The sheet's kind changed from essay to reading — kicker, plate card, three sibling navs, the social card's kicker — because under this grammar that is what it is. on-being-ill's Read by row went from Helen alone to Helen and Ryan, on Ryan's word. The sheet keeps Helen's title rather than taking one of its own, which is the one place this is untidy: every other reading has its own name (The Army of the Upright, The Die Uncast) with the specimen's title on the label. If a session wants to tidy that, the title is the change and the address can stay — /invention-of-normal does not have to match.

How the drafting is disclosed: the colophon, not the label (2026-09-08) Link to this section

These sheets are drafted in Claude Code sessions and edited by whoever is on the Read by row. Ryan's call, asked and answered: one honest section in design.html, and nothing in the labels.

The argument for a per-sheet row was that this site treats provenance as a correctness requirement and publishes an attribution ledger, so leaving a link in the chain unstated is the one thing that would undercut the ledger if it surfaced later. The argument that won is that the label is about the reading, not the tooling — a tool does not get a row, because a byline is responsibility and a tool cannot carry any — and that the colophon is where this site already explains how it is made.

So the disclosure is a section, Who reads, and who writes, and it is not buried or hedged: it names the drafting, names who directs and edits it, and points at the public ledger. The reason it exists at all is written into it — a site that keeps a ledger of everyone else's words owes an account of where its own came from. If a future session is tempted to trim that section for length, that sentence is the one to keep.

Bek-Pedersen's conclusion stayed on the sheet (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The Weird Sisters section quotes Karen Bek-Pedersen's transcriptions of Holinshed, the First Folio and Theobald. Her own argument is that Shakespeare wrote weyward on purpose, that his three women are witches rather than Fates, and that Theobald's 1733 emendation "bypasses Shakespeare altogether" — which is inconvenient for a sheet about reclaiming the Weird Sisters.

It is quoted anyway, twice, and it gets its own item in What this sheet will not tidy. Taking a scholar's evidence and leaving her conclusion behind is the worst version of the paraphrase failure, because every individual quotation is exact and the page still lies.

An open item for a session in the SKS repo (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Not to be fixed from here. The brief for this sheet carried the citation Wassell, E. (2025). Experiences of autistic joy. Disability & Society, 41(3), 1–26. The article's own first page gives 41(1), 236–261, 2026; 2025 is the online-first date and "1–26" is the page range of an unpaginated online-first PDF. Both the issue and the pages are wrong.

Queering Earth's own copy is corrected. If that citation is sitting in SKS notes, on stimpunks.org, or in anything of Helen's, it wants the same correction — from a session in that repo.

The changelog is an accession register, and it is a page rather than a file (2026-09-08) Link to this section

/changelog exists. Star Stuff has kept one since it started; this site had four sheets, a ledger of everyone else's words, and a growing list of its own corrections — all of it visible only to somebody with the repo cloned. A site that publishes an attribution ledger owes the account of its own mistakes to readers, not just to sessions.

Why a register and not a list of releases. Star Stuff's changelog is a timeline of dated releases tagged New piece, Revised, Fact-check, Site, and porting that shape wholesale would have been the palette rule's failure mode in a new place: the same page with the hue rotated. A herbarium already has this document. The accession register is the bound ledger of every specimen as it entered the collection and of every annotation slip pinned to a sheet afterwards — a re-determination, a corrected locality, an identification withdrawn. So the four kinds of entry are the four things that happen to a herbarium sheet, and they map one to one onto Star Stuff's four without borrowing its words:

The tag chips do not use the accent tokens as text. Each kind carries one of the decorative five, and the token is spent on the chip's bottom rule and the entry's left hairline — never on the letters, which are --qe-moss like every other small-caps line here. This is the rule from CLAUDE.md applied to a component that wants colour-as-meaning: the colour sorts, and the words are readable on their own, which is also why the print sheet takes the chips to black and lets the border carry the shape. Verified: check-contrast measures 377 text elements on this page, 0 failures on screen and 0 under print emulation.

Corrections are entries, not an appendix. Six of the entries in the backfill are our own errors — the byline Helen declined, the Wassell citation we were handed, the Miranda caption, the Bridget Cleary sentence, the Walker paraphrase, the pronouns. Each says what it claimed, what it says now, and how it was caught. The page's own note says why they are in the ledger rather than in a drawer, and the sentence to keep if anybody trims it is that on this site the citation is the only evidence a reader has.

The list markers use ::marker, not a ::before glyph. Star Stuff's entry bullets are a content: '★', which puts a decorative character into the accessibility tree. Colouring the native marker gets the same result with nothing to read out.

