The splash screen learned the difference between reading and pressing.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich put a flight on the board.

landed as “PINCER finally collects, and the board has a second row” — 09 August 2026

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich did some housekeeping.

landed as “The two pages that describe the rules stop describing the old ones” — 09 August 2026

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “A line on the board stops being enough to say you flew” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: GR14 - the meter took any added entry in docs/RANKINGS.md as a flight, so a pilot who could not be bothered to play could clear their own by typing a sentence. The ritual has written the tape's checksum under every entry since the board opened and nothing read it. It reads it now, and spends it once.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The rulebook learns to ask whether anybody else wanted a turn” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: GR15 - every rule in the file was about restraint, and none of them had an opinion about one pilot holding the cabinet. The book already shelves the history into runs of one name; the referee now reads the same spine and says something at every fifth. A nudge at any number, nothing on the tally.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The drawn commit stops reading only the diff” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: the chronicle picture reads the words as well as the diff, and marks a file that came back lighter rather than only one that left

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The number stops being written where nobody may correct it” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: the hooks stop stamping a derived number into a message nobody may rewrite, and the rules say what the ones already written mean

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “Two silences, one rule, and now something that checks” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: the third pair of readers that only a comment held together now has a handle at each end and a check across both, on the fixture and on this history, every commit

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The seal and the meter stop being taken on trust” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/evidence-test.sh is new. referee-test.sh grades the verdicts and tally-test.sh grades the sentence; GR14's evidence chain had neither. The seal half puts forged tapes to tools/blackbox.sh - a score raised after the ship went down, a line added to the body, a seal rewritten to match - and expects refusal, expects a good tape to read back, expects a borrowed seat to be named rather than refused, and holds both halves of the pair to FNV-1a's own constants so src/game/blackbox.js and the reader cannot drift apart in silence. The meter half scripts a cabinet where tools/flights.sh arrives after the game does, and asks it where counting starts, what a tape buys, what paperwork costs, whether a couriered tape lands on the pilot the line names or the pen that wrote it, and whether flying, ranking and landing in one commit is one sitting. What a pilot who has never flown reads is pinned as it stands rather than decided here. The pre-commit hook runs it when either half moves, or when src/game/blackbox.js does; every case was checked against a mutation of the thing it grades, so none of them is an empty toll.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The alarm on the readers now has an alarm of its own” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/lockstep.sh is what stops the book, the meter and the ledger disagreeing about which commits are versions, and it runs at every pre-commit through check_lockstep - but nothing checked it. A broken comparison fails loudly on the next commit; one edited until it always passes takes the whole readers-drift alarm with it, in silence. tally-test.sh gets a fifth part: the NOTGAME reader is repointed at a file nobody has, so the pathspec and is_game disagree about exactly one commit, and lockstep has to exit 1 and say so; then the mirror. The sabotage asserts itself, so a case that missed reads as broken rather than passing. The pre-commit trigger gains tools/lockstep.sh, so the toll is only ever charged where a case can fail.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “What a bend costs stops being taken on faith” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/tally-test.sh is new. referee-test.sh grades the verdicts; this grades the sentence, against scripted histories in a lab: tally.sh's pricing (one per bend, two per skip, receipted or caught by the audit but never both, a breach charging the name it carries and never a phantom, mercy every three clean landings), the ledger commits .githooks/post-commit writes, the pre-push guard on the scoreboard, and the GR12 table read back out of the real src/game/tally.js and events.js. The pre-commit hook runs it when any of that machinery moves, the same way it already runs referee-test.sh when the referee moves, and its stale twenty-seconds estimate is corrected in passing.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The referee starts noticing when the poster is of another cabinet” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: GR9 already owns the front door - it asks that the README describe the cabinet rather than the changelog - and said nothing about the screenshots, which describe the cabinet to everybody who has not cloned it yet and go stale without anybody touching them. The rule now names media/ and the referee counts versions since it last moved, asking tools/chronicle.sh for what a version is rather than answering it a second time. Eight, because the last set ran far past that before a human noticed. A nudge at any number: a poster is not a red line and reshooting is twenty minutes.