--- title: "What is settled, and what is open" url: "https://queering.earth/what-is-settled" updated: "2026-09-09" description: "The decision log for Queering Earth: what is settled, what is still open, and the reasoning for each — including the designs that were refused, and why." licence: "CC-BY-SA-4.0" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" attribution_ledger: "https://github.com/Stimpunks/Queering-Earth/blob/main/ATTRIBUTIONS.md" generated_by: "tools/make-markdown.mjs from the page's own
landmark" --- [Queering Earth](https://queering.earth/) · The cabinet itself # What is settled, and what is open The reasoning, kept so the same question is not re-litigated in three weeks. This page is the decision log, generated from `DECISIONS.md` in the repository rather than retyped from it. It exists so the same question is not re-litigated in three weeks, and it is public for the reason the register is: **a decision whose reasoning nobody can read is a decision that will be made again badly.** What is settled, what is open, and the reasoning for each — so the same question is not re-litigated in three weeks. --- ## Open ### The wordmark and the tagline 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 **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: | printable width | `.qe-wide` | a sibling block | effect | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 717px — A4 at Chrome's default margins | 717px | 717px | none | | 739px — Letter, same | 736px | 739px | 3px | | 816px — Letter at zero margins | 736px | 816px | 80px | 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 **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 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*: | 1926, *The New Criterion* | 1930, Hogarth Press | | --- | --- | | with love, battle, and jealousy | with love and battle and jealousy | | is null, negligible and non-existent | is null, and negligible and non-existent | **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) **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 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 `dl`s. **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) **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 `
`/`
` 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. --- ## Settled ### Back to the top, drawn as growth rather than as a chevron (2026-09-09) **Settled.** Ryan wanted a way back up after finishing a piece, and asked for a footer illustration of grasses whose taller stems form an arrow, with *Scroll to top* above them. **The arrowhead is a seed head.** A chevron drawn over grass is a UI arrow in a costume, and this site already has a native idiom for "up": growth, stems drawing themselves on from the ground. Two tall blades arc up and converge at the middle stem's head, and the silhouette is an arrow without one being drawn. **The first attempt put two short awns on the head and read as a small figure with its arms raised** — looked at, and redrawn, which is what this repo's own rule about judging a drawing at its shipped size is for. **No script, and no new motion.** A plain anchor scrolls; `scroll-behavior: smooth` is already set once and already switched off under `prefers-reduced-motion`. The mark wears `.qe-botanical`, so the blades draw themselves on with the same gating as every other drawing here. **A note on how this one was reviewed.** The first pass treated the phrase Ryan used to describe the look — *a grassy waste garden* — as though it were about to be printed on the page, and refused it on attribution grounds at length in four files. It was never going to be printed: the footer says *Scroll to top*, and a drawing of grass quotes nobody. **Design vocabulary in conversation is not a publication, and reading it as one makes the work harder to talk about for no gain.** `ATTRIBUTIONS.md` governs what the site says to a reader. It does not govern how we describe a feel to each other. **`main` gained `tabindex="-1"`, and it is the quiet half of this change.** Two in-page links now aim at that landmark. A landmark that cannot take focus leaves a keyboard reader's focus in the footer while the page scrolls away from it, so their next Tab resumes at the bottom of a page they just left. Verified after the change: activating the link scrolls 9,952px, sets the hash, and moves focus to `main`. **The skip link has wanted this since it was written** and nobody had noticed, because the failure is invisible to anyone using a mouse. ### Every sheet gets a contents list, and one of them puts it in an odd place (2026-09-09) **Settled.** Three of the eight sheets had no *On this sheet* list — Nos. 1, 2 and 7 — and no reconstructible reason for the gap. They run 2,045 to 3,098 words against 2,495 to 5,018 on the five that had one, so the bar the existing pages set was already cleared. All eight now have one, plus `/design` and `/mission`: ten pages. **The opt-in stays in the markup.** Nothing derives the list from a word count, because which pages want one is an editorial call. What is now settled is only that the answer for a *sheet* is always yes. The pages that decline all have a stated reason: the home page, whose plate is already a contents list; `/changelog`, whose headings average 148 characters; and the four pages with two headings each. **"After the lede" turned out not to mean "before the first heading."** Checked before placing anything: five of the existing lists carry opening prose *after* them — `/wild-nights` nineteen blocks, `/invention-of-normal` thirteen. The list is front matter for the sections, and the lede is not a section. **`/coming-to-terms` was the exception for a week, and then stopped being one.** It had no lede at all, and every one of its six headings sat in the 2026 commentary, so a list at the top would have named six sections beginning a fifth of the way down and said nothing about the essay — a contents list misrepresenting its own page. It went after the register note instead. The note said the essay needed a heading of its own before it could be listed, and that **this was a decision about Ryan's 2022 text that nobody should take on the way past.** **Ryan took it on 2026-09-09**: the sheet now has a lede and the essay is a section called **Against My Grind**. Three things about that are worth keeping. - **The heading is his own phrase**, lifted from the anecdote inside the essay, where he writes of the ways norms went against his grind. A heading invented for somebody else's text is a small piece of us wearing their voice, which is exactly what `ATTRIBUTIONS.md` exists to catch. A heading taken from the text is the text naming itself. His words are still untouched. - **"Everything above is the essay" binds a claim to a POSITION**, and a position is the most fragile thing to bind to — it broke the moment a lede and a heading sat above it. The note now names the section instead, and says which parts are ours. Fourth time this house has learned that a claim that binds must move in the commit that breaks it, and the first time on a sheet rather than on `/privacy`. - **The list moved back to the standard position**, straight after the lede: a twelfth of the way down instead of a fifth. The exception is gone, and so is the rule describing it. ### A rail of the page's own headings, and both contents lists shown at once (2026-09-09) **Settled, and the interesting half was overruled.** Every `

` 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) 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) `/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 `.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 `h2`s — 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) `/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 `
`, 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 `
` 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) 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) `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) 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) 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) 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) 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) 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) 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 `blockquote`s 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 `