Backfilled from the commit history, cross-read against this file and ATTRIBUTIONS.md, so that every correction named on the page is one of those two files' own findings rather than a retelling. It groups by accession rather than by commit: the Wyrd sheet, its byline correction, its two plates, and the paste-up CSS are one dated entry, because that is one thing that happened.

Linked from the footer of every page, on the line under the colophon — the same treatment the colophon gets, and for the same reason: it is about the site rather than on the plate, so it does not take a card and a number. It is not in Elsewhere on the plate either. Non-sheet pages do not carry that nav.

Keeping it up is now part of shipping a sheet. A sheet that lands without a register entry is the same omission as a sheet that lands without a social card, and it is worth the same line in CLAUDE.md: mount it, card it, log it.

The Miranda sheet's address names the play, not the phrase (2026-09-08) Link to this section

the-tempest.html is "Miranda: To Be Wondered With", which follows the convention set out above: the filename is the address a reader searching for the source will guess, and the title is what the sheet found in it. A reader who wants this sheet is looking for the play.

The title is Helen's, kept verbatim, and it is not lifted from the specimen. Sheet No. 4 left exactly this untidy on purpose, with a note saying a later session could tidy it. This sheet makes the same choice for a better reason: To Be Wondered With is a deliberate one-preposition turn on Shakespeare's own coinage, which the sheet's second paragraph explains. It is a reading of the specimen rather than a quotation from it, and swapping in a phrase of the play's would delete the argument the title is making.

Helen's Claude laid out Sheet No. 5, and we kept the typography and threw away the hexes (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The Miranda sheet arrived as a finished self-contained page from Helen Edgar's own Claude session — its own :root palette in hex, its own dark-mode block, its own toggle script. The instruction was to adopt the text as written and keep the heading typography and the staging labels. What that meant in practice:

Kept. The leaning title (h1 .qe-lean, one word tilted left and one tilted right in rust), the wobbling section heads (h2 .qe-wobble), rust section heads with a hairline under them, the small letterspaced staging labels (.qe-block-label), the chain of everybody who has staged Miranda, the dashed "will not tidy" panel, and the struck-and-rewritten speaker prefix. All of it is in a restaging section of queering.css and every colour aliases a --qe-* token.

Dropped. The hexes, the prefers-color-scheme block, and the per-page toggle script. This site has one ground and it is paper: a dark mode is not a missing feature here, it is the other site. The draft's body.plain became html.plain, which is where the class actually goes.

Amended 2026-09-08 — the ground has a second state, and this entry was right about what it refused. See The cabinet is the drawer shut, not the lamp switched off below. What arrived with the draft was a generic inverted palette in hex with its own toggle script, and every word above about that still holds. What is shipped now is a herbarium object reached from the tokens: the daylight sheet is still the canonical ground and still the default in print, in the social cards, and for anyone whose machine has no opinion.

Three things the draft got wrong, all of them accessibility rather than taste:

• The chain was a row of spans with → between them. Five decorative arrows in the accessibility tree, read aloud as words, on a device whose whole content is the order. It is an <ol> now and the arrows are drawn with content: "→" / "".
• The correction was text-decoration: line-through on a <span>. A screen reader gets nothing from that, so the one device on the sheet that is an argument about a woman's words being erased would have been erased for exactly the readers most likely to care. <del> and <ins> are what an editor reassigning a speech actually did.
• The struck name was coral at opacity: 0.65. That fails 7:1 twice over. It is moss letters with a coral text-decoration-color now — the colour on the rule and never on the word, which is the rule the register's tags already follow.

The plate was a hot-link with a placeholder under it. The draft pointed at Wikimedia's Special:FilePath with a JavaScript onerror fallback reading "Plate to be inserted … source a high-resolution scan before publishing." Waterhouse's Miranda had been mounted on Sheet No. 4 that same morning, so the scan, the alt text and the provenance already existed and the sheet mounts the local file. A draft that ships a placeholder is a draft that ships a placeholder — the fallback text reads as finished furniture and would have gone live saying "see note to Helen."

Two citation errors and one attribution error came in with the draft and are recorded in ATTRIBUTIONS.md and in the register: Kathman's volume (59 → 58), Chedgzoy's surname (Chedzoy → Chedgzoy), and Helen's own essay cited with Queering Earth as its publisher at a URL that does not resolve. The last is the byline rule from Sheet No. 4 running in the other direction, and it is the one worth remembering: an attribution can be wrong by claiming too much for us, not only by claiming too much for somebody else.