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “Ask the digest for eight and it stops answering with five” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: Two readings in tools/chronicle.sh. --recent N fetched exactly N records and then dropped the ones that are not stories, so the count was of commits rather than of things worth telling; it now walks the log and stops when it has N rows, which changes how far it looks and not what it thinks a story is. And the interlude deed ladder read docs/RANKINGS.md as docs-but-not-book and called it "rebuilt the book"; a ranked flight gets its own sentence, one branch above. The flag sits beside docmoved rather than instead of it, so the paperwork silence - the one pair of readers in that file nothing checks - sees exactly what it saw before.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The referee stops asking for a tile the guide would turn away” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: GR9 asked every new feature for a guide entry while src/ui/fieldguide.js turned away anything that briefs nobody, so the next meta-game feature done right would have collected a nudge for doing it right. GR9 now takes a tile or a stated reason - the spelling two features already use - and the referee follows the wording. GR8's worked example is reworded in the same breath: it cited the bomb as "two to start, one more each wave" and the bomb pays out every second wave now, and a precedent that misquotes itself invites a rules-lawyer. Both are wording, and one line carries them.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “A breach that names nobody now charges nobody” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/tally.sh ignores a Golden-Rule-Breach: line naming somebody no commit was ever authored by, which is the test tools/golden-check.sh already makes at the gate. GR8 and GR12 are unchanged; this is the half of the paperwork that reads the history rather than the commit.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The audits stop taking each other's word for it” — 09 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/chronicle.sh grows --audit, the book builder's own audit with the book left unwritten, and tools/lockstep.sh compares it against --skips over a fixture and over this history. The rules did not move; this is the second reader of them being made to answer out loud.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The book stops reading a move as a burial” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/chronicle.sh weighs a renamed file as the path it came from in both of its audits, the way tools/golden-check.sh already does. Nothing in GOLDEN_RULES.md moved - this is the second reading of GR4 and GR5 catching up with the first.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The rename hole gets four cases, so it stays shut” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/referee-test.sh now covers GR4 and GR5 across a rename, the question the previous commit taught both budgets to ask. Nothing about the rules moved here; this is the part that notices when they quietly stop being kept.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “A file does not become yours by being handed a new name” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: GR4 and GR5 weigh a renamed file as the path it came from rather than the path it arrived under - the ownership question GR11 has asked of a trap since the rename hole was found there, pointed now at the two budgets that had the same hole and lower stakes.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The cabinet stops taking a vote on what counts as a version” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: what counts as a version, and who counts as a pilot, are answered in tools/chronicle.sh and nowhere else. tools/lockstep.sh checks it on every commit - a fixture whose commits separate every clause of the rule, this history read the same way, and a refusal for any second answer written into tools/, .githooks/ or .github/. The fixture reads the machine's own name out of the workflow that files the book, so renaming it there and telling nobody fails here rather than three pushes later, on the cover.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The thing that files the paperwork has a name of its own” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: the workflow's author identity, and the three lockstep filters that keep a machine off the roster, follow it.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The book is a shelf now, and every chapter says what it moved” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: tools/chronicle.sh grew two things the book did not have, and both are worked out from the history rather than from anything anybody has to remember to write down. Every chapter now wears its marks - which parts of the cabinet its commit moved, nine of them, read off the paths alone, so all twenty-six chapters have them retroactively and so will every chapter after this one. And the contents are shelved into books: a run of chapters one pilot flew with nobody else landing in between, collapsible on the cover with the arithmetic of the whole run under the spine, and a shelf of spines in the dock at the foot of every chapter - press one and its chapters stack up over the dock without turning a page. tools/export.sh got one line for the same reason it already had one for the lightbox: inside the single-file export the frame swallows Escape, and a book that is open needs it back.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich rewrote the notes on the cabinet.

landed as “The pictures on the wall are of the game that is in the cabinet now” — 08 August 2026

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “Only people are pilots, and the splash screen was worst about it” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: who counts as a pilot decides the roster, the count, the flight meter and what gets painted, and an account that files paperwork after a push has never flown anything.

While v26 was on the cabinet, David Friedrich changed the rules.

landed as “The book had been counting its own filing as versions since v1” — 08 August 2026

The rules themselves were altered: what counts as a version is the spine of the book, the tally and the flight meter, and two of the three already excluded the ledger while the book did not.