The header art is wind, and the first wave was clipped (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Sea holly on a ledge, every stem, leaf and tendril bent the same way. The subject is a person bent by other people's weather, so the drawing leans rather than standing up straight; three heads on one crown are the household of three.

Two things were rebuilt. The plant was first drawn at about half the scale it needed and sat in the lower right of the frame with two thirds of the viewBox empty. And a breaking wave in the lower left curled down to y 252 in a viewBox that ends at 238 — the crest, which was the entire point of it, was silently clipped off the bottom and the remainder read as a stray squiggle sitting on the ground line. It is two tendrils out of the same crown now, running low along the ledge and curling at the ends, which is Helen's "squiggles and swirly bits" note and the same device the Wyrd sheet uses. An SVG that overruns its viewBox does not error; it just quietly stops drawing.

Not ported: a check for citation fields (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Two of the three attribution errors on this sheet were wrong numbers and a dropped letter inside a reference list — a volume number and a surname. That is now twice the register has carried a citation handed to us with the wrong issue. It is tempting to write check-references.mjs.

Not yet, and the reason is the standing rule: port a check when the failure it catches becomes possible to catch mechanically. Nothing on disk knows that Kathman is volume 58; the only way to find that is to read Cambridge's listing, which is a human or a web fetch and not a gate. A check could plausibly verify that every .qe-references entry is shaped like a citation and that every URL in one resolves — the Edgar URL would have been caught by the second half of that. If a third bad citation ships, write the link-resolver half. A check that cannot fail is a check nobody reads, and a check that can only verify punctuation is worse: it would have passed all three of these.

Addendum, 2026-09-08, from the Dickinson sheet. Three more bad references, all caught before shipping, so the trigger above has still not fired — but two of them were invented DOIs, and both return 404 from the DOI resolver. That is the first citation error on this site a guard could actually have caught, and it is worth knowing that the DOI half is the trustworthy half: https://doi.org/<doi> with Accept: application/vnd.citationstyles.csl+json returns the registered title, authors, journal, volume, issue, pages and year, so a checker can verify the whole field rather than merely that it resolves. The general URL half cannot be trusted the same way — Medium, doi.org's own publisher redirects, the Poetry Foundation and Harvard all answer a script with 403 or 202 whether the URL is good or not, so a checker reading those as broken would cry wolf on most of the references here. If the check gets written: hard failure on DOIs, advisory at most on everything else.

Sheet No. 6 is titled from Ryan's phrase, not from the specimen (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The first exception to the convention above, made on Ryan's call with the alternatives in front of him. A sheet is a reading or an essay settled that a reading takes its title from a phrase in the work it reads — on-being-ill is "The Army of the Upright", promises-like-pie-crust is "The Die Uncast". The Dickinson sheet was offered three titles out of the poem — Done with the Compass, Rowing in Eden, A Heart in Port — and one out of Ryan's own prose, and he picked The Swell and the Dwell.

It is the right call and the convention survives it. The reason a reading is titled from the specimen is that the title should say what the sheet found. This sheet mounts two poems: Dickinson's and Ryan's reply. "The swell and the dwell of relational tides" is the sentence in which the reading actually happens — it is the frame that lets the poem be about co-regulation — and no line of Dickinson's holds both halves of it, because her poem only has the swell in it. A title out of the specimen would have named half the sheet.

So the rule now reads: a reading is titled from a phrase in the specimen unless the reading's own hinge sentence is somewhere else, in which case it is titled from that. The address still names the work — /wild-nights — which is the half of the split that was always doing the navigational work.

Our own verse gets a component, and it is rust where the specimen is moss (2026-09-08) Link to this section

.qe-verse in queering.css, added for the Dickinson sheet, which is the first one to mount a poem of ours next to a poem of somebody else's.

.qe-poem could not be reused and it was not close. It wraps a <blockquote> with a cite and a citation in the figcaption, because it mounts a specimen. Ryan's reply is not a quotation of anybody, has no source to cite, and putting it in a blockquote would have made the markup say it was somebody else's — on the one site whose stated risk is a wrong attribution.

The distinction is carried by the two things a reader sees first, and both alias tokens:

And it is never carried by styling alone. .qe-verse-label says whose words these are in words — "In reply — Ryan Boren" — so plain view, a screen reader, a print-out and a stylesheet-less render all still say it. That is the same rule as the <del>/<ins> fix on the Miranda sheet: a distinction that only exists in CSS does not exist.

Every line is its own <span class="l"> with a hanging indent, for the reasons already written down under Verse gets a shared component. There is deliberately no .l-in: the alternating indent is a fact about Rossetti's 1896 compositor and has no business in our verse.

A licensed plate, for the first time (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Every plate on this site until now has been public domain and said so. The Dickinson facsimile is CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, from the Emily Dickinson Archive, and Ryan asked for it by name.

Mounted, with the three conditions met deliberately rather than incidentally — attribution in the caption in the archive's required form, a non-commercial site, and the file unaltered because it was requested from Harvard's own IIIF service at the width we wanted, so the only derivative was made by the rightsholder's own server. ATTRIBUTIONS.md carries the detail and the instruction not to resize the file locally.

What was considered and rejected: mounting the 1891 printed page instead, which is unambiguously public domain and which we had already read in three copies. It would have been the safe choice and it would have been the wrong object — the sheet's argument is about what the printers did to the leaf, and you cannot show that with a picture of the printing.

The precedent this sets, stated so it does not have to be re-argued: a licensed image may be mounted here when the licence permits our use, the conditions are met in the markup rather than in good intentions, and the sheet says on its face that the plate is licensed rather than free. The default is still public domain. We take a rightsholder at their word on a photograph of a flat public-domain original rather than arguing Bridgeman at them, and that is a decision about how this site behaves, not a legal opinion.

Ryan's verse got punctuation and nothing else, and three places say so (2026-09-08) Link to this section

His brief: "Don't revise my writing above except to give the verse proper poetic formatting/punctuation." Five terminal full stops and five commas were added, and not one word, line break or capital was touched — including the lower-case continuation lines, which turn out to be consistent across all eight stanzas and are therefore prosody rather than typing.

The change is disclosed in three places, on purpose: a Reply in verse row in the sheet's label, a full itemised list in ATTRIBUTIONS.md, and the register entry. The reason is the rule the coming-to-terms label already sets — an unmarked edit of our own published text is the same failure as an unmarked edit of somebody else's, and the site just happens to be the injured party. A verse written for one person and mounted on a public plate is exactly the case where that rule earns its keep.

Corroboration means a different library, not a different file (2026-09-08) Link to this section

The Rossetti entry in ATTRIBUTIONS.md says its colon was verified in "two separately scanned copies", and it happened to be two different libraries. The Dickinson sheet nearly shipped a broken piece of type as a variant reading, because the first two scans of page 97 of Poems, Second Series both come out of University of California Libraries holdings and both show line 11 as mocr instead of moor. They agree. They are one witness.

The University of Toronto copy has the word intact, and the sheet now reports the defect as a defect. The rule, written down because "two scans" reads as sufficient and is not: corroboration means a different physical copy, from a different holding institution, digitised by a different pipeline. Two of those three is not enough.

This is not a candidate for a guard script. Nothing on disk knows which library scanned which Internet Archive item, and the identifier suffix that gave it away — dickrich on both — is a convention, not a contract. It is a reading rule, and the place for it is here and in the ledger.

The cabinet is the drawer shut, not the lamp switched off (2026-09-08) Link to this section

Ryan asked what a dark mode here would be, having seen a dark-ground botanical print, and the answer that survived contact with the measurements was dark warm brown, called the cabinet. changelog.html had already been using the word for a year as its fourth entry kind, which is how we knew the idea had a place to live.

A dark green ground was the obvious first guess and it is the wrong one, for a reason that is measurable rather than a matter of taste. Green ground shares its hue with moss, lichen and verdigris — three of the tokens the site is built from — and every accent measures worse against it for no gain: moss text 7.1:1 against brown's 7.2, rust 6.2:1 against brown's 7.3. Pushed to a real forest tone (#223026) nothing but cream clears 7:1 at all. A green ground makes green unusable. It also reads as a stock eco dark theme, which is the "same site in green" failure the palette rules already name, arriving from the other direction.

Brown was the palette's ground all along. The print that prompted this draws its specimens in cream, sage, marigold and coral on near-black — --qe-ink, --qe-lichen, --qe-marigold, --qe-coral as they already stood. The decorative five cross over unchanged, and deliberately still saturated: lifting them to 7:1 was tried first and turns every flower chalky. 7:1 is a rule for letters. Only ink, moss and rust move.

The inversion worth writing down: in daylight a card is lighter than the page, so the page is the worst case for contrast; on a dark ground a lifted card is the worst case instead. Keeping the "cards lift" instinct and solving 7:1 against a lifted panel drags rust to #eab1a3, a pale pink with no rust in it. The cabinet's cards are recessed, which puts the ground back as the lightest surface, keeps rust an ember, and reads better anyway — compartments in a drawer.

Every hex has one copy. The cabinet values are defined once as --qe-cab-* inside :root; the two switch rules — @media screen and (prefers-color-scheme: dark) on :root:not(.daylight), and @media screen on :root.cabinet — contain nothing but aliases of them. There are two switch rules because CSS cannot set a class from a media query, and the alias indirection is what makes that duplication safe: a drifted switch is a missing ground, never a wrong colour. Both are @media screen, so paper is daylight always and the print sheet cannot inherit a ground.

Three things were not token flips, and all three are now tokens rather than literals: the foxed-paper wash, the drop shadow (a near-black that vanishes on a near-black ground), and --qe-flesh, the pale flesh of a specimen. The last was a real bug: a mushroom's stipe was filled with --qe-paper-deep, a colour it matched only by coincidence, so on the dark ground four mushroom stems became holes.

The toggle is three states behind one word, and it is the quieter of the two controls. Plain view changes what the page is and keeps the pill; this changes what the page is lying on, so it is a word and a hairline. With neither class set the machine decides in CSS with no script involved — which is the reason the media query was kept instead of letting the pre-paint snippet resolve everything and collapsing the stylesheet to one block. A reader with light sensitivity and no JavaScript is exactly the reader who should not be handed the bright page. The button therefore names the ground the reader can see, not a preference they have not expressed, and clicking writes the opposite one down.

And a check that only reports is decoration. The new cabinet pass in tools/check-contrast.mjs was wired to print a column before it was wired into the failure total, which would have made it exactly the "check nobody reads" this repo keeps warning about. It is in the gate, and it was verified by breaking a token on purpose.

tools/check-contrast.mjs gates at WCAG AA, not at the house 7:1 (2026-09-08, closed 2026-09-09) Link to this section

Found while trying to make the new cabinet pass fail: a card lifted to 6.0:1 sailed through. CLAUDE.md names the 7:1 target and check-contrast.mjs in the same breath, which reads as though the script enforces the house standard. It did not — needFor() returned 4.5, or 3.0 for large text, and the summary line said AA in as many words. The 7:1 figure was held by hand-chosen tokens and by nothing else.

Logged and deliberately not fixed at the time: raising the gate needed a run to find out what it newly failed, a decision about the decorative-adjacent text that would surface, and possibly a two-tier report rather than a single threshold. Doing it inside the cabinet work would have buried both.

Closed the next day, and the reason it closed cheaply is that the wish got called in. The recessed --qe-paper-deep panel built during the surfaces work drops --qe-moss to 6.90:1 and --qe-rust to 6.21:1 in daylight and passed this script clean. That is the predicted failure, arriving in the working tree rather than in a hypothetical.

Each of the three worries turned out to be answerable:

• What does it newly fail? Nothing. All 9,142 text elements clear 7:1 (4.5:1 large) in both grounds and under print emulation. The gate could be raised without a single colour changing — which is the whole argument for raising it now rather than later, when it would arrive tangled with whatever it first caught.
• The decorative-adjacent text. Did not surface, because this site already keeps colour on rules and off letters. The two faults of that kind found the same day — the register's ::marker bullets at 2.15:1, and .qe-untidy's at 3.89:1 — are invisible to this tool either way: a ::marker is not an element with its own text, so nothing measures it. That is now written into the tool's header and CLAUDE.md as a known blind spot rather than left to be rediscovered.
• Two tiers or one threshold? Two, reported apart. Under AA is FAIL and is illegible; between AA and 7:1 is UNDER and is readable-but-under-the-house-number. Both exit non-zero. Folding them into one count would hide which kind just landed, and they are genuinely different bugs.

--aa gates at AA only and prints a line saying the house target is not being measured in that run. It exists so that an argument for a specific colour is an argument somebody makes on the record, rather than a two-line edit to needFor() that nobody reviews.

Verified by making it fail before believing it, which is this repo's rule for a new gate: the recessed panel was put back and reported 6.90:1 and 6.21:1 as UNDER with exit 1; a 2.15:1 colour was injected and reported as FAIL on the other tier with exit 1; --aa passed the same tree with exit 0 and said why. Then reverted, and the clean tree re-run.

One thing this does not fix. A pass here is still not evidence about texture. The tool composites computed colour pairs, so grain under body text passes every number in it. That is a rule in CLAUDE.md, enforced by nothing, and it is the next thing on this list to become possible the day somebody reaches for a background image.